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Sextus Empiricus was a Greek Pyrrhonist, a school of philosophical skepticism founded by Pyrrho in the fourth century BC. Sextus promoted a form of philosophical inquiry called the “skeptic way,” which involves counterposing two or more credible but seemingly inconsistent assertions in order to demonstrate the limits of logic. The excerpt below, taken from the […]
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A central purpose of Against Heresies was to refute the heretical teachings of Gnosticism, which flourished during the early church period. Because many Gnostics held that spiritual knowledge was to be arrived at through interior means, and because many also claimed to have access to ‘secret knowledge’ about the nature of the universe, Gnostic beliefs
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The Encheiridion is a short manual of maxims compiled by Arrian of Nicomedia, a 2nd-century student of the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. True to the Stoic tradition, Epictetus asserts that it is our thoughts and judgements, not things themselves, which are the ultimate source of our suffering. Accordingly, Epictetus maintains that man can exercise a considerable
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Lucretius was a Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher born around 99 BC. His best-known work, On the Nature of Things, is a six-book epic poem exploring a wide range of philosophical questions, including how man should respond to the reality of evil and death. For Lucretius, the problem of evil was not a concern about
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In Timaeus, Plato explains the origins of the universe as an act of creation by a powerful and benevolent creator God who formed the cosmos into a harmonious whole from preexistent matter with the assistance of lesser divine beings whom he also created. Unlike the three Abrahamic religions, Plato’s supreme God is not omnipotent. However,
“On Providence” is a dialogue written by Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) in the last years of his life. In it, Seneca deals with the problem of the coexistence of evil and Divine Providence. His answer is representative of the Stoic approach to responding to the problem of evil. It
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Prologue In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. 2 He had seven sons and three daughters, 3 and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the
The Creation of the World In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the
The problem of divine hiddenness focuses on the issue of whether it is reasonable to believe in the existence of God in light of the ambiguity of evidence for God’s existence. The problem of divine hiddenness is often considered a subpart of the problem of pain because God’s absence during the midst of human suffering
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The problem of natural evil centers on the following question: is the existence of an all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful God consistent with the enormous suffering resulting from natural disasters, diseases, genetic defects, predation, and other “evils” that appear to be inherent features of the natural world? The pervasiveness and brutality of so-called “natural evil” is
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