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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.
For example, the Eastern Orthodox see it as a condition brought about by, and the natural consequence of, free rejection of God's love. [ 14 ] In some ancient Eastern Christian traditions, (such as 7th century Syriac Christianity ), Hell and Heaven are distinguished not spatially, but by the relation of a deceased person to God's love.
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.
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.
Second-century theologian and philosopher Irenaeus, after whom the theodicy is named, proposed a two-stage creation process in which humans require free will and the experience of evil to develop. Another early Christian theologian, Origen, presented a response to the problem of evil which cast the world as a schoolroom or hospital for the soul ...
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 ]
In his essay Islam Through Western Eyes, the cultural critic Edward Said suggests that the Western view of Islam is particularly hostile for a range of religious, psychological and political reasons, all deriving from a sense "that so far as the West is concerned, Islam represents not only a formidable competitor but also a late-coming ...
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]