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I looked a bit a head in my metaphysics book... and found that the Author (aka., my professor) comes to the conclusion in the section about God and Evil (theodicy?) that "therefore, there is no God"... so I'm going to need to rediscover refutations of this as the only solution... if anyone has any leads on ways of defending God and Evil, please send them...
One of my tactics will be to deny that the exisitence of evil is contradictory with the concept of an All-loving God...
Another I'm going to look into, is to state that if the view of evil is that it is only a finite thing, and God is infinite, then evil is not contrary to the all-powerful God.
But I'm far from even seriously starting into inquiry about how to defend it... so any help will be of great use.
5 comments:
if i find anything i will let you know, but as i know very little about these sorts of things, I will pray that you are able to discover something Truthful!
Metaphysics taught by an atheist. Talk about putting the Satre before the Marx!
First a caveat: "Only a fully-trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, can conquer Vader"
Proving a negative (e.g., "...ergo, there is no God," quoth the fool in his heart) is a notoriously problematic effort. Empirical data alone can provided 100% certainty of anything and logical arguments have their intrinsic limitations (e.g., the imperfection of premises).
Another classic problem with the argument "evil + world = no god" is the refusal to consider the fact that while humans can know and understand much, we are not smart enough to understand everything (remember God's questions to Job at the end of the book). Essentially, their argument is "If *I* cannot understand it, it does not exist" and is pretty silly.
I would recommend getting a good book on Metaphysics to parallel your classwork (not necessarily to provide fodder for battle with the prof.)
I have a metaphysics book on Aquinas... but it's not been too helpful... as the topics in the class book seem to be quite different... though I will definately look for more books.
As much as I LOVE the Angelic Doctor, a book on Thomas' Metaphysics in se might not demonstrate explicit awareness of contemporary philosophical perspectives, let alone provide ready-made counter-arguments (except seminally).
One more thing:
If you need really good suggestions on the best books available at the moment regarding Metaphysics, etc. that are compatible with orthodoxy, you might think about contacting a few people with strong Catholic and academic credentials.
Christendom College has a number of faculty members with Ph.Ds in Philosophy.
http://www.christendom.edu/academics/faculty.shtml
Then there's Dr. Philip Blosser - Father of Bloggers
http://www.lrc.edu/rel/blosser/index.html
http://www.pblosser.blogspot.com/
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