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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Examining the evil and omnipotence paradox, part 1

God cannot be both omnipotent and benevolent. If evil exists, an all-loving God cannot.

From Neil deGrasse Tyson to Bill Maher, from Richard Dawkins to Stephen Fry, from Internet commentators to close friends, we’ve heard this argument before.

The claim was presented to me in the first class I took at IU — COLL-S 103 Philosophy, Film and Music — where it was at least subject to vigorous debate. In PHIL-P 250 Introductory Symbolic Logic, however, it was presented as fact. The professor made the statement as if it were a logical definite, ineligible for 
scrutiny.

Indeed, many people often employ this line of reasoning as an undeniable attack on God’s existence.

In widely popularized interviews, each of the four men named above cite horrible atrocities as evidence against God’s benevolence or omnipotence. Tyson mentions villages eradicated by tsunamis, Maher references fatwas and honor killings and Fry comments on bone marrow cancer in children.

A benevolent God wouldn’t create a world that allows these things, they say.

Because I’m allowed up to only 550 words in each column, I’m forced to address this issue over the course of multiple publications. I have four responses, each of which will be outlined in its own article, starting here with a hypothetical.

Imagine a world without pain.

Pain, after all, defines their argument. These men employ a heavy dose of pathos by mentioning cancer-ridden children and demolished villages, but, at its core, they’re simply seeing pain.

It would be undoubtedly too subjective to suppose God could eliminate only the “worst” evils in our world, while leaving the simple pains that result from stubbing your toe on the coffee table, for 
instance.

There is no objective ranking system for pain and evil. These things either exist on a full spectrum or not at all. Thus, when you imagine the utopia proponents of this argument charge God with creating, you must imagine that every form of pain has been completely extinguished.

If you can do this, you’ve done the impossible.

Even if God created our world without disease, accidental deaths, or toe-stubbing incidents, even if each of us “freely” chose to do the right thing, even if we never hurt one another, we would still be physical beings.

We would still die.

I imagine we’d do so at the ripe age of 95, going peacefully and painlessly in our sleep, having lived blissful, loving lives, but, nonetheless, death would claim us.

And when it did, our loved ones would mourn. Having committed no wrongs, I suspect many would mourn fiercely. And they would look up at the sky and say, “Why God? How could you take them from me?”

Therefore, the only way for God to truly expunge pain from our existence is for us to not exist at all. A physical realm, no matter how distorted or manipulated by God’s omnipotent powers, necessitates pain.

This doesn’t solve the paradox quite yet, but it does complicate the argument and open up the conversation to a deeply critical approach. From here, one could argue that creating us was, in fact, a malevolent act because pain is inherent in our existence.

As I continue, I’ll examine this proposition, as well as the heavily debated idea among philosophers that our physical existence might be justified, despite its inherent pain.

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