Theodicy
- Created by: DeVanté
- Created on: 17-03-14 09:23
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- The Problem Of Evil (Theodicy)
- Augustinian Theodicy
- God created the world perfectly, with no evil or human suffering.
- Evil entered the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve and the theodicy casts the existence of evil as a just punishment for this
- The theodicy argues that humans have an evil nature in as much as it is deprived of its original goodness, form, order, and measure due to the inherited original sin of Adam and Eve, but still ultimately remains good due to existence coming from God, for if a nature was completely evil (deprived of the good), it would cease to exist
- Iraneus
- Irenaeus argued that human creation comprised two parts: humans were made first in the image, then in the likeness, of God. The image of God consists of having the potential to achieve moral perfection, whereas the likeness of God is the achievement of that perfection.
- To achieve moral perfection, Irenaeus suggested that humans must have free will. To achieve such free will, humans must experience suffering and God must be at an epistemic distance (a distance of knowledge) from humanity
- Therefore, evil exists to allow humans to develop as moral agents
- Anti-Theodicy (Jewish)
- Jewish theologian Zachary Braiterman coined the term anti-theodicy in his book (God) After Auschwitz to describe Jews, both in a biblical and post-Holocaust context, whose response to the problem of evil is protest and refusal to investigate the relationship between God and suffering
- French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who had himself been a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, declared theodicy to be "blasphemous", arguing that it is the "source of all immorality",
- He argued that humans are not called to justify God in the face of evil, but to attempt to live godly lives; rather than considering whether God was present during the Holocaust, the duty of humans is to build a world where goodness will prevail.[
- Augustinian Theodicy
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