Research Paper on:
William Rowe's Argument on Evil

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
that God is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Such a powerful being would be perfectly capable of preventing evil in the world. Since horrendous evil does exist,  it follows that God does not (Rowe 335). The problem of evil has always been the most powerful objection to traditional theism (Honderich, et al 255). However, a close  examination of this argument demonstrates that there are rational ways around the problem of evil that make it possible to defend a belief in God. Alvin Plantinga, for example, argues  that is it perfectly rational to hold a belief that can be evidentially challenged, i.e. the manner in which evil provides evidence against the existence of God, as long as  one also possesses some additional epistemic basis for the truth of that belief (Silver 345). In other words, granting that evil exists, other evidence, such as the beauty and  extreme order evident in the universe, is better explained by a belief in theism than by the competing hypothesis, which is the non-existence of God) (Silver 345). The  traditional response to the problem of evil is to deny that an all-good deity would always choose to prevent evil, which is one of Rowes suppositions. The rationalization is that  by allowing some evils to exist, it makes possible greater goods that cannot be obtained by any other route (Honderich, et al 255). Rowe, of course, was perfectly aware of  this counter to his argument. Ultimately, however, Rowe insists that when we examined the known goods that exist in the universe and how they are counterbalanced by horrendous evils, one  comes to the conclusion that no known good justifies God in permitting any of those horrendous evils. However, while Rowe asserts that there are no known goods that justify