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Theodicy: Sufferings
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[O]f course, when an anti-Darwinist says that theodicy is a problem for Darwinism, one can’t help but wonder whether it is a problem for his position — in this case, Dembski-style ID. How does Dembski’s ID address theodicy? Dembski doesn’t broach that subject in Potemkin, but he has talked about it in other writings, and I’ve commented on that.
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The first and most important task of theodicy is to prove the existence of God. It is of course presupposed that the suprasensible can be known and that the limits of experience pure and immediate can be transcended. The justification of this assumption must be furnished by other branches of philosophy, e.g. criteriology and general metaphysics. The natural demonstrability of God's existence was always accepted by the majority of theists. David Hume and Immanuel Kant were the first to awaken in the minds of would-be theists serious doubt on this point. Not that these philosophers presented any solid reason against the long-tested arguments for the existence of God, but because in their systems a scientific proof of the existence of a supernatural being was impossible.
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Now though, with the prospect of thousands of dead becoming plausible with reports from New Orleans, other forms of theodicy ... taking shape. Much debate is taking place about the scale of human tragedy, about procedures and planning and responsibility. And none of that should be ignored. But it is remarkable how this natural disaster has almost imperceptibly come to seem the result of human agency, as if failures in planning were almost evidence of cause, as if forces of nature were subject to human oversight. The hurricane has been humanized.
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The goal of theodicy is to show that there are convincing reasons why a just, compassionate and omnipotent being would permit pointless and debilitating suffering to flourish. But any method of inquiry that begins with a predetermined conclusion is not rational and scientific,as one point of view suggests. Some suggest that the goal of theodicy is not to determine the truth, but to convince skeptics by any means possible that a reasonably doubted proposition is, in fact, true.
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Paul's speech in Athens is the clearest place in the New Testament where Christian theodicy is explained to Epicureans and their reaction to it recorded. Whether Acts 17 record an actual address by Paul to these very people or a creation of the author, Luke sees Christian doctrine being compared and contrasted with an alternate doctrine, Epicureanism. It is the hypothesis of this study that Christian preaching about theodicy seems regularly to have come in conflict with denials of it, denials which are typically and even specifically characteristic of Epicureans.
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The free will theodicy argues that if God were to 'get involved' and start influencing human actions for the better, then human actions wouldn't be free any longer. Human freedom means that God cannot guarantee human perfection (see incompatible-properties arguments).
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