The orthodox view of God is that he is maximally great. The next step is to spell out how exactly these beliefs contradict each other. The two beliefs in question are the orthodox view of God and the existence of evil. Let us call the person pressing the objection to the Christian the “atheologian.” Now, the first the step the atheologian needs to take to show a contradiction within Christianity is say what two beliefs are supposed to contradict one another. This is the kind of challenge that the problem of evil poses to Christian theism. Buddhists are committed to two beliefs that cannot be reconciled together. If, for example, we could show that Buddhism teaches that there are no such things as unified, human selves, but we can show that a real and unified human self is everywhere presupposed by Buddhist teaching, this counts as an internal contradiction. One powerful way to show that a worldview is false is to show that it contains internal contradictions. With these guideposts in place, I will argue that one reason for supposedly gratuitous evils is that they are required to realize the human good.
In order to build a theodicy, we will first see why there is such a thing as “the problem of evil.” Then we will see how Plantinga’s response to this problem provides useful guideposts in constructing a theodicy. A theodicy is an explanation of how God and evil can co-exist in the world.
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