Quotes About Theodicy

Anything you want to say about God you better make sure you can say in front of a pit of burning babies.

God creates a world containing evil and has a good reason for doing so.

If there were a god, don't you think he would have flicked Hitler's head off?

If there's a God why are there such things as famine and The Jerry Springer Show.

You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

What's undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time dealing with the Problem of Evil.

Theodicy, the philosophers call it: the problem of God's justice. The

God is either good and not all powerful, or He is powerful and not all good. You can't have it both ways.

Ko ?e kazniti Boga zato što ?ini te patimo? Ovde kod ljudi, kad se to u?ini, do?e se u tamnicu ili bude obešen. Ko ?e obesiti Boga?

What pleasure can it give God to see a man devoured by a cancer; to see the quivering flesh slowly eaten; to see the nerves throbbing with pain? Is this a festival for God?

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to; or he cannot and does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, and does not want to, he is wicked. But, if God both can and wants to abolish evil, then how comes evil in the world? Epicurus, philosopher

there's a cartoon of two turtles. One says, 'Sometimes I'd like to ask why he allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he could do something about it.' The other turtle says, 'I'm afraid God might ask me the same question.' Those

The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis. Any person who intentionally loosed such horrors upon the earth would be ground to dust for his crimes.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is not little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.

there is, he reasoned, no such thing as evil or suffering from God's point of view, and this explains why God never tries to do anything about it.

Leibniz invented the term "theodicy" (in its French and Latin forms) to mean the justification of God's ways to man—or, as an unbeliever might put it, the art of making excuses on behalf of God. Among

The tortures occur," he wrote. "If they are unnecessary, then there is no God, or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary for no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict them if they weren't.

The tortures occur," he wrote. "If they are unnecessary, then there is no God, or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary for no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't.

God as Satan? I've rarely heard a more radical formulation of the problem of theodicy (the attempt to reconcile the existence of a supposedly loving and just God with the persistence of evil).