Even if there were a deceiving god ( or an evil demon ), one's belief in their own existence would be secure, for there is no way one could be deceived unless one existed in order to be deceived.

A forerunner of the modern ideas of cyberspace is the Cartesian notion that people might be deceived by an evil demon that feeds them a false reality.

This character is an evil wizard or sorcerer, or sometimes a kind of god or demon.

The ' new evil demon ' argument for internalism ( and against externalism ) begins with the observation that individuals like us on the inside will be as justified as we are in believing what we believe.

Another objection to reliabilism is called the new evil demon problem.

The evil demon problem originally motivated skepticism, but can be resuited to object to reliabilist accounts as follows: If our experiences are controlled by an evil demon, it may be the case that we believe ourselves to be doing things that we are not doing.

In Celtic mythology and English folklore, a Puck is a mischievous sprite, imagined as an evil demon by Christians.

* In Philip Pullman's novel Count Karlstein, the Wild Hunt is featured as a major plot element, only here it is composed entirely of huge phantom hounds and just one huntsman: the evil demon Zamiel, who is actually named " the Demon Huntsman " in the novel.

Following the discovery of a small statue of the demon Pazuzu ( an actual ancient Assyrian demigod ) and a modern-day St. Joseph medal curiously juxtaposed together at the site, a series of omens alerts him to a pending confrontation with a powerful evil, which, unknown to the reader at this point, he has battled before in an exorcism in Africa.

To combat the evil Mahishasura, she had appeared in a great blinding light, to combat this demon and end it for all to be in peace.

It states the evil family of the demon Kali will spring from the back of Brahma.

The accusations referenced a passage in the First Meditation where Descartes stated that he supposed not an optimal God but rather an evil demon " summe potens & callidus " ( " most highly powerful and cunning ").

The accusers identified Descartes ' concept of a deus deceptor with his concept of an evil demon, stating that only an omnipotent God is " summe potens " and that describing the evil demon as such thus demonstrated the identity.

He did not directly rebut the charge of implying that the evil demon was omnipotent, but asserted that simply describing something with " some attribute that in reality belongs only to God " does not mean that that something is being held to actually be a supreme God.

The evil demon is omnipotent, Christian doctrine notwithstanding, and is seen as a key requirement for Descartes ' argument by Cartesian scholars such as Alguié, Beck, Émile Bréhier, Chevalier, Frankfurt, Étienne Gilson, Anthony Kenny, Laporte, Kemp-Smith, and Wilson.

In so doing, he discovered that he could doubt whether he had a body ( it could be that he was dreaming of it or that it was an illusion created by an evil demon ), but he could not doubt whether he had a mind.

Xander takes Anya ( Caulfield ), formerly vengeance demon Anyanka, to his prom in " The Prom ", and his military training proves useful in defeating the evil Mayor ( Harry Groener ) in season finale " Graduation Day ".

* The killing of Narakasura: Celebrated as Naraka Chaturdashi, one day before Diwali, it commemorates the killing of the evil demon Narakasura, who wreaked havoc.

Bies or bes ( ) was an evil spirit or demon in Slavic mythology.

If he is the child of nothingness, if he is the predestined victim of an age of atomic wars, then he will consult only his own organic needs and go beyond good and evil.

In his study Samuel Johnson, Joseph Wood Krutch takes this line when he says that what Aristotle really means by his theory of catharsis is that our evil passions may be so purged by the dramatic ritual that it is `` less likely that we shall indulge them through our own acts ''.

This is an ethical demand which cannot be evaded or glossed over by talking exclusively of weapon superiority or even of the evil of Communism.

`` If we cannot tell evil, horror, and insanity from nonsense, what is the future of humor and comedy ''??

On the positivist theory, everything I sought to express by calling it evil in the first case is still present in the second.

If we were asked why we thought so, we should say that these things involve great evil and are wrong, and that to take delight in what is evil or wrong is plainly unfitting.

If there is nothing evil in these things, if they get their moral complexion only from our feeling about them, why shouldn't they be greeted with a cheer??

For Fromm, capitalism is the enemy, the root of all evil.

Many of them sincerely believe that the use of liquor in any form or in any degree is intrinsically evil and sinful.

Action located where the evil is concentrated will prove most decisive and is most clearly legitimate.

A teenage girl, Abigail Williams, is being sharply questioned by her minister uncle, the Reverend Samuel Parris, about a wild night affair in the woods in which she and some other girls had seemed to have had contact with these evil beings.

As the play unfolds, however, the audience is subtly brought into the grip of an awful evil which grows with ominously gathering power and soon engulfs the community.

The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon -- such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

He is talking about an action which just as efficaciously does an evil thing ( and is known certainly and unavoidably to lead to this evil result ) as it efficaciously does some good.

of which one is deliberately willed or intended and the other not intended or not directly intended, but still both are done, while the evil effect is, with equal consciousness on the part of the agent, foreknown to be among the consequences.

The problem of evil is the argument that the existence of evil is incompatible with the concept of an omnipotent and perfectly good God.

A key belief in Manichaeism is that the powerful, though not omnipotent good power ( God ) was opposed by the semi-eternal evil power ( Satan ).

In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil with that of a deity who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent ( see theism ).

Other explanations include the explanation of evil as the result of free will misused by God's creatures, the view that our suffering is required for personal and spiritual growth, the denial that God is omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent, and skepticism concerning the ability of humans to understand God's reasons for permitting the existence of evil.

# An omnipotent being, who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.

# If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, then no evil exists.

# There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

Thus, as per Draper's argument above, the theory that there is an omniscient and omnipotent being who is indifferent requires no hidden reasons in order to explain evil.

Ditheistic belief systems ( a kind of dualism ) explain the problem of evil from the existence of two rival great, but not omnipotent, deities that work in polar opposition to each other.

Greater good responses to the problem make use of this insight by arguing for existence of goods of great value which God cannot actualize without also permitting evil, and thus that there are evils he cannot be expected to prevent despite being omnipotent.

Several philosophers have argued that just as there exists a problem of evil for theists who believe in an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being, so too is there a problem of good for anyone who believes in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnimalevolent ( or perfectly evil ) being.

In that case, the theist appears to face a dilemma: either to accept that both sets of responses are equally bad, and so that the theist does not have an adequate response to the problem of evil ; or to accept that both responses are equally good, and so to consider the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnimalevolent being as plausible.

As such, they are intended only to demonstrate that it is possible that evil can co-exist with an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being.

Since the relevant parallel commitment is only that good can co-exist with an omniscient, omnipotent and omnimalevolent being, not that it is plausible that they should do so, the theist who is responding to the problem of evil need not be committing themselves to something they are likely to think is false.

However, this by itself does not answer the problem of evil if the superior entity is omnipotent and omnibenevolent.

In Buddhism, the problem of evil, or the related problem of dukkha, is one argument against a benevolent, omnipotent creator god, identifying such a notion as attachment to a false concept.

A theodicy is a response to the evidential problem of evil, the challenge that the occurrence of evil in the world counts as evidence against the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity, making God's existence unlikely.