Evil, a God which is omnipotent and a God which is morally perfect; the problem of evil is the problem that revolves around the co-existence of the above. Arguably, when any two of these exist, it would be impossible for the third to co-exist. For if God is morally perfect, he would have created a world without evil. Yet evil exists, thus we are forced to conclude that either God is not morally perfect, or that he does not have the omnipotence to create a morally perfect world.
             The credibility of some of the various defences against this problem of evil will be examined in the following paragraphs. But first, what is evil? The commonly adopted definition of evil consist of two sub-classes, physical evil and moral evil. Physical evils consist of diseases, pain, natural disasters such as earthquakes, famines et cetera. The problem of evil here is quite straight forward, why would a morally perfect God inflict such suffering on human kind if he had the power to prevent it. Moral evil, on the other hand, is the human capacity to perform evil actions. The question here is why would an omnipotent God allow humans to be capable of such deeds.
             One of the theists' reply to the problem is the means-ends defence which claims that evil is required as a means to good. This defence is mainly used to explain the physical component of the problem of evil. The theists argue that evil (suffering) serves as a warning, a punishment and as a test. Suffering exists to warn us of the consequences of morally evil actions. Punishment acts as an operant conditioner to discourage us from such evil actions. Physical evil also trebles as a test. These three functions combined, serves to increase the amount of good in the world; and given that a morally perfect God would want to maximise the amount of good in the world, evil was required to exist as a means to greater good.
             The problems with this defence range from the non-selective nature of some forms of ...