Make up: Power of Evil

When it comes to the Divine Command Theory very religious people shout for joy. That is before you begin to discuss the power of evil. The arguments made is that:

 1) If God were all powerful, he could prevent evil

2) If God were all loving, he would prevent evil

3) Evil exists

Therefore, there is no God that is all-powerful or all loving.

 The religious person would probably try to refute this with a three pronged attack. The first is that God may be all powerful, but he once he created the Earth, animals, and humans, he decided to sit back and watch us live without interference. Simply because bad things do happen to people doesn’t mean that God cannot act. Simply because evil does exist does not mean that he cannot interfere.

Which then brings us to the next point, that questions if God is all-loving. A religious person would probably explain that although bad things do happen to good people 1) God simply is trying to test us, or that 2) God could help, but as earlier stated, he does not want to interefere in our lives, and that just because he might not prevent bad things from happening does not mean that he doesn’t love us. I’m not suggesting that I agree with this argument, or that I believe it is sound, however based on the christian beliefs passed down over years of religious education, this is the basic argument somebody would present.

Finally, the last point. The fact that evil exists. The argument against this would be that because evil is an intangible thing, and is also subjective, the religious person would try to say that people who commit immoral acts simply are not following God’s way but are still his children, and as such although the act was wrong, it was not evil. Once again this is a poor argument. If one man murders another, the murderer knows that it is wrong and therefore malice is involved. A religious person would probably refuse to acknowledge the existence of evil or try to manipulate the definition of evil being that it is subjective.

All in all the power of evil argument is one of the more sound arguments to stand up against DCT however a religious person would fight to the death.

Utilitarianism- Just too hard?

In our group we were asked to decipher about a page and a half of John Stuart Mill beginnig on page  “The objectors to utilitarianism… - manifestly pernicious to society” (326-327) What we’ve been able to come up with so far is that in the opening paragraph, the argument that the objector to Utilitarianism makes is that it is a standard that is”too high” for a human being to be able to uphold. The idea that a person must try to take into account everybody else’s feelings and overall pleasure in a split second before they do something would be too much to take. Better put, it’s inconceivable that a person would be able to analyze a situation instantly before they make any actions that could affect others (be it in a pleasurable or painful way). So far Mill has not responded to this claim, so stay tuned for some updates.