 I remember reading something. I think it was about Leibniz going on an epic journey across ancient Greece to prove that it was rational to believe in God. What was it called, the Odyssey? Okay, before we do this, please note that this is not a condemnation or debunking of religion or theism. This is a summary of a very interesting problem that religious philosophers have been tying themselves in knots over since the beginning of written history. Please be patient and respectful of others in comments, and don't take it as an assault on your particular beliefs. The problem of evil is a theological dilemma that has been around for a long, long time. The ancient Mesopotamian poem of the Right to Sufferer is perhaps the oldest written record we have of the basic line of thought, and it's almost three and a half thousand years old. However, the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was probably one of the first to summarize the details of the problem in a clear and concise fashion, around 300 BC. The problem of evil, as stated by Epicurus, which is why it's sometimes known as the Epicurian Paradox, consists of a trilema. Three statements, which, taking it face value together, seem irreconcilable. It's not just a dilemma, it's a trilema. Three lemmas for the price of two. I'm very tired. Statement one, some God exists, and that God is omnipotent. Now, the definition of omnipotence can be tricky, but let's just say that gods are generally supposed to be powerful. Statement two, that omnipotent God is also wholly benevolent. Again, benevolence can be a little dicey, but let's just say that we're talking about a God who wants everyone to be happy and content and to have all the ice cream they could possibly want. Statement three, there is evil in the world. If you haven't noticed, a ton of terrible stuff happens on a fairly regular basis. War, genocide, floods, terrible diseases, volcanoes, ice cream shortages, sad puppies. We might call it all suffering, but evil just sounds cooler. That's it. That's the whole basis of the problem, just those three statements. The actual argument itself comes in two distinct flavors, which, although similar, use different approaches. The first is the so-called logical problem of evil. In this, the strongest version of the argument, it's asserted that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God is, by definition, logically irreconcilable with the existence of any evil at all. Let's take a close look at these three statements again. According to this argument, if statements one and two are true, if there is some omnipotent God who's also nice, you'd expect that God to want there to be no evil at all and to be totally capable of eliminating it. And yet, fireflies still got canceled. If statements one and three are true, if there's a powerful deity overlooking a world with evil in it, that evil must be allowed by that deity, if not condoned or even caused by it. Not a nice guy. If statements two and three are true, there's some being somewhere that sees the evil in the world and wants it to stop, but can't do anything to stop it. As far as gods go, that's kind of wimpy. Not really God-like at all. According to the logical problem of evil, it would seem that the deity posited by many world religions simply can't exist by definition, at least by the definitions these words generally carry. One might tinker with the definition slightly to make them work together, like defining good as anything that a particular deity wills, but that's basically conceding that they don't work together the way that most people understand them. This is quite a problem for many believers, and many theologians and philosophers have wrestled with it for millennia. One of the most rigorous and well-respected responses to the logical problem of evil was actually composed in the 20th century by Alvin Plantinga, it's known as the Free Will Defense. The defense revolves around the idea that an omnipotent omnibenevolent deity might have wanted to create a perfect world free from suffering and evil, but that it's logically possible that in order to net the greatest good, this is as good as it gets. First, let's run through the crappier version of the Free Will defense. The deity who created everything gave humans free will, humans sometimes do evil, hence evil not directly due to that deity's influence. That's great and all, only the deity also created the circumstances under which people can act, and could have created those circumstances such that nobody would want to do evil, even with free will. I mean, given the choice between kicking a puppy and eating ice cream, which would you choose? Plantinga negotiates this objection by suggesting that there's a logical possibility that there's some problem with people that have free will, something called transworld depravity. Transworld depravity is a supposed trait such that no matter how you build a world around a particular person, there is always a scenario in that world where that person will always choose evil. So maybe there is that theoretical world where someone can either eat ice cream or kick puppies, but no matter how you tweak the variables, either the ice cream is so good that they swoon and fall on the puppy or they eat it too fast and get brain freeze, you get the picture. Plantinga's defense asserts that the mere possibility that all people with free will suffer from transworld depravity is enough to refute the logical problem of evil. In some sense, he's absolutely right. If there's any possible combination of circumstances such that the argument wouldn't apply, then the issue isn't with the definitions of the words themselves, it's in their particular implementation. But as nice as it would be to close the door on the logical argument entirely, there are some issues with the free will defense. First it necessitates a version of free will called libertarianism, asserting that human beings are totally indeterministic in their choices, that they can literally choose anything at any time. I've covered before why many philosophers don't believe that this is a valid approach in previous videos, but long story short, neuroscience and psychology are totally a thing. Second, if you think about it, it only really covers those evils which can be attributed to free will, to the actions that people choose to do or not to do. That leaves a whole bunch of evil not due to human activity unaccounted for, things like natural disasters and disease, which can cause a massive amount of suffering totally independent of transworld depravity. Nonetheless, Plantinga's free will defense is considered by many philosophers to be the most rigorous response to the logical problem of evil yet devised. But if you'll recall, the logical problem of evil is only one flavor, the other is the evidential problem of evil. See, the logical formulation is meant to be something that's purely analytic, something that you can know to be true without examining the world at all. It's kind of like looking at the definition of circle and looking at the definition of square and saying there can't be any such thing as a square circle because the two are just fundamentally incompatible with each other. In contrast, the evidential formulation doesn't look at evil as some sort of abstract quantity greater than zero. It examines specific concrete examples of evil in the world and calls upon some intuitive judgment that there's some quality to those examples that makes it highly unlikely and unreasonable to believe in an omnipotent omnibenevolent deity. I'm sure that you can come up with an example of some atrocity or horrific injustice in the world, some event which caused seemingly needless suffering from which no conceivable good or prevention of evil could result. The evidential problem of evil calls on us to weigh all such events and to reach the conclusion that there probably is a better world than this one, that a creator if one existed chose not to implement over this one and as such allowed or chose all that needless suffering. Imagining such a world isn't particularly difficult, I mean we're already morally limited by the laws of physics in significant ways, like we can't cause horrible things to happen just by thinking about them. What if actually performing horrible actions was just as impossible? That's it, two distinct formulations of one of the most difficult theological problems ever posited. It's easy to understand, it's compelling, it's been around since the dawn of civilization and it's still a capital P problem for many believers. Of course not all theists are attached to the idea of an omnipotent omnibenevolent deity. If you believe in a god like Loki, it's perfectly obvious why bad things happen to good people. It's because Loki is kind of a jerk. Which formulation of the problem of evil do you find most compelling? What do you think of Plantinga's defense? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share and don't stop thunking.