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Articles

Evil From The Outside

Martin Jenkins considers alternative explanations of suffering, somewhere between traditional monotheism and new atheism.

Theodicy is the name theologians give to attempts to answer the following question. Why does a powerful and loving God permit evil and suffering? This has long been a problem in theology and philosophy. It has also been one of the arguments used by ‘fundamentalist’ atheists to deny the existence of a supreme being. (I distinguish fundamentalist atheists, who militantly assert and argue for the non-existence of God, from those more ‘gentle’ atheists, such as the French astronomer Laplace, whose attitude to God was simply, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”) Surely, the fundamentalist atheists argue, a loving God could not possibly permit suffering?

In making this argument, they are conceding to the believers, since it is the latter who assert that God is loving.

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