Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Exodus 17:1–7 (and the book of Job) characterize suffering as testing and speak of God's right to test human loyalty. 2 Corinthians 4:7–12 says human weakness during suffering reveals God's strength and that it is part of the believer's calling to embrace suffering in solidarity with Christ.
The problem of evil has also been extended beyond human suffering, to include suffering of animals from cruelty, disease and evil. [12] One version of this problem includes animal suffering from natural evil, such as the violence and fear faced by animals from predators, natural disasters, over the history of evolution. [ 52 ]
The Bible contains numerous examples of God inflicting evil, both in the form of moral evil resulting from "man's sinful inclinations" and the physical evil of suffering. [12] These two biblical uses of the word evil parallel the Oxford English Dictionary 's definitions of the word as (a) "morally evil" and (b) "discomfort, pain, or trouble."
Augustinian scholars have argued that 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 original sin. [49]
Natural evil (also non-moral or surd evil) is a term generally used in discussions of the problem of evil and theodicy that refers to states of affairs which, considered in themselves, are those that are part of the natural world, and so are independent of the intervention of a human agent.
Epicurus was not an atheist, although he rejected the idea of a god concerned with human affairs; followers of Epicureanism denied the idea that there was no god. While the conception of a supreme, happy and blessed god was the most popular during his time, Epicurus rejected such a notion, as he considered it too heavy a burden for a god to have to worry about all the problems in the world.
Framed this way, the suffering of Hell is caused by free will and something God could not have prevented; or worse still is caused by the lack of free will, as God's omniscience—His knowing/determining all that will ever happen in His creation, including human acts of good and evil—makes free will impossible and souls predestined, but God ...
The Dialogue between a Man and His God is the earliest known text to address the answer to the question of why a god permits evil, or theodicy, a reflection on human suffering. It is a piece of Wisdom Literature extant on a single clay cuneiform tablet written in Akkadian and attributed to Kalbanum, on the last line, an individual otherwise ...