Figuring out the Trilemma of Evil
I’d never been quite satisfied with the problem of evil (if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, how can there be evil?) because it looked like a false trilemma, like C.S. Lewis’s liar, lunatic, or lord.
Lewis’s trilemma fails because it doesn’t account for all possibilities (e.g., a fourth possibility is “legend”). So how do we know that omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence cover all possibilities in the problem of evil? Granted, the fact that a lot of very smart people have looked at it for millennia, so it’s probably solid, but it always bothered me that I hadn’t seen a good demonstration that it wasn’t a false trilemma.
But then I reasoned thusly:
- If there is evil in the world, and God is omniscient, then God knows about it.
- If God knows about evil, and is omnibenevolent, then God wants to fix it.
- If God wants to fix evil, and is omnipotent, then God can fix it.
I like this formulation because the three parts of the argument flow from each other.