Results for ' gratuitous evil'

974 found
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  1. Gratuitous Evil Unmotivated: A Reply to MacGregor.Ross Inman - 2013 - Philosophia Christi 15 (2):435-445.
    In his article “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil,” Kirk R. MacGregor has argued that the Christian theist need not demur at the existence of gratuitous evil. In fact, we are told that Christian theists have ample philosophical, theological, and biblical evidence in favor of the existence of gratuitous evil. In this brief note I examine both the general structure of his argument as well as several of his more central arguments in favor (...)
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  2. Is Theism Compatible with Gratuitous Evil?Daniel Howard-Snyder & Frances Howard-Snyder - 1999 - American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (2):115 - 130.
    We argue that Michael Peterson's and William Hasker's attempts to show that God and gratuitous evil are compatible constitute miserable failures. We then sketch Peter van Inwagen's attempt to do the same and conclude that, to date, no one has shown his attempt a failure.
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  3. On Necessary Gratuitous Evils.Michael James Almeida - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (3):117-135.
    The standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil makes the prevention of gratuitous evil a necessary condition on moral perfection. I argue that, on any analysis of gratuitous evil we choose, the standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil is false. It is metaphysically impossible to prevent every gratuitously evil state of affairs in every possible world. No matter what God does—no matter how many gratuitously evil states of (...)
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  4. God and gratuitous evil: Between the rock and the hard place.Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (3):317-345.
    To most of us – believers and non-believers alike – the possibility of a perfect God co-existing with the kinds of evil that we see calls out for explanation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the belief that God must have justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see has been a perennial feature of theistic thought. Recently, however, a growing number of authors have argued that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with the existence (...)
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  5. Antitheism and Gratuitous Evil.Ebrahim Azadegan - 2019 - Heythrop Journal 60 (5):671-677.
    Kahane introduces two versions of antitheism: impersonal and personal. I deny that impersonal antitheism can be cogently defended, but I accept that the meaningful life argument in favour of personal antitheism is sound. I then argue that the personal form of antitheism reduces to a form of gratuitous evil. Subsequently, I show that instead of denying the existence of gratuitous evil by approving sceptical theism, one can accept the existence of gratuitous evil and show (...)
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  6. God, Schmod and Gratuitous Evil.Daniel Howard-Snyder & John Hawthorne - 1993 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4):861-874.
    It is common these days for theists to argue that we aren’t justified in believing atheism on the basis of evil. They claim that neither facts about particular horrors nor more holistic considerations pertaining to the magnitude, kinds and distribution of evil can ground atheism since we can't tell whether any evil is gratuitous.1 In this paper we explore a novel strategy for shedding light on these issues: we compare the atheist who claims that there is (...)
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  7. Should Atheists Wish That There Were No Gratuitous Evils?Guy Kahane - 2021 - Faith and Philosophy 38 (4):460-483.
    Many atheists argue that because gratuitous evil exists, God (probably) doesn’t. But doesn’t this commit atheists to wishing that God did exist, and to the pro-theist view that the world would have been better had God existed? This doesn’t follow. I argue that if all that evil still remains but is just no longer gratuitous, then, from an atheist perspective, that wouldn’t have been better. And while a counterfactual from which that evil is literally absent (...)
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  8. Evil and Evidence.Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7:1-31.
    The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from (...)
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  9. God, Evil, and Meticulous Providence.Bruce Reichenbach - 2022 - Religions 13.
    James Sterba has constructed a powerful argument for there being a conflict between the presence of evil in the world and the existence of God. I contend that Sterba’s argument depends on a crucial assumption, namely, that God has an obligation to act according to the principle of meticulous providence. I suggest that two of his analogies confirm his dependence on this requirement. Of course, his argument does not rest on either of these analogies, but they are illustrative of (...)
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  10. How to Solve the Problem of Evil: A Deontological Strategy.Justin Mooney - 2019 - Faith and Philosophy 36 (4):442-462.
    One paradigmatic argument from evil against theism claims that, (1) if God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil. But (2) there is gratuitous evil, so (3) God does not exist. I consider three deontological strategies for resisting this argument. Each strategy restructures existing theodicies which deny (2) so that they instead deny (1). The first two strategies are problematic on their own, but their primary weaknesses vanish when they are combined to form the third (...)
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  11. Evils, Wrongs and Dignity: How to Test a Theory of Evil.Paul Formosa - 2013 - Journal of Value Inquiry 47 (3):235-253.
    Evil acts are not merely wrong; they belong to a different moral category. For example, telling a minor lie might be wrong but it is not evil, whereas the worst act of gratuitous torture that you can imagine is evil and not merely wrong. But how do wrongs and evils differ? A theory or conception of evil should, among other things, answer that question. But once a theory of evil has been developed, how do (...)
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  12. Evil Actions, Evildoers, and Evil People.Peter Brian Barry - manuscript
    Typically, philosophers interested in evil have typically been concerned with reconciling (or not) the apparent existence of gratuitous suffering with the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient and supremely loving and caring Deity. Undeniably, ‘evil’ functions as a mass noun: note the intelligibility of asking “Why is there so much evil in the world?” But ‘evil’ sometimes functions as an adjective and is used variously to describe persons, actions, desires, motives, and intentions; Joel Feinberg even (...)
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  13. Weighing evils: the C. S. Lewis approach.Joshua Seachris & Linda Zagzebski - 2007 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (2):81-88.
    It is often argued that the great quantity of evil in our world makes God’s existence less likely than a lesser quantity would, and this, presumably, because the probability that some evils are gratuitous increases as the overall quantity of evil increases. Often, an additive approach to quantifying evil is employed in such arguments. In this paper, we examine C. S. Lewis’ objection to the additive approach, arguing that although he is correct to reject this approach, (...)
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  14. Defusing the Common Sense Problem of Evil.Chris Tweedt - 2015 - Faith and Philosophy 32 (4):391-403.
    The inductive argument from evil to the non-existence of God contains the premise that, probably, there is gratuitous evil. Some skeptical theists object: one's justification for the premise that, probably, there is gratuitous evil involves an inference from the proposition that we don't see a good reason for some evil to the proposition that it appears that there is no good reason for that evil, and they use a principle, "CORNEA," to block that (...)
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  15. Introducing the Problem of Evil.Peter Hutcheson - 1999 - Teaching Philosophy 22 (2):185-194.
    This paper addresses several reasons why students may be uninterested or unwilling to engage with the problem of evil and discusses a method of teaching it which overcomes these difficulties. This strategy, first, distinguishes between evil and gratuitous evil. This prevents students from thinking that the task of theodicy is fulfilled by a reconciliation of God with mundane evil (e.g. immunizations). Second, the goal of theodicy is framed as the reconciliation of God with the appearance (...)
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  16. "Meat and Evil".Matthew C. Halteman - 2019 - In Andrew Chignell (ed.), Evil: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 88-96.
    In a world where meat is often a token of comfort, health, hospitality, and abundance, one can be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the conjunction “meat and evil.” Why pull meat into the orbit of harm, pestilence, ill-will, and privation? From another perspective, the answer is obvious: meat—the flesh of slaughtered animals taken for food—is the remnant of a feeling creature who was recently alive and whose death was premature, violent, and often gratuitous. The truth is that (...)
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  17. Theory of Compensation and the Problem of Evil; a New Defense.Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (2).
    All previous solutions to the problem of evil have attempted to resolve the issue by showing that God permits them in order for a greater good. However, some contest that there are some instances in which there is no greater good, while in other cases good and evil have been distributed unjustly. I intend, in this paper, to show that if God compensates the harms of evil in the afterlife, any sort of good is enough to resolve (...)
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  18. An Axiological-Trajectory Theodicy.Thomas Metcalf - 2020 - Sophia 59 (3):577-592.
    I develop a new theodicy in defense of Anselmian theism, one that has several advantages over traditional and recent replies to the Problem of Evil. To make my case, I first explain the value of a positive trajectory: a forward-in-time decrease in ‘first-order-gratuitousevil: evil that is not necessary for any equal-or-greater first-order good, but may be necessary for a higher-order good, such as the good of strongly positive axiological trajectory. Positive trajectory arguably contributes goodness to (...)
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  19. Toward a Reactive Attitudes Theodicy.Garrett Pendergraft - 2022 - In Leigh Vicens & Peter Furlong (eds.), Theological Determinism: New Perspectives. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 231–50.
    According to the argument from gratuitous evil, if God were to exist, then gratuitous evil wouldn’t; but gratuitous evil does exist, so God doesn’t. We can evaluate different views of divine providence with respect to the resources they are able to bring to bear when encountering this argument. By these lights, theological determinism is often seen as especially problematic: the determinist is seen as having an impoverished set of resources to draw from in her (...)
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  20. The Problem of Alternative Monotheisms: Another Serious Challenge to Theism.Raphael Lataster - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (1):31-51.
    Theistic and analytic philosophers of religion typically privilege classical theism by ignoring or underestimating the great threat of alternative monotheisms. [1] In this article we discuss numerous god-models, such as those involving weak, stupid, evil, morally indifferent, and non-revelatory gods. We find that theistic philosophers have not successfully eliminated these and other possibilities, or argued for their relative improbability. In fact, based on current evidence – especially concerning the hiddenness of God and the gratuitous evils in the world (...)
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  21. Skeptik Teizm ve Kötülük: Peter van Inwagen'ın "Minimum-Yok İddiası".Atilla Akalın - 2021 - Theosophia 3 (3):77-90.
    Skeptical theists are seeking for some reasonable solutions to the evidential problem of evil. One of the most fundamental responses of skeptical theism is that the concept of “gratuitous evil”, which cannot be a proof of the absence of God. Therefore, it is not the existence of God that skeptical theism suspects. Instead, skeptical theism contemplates whether the evil in the world really has a “gratuitous” basis. This paper focuses on Peter van Inwagen's “no-minimum claim”. (...)
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  22. Representing the Parent Analogy.Jannai Shields - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (4).
    I argue that Stephen Wykstra’s much discussed Parent Analogy is helpful in responding to the evidential problem of evil when it is expanded upon from a positive skeptical theist framework. This framework, defended by John Depoe, says that although we often remain in the dark about the first-order reasons that God allows particular instances of suffering, we can have positive second-order reasons that God would create a world with seemingly gratuitous evils. I respond to recent challenges to the (...)
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  23. Not Skeptical Theism, but Trusting Theism.John McClellan - 2016 - Southwest Philosophy Review 32 (1):233-244.
    Over the last three decades, a vast literature has amassed debating the merits of skeptical theism, and it is easy to get the sense that the rationality of theism itself depends crucially on the viability of the skeptical theist response. I will argue that this is mistaken, as there is no need for theists to maintain that non-theists are wrong to treat inscrutable evils as compelling evidence for atheism. I will show that theists instead need only take themselves to have (...)
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  24. Axiarchism: How to Narrow the Gap Between Pro-Theism and Anti-Theism.Perry Hendricks - 2022 - In Kirk Lougheed (ed.), Value Beyond Monotheism: The Axiology of the Divine. New York: Routledge.. pp. 114-128..
    (Wide) pro-theism is the view that the world is better overall if theism is true. (Wide) anti-theism is the view that our world would be better overall if atheism is true. Arguments for pro-theism and anti-theism typically make use of traditional theism (the view that an omni-God exists) and generic atheism (the view that an omni-God doesn’t exist). In my view, when the debate between pro-theists and anti-theists makes use of traditional theism and generic atheism, pro-theism clearly comes out on (...)
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  25. Commonsense, Skeptical Theism, and Different Sorts of Closure of Inquiry Defeat.Jonathan Curtis Rutledge - 2017 - Faith and Philosophy 34 (1):17-32.
    Trent Dougherty argues (contra Jonathan Matheson) that when taking into consideration the probabilities involving skeptical theism (ST) and gratuitous evils, an agent may reasonably affirm both ST and that gratuitous evils exist. In other words, Dougherty thinks that assigning a greater than .5 probability to ST is insufficient to defeat the commonsense problem of evil. I argue that Dougherty’s response assumes, incorrectly, that ST functions solely as an evidential defeater, and that, when understood as a closure of (...)
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  26. Theodical Individualism.T. J. Mawson - 2011 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (1):139 - 159.
    In this journal Steve Maitzen has recently advanced an argument for atheism premised on theodical individualism, the thesis that God would not permit people to suffer evils that were underserved, involuntary, and gratuitous for them. In this paper I advance reasons to think this premise mistaken.
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  27. Evil's Inscrutability in Arendt and Levinas.Imge Oranli - 2018 - Science Et Esprit 70 (3):341-362.
    Since 2001, Continental philosophical studies of evil suggest that we are forced to rethink the category of evil as we face acts of terrorism on a global scale. In light of this suggestion, this article traces the idea of the “inscrutability of evil” as a common lens through which we associate the category of evil with the phenomena we identify as evil. This idea finds its first modern formulation in Kant’s theory of radical evil. (...)
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  28. Evil and Evidence: A Reply to Bass.Mike Almeida - 2023 - Religious Studies.
    In ‘Evil is Still Evidence: Comments on Almeida’ Robert Bass presents three objections to the central argument (ENE) in my ‘Evil is Not Evidence’. The first objection is that ENE is invalid. According to the second objection, it is a consequence of ENE that there can be no evidence for or against a posteriori necessities. The third objection is that, contrary to ENE, the likelihood of certain necessary identities varies with the evidence we have for them. In this (...)
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  29. Evil and Embodiment: Towards a Latter-day Saint Non-Identity Theodicy.Derek Christian Haderlie & Taylor-Grey Miller - 2024 - Religious Studies.
    We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources (...)
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  30. Lesser-Evil Justifications: A Reply to Frowe.Kerah Gordon-Solmon & Theron Pummer - 2022 - Law and Philosophy 41:639–646.
    Sometimes one can prevent harm only by contravening rights. If the harm one can prevent is great enough, compared to the stringency of the opposing rights, then one has a lesser-evil justification to contravene the rights. Non-consequentialist orthodoxy holds that, most of the time, lesser-evil justifications add to agents’ permissible options without taking any away. Helen Frowe rejects this view. She claims that, almost always, agents must act on their lesser-evil justifications. Our primary task is to refute (...)
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  31. Evil and the Immaturity of Freedom: An Existential-Ontological Inquiry into the Heart of Darkness.Richard Oxenberg - 2017 - Interreligious Insight 15 (1):28-26.
    Whence comes the evil will? My paper examines Kant’s notion of radical evil and Kierkegaard’s analysis of sin in order to uncover the existential-ontological dynamic of the evil will. Ultimately, I argue, the evil will arises in response to the anxiety inherent in freedom itself. I conclude with an examination of Kierkegaard’s ‘formula of faith’ as a solution to the dilemma of freedom, and consider the role faith may play in freedom’s moral maturation.
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  32. Understanding Evil Deeds in Human Terms: Empathy for the Perpetrators, the Dead Victims, and the Ethics of Being the Afterlife.Natan Elgabsi - 2023 - Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie (00).
    This essay concerns what it means to historicize evil in an ethically responsible way: that is, what it means to think and narrate perpetrators and victims of evil through what is testified to and told about them. I show that a responsible gaze can only be recognized by allowing ourselves to be addressed by the dead victims. The argument consists in an existential critique of a set of common ideas in the human sciences, which suggest that we must (...)
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  33. Artificial Evil and the Foundation of Computer Ethics.Luciano Floridi & J. W. Sanders - 2001 - Springer Netherlands. Edited by Luciano Floridi & J. W. Sanders.
    Moral reasoning traditionally distinguishes two types of evil:moral (ME) and natural (NE). The standard view is that ME is the product of human agency and so includes phenomena such as war,torture and psychological cruelty; that NE is the product of nonhuman agency, and so includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, disease and famine; and finally, that more complex cases are appropriately analysed as a combination of ME and NE. Recently, as a result of developments in autonomous agents in (...)
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  34. God, evil, and suffering.Daniel Howard-Snyder - 1999 - In Michael J. Murray (ed.), Reason for the Hope Within. Eerdmans. pp. 217--237.
    This essay is aimed at a theistic audience, mainly those who are new to thinking hard about the problem of evil.
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  35. The Evil-God Challenge: Extended and Defended.John M. Collins - 2019 - Religious Studies 55 (1):85-109.
    Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend (...)
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  36. Small Evils and Live Options.Spencer Case - 2020 - Philosophia Christi 22 (2):307-321.
    Many philosophers have thought that aggregates of small, broadly dispersed evils don’t pose the same sort of challenge to theism that horrendous evils like the Nazi Holocaust do. But there are interesting arguments that purport to show that large enough aggregates of small evils are morally and axiologically equivalent to horrendous evils. Herein lies an intriguing and overlooked strategy for defending theism. In short: small evils, or aggregates of such evils, don’t provide decisive evidence against theism; there’s no relevant difference (...)
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  37. Evil in the Fine‐Tuned World.Ebrahim Azadegan - 2019 - Heythrop Journal 60 (5):795-804.
    If the world has been fine-tuned for human life, why does that life encompass such calamity and suffering? It seems that in so far as we are impressed by the fine-tuning intuition that the world has been designed for human life, the problem of natural evil gains in urgency. I propose that observing the world from the anthropic point of view is the source of theists’ challenge which arises from this tension. Dealing with this challenge I suggest perhaps the (...)
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  38. Meeting the Evil God Challenge.Ben Page & Max Baker-Hytch - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (3):489-514.
    The evil God challenge is an argumentative strategy that has been pursued by a number of philosophers in recent years. It is apt to be understood as a parody argument: a wholly evil, omnipotent and omniscient God is absurd, as both theists and atheists will agree. But according to the challenge, belief in evil God is about as reasonable as belief in a wholly good, omnipotent and omniscient God; the two hypotheses are roughly epistemically symmetrical. Given this (...)
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  39. Understanding Evil Acts.Paul Formosa - 2007 - Human Studies 30 (2):57-77.
    Evil acts strike us, by their very nature, as not only horrifying and reprehensible, but also as deeply puzzling. No doubt for reasons like this, evil has often been seen as mysterious, demonic and beyond our human powers of understanding. The question I examine in this paper is whether or not we can (or would want to) overcome this puzzlement in the face of evil acts. I shall argue that we ought want to (in all cases) and (...)
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  40. Evil as Privation and Leibniz's Rejection of Empty Space.Stephen Puryear - 2016 - In Wenchao Li (ed.), "Für Unser Glück oder das Glück Anderer": Vortrage des X. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses, v. III. Georg Olms. pp. 481-489.
    I argue that Leibniz's treatment of void or empty space in the appendix to his fourth letter to Clarke conflicts with the way he elsewhere treats (metaphysical) evil, insofar as he allows that God has created a world with the one kind of privation (evil), while insisting that God would not have created a world with the other kind of privation (void). I consider three respects in which the moral case might be thought to differ relevantly from the (...)
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  41. Evil, Unintelligiblity, Radicality: Footnotes to a Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers.Andrew Chignell - 2019 - In Evil: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 18-42.
    This chapter articulates two concerns that Karl Jaspers raised (with Hannah Arendt) about the common practice of viewing moral evil as unintelligible. The first is that this involves exoticizing the act and/or perpetrator in such a way that moral condemnation becomes difficult. The second is that it can lead us to treat the perpetrator, place, or victim as tainted or stained by a force whose motives we cannot grasp; this in turn can lead to magical thinking about evil (...)
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  42. Evil and moral detachment: further reflections on The Mirror Thesis.Alfred Archer - 2016 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2):201-218.
    A commonly accepted claim by philosophers investigating the nature of evil is that the evil person is, in some way, the mirror image of the moral saint. In this paper I will defend a new version of this thesis. I will argue that both the moral saint and the morally evil person are characterized by a lack of conflict between moral and non-moral concerns. However, while the saint achieves this unity through a reconciliation of the two, the (...)
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  43. Evil and God's Toxin Puzzle.John Pittard - 2016 - Noûs 50 (2):88-108.
    I show that Kavka's toxin puzzle raises a problem for the “Responsibility Theodicy,” which holds that the reason God typically does not intervene to stop the evil effects of our actions is that such intervention would undermine the possibility of our being significantly responsible for overcoming and averting evil. This prominent theodicy seems to require that God be able to do what the agent in Kavka's toxin story cannot do: stick by a plan to do some action at (...)
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  44. Evil, virtue, and education in Kant.Paul Formosa - 2019 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 51 (13):1325-1334.
    For Kant, we cannot understand how to approach moral education without confronting the radical evil of humanity. But if we start out, as Kant thinks we do, from a morally corrupt state, how...
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  45. Horrendous Evil and Christian Theism: A Reply to John W. Loftus.Don McIntosh - 2024 - Trinity Journal of Natural and Philosophical Theology 2 (1):25-44.
    In his recent article, “God and Horrendous Suffering,” John W. Loftus argues that what he calls horrendous suffering is incompatible with traditional theism. The extent of horrendous suffering in the world, he says, “means that either God does not care enough to eliminate it, or God is not smart enough to eliminate it, or God is not powerful enough to eliminate it.” For Loftus, however, the problem is not simply evil, but horrendous suffering, a particularly acute form of (...) which renders theism completely untenable. Here I will argue in reply, first, that because horrendous suffering is itself a form of evil, it cannot be easily reconciled with naturalism, since naturalism actually precludes the existence of evil. Then I will argue that horrendous suffering is not only compatible with theism, but is best explained in the context of Christian theism in particular. Finally I will suggest that because God’s work of creation is not yet complete, we have good reason for maintaining hope even in the face of horrendous evils. (shrink)
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  46. Evil and Forgiveness.Kathryn J. Norlock - 2017 - In Thomas Nys & Stephen De Wijze (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil. New York: Routledge. pp. 282-293.
    Our experiences with many sorts of evils yield debates about the role of forgiveness as a possible moral response. These debates include (1) the preliminary question whether evils are, by definition, unforgivable, (2) the contention that evils may be forgivable but that forgiveness cannot entail reconciliation with one’s evildoer, (3) the concern that only direct victims of evils are in a position to decide if forgiveness is appropriate, (4) the conceptual worry that forgiveness of evil may not be genuine (...)
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  47. Evil in Schelling and Schopenhauer.Alistair Welchman - 2018 - In Douglas Hedley (ed.), The History of Evil in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 1700–1900 CE. Routledge. pp. 150-166.
    Schelling and Schopenhauer both operate in the German idealist tradition initiated by Kant, although both are critical of some of its developments. Schelling's interest in evil – which is at its most intense in his 1809 Freedom essay – stems from his belief that Kant's account of morality. In the Freedom essay Schelling links these theories with the traditional Christian conception of evil as a privation, and attempts by contrast to develop a concept of "radical" or "positive" (...) that grounds both our freedom and individual personality. Evil as folly is a corollary of the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge. The distinguishing feature of the free-will defenses is that god is logically constrained to permit moral evil if God creates a world with moral freedom. It is consistent with such defenses that God is (in some sense) responsible for creating evil, but God's actions are all things considered justified. (shrink)
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  48. Evil or the Lack of Meaning.Patrik Fridlund - 2018 - Logoi. Ph – Rivista di Filosofia, Journal of Philosophy 4 (11):34-48.
    I argue that Paul Ricœur displaces and decentres established theodicies; the issue of evil is perceived as a practical rather than a speculative matter. It is the view of evil as a productive aporia, which suggests that evil provokes action and obliges human beings to take a stand ethically and politically. Hence, the topic of evil is not necessarily about putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The central problem of evil has less to do with logic (...)
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  49. Evil is not Evidence.Mike Almeida - 2022 - Religious Studies 1 (1):1-9.
    The paper aims to show that, if S5 is the logic of metaphysical necessity, then no state of affairs in any possible world constitutes any non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. There might well be states of affairs in some worlds describing extraordinary goods and extraordinary evils, but it is false that these states of affairs constitute any (non-trivial) evidence for or against the existence of God. The epistemological and metaphysical consequences for philosophical theology of (...)
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  50. Encountering Evil: The Evil-god Challenge from Religious Experience.Asha Lancaster-Thomas - 11th July Online - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (3):0-0.
    It is often thought that religious experiences provide support for the cumulative case for the existence of the God of classical monotheism. In this paper, I formulate an Evil-god challenge that invites classical monotheists to explain why, based on evidence from religious experience, the belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god is significantly more reasonable than the belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, evil god. I demonstrate that religious experiences substantiate the existence of Evil-god more so than they (...)
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