Problem of evil

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Suppose we have the following four premises:

  1. God is omniscient
  2. God is omnipotent
  3. God is omnibenevolent
  4. Evil exists.

We get the following contradiction. If God is omnibenevolent, then He does not want evil to exist. If God is omniscient, then He must know about all evil in the world. If God is omnipotent, then He must be capable of doing something about it. Therefore, evil should not exist. Dropping any one of those four premises would resolve the contradiction, but dropping #4 would require us to fundamentally redefine evil in some way, and dropping the other three would undermine the Christian concept of God.

Counterarguments

Free Will

It is often claimed that evil exists because God gave humans free will. Free will is assumed to be a greater good than the evil that they cause.

This argument fails to explain why God allows natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tsunami, earthquakes,