ABSTRACT
Why would an omniscient, omnipotent, salvational God allow evil in the world? No one has ever answered that question without remainders, doubts, and uncertainties clinging to the answer. Even Augustine, who draws the will into philosophical discourse first and foremost to protect his God from responsibility for evil, found the labyrinth opened by this question to be too involuted for a mere human to navigate with confidence. Paul Ricoeur, a devout twentieth-century Christian, concludes that the Augustinian account of the origins and responsibility for evil must be rewritten if Christianity is to transcend the most punitive dispositions inscribed in its history.1 Epicurus, writing before the advent of Christianity, found the demand that life continue after death to be part of the problem. Much evil in the world could be curtailed, he thought, if people would come to terms more calmly and affirmatively with the contingency of life.
