Evil, the Problem Of
The problem of evil concerns the contradiction, or apparent contradiction, between the reality of evil on the one hand, and religious beliefs in the goodness and power of God or of the Ultimate on the other. In a very general classification, the religions of the world have offered three main types of solution: (1) There is the monism of the Vedanta teachings of Hinduism, according to which the phenomenal world, with all its evils, is maya, or illusion. A confused echo of this doctrine is heard in contemporary Western Christian Science, which affirms that "evil is but an illusion, and it has no real basis. Evil is a false belief" (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, auth. ed., Boston, 1934, p. 480:23,24). Considered as a response to the problem of evil as stated above, this view is defective in that it redescribes the problem but does not attempt to solve it, for it leaves unexplained the evil of our suffering from the compulsive illusion of evil. (2) There is the dualism exemplified most dramatically in ancient Zoroastrianism, with its opposed good and evil deities, Ahura Mazdah and Angra Mainyu. A much less extreme dualism was propounded by Plato (Timaeus 30A and 48A) and is found in various forms in the finite deity doctrines of such modern Western philosophers as J.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 4,720 words (approx. 16 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Evil, the Problem Of Access Pass.
