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HOLY SPIRIT

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Title: HOLY SPIRIT


1
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
The Scream, E. Munch, http//www.ibiblio.org/wm/pa
int/auth/munch/
2
THEODICIES-Stephen T. DavisRedeeming it all
3
THEODICIES Davis
  • A Theodicy of Trust, Encountering Evil, 73-89
  • I am both an analytic philosopher and an
    evangelical Christian. . . . My controlling
    presuppositions are that people ought to believe
    what is rational for them to believe and that
    human reason is a normative guide to all belief
    and action. As an evangelical Christian . . . . I
    believe that all truth is from God and is
    consistent with the existence, goodness, and
    omnipotence of God. EE, 73

4
THEODICIES Davis
  • Indeed, I do not believe the problem of evil can
    be solved with the resources provided by bare
    theism it can only be solved, in my opinion,
    from a perspective that makes use of Christian
    doctrine, especially Christian soteriology and
    eschatology. EE, 73

5
THEODICIES Davis
  • Davis distinguishes the LPE, logical problem of
    evil, from the EPE, the emotive problem of evil.
    EE, 74
  • As for the logical problem of evil, Davis argues
    that the following are logically consistent,
    using the classical Free-Will Defense (FWD). EE,
    74
  • God is omnipotent
  • God is perfectly good
  • Evil exists

6
THEODICIES Davis
  • According to free-will defenders, God had two
    main aims. First, God wanted to create the best
    universe God could, i.e., a universe with the
    best possible balance of moral and natural good
    over moral and natural evil. Second, God wanted
    to create a world in which created rational
    agents (e.g., human beings) would decide freely
    to love and obey God. Accordingly, God created
    what was originally an evil-free world, and God
    created humans with the facility of free moral
    choice, with what philosophers call libertarian
    freedom. EE, 74

7
THEODICIES Davis
  • The possibility of evil is one of the risks that
    accompanies human freedom- but God is not to be
    blamed for the existence of moral evil. We are.
    EE, 75
  • But- this is better than a world in which there
    is no real freedom. Gods policy decision to
    make us free was wise, for it will turn out
    better in the long run that we act freely, even
    if we sometimes err, than it would have turned
    out had we been created as innocent automata,
    programmed always to do the good. EE, 75

8
THEODICIES Davis
  • Davis does not embrace the argument that this is
    the best of all possible worlds.
  • Must free-will defenders make this claim? I
    believe not. In the first place, it is not clear
    that the notion of the best of all possible
    worlds is coherent. . . . For any possible world,
    no matter how much pleasure and happiness it
    contains, we can always think of a better one,
    i.e., a world with slightly more pleasure and
    happiness. EE, 75

9
THEODICIES Davis
  • The burden of the FWD What the free-will
    defender must insist upon is, first, that the
    amount of evil that in the end will exist will be
    outweighed by the good that will exist, and,
    second, that this favorable balance of good over
    evil was obtainable by God in no other way. EE,
    76
  • Moreover, there are good reasons why God does not
    constantly intervene- human free will and moral
    responsibility would be undermined if he did. EE,
    77

10
THEODICIES Davis
  • Three major objections to resolving LPE
  • The first asks why an omnipotent creator could
    not create free beings who always freely chose
    the good. EE, 77
  • The second objection . . . If the whole
    creation was originally perfectly morally good .
    . . then how do we explain the fact that people
    sin?
  • The third objection concerns natural evil. The
    FWD defense- so it is said- may well be able to
    account for the presence of moral evil but not
    the presence of natural evil. EE, 78

11
THEODICIES Davis
  • Davis does not believe that the EPE is a
    philosophical problem.
  • What does remain is what we might all an
    evangelistic difficulty.. . . If philosophers
    have successfully defended theism against the
    charge that (8) God is omnipotent and God is good
    and evil exists is inconsistent or improbable, it
    is not easy to see what else they can or must
    do. EE, 81

12
THEODICIES Davis
  • FWD still seems open to the objection that it
    flounders against the huge amount of suffering
    that exists. The question can still be raised
    whether the moral freedom that the FWD says God
    gave us was worth the cost. This is an especially
    riveting question when viewed in relation to
    moral monsters like Hitler and Stalin. To put the
    question in economic terms Is human freedom
    cost-effective? Why didnt God create a world of
    less freedom and thus less murder? EE, 82

13
THEODICIES Davis
  • FWD makes two preliminary points about our
    present suffering neither of them alone is
    sufficient to solve the theodicy problem, but
    both are important nonetheless. First, suffering
    and the waiting it almost always includes, can be
    spiritually uplifting. . . . Second, God is with
    us in our suffering, loving and caring for us.
    EE, 83

14
THEODICIES Davis
  • The basic claim of my theodicy is that God will
    redeem all evil. There are two ways in which this
    will be done First, some evil will be used
    causally by God to help produce the great good of
    the kingdom of God. Second, in the kingdom of God
    all evil will be overcome, transcended, made to
    pale into insignificance. EE, 83-84

15
THEODICIES Davis
  • The biblical vision is that despite the pain
    that all people have endured, and despite the
    horrible pain that some people have endured, the
    vision of the face of God that we will then
    experience will make all previous suffering such
    that the pain will no longer matter. We may not
    at present be able fully to realize or even
    conceptualize the infinite goodness of the
    kingdom of God and the way that it will overwhelm
    all previous evil. But given that we are dealing
    with infinite goods produced by a transcendent
    God, our inability to understand this point is
    just what we should expect. EE, 85

16
THEODICIES Davis
  • Ultimately it comes down to trust. Some folk
    trust in God and some do not the ones who do
    trust in God choose not to question God
    inordinately (Isa. 459-11). They believe God has
    the answers to many questions that now appear
    unanswerable. Christians believe that God has
    good reasons for allowing particularly evil
    people to exist and particularly evil events to
    occur. Christians do not always claim to know
    what those reasons are, but they trust in God
    nonetheless. EE, 87-88

17
THEODICIES Davis
  • If Christianity is true, then given what it says
    about Gods transcendence and our cognitive
    limits, we would expect that there will be evils
    that we cannot explain (but God can) and goods so
    great that we cannot comprehend them (although
    God can). So the fact that there are mysteries in
    theodicy and that many of the relevant truths are
    quite beyond our ken is not a last-ditch attempt
    to save a theology from criticism but rather
    exactly what that theology should lead us to
    expect. EE, 88

18
CRITIQUE OFStephen T. Davis
19
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
The Scream, E. Munch, http//www.ibiblio.org/wm/pa
int/auth/munch/
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