Abstract

One familiar philosophical use of the term ‘evil’ just contrasts it with ‘good’, i.e., something is an evil if it is a bad thing, one of life’s “minuses.” This is the sense of ‘evil’ that is used in posing the traditional theological problem of evil, though it is customary there to distinguish between moral evils and natural evils. Moral evils are those bad things that are caused by moral agents; natural evils are those bad things that are not caused by moral agents. Since the existence of evils of both sorts is usually taken to be indubitable, the problem of evil is then construed as the problem of how to square their existence with the existence of an all-powerful and benevolent God.