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A sticking point for Muno and polytheistic religions alike, it is thought that Epicurus was probably the first to raise the problem of evil.

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It centres on how we can reconcile the existence of evil in the world with an omnibus, omniscient and omnipotent God.

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I'm a little bit and here with me to discuss the problem of evil are Luke Martin completing a philosophical theology at Oxford.

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Frase McDermott, who graduated last year in theology at Christ Church and is now studying for a master's in patristic theology and Tilak Perak,

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a final year undergraduate reading, theology and religion at Oxford, researching Hindu theology and comparative Hindu Christian theology.

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Look, perhaps you could give us your version of the problem of evil.

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Sure. So first, we might want to distinguish between two types of evil.

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First, moral evil on second, natural evil.

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So let's let moral evil be evil that comes as a result of free human action and we can let natural evil be evil,

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that doesn't come as a result of free human action.

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So example of moral evil, the theft, murder, rape, example of natural evil might be an earthquake.

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So natural disasters, natural disasters or some illnesses which don't come as a result of, say, bad health or a bad lifestyle or something like that.

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OK, so to the arguments for premises and a conclusion, premise one.

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If God if there is a God, he or she is all powerful.

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Premise two, if there is a God, he or she is all good.

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Premise three. An all powerful and all good God could and would prevent evil from taking place in the world.

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Premise for there is evil in the world, therefore the conclusion God does not exist.

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Hmm. It's pretty damning. So does everybody else agree with that conception of the problem of evil?

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What about you? I think the problem of evil is conceptualised very differently in Hinduism, for example,

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if there are two paintings and there was a shade of blue in both the way the blue seen,

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the way the blue is perceived, the perception of that blue colour is dependent on the colours in the painting surrounding that that blue patch.

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So in the same way, there is evil in Hinduism and in Christianity. But the way the problem is conceptualised and thought of is very, very different.

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I see. So is it do you have the same distinction between natural evil and moral evil?

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Yes, I think the distinction remains. But at the same time, the problem isn't really a big problem in Hinduism.

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Oh, it's an except that it's an accepted fact of life.

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OK, and evil is seen as something that's part of the natural order of the world rather than a divine problem.

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It's seen as a human issue and part of the natural mechanics of the universe.

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Could you give us an example then of how Hindus would deal with the problem of evil in real life?

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So before going to so sort of a practical look at the way he does deal with the problem of evil,

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I think it would be good to the grounds of bit theory. First, with the with the notion of karma.

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Karma is one of the key sort of cornerstones of Hindu theology, whereby there's a law of cause and effect.

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So. Our actions in previous births and our current lives give us futz with that we had those those be good.

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If I were to push a granny, I would be I'd receive the fruits of that.

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If I were to help someone to receive the fruits of that,

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to sow the evil that happens to us is generated by ourselves and several texts, canonical Hindu texts like the patient's state.

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This fact. Um, so that means Hindus deal with evil in a very different way.

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For example, I an example comes to mind currently of of an attack on on a Hindu temple in 2002.

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It's a massive complex. And this family are not Shredderman in Gandhinagar in India.

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And terrorists attacked the place and they killed about 32 people, wounded 70 when the leader of the organisation from Miami arrived at the place,

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he said that we should pray for everybody and it was God's doing.

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So that's really a microcosm of how Hindus deal with with the problem of evil even in their homes.

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So we've wanted to bring that into comparison with what Luke's saying.

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Then perhaps the premise that they wouldn't agree with is the idea that God would and should do something about evil in the world.

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If it's present. Yes, perhaps this evil is more a sort of.

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A process of how humans become than something which should be prevented.

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Yeah, so as I said, karma is the mechanics of the universe,

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and there's an analogy given in the tradition of the canonical text of Hinduism where they met,

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there are seeds planted in the ground and God provides the rain and the soil.

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How that seed grows is dependent on the genetic DNA of the seeds.

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So my karmic fruits, my karma, my desires are in the seed and that's how I'll grow.

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And as the fruits I'll experience, God provides the same rain, the same soil to everybody.

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So the evil we experience or the good we experience is due to our actions.

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I see. So even as a problem for people and not for God. Yeah.

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Fraser, what do you think about returning to Anglicanism for the minute, what would you think about Luke's conception of the problem of evil?

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Well, I think what we've had so far, two very eloquent descriptions, but two very eloquent descriptions,

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which are sort of touching upon very different metaphysical constructs.

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Yes. So we've had one sort of what I call a modernist approach in Luke's description of how the Hindu approach interacts.

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And I think what I would like to sort of flag up is that these aren't necessarily the only ways that we would deal with we might deal with evil.

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The monice approach that Luke explained sort of grew up.

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Within well, I suppose originally through the through the sort of Jewish Abrahamic religions, but in Christianity,

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its main proponent was Augustine, who was great, the fourth and fifth century Christian theologian.

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But along side, the same time Augustine was was alive,

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where another group of Christians called the monarchies, whom Augustine was actually one of originally.

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And they they would reject the description of God as all powerful.

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They preferred to believe that they had any sort of experienced evil in such a personal in such a devastating way.

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I suppose there was no way that they could, in good conscience attribute evil to God.

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This is very interesting because I suppose what we're seeing here is that it's up to an individual to define how they take evil to affect their life.

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Sure. And I suppose this might be I mean, especially easy to say in the 21st century.

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But back in these times,

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it was definitely the religion to which you described would determine how how one looks at evil and just have to finish off the monarchies.

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They said instead of saying that evil is due to that all powerful God, they conceptualise it differently.

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They said this all powerful, this benevolent God is actually in sort of competition with a completely evil God.

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There are two there's a sort of cosmic battle going on.

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If you kind of imagine a sort of Star Wars situation, you've got the force, the good side against the dark side.

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And the world is kind of the battlegrounds. So you can see forces for good.

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You can see force of evil. But in no way should we say that the good God is responsible for the bad.

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And actually, that's that's a very interesting way of conceptualising evil for the person,

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because moral evil is suddenly it's not one's not responsible oneself for moral evil, because if evil is the result of, you know,

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a situation beyond your control and the result of the dark, dark side, for want of a better phrase,

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you're suddenly able to say, well, any evil action I do isn't is it my own doing, but is that of some cosmic force.

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So this is a Augustan at least I found it very helpful and cathartic for his his sort of guilty conscience.

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That's that's really interesting. Fraizer, I was wondering whether you comment upon some contemporary religious movements

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within Christianity which attribute some natural and moral evil to to the devil,

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devil or demons. So to my mind, this is but I don't know the Manichaeans like you do, but this is so different from what they're saying.

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But there's still a similarity where there is this evil being and his minions as demons and they get blamed

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for earthquakes or for the bad things that people do to think there's a similarity between the two.

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Definitely, yes.

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And I think actually I think it was actually more evangelical Christianity, which in the states might say that anything that that one considers evil,

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be it sort of murder or rape or in some situations gay people or sort of, you know, whatever is due to the devil.

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And I'm not sure that's actually consistent with the monist approach that you set out to start, because there's the problem of why is there a devil?

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Most Christians, which I would say because Satan felt it was as a result of his free will.

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But then, of course, one has to ask, you know, why did God make it so that Satan fell for it?

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Can you just give us the story about Satan falling? So generally, I suppose the argument runs as follows.

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God created all the angelic dominions, all of the heavenly powers, one of which was called Lucifer or Satan.

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He decided that this state in which he was he was subordinate to God, yet in perfect bliss wasn't enough for him.

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So he decided to grasp towards he envied God's power and God's sovereignty and decided to grasp towards it.

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And as a result of that, he fell back towards that sort of the nothingness out of which he came before earth is created.

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And that's a good question. I'm not sure it's because, of course, that the angelic powers aren't mentioned to Genesis one or two.

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So I don't think Christianity has a strict answer to that question.

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But it comes up more, I think, mediaeval theology. So this is a product of mediaeval theology more than the Bible.

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Is mentioned several times in the Bible, but I think certainly becomes more of a caricature in mediaeval theology.

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Certainly. Yes. Thank you. See, with Hinduism, there is no evil entity.

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There is suffering, but there is no evil such there is no equivalent of Satan and for example, the God of death.

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Kamaraj is actually revered sometimes and even worshipped because he.

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Gives justice and at the same time, is that justice in the form of appropriate acquittal for bad action?

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Yes, death as punishment. So once again, there is there's a totally different metaphysical basis for Christianity and Hinduism.

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Yes. With Christianity, there is only one life with Hinduism. There are infinite lives as reincarnation.

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So if I were to commit evil deeds right now, I would suffer them with my karma in my next life, but also in between.

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When your marriage comes to collecting for death, who take me to a temporary [INAUDIBLE] where I would also suffer a little bit.

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But there's also, you know, one of the biggest things that we see in suffering is death.

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It's the climax of suffering, perhaps.

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But for Hinduism, death is perhaps just another name for life, because time is seen as cyclical destruction, creation, destruction and creation fact.

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There are three gods considered to be sort the stewards of the earth, the creative sustainer and the destructor.

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The destruction is known as Shiva, and he is a very, very popular deity within Hinduism.

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So despite his his past to disrupt the world, he is revered as God.

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But it sure shows the difference sort paradigm Hinduism gives to the debate.

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Yes, I can see probably important here to distinguish them between suffering and evil as a force.

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I suppose that means that Shiva perhaps doesn't run the same risk as Satan is maybe exculpating those who

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do wrong because you have the you have the idea of karma sort of punish people for wrongdoing later on,

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whereas perhaps as a concern that those who were Satan too heavily in their theology are in fact sidestepping the blame for their bad actions.

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Would you say that's an accurate criticism? I think definitely. And I think it's also interesting to look at how perhaps Judaism would view this.

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For example, in Judaism, there's not such a distinction between this life and the next life.

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There's not that the afterlife is thought to be a sort of shadowy place called Sheol,

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where everyone goes no matter what their actions like in this life.

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So justice is very much thought to be dispensed in this life.

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So it's natural that the good will be rewarded for their good actions by riches and prosperity in this life.

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And the evil should be rewarded with, you know, horrible things.

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And of course, it's a very good question. Jewish literature when this doesn't occur.

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Yes. Why this is and this is kind of how the Jewish philosophy framed the question of theocracy,

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which is why how God can be justified and how evil can be can coexist with a benevolent God.

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I think going back to the topic of the devil, it seems like the devil's there to get caught off the hook, but it also gets humanity off the hook.

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So I'm not too sure about how that fits. I mean, does it really get God off the hook, though, because of God's all powerful and all knowing,

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you know, he created a world in which there were these angels.

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He knew that this angel was going to fall and he knew that the angel was going to cause the the

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devil was going to cause this evil in the world to still got to bring it back to God and say,

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you know, why did you create a world in which. The devil fell and and caused the evil that what he has done, if you think he has caused it.

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I think that's an interesting question because it goes back to the.

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Question that's been plaguing theology for four generations is the mystery of God, why does God do what God does?

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There's a notion of, you know, humanity just not knowing where finite beings God is an infinite being.

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And even in Hinduism, there comes a point where you have to say, which sometimes are natural even as well,

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that God's it's God's will and God does things because he knows what he's doing.

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And he reminds me of a of a story that I was reading the other day, a 19th century figure popularly revered as God by many Samini.

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He was travelling in a cart and yet a cart driver and a bunch of men came and asked, you know, someone's stolen our jewellery, who's got it?

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And some in the eye, and said, oh, the cart driver has stolen it.

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The men came and they beat the cart driver and they went after and in the cart driving, asked around, why?

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Why did you allow that to happen? I didn't do anything.

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And then so I mean, I said that, you know, you were beaten for six minutes and I wiped away six of your next lives in the in the six minutes.

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And you will attain liberation now.

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So the story just goes to show that God's doing is sometimes inaccessible to humans and God does what he likes, really.

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And it's always for the best. And that's something that Hindus many times resort to when they face suffering.

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Yeah, that's that's really interesting. I mean, in the literature I'm familiar with the philosophy of religion.

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There is a view called sceptical theism, and there's lots, lots written on sceptical theism.

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But the basic idea is just that we're not in a good position to know or at least always know what good can come from certain evils.

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So even if we look at a situation, we think, you know, there's no good that we can see coming from this.

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We're not in the same situation that God is in. We don't have the perspective on the knowledge that God has.

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So now we've sketched out the problem of evil. Perhaps it's worth looking at the ways in which people commonly exculpate God.

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Yeah, OK, so one way to deal with the the problem of evil that I said earlier is by questioning the third premise of the third

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premise is that states that are all powerful and all good God could and would prevent evil from taking place in the world.

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Some. Thinkers want to suggest that whilst God could prevent evil from taking place in the world, it's not clear that he always would.

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A one response we find here is called the Free World Defence and.

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Those who hold to the free world defence.

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Think that there may be certain goods for which it is worth God allowing evils and in particular the good of free will,

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because the view is in creating a world with creatures who have significant free will and God's leaves open the possibility of evil in the world.

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So this is a good deriving from evil, not in the sense that there could be good consequences of actions that immediately see evil,

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but in the idea that the right to have free will is in itself an intrinsic right.

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That's right. OK, would you say that features at all in the Hindu perspective, Tilak?

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Yes, I think it's very similar in that God given us this Frigo and it's because of that free will.

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We should be so thankful to God for giving us a free will in the first place and.

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It's true that free will we can therefore carry out Alkermes and then receive the fruits again.

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So what problems are there with the free world events? Does that get God off the hook?

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OK, so here's a problem. We might think that in certain circumstances, the good of a person having free will justifies the evil that takes place.

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So say I go in to a shop and I shoplift.

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You might think that the harm caused by my by me shoplifting isn't great enough to suggest that God should remove my free will.

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OK, but let's take a more extreme example. Say a child is kidnapped and put in a basement and tortured for 10 to 20 years, then dies in captivity.

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This is a horrible example,

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but it makes us question whether the good of free will is enough to justify God allowing this sort of evil to take place in the world.

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Surely we might think whilst having the freedom to choose whether or not shoplift seems like a good thing,

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having the freedom to choose whether or not to kidnap a child and torture the child and kill the child.

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That doesn't seem good. Perhaps it's worth talking for a bit about what sort of good we see free will to be.

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It's very difficult to think about it in terms of the kind of daily benefits we might receive in the way that we might weigh up other goods,

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for example, like, I don't know,

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never being hungry or something like that is that phrase of could you perhaps discuss why you think free will is important for humanity?

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Sure. Well, I think it's whenever free was spoken about, it's often spoken of,

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but not spoken about negatively, because the two examples we just had, of course, were, you know,

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not the best examples of humans exercising their free will, but, of course,

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free will, I suppose, from a Christian perspective, was originally bestowed because.

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Without free will, humans cannot turn towards God, cannot do any good that is truly good without being truly free,

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inasmuch as the good needs to be intended as good are not predetermined for them.

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Indeed, yes. So counts in order to be praiseworthy, perhaps. Yes.

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Yeah.

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So I mean the classic defence of Christian Christian three well is that in order for human love to be properly considered love and not compulsion,

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it needs to be effected, freely compelled, love, love, compelled by God would not be free, for example.

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It's I mean, it's possible. And of course, God being omnipotent by the classical definition of Christianity, that he could make a world without evil.

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And as Christians, I think Christians will want to say.

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Of course it's possible, but there is some good reason why that didn't occur.

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Yes, and the possibility and I think I think Freewheel must be that reason and the possibility that that

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free will will result in good loving actions to be performed by those who have been bestowed with it.

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So would you say the problem of free will is conceived of similarly in Hinduism?

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I think before we go further, it would be good to.

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Placed a caveat at this point, yeah, that Hinduism is arguably a Western construct imposed on the traditions,

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the religious traditions within India, by the West during colonial times and.

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There was never a word there was never worked for a religion in India,

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and there still isn't an equivalent because there was never a unity such within Hinduism that binds it all these traditions together.

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Even today, many scholars say Hinduism is just an umbrella term for many different religions

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because there is not a single scripture or single God that everyone believes in.

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Therefore, some say the name Hindu was invented by outsiders,

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and it was a label conceived and deployed to classify a wide variety of inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent.

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So do you have canonical texts in common then? With Hinduism being so broad, yes, within individual traditions, there are canonical texts, yes.

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So, for example, within there's a specific school called Vedanta School.

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There are three scriptures to trace the Geeta and the sutras,

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which are considered canonical and generally within Hinduism Devadas, yes, are considered to be canonical.

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Having said that, I wouldn't say they are equivalent to the Bible in Christianity.

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So there is a real unity because some traditions within Hinduism also don't place too much importance on the.

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Therefore, there's a wide variety within Islam and probably a wide reflection of that in how different groups treat the problem of free will.

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Yes. And the problem of evil in general. Yes. So.

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From the perspective I'm coming from, which is the devotional traditions within Hinduism, there's a notion of the soul,

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the animal which is common to most in the traditions, and the AMA is considered to be just as old as God.

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Therefore, I could say I'm just as old as God, which is pretty cool to say.

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So I'm on my own journey to attain liberation from the cycle of birth and death.

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Therefore, this freewill is very, very important to me. So the soul is what's reincarnated over and over again.

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Yes, well, the common element between different seeming lives and to put it simply, that the soul is your karma counter.

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Yes, either karmas of this life are onto that soul.

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And I take them to the next life. Yes. Which is how the system works.

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Therefore, freewill is is vital for me to carry out my acts and to attain liberation.

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I think that's a very good sort of take stock of where we are.

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So as I see it, it's very important to each system as to how evil is treated temporarily.

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So in Hinduism, evil isn't such a problem as I think it is for Christianity because of the endlessness of time and of

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the circularity of time and the fact that evil can be equalised and made good throughout the time,

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denatured or denatured. But there isn't there isn't an entity of evil.

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There is no Satan degree, and which is part of the system of suffering as as a punishment.

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Whereas in Judaism, as I mentioned, this life is all there is.

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So there's no sort of there's no ability to for evil to be done restitute have to have done restitution for evil or to be to be punished or rewarded.

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Whereas in Christianity, of course, there's the notion of this life being rewarded or punished in the next life.

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So there's this very clear dichotomy. Yes.

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So burning in [INAUDIBLE] versus eternal bliss is is that enough of a justification then, for the kind of evil that people can do so yes to?

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Or maybe justification is the wrong word. So going back to the the example of the child who's kidnapped,

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I tend not to want to resort to heaven and [INAUDIBLE] the kind of argument that I put forth.

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So just to recap, the free will to defend Stitz, that God may be justified in allowing certain evils because of the value of free will.

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An objection I put forward as well.

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In some cases that seems right to us, but in other cases, in the example of the child who's been kidnapped and tortured,

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it doesn't seem like God is justified in allowing this evil for the sake of free will.

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Rather, we might think that God should restrict freedom. One thought is this here.

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This example is one of the most extreme examples of evil I can think of in the world.

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There are not many things which I find more harm than the thought of a child being tortured for 10 to 20 years and then dying.

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Absolutely right. Glad we're all in agreement so.

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Well, let's take a let's imagine a different world in which freedom is restricted.

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OK, so there are none of these sort of KISS's these extreme cases say in this world that we're imagining the worst thing

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that someone does is someone punches another person whilst the person is shopping on the street on a Saturday,

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OK? Yeah. And that's the worst thing that happens in the world because God has restricted evil.

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It still seems plausible to me that if we were citizens of that world,

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we would still be horrified by this event because this event of the person punching someone on

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the street would be the worst thing that we'd ever heard of is evil as a relational construct,

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then? I think our response to evil,

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the mode of horror we experience is probably relative to the amount of evil we've come across and heard about in our lives.

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So the the reason that's a counterargument is because it's just no matter how much God restricts our human freedom,

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we're always going to question whether God is justified in allowing the most extreme cases of evil in the world.

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I think the fact that we find evil to be evil is a good thing in itself.

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Yeah, because if we were to see someone punching someone else just to be normal for to me, then that would show more about humanity.

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So the fact that we find evil to be evil is, I think, a good thing in itself.

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On the other hand, there are some philosophical schools, perhaps like the Stoics, who might dispute that and say,

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well, you know, the fact that you find evil evil is actually I mean, that's causing you to suffer.

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That's causing the human race, you know, in its entirety to experience pain and to think that something is bad.

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Whereas the Stoics might like to say, well, actually, there's no objective evil in itself.

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There's no one act that one can say is evil, even murder.

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You can't say if I murdered my brother.

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You can't say that is evil. If I was punched when I was walking down the street on a Saturday.

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I can't say that that's evil. So where they where evil comes in, in the stomach system is in how they judge things.

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So if I consider being punished, being violated to be an evil act, to be a badness that's before me, before me,

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then I that's sort of a suffering, an extra suffering that I'm heaping upon myself as well as being punished.

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I'm also thinking, gosh, isn't this a horrible thing that I've that I've suffered?

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Whereas if I a stooks teach you value all sorts of physical and material things neutrally,

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then anything that you experience in your material life or in your sort of

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bodily existence is neither good nor bad and starts to place all the all the.

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Worth and value in things that can't be taken away in this life, for example, courage, virtue, things,

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things like that, so evil as something we impute or ascribe to acts rather than intrinsic property in itself.

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Indeed, but I think that there's a reason that stoicism hasn't exactly thrived, because that doesn't seem to that most people don't like.

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We'd like to say that murder is actually an evil and there's some sort of inconsistency with saying there's no objectivity.

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Yes, absolutely. I suppose.

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There is also the defence in intersubjectivity, there is objectivity, and as much as if enough people conceive of an act as evil, it's pretty.

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It's perhaps more representative to call it evil than it is to call it really evil on the show.

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Yeah, I mean, one point this raises what raises the issue of objective moral facts.

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And I mean, it seems if you if you want to hold that the problem of evil is a problem, you're going to have to hold that.

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There are these objective moral facts that things are actually good and actually bad.

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Yeah, no different religious traditions have accounts of not only what is good and what is bad, but why those why those things are good and bad.

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But, you know, from the perspective of a naturalist, an atheist,

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the naturalist will have to give an account of objective moral facts if he or she wants to think that there's wita to the problem of yourself.

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So could you tell us a bit more about what a naturalist perspective entails?

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Well, I mean, there's there are debates around what exactly you mean by naturalism, but.

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If. If I think that the only things that exist in the world are chairs and grass, trees or whatever they're made out of.

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If I only believe in physical things, it's not immediately clear.

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How or why I'm going to believe in things like moral facts, because the moral facts, just the the idea,

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the age range thing, right, the idea that it's wrong to murder is it's not a physical idea.

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So I think even though the problem of evil is a is a serious problem for a theists, you know,

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the atheists still needs to give a really robust account of of of of why we should pursue objective moral facts in our in our metaphysics.

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Yes. And why there should be any distinction being between good and bad weather should be laws.

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All of these things, atheists and naturalists, materialists also have to be, as you say, given cultural.

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Sure. I mean, there are accounts in the literature, but it's.

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Yeah, it's not an easy task. Right. Right.

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So so far, we've just been talking about moral evil, but I seem to remember there being another kind of evil that you discussed.

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What's your response to the problem of evil concerning natural evil?

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Well, of course, by natural evil, I think we probably mean any evil that hasn't been or any anybody that hasn't been committed by a conscious,

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willing agent, earthquakes, as we say, and disease and anything that perhaps it's not due to humans.

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And I suppose one response to that from the Christian tradition, which also goes for for moral evil,

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but there's also quite a good response, I think, to natural evil. Is that that of ironies?

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And who is a second century Christian theologian and its more recent proponent or opponent, John Hick?

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And that's that life. And our experience of evil and good are a sort of journey of soul making.

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And let me unpack that a little bit. So he he answers talk that Adam and Eve weren't born as fully developed and agents with.

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A sort of complete intellect and complete knowledge of the good and the evil as born as adults.

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Is that something we know from the Bible, whether or not do are they babies?

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Well, it's actually it's ambiguous. There's no sort of thing that says Adam was born a fully grown and made a fully grown human adults.

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There's it's conceivable to, I suppose, imagine him being born as a baby and then and then Eve being created out of his robes.

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I mean, where where he is or even I mean,

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many contemporary thinkers don't think there was an Adam and Eve which just this sort of the the early chapters of Genesis,

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sort of a metaphor for the early human condition. Sure.

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Yeah. That's that's a very important distinction to make because a lot of people are very cautious before they sort of say place any wait on Genesis.

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Yes. You know, how are we actually thinking this anyway? Arnez sort of said that Adam and Eve were born as infants.

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Immature, I think, is the essential word, and that their experience of the world and of evil in the world and of good,

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but mainly of evil was that of experience and of growth in virtue.

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So do you mean that as they encounter evil, that they develop their conception of what good is?

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Yes, that's right. And developed also conceptions of virtue and how the how evil is to be dealt with.

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And I suppose more ultimately that they developed their conception of what freewill is for and what God is and what the good is,

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because it's impossible to know the good if you've never encountered the bad.

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And I suppose that's kind of of your analogy of the blue in the same painting.

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You know, in order for a painting to have any sort of meaning and contrast, you need certainly some dark shades as well as light.

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Otherwise it just be a sort of amorphous, you know, white space.

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So you need you need evil in order to balance and to into a product of the structuralist views of theology.

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It seems to be quite, quite heavily based on the idea that we might conceive of notions as.

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Relational in character interest.

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Well, so, yeah, to pick up on this or make an idea well,

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let's take example last about a year ago I was injured and I experienced chronic pain for a couple of months.

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And I was all day every day and I did take medication, but it didn't take the pain away completely.

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And it also slowed down my mind. But so I experienced a degree of suffering.

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And, you know, I think about Ernest John Hecks response.

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This idea of soul making does sort of seem to make sense, you know,

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because there are certain character traits that I developed through that experience.

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Right. So traits of patients or being resilient and persevering.

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And also you could say that, you know, this experience of mine give other people an opportunity to show virtue as well as the doctors and nurses.

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And perhaps without this sort of suffering or even more intense suffering the mind, it doesn't.

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In a world without such suffering, there would be no opportunity for us to show these virtues of kindness and being caring.

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But still, you got to go to the some of the more extreme examples and think, OK, all right,

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look, you got a couple of months of chronic pain unpleasant, but you got over it, you know.

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But what about these people? You have conditions that lasts for their whole lives.

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And that's where I think I mean,

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you almost have to go back to what we were talking about earlier and what we're talking about for the Hindu tradition as well.

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This idea of mystery that sometimes it is it is very hard to know what good is coming from a situation,

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particularly from someone who has experienced suffering to such an extent that it isn't having good moral a good moral effect on the person.

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So the person is becoming grumpy and violent and all these sorts of things.

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And perhaps there are you just have to if you believe in God, you just have to think,

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well, maybe there are there's more going on here than I'm aware of.

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And I think also talking about this practical response to evil.

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Yes. In such conditions, there's a notion in Hinduism, a very strong sort of motif of refuge in God.

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It reminds me of the very popular Hindu text, and there's a war to be fought.

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And God is, in this context, telling the man, Arjuna, the warrior, to fight because it's his duty to fight and to remove the evil.

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And at the end of all of this, of the text of Christian Toltz urging to forsake everything and take refuge in me.

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So there's a level of trust in his faith in God, trust in Hinduism, considered a virtue in itself.

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So we've been talking about evil as a. And I suppose if we were to put it back in terms of the problem,

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what we would be saying is we can defend God doing evil because the learning that we get is

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intrinsically a good enough benefit to balance out to the detriment of the world created by that evil.

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Yeah, it's it's hard to know. I mean, to some extent, yes.

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In terms of the moral character we develop. But then you could you could paint it another way and say, you know,

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if I was to have a child and I say I wanted to make sure my child really loved me.

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So I put all these obstacles in her way so that she kept getting hurt.

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And so she kept coming back to me, you know, seems like a bit of a perverse way of getting love and attention from a child.

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And I suppose what you said about mystery today is very interesting.

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And I suppose as mortal, you know, finite creatures we're dealing with when we're talking to someone trying to sort of justify God,

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which is what we're doing, I suppose, today it's kind of some sort of contradiction in there.

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And and, you know,

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who we from such small perspectives and such limited understanding to question what may well be viewed by theists as the word of God.

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There's also this using learning. Sometimes I find with these extreme examples, like, for example, the Holocaust or some learning came out of that.

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And how how was there any progress? Certainly. So it's.

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And why and why, you know, if God wanted the world or the communities affected by the Holocaust to have learnt from this,

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why could he not have killed two million Jews instead of six?

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You know why? Why why would six better than two?

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So I think just on that one, you've got at least Hying a lot of quite a lot of weight on the free world defence.

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I think the sword making will only go so far with something like the Holocaust and that free will is good in itself and that the Hindu perspective,

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00:43:24,240 --> 00:43:30,520
natural evil isn't so much learning. Um, because once again, the starting points are different.

377
00:43:30,520 --> 00:43:32,490
There is no notion of the.

378
00:43:32,490 --> 00:43:39,930
In in Hinduism, there's no notion out of Satan, the fall of Satan, the Apple, the Adam and Eve, there's nothing like that in Hinduism.

379
00:43:39,930 --> 00:43:44,940
So creation in Christianity was done so out of nothing.

380
00:43:44,940 --> 00:43:52,410
But in some Hindu traditions, there is a notion of Christian God being both the efficient and the mature course of the world.

381
00:43:52,410 --> 00:43:59,520
But in some nutrition's there's creation material. So God and creator have nothing God created out of something like this.

382
00:43:59,520 --> 00:44:04,410
There's an entity called Maya, so similar to Plato with the very edge.

383
00:44:04,410 --> 00:44:09,780
So therefore, God created the world out of this material called Maya.

384
00:44:09,780 --> 00:44:14,190
Therefore, the Maya is responsible in a way, for some of the evil in the world.

385
00:44:14,190 --> 00:44:23,940
Secondly, there are no dates within Hinduism who are stewards of the world, the god of rain, the cause of fire, the God of air.

386
00:44:23,940 --> 00:44:32,310
So God is delegated, as you know, you could say, the running of the world to these deities who are afflicted by,

387
00:44:32,310 --> 00:44:36,690
you know, things like pain and anger, etc., to a lesser degree than humans.

388
00:44:36,690 --> 00:44:47,400
But they still are. So God, just leave that to them. Now, you could pose the question, why doesn't God intervene and make sure there's no suffering?

389
00:44:47,400 --> 00:44:51,290
And that really goes back down to God knows best.

390
00:44:51,290 --> 00:45:00,160
Um, well, so we're starting to run out of time here. Are there any defences to the problem of evil that we haven't come across?

391
00:45:00,160 --> 00:45:13,290
Yes, there's one more view that it's complex, but at a very basic level, it just states that.

392
00:45:13,290 --> 00:45:18,050
Given that we're made out of the stuff we're made out of.

393
00:45:18,050 --> 00:45:25,760
There are certain side effects which lead to the suffering that we experience,

394
00:45:25,760 --> 00:45:35,690
and there's no way to get the sort of creatures that we are without using the stuff that we're made out of.

395
00:45:35,690 --> 00:45:42,440
And if God chooses to use the stuff that we're made out of, then it's just kind of a fact,

396
00:45:42,440 --> 00:45:48,830
a natural necessity that you get with it these other side effects of the diseases.

397
00:45:48,830 --> 00:45:53,000
And yeah, so it's kind of an acceptance of our embodied state.

398
00:45:53,000 --> 00:45:59,620
All right. In Hinduism, there's also this idea of eight factors, so called karma.

399
00:45:59,620 --> 00:46:05,300
Uh, so time your actions, your company, all of these things have an effect on what's happening in the world.

400
00:46:05,300 --> 00:46:08,610
And sometimes one fact takes predominance over another.

401
00:46:08,610 --> 00:46:16,610
So even if I've been good all my life, the time could take predominance and do something evil and a tsunami happened or something else.

402
00:46:16,610 --> 00:46:22,310
So these eight factors also have a role in sort of controlling what's happening in the world.

403
00:46:22,310 --> 00:46:30,950
Although God is always seen as the ultimate control, that complicates the causal narrative sufficiently that maybe the problem of evil isn't so stark.

404
00:46:30,950 --> 00:46:35,580
Yes, with it's not as simple as just to try triad of God being all loving.

405
00:46:35,580 --> 00:46:41,860
And how much of the tradition thinks that's.

406
00:46:41,860 --> 00:46:52,540
The afterlife, as you know, is eternal, it doesn't stop, so, you know, I speaking about pain in my body the last a couple of months,

407
00:46:52,540 --> 00:46:57,460
we can think about people who experience pain and suffering for 60, 70 years.

408
00:46:57,460 --> 00:47:09,670
But I mean, if the afterlife never ends, then, you know, it's literally just a speck, you know, a point on a very,

409
00:47:09,670 --> 00:47:18,550
very long line in terms of the endurance of the suffering and the sort of suffering free life that comes after it.

410
00:47:18,550 --> 00:47:28,210
So in a way, heaven and [INAUDIBLE] as eternal kind of seem, you know, unequal to a life that very well or very badly.

411
00:47:28,210 --> 00:47:40,420
So, you know, it's feasible to argue that Hitler, although his deeds were extremely, you know, horrible and horrendous,

412
00:47:40,420 --> 00:47:47,350
doesn't deserve an eternal punishment and damnation because that would be unequal to,

413
00:47:47,350 --> 00:47:52,020
you know, his his his evil in this world, which he does in Christianity.

414
00:47:52,020 --> 00:47:57,070
It depends who you ask. If you ask Origin, [INAUDIBLE] say no.

415
00:47:57,070 --> 00:48:01,960
If you are some, they'll say yes, a whole bunch of different views.

416
00:48:01,960 --> 00:48:06,970
Some will even say they won't say like origin, that Hitler will be returned to God.

417
00:48:06,970 --> 00:48:10,940
They won't say, like others, that [INAUDIBLE] be gone forever, but they'll say that he [INAUDIBLE] just perish.

418
00:48:10,940 --> 00:48:15,010
You'll cease to exist. And that in itself is a punishment. Hmm.

419
00:48:15,010 --> 00:48:24,460
Yes. Certainly Christian Christianity, like Hinduism, is not as simple and as uncomplicated vannett that it might appear to be.

420
00:48:24,460 --> 00:48:34,990
Well, thank you very much for this complicated and pluralistic offering of views on the problem of evil and its stance on Hinduism and Christianity.

421
00:48:34,990 --> 00:48:37,198
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.