An Impossible (or Penrose) Triangle
Three Types of Contradictions
Writing in 1955, the late Oxford don J.L. Mackie claimed that evil is logically inconsistent with God’s existence.
In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.[1]
Consider the following set of propositions: {God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; evil exists}. Mackie claimed that the set is somehow contradictory. But how?
