Abstract
The problem of evil is the most difficult confronting the theist, and the existence of evil has always been cited by atheists as the most persuasive fact in support of their disbelief. How, it has been demanded, can evil in any form be thought compatible with divine goodness, omniscience and omnipotence? If everything that happens is in any sense God’s act, if all reality and occurrence is the effect of God’s power and will, he must be the ultimate cause of all error and evil, the reality of which none can plausibly deny. How, then, can God be at once omnipotent and benevolent?
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References
Reason and Belief (Yale University Press, 1975), p. 546.
Op. cit., p. 510
Ibid, and p. 524
See, however, ray paper, ‘Rationalism and Reason’, forthcoming.
loc. dt
Cf. my Revelation through Reason, Ch. VI, pp. 100–103.
See Nicomachean Ethics, 1174b, 1175a.
Cf. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Book IV; F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, Ch. III.
Cf. Plato. Phaedo, 60B.
Cf. Revelation through Reason, pp. 106–111.
A carpenter or a tennis player is ‘good’ so far as his skill conduces to success, but success in special pursuits is itself good only so far as it contributes to the goodness of life as a whole, and that in the final issue is the moral end.
Cf. New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London, 1955), 8, pp. 144–69.
Cf. W. G. Maclagan’s discussion in The Theological Frontier of Ethics (London, 1961.), Ch. II.
The Brothers Karamazov, Bk. V, Ch. IV.
Cf. Epistle XXIII.
Process must not be understood as purely temporal. There is also a necessary aspect in which, qua process, it constitutes an eternal whole eternally self-realized; for unless this were so, no process could be actually progressive.
Cf. my discussion of Spinoza’s theory in Salvation from Despair, Ch. VII, §7.
Romans VIII, 7, 14–15.
Ethics, V, xviii, Schol.
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© 1977 Tulane University New Orleans
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Harris, E.E. (1977). Evil and Transfiguration. In: Atheism and Theism. Tulane Studies in Philosophy, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9785-4_6
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