Sentences with phrase «gratuitous evil»

Since it didn't «work,» it seems like nothing more than gratuitous evil on the part of God, or at the bare minimum, some sort of childish temper - tantrum when the people He created stop doing what He wants.

But when we look at the world around us, we find prevalent instances of apparently gratuitous evil — pointless suffering from which no greater purpose seems to result.

But what could we possibly mean by calling God perfectly good other than that God would, if possible, prevent all gratuitous evil — all things that would make the universe worse than it would have otherwise been?

In response to Hasker's fourth proposition, however, I argued against his contention that the notion of gratuitous evil does not provide the needed criterion.

They contend that «what appears as gratuitous evil is really just the makings of aesthetic value in the Consequent Nature» (ECG 123).

For traditional theism, the qualifier «if possible» can be deleted, so that its God, to be considered perfectly good, would simply prevent all gratuitous evils.

Hasker's real position, in other words, seems to be that although at one level the prima facie evils of this world are gratuitous evils, they at another level are not, because their very gratuitousness is intended by God to evoke our moral efforts to overcome them.

Having added the second issue, which deals not with the proposed criterion as such but with an imagined situation in which we could know that God is abiding by it, Hasker then argues that God should not prevent all gratuitous evils.

A second problem with Hasker's argument is that, although he claims that he is arguing that God should allow gratuitous evils, he is in fact arguing that even the gratuitous evils are not really gratuitous, because they contribute to «God's intention to make us responsible moral individuals,» which from his perspective is a more important consideration than the relative balance of enjoyment and suffering in the world.

Not exact matches

It can however be deflated quite easily by changing «evil» to something more tangible but just as problematic; gratuitous suffering for example.

, the myth of why we [in the West] are evil,» thus giving terrorists «gratuitous fuel for self - regeneration, fulfilling their prophecies by providing them with martyrs and justifications.»

Hasker's fourth proposition states that this criterion can not be the insistence that God should prevent all «gratuitous» evils, with those defined as evils «that God could prevent... without incurring any equal or greater evils and without losing any goods that would be sufficient to outweigh them.»

The titular battle royale feels entirely contrived, and ultimately amounts to limit more than gratuitous superhero - on - superhero violence with a foregone conclusion: that Batman and Superman will make nice and join forces to fight a greater evil, yadda yadda yadda.

Now don't get me wrong, there is plenty of blood, but it's not gratuitous like it was in Evil Dead or other gore fests.

Jared Woodard, Condor Options, @condoroptions: Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing; Bryan Frances, Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil; Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths.

As an evil character wielding a massive warhammer, most of my finishing moves resulted in mashing my opponents into a bloody pulp in gratuitous slow motion.