Paul and Rowe

What type of POE do they present?

Evidential POE

What is the evidential POE?

The empirical evidence of the existence of evil and suffering shows how improbable it is that God exists

What assumption is being made?

God being omnipotent and omnibenevolent, would want to remove evil from the universe- it might have some greater purpose that we are unaware of

What does Aquinas state?

The way we understand goodness may not ge the same as God’s understanding of goodness. Our understanding of goodness is often relative to time and the culture within which we live. We are always changing

How does this link back to God? What does this mean for God?

God as being a perfect being, is not subject to change and therefore his understanding of good and evil is foxed and unchangeable. There is no logical contradiction within the inconsistent triad and no challenge to God’s omnipotence

What is Rowe characterised as?

The friendly atheist

What does he accept?

Theism could be justified even if God doesn’t exist

What is his work on the POE?

‘The problem of evil and some varieties of atheism’- 1979

What does his book present us with?

The evidential problem of evil, as it uses the existence of evil as evidence to argue against the existence of God

What is his view?

Logical presentation makes assumptions that we cannot possibly know to be true. We can question its premises

As we are not omniscient, we don’t know what?

Whether suffering can bring a greater good. So, there is no need to accept that an all-loving God would eliminate evil

For Rowe, it’s reasonabl for God to what?

Allow some limited suffering to enable humans to grow. However, Rowe could not accept God allowing ‘intense suffering’ and animal suffering appears pointless

To outline that animal suffering seems pointless, what example does he use?

Fawn example

What does he argue?

• omnipotent + omniscient being would know intense suffering was about to take place

• such a being could prevent suffering frok happening

• an all-loving being would probably prevent all evil and suffering that had no purpose and was pointless and unavoidable

• such evil and suffering does happen

• therefore, probably God doesn’t exist

Explain the fawn example more thoroughly

It doesn’t benefit any being. No one freely caused this evil to happen. No one could have performed a good act to help and no one has learned anything from the suffering of the fawn as there were no witnesses. This is unnecessary, avoidable event that should have been prevented if God was omnipotent and omnibenevolent

Why did he view himself as a ‘friendly atheist’?

He did not reject theistic answers to the POE completely, but considers the evidence as a strong indication that God of Classical Theism does not exist

What is Paul’s journal called and what does he discuss?

Philosophy and Theology- it uses statistical evidence to argue that an omnibenevolent God cannot exist

What does he argue?

The sheer scale of the number of children throughout history who have died before reaching ‘the age of reason’. Their lives were so short that they were unable to make a mature decision about the Christian fairy.

What does he estimate?

100 billion humans have been born and the number of conceptions is much higher- possibly a trillion

What was the statistic regarding children deaths?

Those who died in infancy was 25% in 1900 and before 1800, at least half of all children died before maturity

What does Paul reject?

Suffering is necessary in order for us to learn, grow and make free decisions, because so many children never get to do those things

What do some believers argue though?

Free will is so important that some suffering is necessary. We beed to have real choices between good and evil, and real challenges to face, otherwise we would be puppets

What does Paul argue?

This does justify evil because of the sheer number of very young people who do not ever get those free mature choices and opportunities to learn

What question does this not resolve?

Why they had to suffer in their short lives

What does Paul challenge?

The claim the universe has been fine-tuned so that it is exactly right for human life and human flourishing, and that the statistics show that in fact the world is a death drop for children

What else does he argue?

If God does exist, he is not worthy of worship