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It is sometimes described as the "Lunatic, Liar, or Lord", or "Mad, Bad, or God" argument. It takes the form of a trilemma—a choice among three options, each of which is in some way difficult to accept. A form of the argument can be found as early as 1846, and many other versions of the argument preceded Lewis's formulation in the 1940s.
Although God cannot create a self-contradictory world, he is all-powerful and all-knowing, as emphasized in §55. He cannot be prevented from creating a world by not knowing about it, or by lacking the power to make it. Given these assumptions, it might seem that God could create just any one of the worlds.
One resolution to the problem of evil is that God is not good. The evil God challenge thought experiment explores whether an evil God is as likely to exist as a good God. Dystheism is the belief that God is not wholly good. Maltheism is the belief in an evil god. Peter Forrest has stated:
There is, therefore, no ontological source of evil, corresponding to the greater good, which is God; [28] evil being not real but rational—i.e. it exists not as an objective fact, but as a subjective conception; things are evil not in themselves, but because of their relation to other items or persons. All realities are in themselves ...
Dystheism as a concept, although often not labeled as such, has been referred to in many aspects of popular culture.As stated before, related ideas date back many decades, with the Victorian era figure Algernon Charles Swinburne writing in his work Anactoria about the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her lover Anactoria in explicitly dystheistic imagery that includes cannibalism and sadomasochism.
In conceptions of God as the summum bonum (the highest good), the proposition of God not being wholly good would be an oxymoron. Nevertheless, in monotheism , the sentiment may arise in the context of theodicy (the problem of evil , the Euthyphro dilemma ) or as a rejection or criticism of particular depictions or attributions of the ...
Good and evil, though real, are considered to be created by God, thus God is not subject to good and evil, humans merely learn whatever God created. Blaming God for a violation of right and wrong is thus considered undue, since God created right and wrong in the first place. [ 68 ]
If divine simplicity is accepted, then to describe God as good would entail that goodness and God have the same definition. [2] Such limits can also be problematic to religious believers; for example, the Bible regularly ascribes different emotions to God, ascriptions which would be implausible according to the doctrine of divine simplicity.