Considerable effort has been expended on constructing theodicies which try to reconcile the suffering of unwilling innocents, such as Job, with the existence and nature of God as understood in Christian theology. There is, of course, abundant reflection on the problem of evil and the story of Job in the history of Jewish thought, but this material has not been discussed much in contemporary philosophical literature. I want to take a step towards remedying this defect by examining the interpretation of (...) the story of Job and the solution to the problem of evil given by one important and influential Jewish thinker, Saadia Gaon. (shrink)

I shall argue in this paper that extant definitions of causality are incorrect since they do not cohere in the proper way with the concept of a cause of the universe. This lack of coherence is twofold. For some extant definitions of a cause, there are possible instances of the concept of a cause of the universe that do not satisfy the definitions. For these or other extant definitions, there are entities or occurrences that are not instances of the concept (...) of a cause of the universe but that count as causes of the universe according to the definitions. This failure of coherence between extant definitions of causality and the concept of a cause of the universe entails either that there is some other definition of a cause that is correct or that causality is indefinable. I shall suggest in the conclusion of this paper that it is more plausible to believe that causality is indefinable. (shrink)

IN A RECENT DISCUSSION ON THE MIRACULOUS, ROBERT LARMER ARGUES THAT THERE ARE CONCEIVABLE OCCURRENCES FOR WHICH IT WOULD BE MOST REASONABLE TO BELIEVE NO NATURAL EXPLANATION WILL BE FORTHCOMING. IN RESPONSE I ARGUE THAT THERE ARE NO SUCH OCCURRENCES. IT IS, IN PRINCIPLE, ALWAYS JUSTIFIABLE TO MAINTAIN THAT ANY CONCEIVABLE EVENT IS THE PRODUCT OF SOLELY NATURAL CAUSAL FACTORS.

Sceptical theists--e.g., William Alston and Michael Bergmann--have claimed that considerations concerning human cognitive limitations are alone sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil. We argue that, if the considerations deployed by sceptical theists are sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil, then those considerations are also sufficient to undermine inferences that play a crucial role in ordinary moral reasoning. If cogent, our argument suffices to discredit sceptical theist responses to evidential arguments from evil.

This study intends to show that the question whether faith can be justified without proofs can be resolved by importing ideas from Kierkegaard’s and Plantinga’s affirmative take on the matter. There is a deep similarity between the way they understand belief in God and belief in Christianity: for both the first is considered universal human knowledge and the second seen as a gift from God. Against the charge that such an understanding is irrational Plantinga offers an externalist epistemological model which (...) allows those beliefs to be warranted. The authors also share the modern idea that there is an objective truth, combining it with the postmodern stance that no method exists which would guarantee access to it. A specific contribution on Kierkegaard’s part to the understanding of the rationality of transitions toward a Christian stage of existence is to show in detail the way in which such transitions are mediated through inwardnes - a perspective akin to Michael Polanyi’s scientific epistemology. One can see in both authors not only a deep commonality of ideas, but also a remarkable way in which their understandings augment each other. Whereas Plantinga’s inquiry contributes to the rational plausibility of a “Justified Faith without Reasons” project, Kierkegaard’s venture balances such a logical-analytic effort with a deep existential inquiry. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a family of responses to arguments from evil. One important member of that family is Stephen Wykstra’s CORNEA-based criticism of William Rowe’s arguments from evil. A cornerstone of Wykstra’s approach is his CORNEA principle. However, a number of authors have criticized CORNEA on various grounds, including that it has odd results, it cannot do the work it was meant to, and it problematically conflicts with the so-called common sense epistemology. In this paper, I explicate and defend a (...) CORNEA principle. After sketching a brief argument for it, I show how it can be acquitted of these recent charges. (shrink)

Many people do not know or believe there is a God, and many experience a sense of divine absence. Are these (and other) “divine hiddenness” facts evidence against the existence of God? Using Bayesian tools, we investigate *evidential arguments from divine hiddenness*, and respond to two objections to such arguments. The first objection says that the problem of hiddenness is just a special case of the problem of evil, and so if one has responded to the problem of evil then (...) hiddenness has no additional bite. The second objection says that, while hiddenness may be evidence against generic theism, it is not evidence against more specific conceptions of God, and thus hiddenness poses no epistemic challenge to a theist who holds one of these more specific conceptions. Our investigation leaves open just how strong the evidence from hiddenness really is, but we aim to clear away some important reasons for thinking hiddenness is of no evidential significance at all. (shrink)

A number of authors have developed evidential arguments from evil in the past thirty years. Perhaps the best known evidential arguments from evil are those presented in Rowe (1979) and Draper (1989). We shall spend most of this chapter examining these two arguments.

Atheists have tacitly conceded the field to theists in the area of philosophical cosmology, specifically, in the enterprise of explaining why the universe exists. The theistic hypothesis is that the reason the universe exists lies in God’s creative choice, but atheists have not proposed any reason why the universe exists. I argue that quantum cosmology proposes such an atheistic reason, namely, that the universe exists because it has an unconditional probability of existing based on a functional law of nature. This (...) law of nature (“the wave function of the universe”) is inconsistent with theism and implies that God does not exist. I criticize the claims of Alston, Craig, Deltete and Guy, Oppy and Plantinga that theism is consistent with quantum cosmology. (shrink)

To many atheists the existence of evil seems to provide a conclusive argument against the existence of God. God is by definition omnipotent and perfectly good; a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can, an omnipotent being can remove any evil he chooses, so if there is a God there will be no evil, but there is evil, hence there is no God. Theists normally challenge this argument by challenging the premiss that a perfectly good (...) being will remove evil in so far as he can. The theistic defence is usually put as the defence that many evils are logically necessary conditions of greater goods, and hence a perfectly good being may allow them to occur in order to bring about the greater good; so a perfectly good being may well allow some evils to occur. (shrink)

In this research, we discussed the types of evil: moral and natural, which are cited by atheistic philosophers as evidence against the existence of God. The so-called evidence from evil has been used by the atheistic and other non-theistic scholars to raise hypothesis on evaluating the possibility or likelihood that an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God exists in a world that is littered with evil. Moral evil is evil that arise from the misuse of free will by moral agents, (...) while natural evils are natural disasters such as: earthquakes, famine, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes etc. We discussed moral evil and Plantinga’s free will defense. We also discussed the natural evil and how it poses threat to theism. The logical and the evidential arguments from evil are the forms of arguments developed from moral and natural evils. While many scholars have agreed that Plantinga’s free will defense adequately responds to the problem of logical evil, the same consensus does not necessarily apply to the evidential argument from evil. We also examined William Rowe’s evidential argument which he developed from cases of intense animal and human sufferings considered by him to be pointless or gratuitous with no known reasons or goods for which God should have allowed the visceral experience of such sufferings. The work of Rowe and other non-theistic philosophers have made evidential evil a relevant and predominantly modern argument, addressing real life cases of animal and human sufferings, thereby making a case for atheism and also creating an awareness for not just the irrationality of theism but also the problem of the probity, morality, or rightness of doing theodicy. We also considered the works of other atheistic, and even some theistic scholars, who argue against the morality and rightness of doing theodicy. Some of these scholars consider theodicy to be a failed enterprise simply because, according to them, it ignores or suppresses the effects of horrendous and terrible evils that human beings and animals experience. Many theistic scholars on the other hand reject the notion that theodicy ignores suffering by developing various positively moral reasons to support not just the plausibility of theism but also to demonstrate that theodicies have successfully provided answers to problem of evil. The thesis of this research examines various problems associated with evils and the effects of Rowe’s instances of intense suffering on the enterprise of theodicy. It challenges the act of theodicy and questions its morality on the basis of its purposes, goals, attitudes, problems, truth, and accomplishment. This research concludes that theodicy is not a failed enterprise, but it is the only rational explanation to the problem of evil and the only option that gives hope and comfort with respect to the effects of various intense and horrendous evil in our world. (shrink)

The argument that(1) God exists, and is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly goodand(2) Evil existsare logically incompatible, can be construed aporetically (as generating a puzzle and posing the constructive challenge of finding a solution that displays their compatibility) or atheologically (as a positive proof of the non-existence of God). I note that analytic philosophers of religion over the last thirty years or so have focused on the atheological deployment of the argument from evil, and have met its onslaughts from the posture (...) of defense. I take Nelson Pike (in his article “Hume on Evil”) and Alvin Plantinga (in The Nature of Necessity, “Self-Profile,” and other pieces) as paradigm defenders, analyse their approaches, and try to make explicit parameters and assumptions within which these defenses have been conducted. In particular, both writers seem to attempt a reply within the parameters of a religion-neutral value theory and on the assumption that God has obligations to do one thing rather than another in creation-both of which conspire to defend God as a producer of global goods and shift attention off the more pressing question of His agent-centered goodness. I then argue that value-theory pluralism explodes the myth of shared values, and so complicates the structure of fair-minded debate about the problem of evil as to significantly limit the utility of defense. I invite Christian philosophers to approach the problem aporetically, and to exhibit the compossibility of (1) and (2) by formulating their own beliefs about how God is solving the problem of evil using the valuables within a Christian value theory to defeat evils. After sketching a strategy for doing this, I answer the objection that my recommendation conflates Christian philosophy and theology, and try to show how it affords a continuity between the so-called philosophical and existential problems of evil. (shrink)

El presente artículo introduce el lector a la filosofía analítica de la religión desde un punto de vista histórico y haciendo énfasis en su evolución. El objetivo es doble: primero dar a conocer una nueva disciplina que se ha desarrollado de manera notoria dentro del habla inglesa pero que ha sido ignorada dentro de la filosofía de habla hispana; segundo, comprender su nacimiento y algunas de sus principales características.

I examine different strategies involved in stating anti-theistic arguments from natural evil, and consider some theistic replies. There are, traditionally, two main types of arguments from natural evil: those that purport to deduce a contradiction between the existence of natural evil and the existence of God, and those that claim that the existence of certain types or quantities of natural evil significantly lowers the probability that theism is true. After considering peripheral replies, I state four prominent theistic rebutting strategies: skeptical (...) theism; Richard Swinburne's view that moral knowledge entails natural evil; the soul-making theodicy; and the natural law theodicy. (shrink)

The physicist Richard Gott defends the Copernican principle, which claims that when we have no information about our position along a given dimension among a group of observers, we should consider ourselves to be randomly located among those observers in respect to that dimension. First, I apply Copernican reasoning to the distribution of evil in the universe. I then contend that evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life strengthens four important versions of the argument from evil. I remain neutral regarding whether this (...) result is a reductio of these arguments from evil or the statement of a genuine evidential relationship. (shrink)

Em Warranted Christian Belief (2000), Alvin Plantinga (1932-) desenvolve sua Epistemologia Reformada (Calvinista), com o objetivo de oferecer aval (warrant) para a crença teísta (professada pelas Religiões Abraâmicas: Judaísmo, Cristianismo e Islam) e para a crença cristã clássica (uma crença cristã ecumênica aceita pelos Apóstolos de Cristo, os cristãos primitivos, os pais da Igreja, os ortodoxos, os católicos, os protestantes (os luteranos, os reformados e os arminianos) e os anabatistas). Todavia, o mais natural, que poderíamos esperar de uma Epistemologia Reformada, (...) seria uma epistemologia dedicada às crenças da Cosmovisão Reformada. Sendo assim, a questão norteadora do presente trabalho é: A Epistemologia Reformada de Plantinga é Realmente Reformada? (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to clarify or explicate the concept of theodicy. More specifically, I shall provide an account of the concept that takes its logical aspects seriously into consideration as well as satisfies the basic intuitions philosophers of religions have had about it. This shall be done by systematically analysing the several theodical conditions found in the literature. As it shall be seen, these conditions are logically related to one another; collectively, they point not to one, but (...) to several concepts of theodicy. Thus, as by-product of this explicatory endeavour, I shall provide a logically guided, I may say, analysis of such conditions as well as a systematization of the theodical concepts arising from them. I shall follow what might be termed a semiformal approach; despite not developing a full logical theory, I use the standard notation and some important results from the field of formal logic. (shrink)

While William Rowe has argued that the principle of credulity does not lend justification to religious experience, he must affirm something quite like the principle of credulity in his empirical argument from evil. To do so Rowe has proposed a modified version of the principle of credulity.I shall argue that Rowe’s modified principle of credulity creates for him a dilemma regarding the justification of belief in other minds. I further suggest it is not adequate for bridging the logical gap between (...) the existence of apparently pointless evils and the existence of genuinely pointless evil. (shrink)

This thesis explores possibilities that arise from regarding theodicy as the activity of descriptive understanding of Christian belief and practice as found in the classical theistic framework. First, any theodicy as an activity is analysed in terms of the role of philosophy, the place of epistemology, the basis of theology, and the taking of an apologetic stance. It is then argued that traditional approaches to theodicy suffer from methodological weaknesses which derive from formulating theodicy in terms of unbelief, and from (...) strictly theoretical analysis. The superiority of philosophical description is argued as better suited to understanding religious belief as held in the community of believers, with especial reference to relationships that hold between language and reality. A critical exploration follows of the approach to theodicy of a proponent of philosophical description, D.Z. Phillips, and consideration is given to the status of evaluations made by believers. In the light of this critique, two attempts are made to describe the shape of Christian theodicy using the interperson model of theological language. The first attempt, based on a description of actual interpersonal relationships, is found eventually to be open to serious objections. A second attempt is then made, based not only on interpersonal language, but using a distinction between "surface" and "depth" in religious language, and by arguing for the presence of an epistemological "direction" in religious belief. On this basis, a Theodicy of Dependence is developed as best describing the shape of Christian belief held in a world which is frequently hostile. (shrink)

Plantinga underestimates the prospects for probabilistic atheism. He employs a flawed mathematical rendition of the atheist's crucial claim, (1) and he misunderstands the utility (1) would have for the atheist.