The problem of evil is supposed to challenge belief in God’s existence by calling attention to the wickedness and suffering in the world. God is wholly good and all-powerful. Thus, according to the argument, He would be both willing and able to put a stop to all evil. Evil exists, however; so, the argument concludes, a wholly good God must not exist. I examine different formulations of the argument from evil and defend their cogency against some of the contemporary responses to these arguments. On the other hand, the various arguments from evil depend on accounts of God’s goodness that turn out to be difficult to justify. Drawing from the work of Christopher Coope, I suggest another way of looking at the problem. If we piously believe that God exists and accept that we experience different varieties of evil, we must reject any belief about God’s goodness that in conjunction with our other beliefs entails an inconsistency. In this way, we can rule out accounts of God’s goodness that are incompatible with His omnipotent, omniscient character and with the testimony of creation. Using the testimony of creation, we may develop constraints on the ways we are able to understand God’s goodness. Any explanation of God’s goodness must take these constraints into account if it is to be able to explain the existence of the various kinds of evils we experience. If God exists then everything, including all instances of sin and suffering, are manifestations of God’s goodness. I argue that the accounts of John Hick and Peter van Inwagen fail to give satisfactory explanations for the ways in which sin and suffering are manifestations of God’s goodness, but that St. Augustine’s account of evil in On Free Choice of the Will successfully explains such evil. He argues that all evil is either sin or the punishment for sin, and that the existence of sinners and the punishment of sinners are each manifestations of God’s goodness. He believes that while we genuinely experience evil, evil as such lacks being and thus cannot count as evidence against God’s existence.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-131).

abstract: The Pearson and likelihood ratio statistics are commonly used to test goodness-of-fit for models applied to data from a multinomial distribution. When data are from a table formed by cross-classification of a large number of variables, the common statistics may have low power and inaccurate Type I error level due to sparseness in the cells of the table. The GFfit statistic can be used to examine model fit in subtables. It is proposed to assess model fit by using a new version of GFfit statistic based on orthogonal components of Pearson chi-square as a diagnostic to examine the fit on two-way subtables. However, due to variables with a large number of categories and small sample size, even the GFfit statistic may have low power and inaccurate Type I error level due to sparseness in the two-way subtable. In this dissertation, the theoretical power and empirical power of the GFfit statistic are studied. A method based on subsets of orthogonal components for the GFfit statistic on the subtables is developed to improve the performance of the GFfit statistic. Simulation results for power and type I error rate for several different cases along with comparisons to other diagnostics are presented. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Statistics 2017

Prof. L. Lombard Prof. M.C. Koen

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Thesis advisor: Christopher J. Kelly / Rousseau's Confessions is controversial and influential since its first publication. Besides the dispute over the relationship of Rousseau's autobiographical and philosophical works, by adopting the same title as the famous autobiography in the Christian tradition, Augustine's Confessions, the effect is striking. However, few scholars were interested in their relationship and they write only a few lines about them or do not focus upon the key idea of Rousseau's thought, the natural goodness of man, which contradicts the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Rousseau promises to delineate his self-portrait as a man according to nature in his autobiography in contrast to the picture of a born sinner saved by God's mercy in Augustine's Confessions. By comparing with Augustine's Confessions, it is clear that Rousseau's understanding of human nature and the source of evil reject the traditional Christian view. It is Rousseau's ingenuity to compose his Confessions structurally and thematically analogous to Augustine's Confessions to refute Augustine's theology and convey his answer to the problem of secular society. I demonstrate their relationship by comparing them according to their structural and thematic similarities. This study will contribute to the study of the relationship between modernity and Christianity and that between secularization and religion. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

by Kwong-hon Ho. / Bibliography: leaves 51-53 / Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1984

In this note it is shown that even for relatively large sample sizes the asymptotic distribution of the smoothed length as derived in Reschenhofer and Bomre (1991) should not be used for the determination of critical values. Therefore extended tables of critical values for both the 1% and 5% levels of significance generated by simulation are presented. (author's abstract) / Series: Forschungsberichte / Institut für Statistik