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Plantinga writes in God, Freedom, and Evil that J. L. Mackie has presented the objection that God, being omnipotent and omnibenevolent, would easily be able to create the best of all possible worlds. He reasons that such a world would be one in which all humans use their free will only for good – something they do not do.
The problem of evil is acute for monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism that believe in a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent; [88] [89] but the question of why evil exists has also been studied in religions that are non-theistic or polytheistic, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism.
In 1955 he published "Evil and Omnipotence", which summarized his view that belief in the existence of evil and an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good god is "positively irrational". [ 18 ] Mackie's views on this logical problem of evil prompted Alvin Plantinga to respond with the " free-will defense ", which Mackie later responded in his ...
But if it does not do it, its knowledge of evil is limited, so it is not all-knowing. If a god is all-knowing and totally good, then it knows of all the evil that exists and wants to change it. But if it does not, it must be because it is not capable of changing it, so it is not omnipotent.
The problem of evil is concerned with how it is possible to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering, with an all-knowing, all-powerful and good God. Hume summarizes one of the first versions of the argument: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
An omnipotent being with both first and second-order omnipotence at a particular time might restrict its own power to act and, henceforth, cease to be omnipotent in either sense. There has been considerable philosophical dispute since Mackie, as to the best way to formulate the paradox of omnipotence in formal logic.
According to this tradition, "evil, though real, is not a 'thing', but rather a direction away from the goodness of the One"; [11] evil is the absence of good, and accordingly, it is technically wrong to say that God created evil, properly speaking. Rather, he created a world which was imperfectly good.
Omnibenevolence is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "unlimited or infinite benevolence".Some philosophers, such as Epicurus [a], have argued that it is impossible, or at least improbable, for a deity to exhibit such a property alongside omniscience and omnipotence, as a result of the problem of evil.