Peter Van Inwagen's Arguments Against The Existence Of God

1737 Words7 Pages
For longer than human history has been recorded, the existence of God has been an essential and highly debated argument. An objection commonly used against the existence of God is the argument from evil. However, philosophers have offered plausible defenses against this argument, the most successful one being the Free Will Defense. Peter Van Inwagen, a widely known philosopher and professor at the University of Notre Dame, evaluates the objections to this defense and offers his own version in hopes of combating these challenges. The Problem of Evil, or the argument from evil, is considered one of the most powerful and famous arguments against the existence of God. This argument relies on the non-negotiable definition of God: a being, presuming He exists, who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good. The argument from evil states that if God is omnipotent, He can do anything that is possible and that if He is omniscient, then He knows everything that is true. It goes on to say that if God is all morally good, and He knew an evil was about to occur and had the means to prevent it, then He would have prevented it. If God prevented all evil, then there would be no evil. Because there is evil that could have been prevented, the conclusion of this argument is…show more content…
Theodicy is put forward as true and ultimately strives to explain the coexistence of God and evil. A defense, on the other hand, seeks to show that it is rational to believe in God, even when evil is present. Defenses can claim nothing more than having a real possibility of being true, given that God exists. A defense isn’t focusing on making claims as to how God works, but instead showing how atheistic challenges to the existence of God can be refuted. While theodicy and defense have two distinct meanings, they do not necessarily have to differ in content. Insights of defenses and theodicy often overlap and could even be verbally identical

More about Peter Van Inwagen's Arguments Against The Existence Of God

Open Document