1
Response Essay Assignment
Berreka B. Franklin
Department of Social Work, Liberty University
PHIL201: Philosophy and Contemporary Ideas (D07)
Professor David Pensgard
May 10, 2023
2
As a Christian, the question of "the problem of evil" must be a basic understanding for
one that follows after the faith because of the standards of the Bible, the way believers can tell
nonbelievers about the Christian faith, and how the problem of evil plays a major role in the
reason man was separated from God in the Garden of Eden. According to Dew and Gould, the
logical problem of evil can be demonstrated by the argument that God's existence is
incompatible with the reality of evil. Because of this, the answer to the logical dilemma of evil is
that God has a morally adequate justification for permitting mankind to suffer. God's existence is
irreconcilable with the reality of evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker
Publishing Group, 2019), 179.
The answer that Dew and Gould presented on the logical problem of evil aligns with the
argument that Pruitt brings across on the problem of evil. As stated by Pruitt, one powerful way
to show that a worldview is false is to show that it contains internal contradictions. Were the
example that Pruitt used the religion Buddhism, stating that, for example, we could show that
Buddhism teaches that there are no such things as unified human selves, but we could show that
a real and unified human self is everywhere presupposed by Buddhist teaching, this counts as an
internal contradiction. Buddhists are committed to two beliefs that cannot be reconciled together.
Pruitt then goes on to highlight that this is the same kind of challenge that the problem of evil
poses to Christian theism (Pruitt, 2014). The question is, ‘How does Dew and Gould's answer
support Pruitt’s argument?’ The answer to that question is that both Dew and Gould and Pruitt
