Abstrakt
In the Western tradition, the question of evil has been tied to theodicy. Etymologically, the word, theodicy, comes from the Greek words for God (theos) and justice (diké).
Theodicy asks, how evil is compatible with God's justice. In considering this question, we have to distinguish between natural and human evil.
Natural evil involves such things as the suffering involved when an animal seizes on its prey. It also includes such things as natural disasters like draught and disease.
Its exemplar is the fact of death, which, as inevitable, is a part of life as such. Human evil, by contrast, is the evil that we ourselves commit.
Here, the question of theodicy concerns God's response to the evil that we bring into the world. In what follows, I will argue that theodicy fails when it runs together these two types of evil.
Justifying the presence of natural evil in terms an "economy" that looks to the whole, it makes itself ridiculous when it applies this concept to human evil. Doing so, it misses the specifically Christian conception of God's relation to the evils we commit.