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Chapter 1 Introduction Is it possible for a person who has a proper regard for his or her rational faculties, and for the evidence afforded by experience, to believe in the God who is the object of worship by Christians? In this world there is so much suspicion, hatred, and cruelty, and so much grievous suffering, that is impossible for anyone with even a modest degree of open-mindedness to avoid questions or doubts about this God. Is this God, if indeed there be such a God, perhaps indifferent to the sufferings of humans? Yet Christians affirm that God is perfectly loving, that he gave his own son to make it possible for humans to overcome suffering. Is this God, if indeed there be such a God, perhaps too weak to defeat and banish the powers of evil? Yet Christians affirm that their God is omnipotent and that, by his divine providence, he is the ruler of the world. Without doubt the so-called problem of evil constitutes the greatest intellectual obstacle to the Christian faith, or indeed any form of theistic belief. Though this problem has most often been discussed in connection with Christian theology, as I shall do, it was formulated before the Christian era, and it has a wider application. It is a central theme of the biblical book, Job. Perhaps the earliest precise formulation was given by Epicurus (342–270 B.C.), who wrote: God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able; or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, 1 which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which is alone suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?1 Within the Western theological tradition the effort to provide a solution to this problem has in modern times been called theodicy, adopting the terminology of the philosopher Leibniz.2 In this work I want to focus on the free will defense. The free will defense argues that God is responsible for none of the evils in the world, but that they are rather due to the misuse of free will by humans (or initially by the rebel angels and then by humans). According to the traditional argument, God has a great goal for all humans: namely, the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is so infinitely good that it outweighs any and all evils which may be unavoidable in the process of its attainment. The Kingdom of God is a society in which humans freely love God and one another. This goal requires that humans be created with free will, for no relationship can be a genuinely loving one unless the love is freely given. Having granted free will to humans, even God logically cannot prevent them from choosing evil; and it is the misuse of free will that is the origin of all evils. In its original state, as created by God, the world contained no evil at all. All evil is either sin (misuse of free will) or the consequence of sin. It has been widely held by Christian theologians that this defense provides us with an adequate theodicy. Moreover, none of the other arguments or defenses, which have been developed, come anywhere close to cogency, certainly not on their own and not unless included as an aspect of a free will defense. Since my purpose is to see if the free will defense can be formulated in a maximally cogent way, I shall not dwell at length on other arguments. The so-called contrast theory will later be discussed in some detail because, though it cannot stand alone, it constitutes an important element in the traditional free will defense, and also in the revised free will defense which I shall develop. The eschatological argument clearly does not belong in a theodicy; for theodicy seeks to offer rational arguments and evidences to show that belief in the Christian God is compatible with the fact that the world contains so many evils. The eschatological argument is not really an argument at all; it is an appeal to what...

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