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> if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil exist? Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certai
by irrational 5y ago
> if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil exist?
Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).
- brimble 5y agoSure, needing to deal with the question at all is a result of a certain set of cosmological and metaphysical assumptions—but it happens to be a problem that a ton of Western philosophers dealt with, over the years, because they were starting from such a set of assumptions, and so did feel a need to address it, so if you're reading (or reading about) Western philosophy—especially before the 20th century—you're gonna see a lot of it. In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)