I’d never been quite satisfied with the problem of evil (if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, how can there be evil?) because it looked like a false trilemma, like C.S. Lewis’s liar, lunatic, or lord.
Lewis’s trilemma fails because it doesn’t account for all possibilities (e.g., a fourth possibility is “legend”). So how do we know that omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence cover all possibilities in the problem of evil? Granted, the fact that a lot of very smart people have looked at it for millennia, so it’s probably solid, but it always bothered me that I hadn’t seen a good demonstration that it wasn’t a false trilemma.
But then I reasoned thusly:
- If there is evil in the world, and God is omniscient, then God knows about it.
- If God knows about evil, and is omnibenevolent, then God wants to fix it.
- If God wants to fix evil, and is omnipotent, then God can fix it.
I like this formulation because the three parts of the argument flow from each other.
