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  1. Moral Antitheodicy: Prospects and Problems.Robert Mark Simpson - 2008 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 65 (3):153-169.
    Proponents of the view which I call ‘moral antitheodicy’ call for the theistic discourse of theodicy to be abandoned, because, they claim, all theodicies involve some form of moral impropriety. Three arguments in support of this view are examined: the argument from insensitivity, the argument from detachment, and the argument from harmful consequences. After discussing the merits of each argument individually, I attempt to show that they all must presuppose what they are intended to establish, namely, that the set of (...)
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  • Anti‐Theodicy.Toby Betenson - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (1):56-65.
    In this article, I outline the major themes of ‘anti-theodicy’. Anti-theodicy is characterised as a reaction, as rejection, against traditional solutions to the problem of evil and against the traditional formulations of the problem of evil to which those solutions respond. I detail numerous ‘moral’ anti-theodical objections to theodicy, illustrating the central claim of anti-theodicy: Theodicy is morally objectionable. I also detail some ‘non-moral’ anti-theodical objections, illustrating the second major claim of anti-theodicy: Traditional formulations of the problem of evil are (...)
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  • Eternal Life as an Exclusively Present Possession: Perspectives from Theology and the Philosophy of Time.Mikel Burley - 2016 - Sophia 55 (2):145-161.
    Does it make sense to think of eternal life not as an unending continuation of life subsequent to death but as fully actualized in one’s present mortal and finite life? After outlining conceptual and moral reasons for being troubled by the notion of an endless life, this article draws upon the thought of major Christian theologians and philosophers of religion to expound the idea of eternal life as a possession exclusively of the life one is presently living. Supplementing the claims (...)
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  • The Greek evil eye, African witchcraft, and Western ethnocentrism.Anastasia Apostolides & Yolanda Dreyer - 2008 - HTS Theological Studies 64 (2):1021-1042.
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  • O mal e as razões de Deus: O projeto de teodiceia e suas condições de adequação (Evill and the reasons of God: The theodicy project and its adequacy conditions).Ricardo Sousa Silvestre - 2012 - Filosofia Unisinos 13 (1):68-89.
    Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to the project of meta-theodicy, understood here as the elucidation of the concept of theodicy through the analysis of its adequacy. In our case, the analysis shall be made inside a framework including a taxonomical view of the theodical adequacy conditions which allows for a rigorously acceptable description of them as well as for a natural appraisal of the role, importance and intra-logical relations holding between them. The result of the analysis shall (...)
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  • Ignorance, Instrumentality, Compensation, and the Problem of Evil.Marilyn McCord Adams - 2013 - Sophia 52 (1):7-26.
    Some theodicists, skeptical theists, and friendly atheists agree that God-justifying reasons for permitting evils would have to have an instrumental structure: that is, the evils would have to be necessary to secure a great enough good or necessary to prevent some equally bad or worse evil. D.Z. Phillips contends that instrumental reasons could never justify anyone for causing or permitting horrendous evils and concludes that the God of Restricted Standard Theism does not exist—indeed, is a conceptual mistake. After considering Phillips’ (...)
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  • The normatively relativised logical argument from evil.John Bishop & Ken Perszyk - 2011 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (2):109-126.
    It is widely agreed that the ‘Logical’ Argument from Evil (LAFE) is bankrupt. We aim to rehabilitate the LAFE, in the form of what we call the Normatively Relativised Logical Argument from Evil (NRLAFE). There are many different versions of a NRLAFE. We aim to show that one version, what we call the ‘right relationship’ NRLAFE, poses a significant threat to personal-omniGod-theism—understood as requiring the belief that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good person who has created our world—because it (...)
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  • The Power of God.Andrew Gleeson - 2010 - Sophia 49 (4):603-616.
    Much contemporary analytic philosophy understands the power of God as belonging to the same logical space as the power of human beings: a power of efficient causation taken to the maximum limit. This anthropomorphic picture is often explicated in terms of God’s capacity to bring about any logically possible state of affairs, so-called omnipotence. D.Z. Phillips criticized this position in his last book, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God. I defend Phillips’s argument against recent criticism by William (...)
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  • Theodicy: The solution to the problem of evil, or part of the problem?Nick Trakakis - 2008 - Sophia 47 (2):161-191.
    Theodicy, the enterprise of searching for greater goods that might plausibly justify God’s permission of evil, is often criticized on the grounds that the project has systematically failed to unearth any such goods. But theodicists also face a deeper challenge, one that places under question the very attempt to look for any morally sufficient reasons God might have for creating a world littered with evil. This ‘anti-theodical’ view argues that theists (and non-theists) ought to reject, primarily for moral reasons, the (...)
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  • The global/local distinction vindicates Leibniz's theodicy.James Franklin - 2022 - Theology and Science 20 (4).
    The essential idea of Leibniz’s Theodicy was little understood in his time but has become one of the organizing themes of modern mathematics. There are many phenomena that are possible locally but for purely mathematical reasons impossible globally. For example, it is possible to build a spiral staircase that is rising at any given point, but it is impossible to build one that is rising at all points and comes back to where it started. The necessity is mathematically provable, so (...)
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  • What overarching ethical principle should a superintelligent AI follow?Atle Ottesen Søvik - 2022 - AI and Society 37 (4):1505-1518.
    What is the best overarching ethical principle to give a possible future superintelligent machine, given that we do not know what the best ethics are today or in the future? Eliezer Yudkowsky has suggested that a superintelligent AI should have as its goal to carry out the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity (CEV), the most coherent way of combining human goals. The article discusses some problems with this proposal and some alternatives suggested by Nick Bostrom. A slightly different proposal is (...)
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  • Antitheodicy and the Grading of Theodicies by Moral Offensiveness.James Franklin - 2020 - Sophia 59 (3):563-576.
    Antitheodicy objects to all attempts to solve the problem of evil. Its objections are almost all on moral grounds—it argues that the whole project of theodicy is morally offensive. Trying to excuse God’s permission of evil is said to deny the reality of evil, to exhibit gross insensitivity to suffering, and to insult the victims of grave evils. Since antitheodicists urge the avoidance of theodicies for moral reasons, it is desirable to evaluate the moral reasons against theodicies in abstraction from (...)
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  • Grammatical Thomism.Simon Hewitt - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
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  • Re-reading genesis, John, and job: A Christian response to darwinism.Christopher Southgate - 2011 - Zygon 46 (2):370-395.
    Abstract. This article offers one response from within Christianity to the theological challenges of Darwinism. It identifies evolutionary theory as a key aspect of the context of contemporary Christian hermeneutics. Examples of the need for re-reading of scripture, and reassessment of key doctrines, in the light of Darwinism include the reading of the creation and fall accounts of Genesis 1–3, the reformulation of the Christian doctrine of humanity as created in the image of God, and the possibility of a new (...)
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  • (1 other version)The problem of evil and critical realism.Dominic Effiong Abakedi, Emmanuel Kelechi Iwuagwu & Mary Julius Egbai - 2021 - Journal of Critical Realism 21 (2):196-210.
    This paper applied the philosophical theory of critical realism to the problem of evil. Using the method of critical analysis of related literature, the paper discovered, among other things, that e...
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  • Meaningful and meaningless suffering.Sami Pihlström - 2019 - Human Affairs 29 (4):415-424.
    The problem of suffering crucially focuses on meaninglessness. Meaningful suffering—suffering having some “point” or function—is not as problematic as absurd suffering that cannot be rendered purposeful. This issue is more specific than the problem of the “meaning of life” (or “meaning in life”). Human lives are often full of suffering experienced as serving no purpose whatsoever – indeed, suffering that may threaten to make life itself meaningless. Some philosophers—e.g., D.Z. Phillips and John Cottingham—have persuasively argued that the standard analytic methods (...)
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  • Narrative philosophy of religion: apologetic and pluralistic orientations.Mikel Burley - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 88 (1):5-21.
    Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in narrative both in certain areas of philosophy and in the study of religion. The philosophy of religion has not itself been at the forefront of this narrative turn, but exceptions exist—most notably Eleonore Stump’s work on biblical stories and the problem of suffering. Characterizing Stump’s approach as an apologetic orientation, this article contrasts it with pluralistic orientations that, rather than seeking to defend religious faith, are concerned with doing conceptual justice to the (...)
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  • William Hasker’s avoidance of the problems of evil and God.D. Z. Phillips - 2007 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (1):33-42.
    Our Book Review Editor, James Keller, invited William Hasker to write a review of the Book by D. Z. Phillips, "The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God" and then in consultation with the Editor-in-Chief invited Phillips to respond. Aware of both their respect for each other and their philosophical differences we planned that Hasker's review and Phillips' response would appear in the same issue of the "International Journal for Philosophy of Religion." Unfortunately that was not to be. Dewi, (...)
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  • Reincarnation and the Lack of Imagination in Philosophy.Mikel Burley - 2015 - Nordic Wittgenstein Review 4 (2):39-64.
    It has been observed, by D. Z. Phillips among others, that philosophy suffers from a “lack of imagination”. That is, philosophers often fail to see possibilities of sense in forms of life and discourse due to narrow habits of thinking. This is especially problematic in the philosophy of religion, not least when cross-cultural modes of inquiry are called for. This article examines the problem in relation to the philosophical investigation of reincarnation beliefs in particular. As a remedial strategy, I argue (...)
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  • On Letting Go of Theodicy: Marilyn McCord Adams on God and Evil.Andrew Gleeson - 2015 - Sophia 54 (1):1-12.
    Marilyn McCord Adams agrees with D. Z. Phillips that instrumental theodicy is a moral failure, and that sceptical theists and others are guilty of ignoring what we know now about the moral reality of horrendous evils to speculate about unknown ways these evils might be made sense of. In place of theodicy, Adams advocates ‘the logic of compensation’ for the victims of evil, a postmortem healing of divine intimacy with God. This goes so deep, she believes, that eventually victims will (...)
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  • Contemplating Evil.Mikel Burley - 2012 - Nordic Wittgenstein Review.
    Via a discussion of various ways in which putative descriptions or explanations can be deemed to be morally insensitive, this article investigates the role of “contemplation” in philosophy of religion and ethics, and especially in connection with the “problem of evil.” Focusing on the Wittgenstein-influenced methods of D. Z. Phillips, the question is considered whether a tension obtains between, on the one hand, a “contemplative conception of philosophy,” and on the other hand, the sort of critique of theodicy according to (...)
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  • Philo’s Argument from Evil in Hume’s Dialogues X: A Semantic Interpretation. [REVIEW]Anders Kraal - 2013 - Sophia 52 (4):573-592.
    Philo's argument from evil in a much-discussed passage in Part X of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) has been interpreted in three main ways: as a logical argument from evil, as an evidential argument from evil, and as an argument against natural theology's inference of a benevolent and merciful God from the course of the world. I argue that Philo is not offering an argument of any of these sorts, but is arguing that there is a radical disanalogy between (...)
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  • More on the Power of God: A Rejoinder to William Hasker.Andrew Gleeson - 2010 - Sophia 49 (4):617-629.
    In ‘The Power of God’ (Gleeson 2010) I elaborate and defend an argument by the late D.Z. Phillips against definitions of omnipotence in terms of logical possibility. In ‘Which God? What Power? A Response to Andrew Gleeson’ (Hasker 2010), William Hasker criticizes my defense of Phillips’ argument. Here I contend his criticisms do not succeed. I distinguish three definitions of omnipotence in terms of logical possibility. Hasker agrees that the first fails. The second fails because negative properties (like disembodiedment and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Philosophy of religion.Charles Taliaferro - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Therapeutic Theodicy? Suffering, Struggle, and the Shift from the God’s-Eye View.Amber L. Griffioen - 2018 - Religions 9:99ff..
    From a theoretical standpoint, the problem of human suffering can be understood as one formulation of the classical problem of evil, which calls into question the compatibility of the existence of a perfect God with the extent to which human beings suffer. Philosophical responses to this problem have traditionally been posed in the form of theodicies, or justifications of the divine. In this article, I argue that the theodical approach in analytic philosophy of religion exhibits both morally and epistemically harmful (...)
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  • Believing in Reincarnation.Mikel Burley - 2012 - Philosophy 87 (2):261-279.
    Is it absurd to believe that, in the absence of bodily continuity, personal identity could be retained? Bernard Williams argued for an affirmative answer to this question partly on the basis of a well-known thought experiment. Some other philosophers, including D. Z. Phillips, have accepted, or appear to have accepted, Williams' conclusion.Yet the argument has the consequence of dismissing as absurd the sorts of reincarnation beliefs which, within their proper contexts, have a meaningful role in the lives of many millions (...)
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  • Avoiding the Afterlife in Theodicy.Robert Simpson - 2008 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 13 (2):217-231.
    Contemporary proponents of theodical generally believe that a theodical reply to the evidential argument from evil must involve some appeal to the afterlife. In Richard Swinburne's writings on theodical, however, we find two arguments that may be offered in opposition to this prevailing view. In this paper, these two arguments—the argument from usefulness and the argument from assumed consent—are explained and evaluated. It is suggested that both of these arguments are rendered ineffective by their failure to distinguish between the different (...)
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  • Panentheism, Panpsychism and Neuroscience : In Search of an Alternative Metaphysical Framework in Relation to Neuroscience, Consciousness, Free Will, and Theistic Beliefs.Oliver Li - unknown
    This thesis philosophically examines, critically discusses, and proposes how a plausible philosophical framework of consciousness and free will should be formulated. This framework takes into account contemporary scientific research on human consciousness and free will and its possible challenges; also it is examined how this framework should be related to theistic beliefs – especially those connected to human and divine consciousness and free will. First, an overview of important research within the natural sciences about the conscious mind is presented together (...)
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  • God and Evil: A View from Swansea.Andrew Gleeson - 2012 - Philosophical Investigations 35 (3-4):331-349.
    Herbert McCabe and Brian Davies defend an Aquinas-inspired, anti-anthropomorphic natural theology that emphasises the mysterious distance between the Creator and his creation. This theology gives rise to a powerful response to the problem of evil, powerful enough to scuttle the academic problem of evil that is based on a confused anthropomorphic understanding of God. But that does not dispose of the problem of evil per se. The McCabe–Davies natural theology can succeed only by appropriating a personal understanding of “the ultimate (...)
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  • D. Z. Phillips on the grammar of “God”.Anselm K. Min - 2008 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 63 (1-3):131-146.
    In this essay dedicated to the memory of D. Z. Phillips, I propose to do two things. In the first part I present his position on the grammar of God and the language game in some detail, discussing the confusion of "subliming" the logic of our language, the contextual genesis of sense and meaning, the idea of a world view, language game, logic, and grammar internal to each context, the constitution of the religious context, and the grammar of God proper (...)
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  • Horrendous Evil and the Loving God: a Reply to Joshua Thurow.Andrew Gleeson - 2022 - Sophia 61 (2):419-428.
    Marilyn McCord Adams has defended theodicy by appeal to the idea of post-mortem compensation for the victims of horrendous evil. I have argued that this overlooks the dissociation of theodicy from moral reality that she concedes in her response to criticism of theodicy by D Z Phillips. Joshua Thurow has recently defended Adams against my argument. Here I defend and strengthen that argument against Thurow.
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  • Why Richard Swinburne Won’t ‘Rot in Hell’: A Defense of Tough-minded Theodicy. [REVIEW]Peter Forrest - 2010 - Sophia 49 (1):37-47.
    In his recent paper in Sophia , ‘Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?’ Nick Trakakis endorses the position that theodicy, whether intellectually successful or not, is a morally obnoxious enterprise. My aim in this paper is to defend theodicy from this accusation. I concede that God the Creator is a moral monster by human standards and neither to be likened to a loving parent nor imitated. Nonetheless, God is morally perfect. What is abhorrent (...)
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  • ‘Superstition’ as a contemplative term: a Wittgensteinian perspective.Hermen Kroesbergen - 2015 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 77 (2):105-122.
    Can a contemplative philosopher describe a particular religious practice as superstitious, or is he thereby overstepping his boundaries? I will discuss the way in which the Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips uses ‘Superstition’ as a contemplative term. His use of the distinction between genuine religion and superstition is not a weakness as is often supposed, but a necessity. Without contemplating ‘Superstition’ and ‘genuine religion’ Phillips would not have been able to elucidate the meaning that religious beliefs have in (...)
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  • مدل‌های الهیاتی در ترازوی آرای لیندبک و فیلیپس.سیدامیررضا مزاری & جهانگیر مسعودی - 2018 - پژوهشنامه فلسفه دین 16 (1):211-224.
    یکی از مباحث چالش‌برانگیز در حوزۀ فلسفۀ دین مدل‌هایی است که در حوزۀ الهیات از مفاهیم بازی زبانی و نحوه‌های زندگی ویتگنشتاین اخذ شده است. این مدل‌ها در ظاهر با این که ریشۀ فکری یکسانی در خاک اندیشه ویتگنشتاین دارند و گاهی انتقاداتی مشابه به آنها وارد شده است، در باطن امر برخی از این مدل‌ها بهتر توانسته‌اند از این انتقادات جان سالم به در برند. در این مقاله، دو مدل معروف ویتگنشتاینی را مورد بررسی قرار می‌دهیم: مدل زبانی‌ـ‌فرهنگی جورج (...)
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  • D. Z. Phillips’ problems with evil and with God.William Hasker - 2007 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 61 (3):151-160.
    It is widely held that the logical problem of evil, which alleges an inconsistency between the existence of evil and that of an omnipotent and morally perfect God, has been solved. D. Z. Phillips thinks this is a mistake. In The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, he argues that, within the generally assumed framework, “neither the proposition ’God is omnipotent’ nor the proposition ‘God is perfectly good’ can get off the ground.” Thus, the problem of evil leads (...)
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  • Misunderstanding the Talk(s) of the Divine: Theodicy in the Wittgensteinian Tradition.Ondřej Beran - 2017 - Sophia 56 (2):183-205.
    The paper discusses the unique approach to the problem of evil employed by the Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and ethics that is primarily represented by D. Z. Phillips. Unlike traditional solutions to the problem, Phillips’ solution consists in questioning its meaningfulness—he attacks the very ideas of God’s omnipotence, of His perfect goodness and of the need to ‘calculate’ God’s goodness against the evil within the world. A possible weakness of Phillips’ approach is his unreflected use of what he calls ‘our (...)
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  • D. Z. Phillips' contemplations on religion and literature.Mikel Burley - 2012 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 71 (1):21-37.
    This paper critically discusses D. Z. Phillips’ use of literary works as a resource for philosophical reflection on religion. Beginning by noting Phillips’ suggestion, made in relation to Waiting for Godot , that the possibilities of meaning that we see in a literary work can reveal something of our own religious sensibility, I then proceed to show what we learn about Phillips from his readings of certain works by Larkin, Tennyson, and Wharton. Through exploring alternative possible readings, I argue that, (...)
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