Abstract

To many atheists the existence of evil seems to provide a conclusive argument against the existence of God. God is by definition omnipotent and perfectly good; a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can, an omnipotent being can remove any evil he chooses, so if there is a God there will be no evil, but there is evil, hence there is no God. Theists normally challenge this argument by challenging the premiss that a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can. The theistic defence is usually put as the defence that many evils are logically necessary conditions of greater goods, and hence a perfectly good being may allow them to occur in order to bring about the greater good; so a perfectly good being may well allow some evils to occur.