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Religious responses to the problem of evil are concerned with reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God. [1] [2] The problem of evil is acute for monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism whose religion is based on such a God.
Judaism teaches that the soul continues to exist after death, and that it is subject to both reward and punishment after death. [11] However, this punishment is held to be temporary, normally only lasting up to 12 months after death. [12] After this period, the soul is able to enjoy the light of God in the afterlife.
Evil, according to Clement, does not exist as a positive, but exists as a negative or as a "lack of good". [58] Clement's idea was criticised for its inability to explain suffering in the world, if evil did not exist. He was also pressed by Gnostics scholars with the question as to why God did not create creatures that "did not lack the good".
A defence attempts to demonstrate that the occurrence of evil does not contradict God's existence, but it does not propose that rational beings are able to understand why God permits evil. A theodicy shows that it is reasonable to believe in God despite evidence of evil in the world and offers a framework which can account for why evil exists. [8]
In Judaism, yetzer hara is the congenital inclination to do evil, by violating the will of God. The term is drawn from the phrase "the imagination of the heart of man [is] evil" ( יֵצֶר לֵב הָאָדָם רַע , yetzer lev-ha-adam ra ), which occurs twice at the beginning of the Torah.
Christian scholars have offered three main theodicies of why a good God might need to allow evil in the world. These are based on the free will of humankind, [ 103 ] a self-limiting God, [ 104 ] and the observation that suffering has "soul-making" value. [ 105 ]
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Christian Universalism teaches that an eternal Hell does not exist and is a later creation of the church with no biblical support. Reasoning by Christian Universalists includes that an eternal Hell is against the nature, character and attributes of a loving God, human nature, sin's nature of destruction rather than perpetual misery, the nature ...