Category: Good and Evil
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Ignorance of Evil
Ignorance is evil, and the worst ignorance is the ignorance of evil itself: that it is real, and that free will is real, without which evil cannot exist.
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An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism
Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising: Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end). Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical…
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The Lure of the Good
Some of us hear the call to perfect ourselves morally, or at least to better ourselves. Whence the call? The Whence is cloud-hidden, and what is hidden may be doubted. And yet conscience intimates a reality absolute and complete that sustains and envelops this vale of transience. The love of truth and the love of…
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Natural Evil and Fallen Angels
This is an old post from my first blog, dated 3 January 2005, slightly redacted. ……………………………….. Keith Burgess-Jackson writes: I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then…
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Some Questions About Animal Suffering and Religious Belief
This just in from Karl White: A couple of questions. 1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God. Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike…
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More on Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil with Responses to Caiati and Pollack
Vito Caiati, to whom I responded earlier, replies: In your excellent response to my email on animal suffering and theism, you write, “If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on…
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Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil
A Catholic reader of this blog is deeply troubled by the problem of animal suffering. He reports his painful recollection of a YouTube video that depicts . . . the killing of a baby elephant by 13 lions. They first attacked the little elephant in the open, but he was saved when several water buffalo intervened…
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Suffering Without Evil?
The following entry has been languishing in the cloud for going on ten years. I think I'll post it now, warts and all. ………………… I argued earlier that there can be instances of evil that do not involve suffering. Now I consider the converse question: Can there be instances of suffering that are not instances…
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The Cautionary Tale of Pippa Bacca
Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason…
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The Riddle of Evil and the Pyrrhonian ‘Don’t Care’
Today I preach upon a text from Karl Jaspers wherein he comments on St. Augustine (Plato and Augustine, ed. Arendt, tr. Mannheim, Harcourt 1962, p. 110): In interminable discussions, men have tried to sharpen and clarify this contradiction: on the one hand, evil is a mere clouding of the good, a shadow, a deficiency; on…
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On Demonizing Opponents
Here is an entry from my first weblog. It first saw the light on 23 June 2004. Don't say it is dated. The distinctions and truths it contains are timeless. The bit about courage is important and not widely understood. ……………. One night on Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity interviewed Al Sharpton. Sharpton had recently…
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The Holocaust Argument for God’s Existence
Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing, Nelson, 2016, p. 231: There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual…
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The Evil of Ignorance
It is an evil state we are in, ignorant as we are of the ultimate why and wherefore. The topic of birthdays came up among some friends. I said I don't celebrate mine: my birth befell me; it was not my doing. A female companion replied that life is a gift to which my response…
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Reading Now: Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness
The book arrived yesterday via Amazon and I began reading it this morning. Looks good! Oxford University Press, 2001. Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of…
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On Denying the Cat, or Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined
Yesterday, Victor Reppert quoted the following passage from G. K. Chesterton: Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether…