[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Theodicy
We live in a world of unprecedented atheism, humanism and despair. Ours is a world where belief in God certainly is not easy to maintain. The scientific challenge to theism is monumental, and yet there is an even more urgent problem for the theist: the problem of reconciling belief in God with the world’s suffering and anguishes. In the minds of many theologians, this is by far the most serious threat to religious belief, a threat which the contemporary scientific alternative has rendered more pressing than ever.
How can we believe in an all-powerful and all-loving God who orders and guides our lives, when all around us there exists such devastating evil and suffering? Could an all powerful God not have eliminated the suffering and pain we creatures must endure? Should an all-powerful and all-loving God not have done so? Indeed, could an all-powerful and all-loving God not have created a better world in the first place, a world with less evil or perhaps with none at all.
This, in brief, is the infamous ‘problem of evil’, technically referred to as “theodicy” (Endo, 2000). It has been a major concern of theologians for centuries and persists as one of the most perplexing and disconcerting of problems. It not only is a problem, moreover, for professional theologians and philosophers, but has been a prevalent theme in poetry, novels, drama and in other facets of human creativity and inquiry. Everywhere, every when, and every how, it seems this problem has been near the heart of the important work of significant writers, artists, and others. The problem of evil is a problem which no human being can ignore.
Looking around, it is clear that we do not always experience the conditions of sublime existence enjoyed by the idea of infinite goodness. Instead of harmony and infinity we might sometimes experience discord and limitation.......
