Everyday our news bulletins are filled with stories of deadly diseases, traffic accidents, bullying, knife crime and wars and this raises the question on why God allows all these events to take place if indeed He exists. The issue of suffering is so real because every individual has at one point or another undergone through some type of suffering such as relationship breakdown, depression, financial pressure and illness. By introducing “the problem of evil,” many individuals get to question God’s existence and specifically, most people link God’s characteristics of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence to the existence of both moral and natural evil. In “Why God allows Evil,” Swinburne shades light on the concept of evil and justifies its existence in our world. One of the reasons given by Swinburne (93) is that God has the right of causing human suffering to an extent that an individual can handle. In simpler terms, the argument by Swinburne implies that God allows humans to suffer within their limits in order to encourage them to attain a greater or better purpose hence human suffering is for their own good. Another reason for this suffering is to strengthen the relationship between God and humanity. Swinburne (94) employs a parent-child relationship as a metaphor for the relationship between God and humans in that; children are not always given what they want by their parents and most of the time this is for their own good.
Swinburne uses the “Free Will Theodicy” to discuss how the evil that is in existence is caused by humans. Through the Free Will Theodicy, Swinburne creates a distinction between moral and natural evil in the sense that moral evil is a suffering that arises following an action an individual takes towards another individual while natural evil is not associated with human cause (Swinburne 70). The idea for introducing these two types of evil is to show that individuals that are capable of distinguishing right from wrong could not in any way consider the moral option and consequently, suffering occurs. Therefore, as much as suffering will still be occurring, humans have free will, which is a valuable attribute hence God always gives us the opportunity to practice free will to see if we can make responsible choices.
Work cited
Swinburne, Richard. “Why God allows evil.” Is there a God (1996): 95-113.
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