Okay, I'm gonna need everyone's help with this. I will be posting parts of my paper and I want y'all to discuss the problem/thesis raised in that particular part of the paper. I will post the next section as soon as I get a comment.
In this paper, I am dialoguing with four philosophers on the problem of Evil. This problem is legend in the religious circles: how can there be a good God and yet Evil is present? It also takes on other forms: Does Evil exist? Where do our morals and ethics come from? Why is something Good and the other not? Who decides what is Evil, or what is Good?
I am talking to St. Augustine, of the original apologetic masterminds. Much of the theology adopted by Christianity today can be traced somehow or other back to Augustine's beliefs. Although he was a bit controversial--and still is, there has been a rise in his reading with the advent of Postmodernism and the return to High Church tradition among today's people (see my reblog Why Young People Are Leaving the Church . . . it might be under the name "Worth a read from CNN's belief blog"). He held that everything was created good but ultimately corruptible . . . I won't give too much away right now.
I'm also talking to David Hume. He was an eighteenth-century skeptic who held that God doesn't exist because there is evil. Hume, an empiricist (knowledge comes through experience) is famous for inspiring Immanuel Kant, in my opinion one of the most extreme philosophers out there (we can't know anything except that we can perceive it....yeah, I know, me too).
The other two are Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment) and J.L. Mackie. Dostoevsky likes to give his opinion and then shoot it down by saying that he could be completely wrong except when he's not. Mackie is most famous for stating that ethics were inventions.
Okay. These are oversimplified versions of what they actually thought, but the paper will delve deeper into that.
Have fun!
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