Quotes About Theodicy

People often ask: Where was God in the Holocaust? It is the wrong question. The real question: Where was man?

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

The problem of pain has remained the single greatest question, not only for the skeptic who uses it as an excuse to doubt God's existence, but also for the believer who questions God's purpose.

And as for the gods, I've never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain? I was taught pain is to let us know when our body is breaking down. Well, why couldn't we have a light? Like a dashboard light? If Chevrolet could come up with that, why couldn't God? Why is agony a good way to handle things?

What kind of God would allow suffering in His universe?

1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. 2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. 3) (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

Christianity entails doctrines that increase the probability of the coexistence of God and suffering.

Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?

The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else.

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

It used to be widely held that evil was incompatible with the existence of God: that no possible world contained both God and evil. So far as I am able tell, this thesis is no longer defended

Faith is, necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil.

To say that God permits evil in the world may not be pleasing to the ear. But if He is held responsible for the good, it follows that He has to be responsible for the evil too.

If 'everything happens for a reason,' then every act of evil is ultimately God's doing.

The difficulty is old, but none the less real. An omnipotent being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.

How could a good, all-powerful God allow suffering?

Because we don't see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God's existence and goodness.

I am not accusing God of sinning; I am suggesting that he created sin

Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once and He volunteered.

If God is, why is there evil? But if God is not, why is there good?

Sometimes (at least in principle) God might allow some evil because doing so will prevent a greater evil, and sometimes He might allow evil because it will produce a greater good.

If there is a god they need to come down to Earth and explain WWII, Hitler, bowel cancer, and Croc shoes.

Test all statements (about God, theology, morality, faith, life) based on whether such statements would be credible in the kind of world in which two-year-olds have been thrown alive into pits of fire. I would hasten to add: the kind of world in which Jewish two-year-olds have been burned alive mainly by baptized Christians.24

On this view, God is the cause of physical evil. The question arose, then, whether He is also the cause of sin and of moral evil; and, if so, how He could have invented the very thing that corrupts His creation. The attempt to vindicate God's will was called theodicy in Greek, and it is this term that is traditionally used to refer to all human attempts to justify the existence of evil in a world that has been perfectly made. Theodicies