Abstract

Atheists have argued that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of God. They claim that it would be wrong for a person to allow evil which one could prevent, and because God is omnipotent, He could prevent evil. So, since evil does exist, a perfectly good and omnipotent God does not exist. This is the oldest and most pressing attack on theism, and theists have developed a variety of defensive responses to this argument. In this paper I propose to outline a strategy which appears to have escaped recent attention, and to compare this strategy with two more widely discussed types of theodicy