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Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in its final version in his 1977 book God, Freedom, and Evil. [1] Plantinga's argument is a defense against the logical problem of evil as formulated by the philosopher J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955.
The problem of evil is generally formulated in two forms: the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil. The logical form of the argument tries to show a logical impossibility in the coexistence of a god and evil, [2] [10] while the evidential form tries to show that given the evil in the world, it is improbable that there is ...
Carneades could be the true author of the paradox attributed to Epicurus.. There is no text by Epicurus that confirms his authorship of the argument. [3] Therefore, although it was popular with the skeptical school of Greek philosophy, it is possible that Epicurus' paradox was wrongly attributed to him by Lactantius who, from his Christian perspective, while attacking the problem proposed by ...
The absence of good (Latin: privatio boni), also known as the privation theory of evil, [1] is a theological and philosophical doctrine that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial, so that thinking of it as an entity is misleading. Instead, evil is rather the absence, or lack ("privation"), of good.
Later Scholastics like Pierre D'Ailly and his student Jean de Gerson explicitly confronted the Euthyphro dilemma, taking the voluntarist position that God does not "command good actions because they are good or prohibit evil ones because they are evil; but... these are therefore good because they are commanded and evil because prohibited."
The evil demon, also known as Deus deceptor, [1] malicious demon, [2] and evil genius, [1] [3] is an epistemological concept that features prominently in Cartesian philosophy. [1] In the first of his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy , Descartes imagines that a malevolent God [ 1 ] or an evil demon , of "utmost power and cunning has employed ...
He claimed, however, that the existence of evil does not necessarily mean a worse world, so that this is still the best world that God could have made. In fact, Leibniz claimed that the presence of evil may make for a better world, insofar as "it may happen that the evil is accompanied by a greater good" [ 13 ] – as he said, "an imperfection ...
Here he suggests that whilst an extended formulation of Augustine's presentation of the free-will theodicy can answer the problems of global human and natural evil, it is incapable of answering what he calls local arguments from evil, which focus upon specific instances of evil that could have been removed from the world for the better without ...