The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil (eBook)

Justin P. McBrayer, Daniel Howard-Snyder (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2014
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-118-60797-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil presents a collection of original essays providing both overview and insight, clarifying and evaluating the philosophical and theological 'problem of evil' in its various contexts and manifestations.

• Features all original essays that explore the various forms of the problems of evil, offering theistic responses that attempt to explain evil as well as discussion of the challenges facing such explanations
• Includes section introductions with a historical essay that traces the developments of the issues explored
• Acknowledges the fact that there are many problems of evil, some of which apply only to those who believe in concepts such as hell and some of which apply to non-theists
• Represents  views from the various religious traditions, including Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim

Justin P. McBrayer is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fort Lewis College, Colorado. He has authored numerous papers in philosophy of religion and ethics, including 'CORNEA and Inductive Skepticism' (2009), 'Skeptical Theism' (2010), 'A Limited Defense of Moral Perception' (2010), 'Skepticism about the Argument from Divine Hiddenness' (2011), and 'Christianity, Homosexual Sex, and Sexism' (2012).

Daniel Howard-Snyder is Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University. He is co-author of The Power of Logic (2013, 5th Ed.), and editor or co-editor of various publications including The Evidential Argument from Evil (1996), Faith, Freedom, and Rationality (1996), and Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (2002).

Inhalt

Notes on contributors ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiv

Part I Problems of Evil 1

1 A brief history of problems of evil 3

Michael W. Hickson

2 The logical problem of evil: mackie and plantinga 19

Daniel Howard-Snyder

3 A new logical problem of evil 34

J.L. Schellenberg

4 Rowe's evidential arguments from evil 49

Graham Oppy

5 Explanation and the problem of evil 67

Paul Draper and Trent Dougherty

6 A carnapian argument from evil 83

Richard Otte

7 The experience of evil and support for atheism 98

Jerome Gellman

8 The problem of animal pain and suffering 113

Robert Francescotti

9 Hell and the problem of evil 128

Andrei A. Buckareff and Allen Plug

10 The problem of apparently morally abhorrent divine commands
144

Wesley Morriston

11 God because of evil: An ad hominem argument from evil
for belief in God 160

Marilyn McCord Adams

Part II Theodicies 175

12 A brief history of theodicy 177

René van Woudenberg

13 Counterpart and appreciation theodicies 192

Justin P. McBrayer

14 Free will and soul-making theodicies 205

Daniel Speak

15 The connection-building theodicy 222

Robin Collins

16 Best possible world theodicy 236

Hud Hudson

17 Providence and theodicy 251

Thomas P. Flint

18 A christian theodicy 266

Laura W. Ekstrom

19 Toward an Indian theodicy 281

Purushottama Bilimoria

20 Earth's epistemic fruits for harmony with God: an
Islamic theodicy 296

Mohammad Ali Mobini

21 On constructing a Jewish theodicy 309

David Shatz

22 Feminism and the problem of evil 326

Beverley Clack

23 Process theism and theodicies for problems of evil 340

James A. Keller

24 Theodicy in a vale of tears 349

Evan Fales

25 Antitheodicy 363

N.N. Trakakis

Part III Skeptical Responses 377

26 A brief history of skeptical responses to evil 379

T.M. Rudavsky

27 Peter van Inwagen's defense 396

Meghan Sullivan

28 A defense without free will 411

Derk Pereboom

29 Skeptical theism, CORNEA, and common sense epistemology
426

Thomas D. Senor

30 The moral skepticism objection to skeptical theism 444

Stephen Maitzen

31 The global skepticism objection to skeptical theism 458

Ian Wilks

32 Theistic objections to skeptical theism 468

David O'Connor

33 Skeptical theism and the "too much skepticism"
objection 482

Michael C. Rea

Index 507

Rezensionen

"This volume is an outstanding and comprehensive
collection of essays of high quality on aspects of one of the
greatest problems in intellectual history: The Problem of
Evil. The editors have covered the usual territory well, and
they have also included essays that broaden the scope of the book
considerably. Highly recommended."

--John Martin Fischer, University of California,
Riverside

"An impressive list of contributors, writing from a variety of
perspectives. The volume nicely summarizes the history of the field
and advances the discussion with some superb, groundbreaking
work."

--Thomas M. Crisp, Biola University

"The editors, Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder,
are to be congratulated on this stimulating, balanced and
comprehensive collection. It is a first-rate resource both for
students and for researchers."

--Peter Forrest, University of New England

"This splendid collection of essays both represents important
recent developments and breaks new ground. Theologians as well as
philosophers will appreciate this resource for what it is: the best
one available."

--Thomas H. McCall, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Textauszug

1

A Brief History of Problems of Evil

Michael W. Hickson

Introduction

If we understand “evil” broadly, as most contemporary philosophers do, to mean “all bad things” – for example, physical and mental suffering, intentional wrongdoing, error, and poverty – then it goes without saying that every Western philosopher and religious thinker has found evil problematic and has attempted, at least partially, to explain its origin and the means of overcoming or escaping it. To give an exhaustive survey of problems of evil in the West, therefore, would amount to writing a fairly complete history of 2500 years of philosophy and religion.

In what follows, therefore, I do not attempt to offer such a complete history, but rather to present several important moments of it in an attempt to track the emergence of what philosophers today call “the problem of evil.” In contemporary parlance, “the problem of evil,” despite the definite article, denotes a family of challenges to belief in a God who is supremely benevolent and powerful (van Inwagen 2006, 4–10): how can belief in such a God be justified given the vast extent and often horrendous nature of the suffering and moral depravity of human beings?

This family of problems, depending on logical presentation and authorial intent, can be considered either aporetically or atheologically (Adams and Adams 1990, 2–3). In the former case, the problems are presented as challenging human reason to think more deeply about the nature of God and his causal relation to the world (see Chapters 9 and 10). In the latter case, the problems are presented such that evil is explicitly offered as strong evidence against the very existence of God (see Chapters 4 and 5). Such atheological arguments, which are the primary focus of contemporary philosophers, have lately been referred to as “arguments from evil” in order to distinguish them from broader problems of evil that do not explicitly threaten belief in God's existence (Howard-Snyder 1996, xi–xvi). The goal of this chapter is to trace the historical origin of arguments from evil. The question I wish to answer is this: has the existence of evil always been treated by philosophers as a challenge to God's existence, or is this a more recent trend in thinking about evil?

Since authorial intent is very difficult to determine with any confidence, I focus on the presentation of the problems of evil that have been treated over the centuries, and ask whether the authors in question link evil to the denial of God's existence. The problems of evil that must be considered are those in which evil is used as the basis of an objection to an account of the origin of the universe according to which some God is the principal cause. In considering such problems, I return to the same question: is evil being used to discredit belief in the existence of God, or is evil being opposed to some other element of the causal theory?

Another Footnote to Plato

Western philosophical reflection on the problem of evil is, not surprisingly, another footnote to Plato (429–347 BC). But a footnote to which dialogue or dialogues? A single passage in the Republic has been identified as “the first distinct statement in Greek literature of the problem of evil” (Chase Greene 1944, 298): “since a god is good, he is not – as most people claim – the cause of everything that happens to human beings but of only a few things, for good things are fewer than bad ones in our lives. He alone is responsible for the good things, but we must find some other cause for the bad ones, not a god” (Plato [1018] 1997; 379c).

The problem of evil is certainly lurking in the background of this passage, where the concern is to avoid charging the gods with any involvement in evil. However, this text does not yet explicitly state or engage any problem of evil; rather, the text sets up an elegant evasion of all such problems, an evasion that will be elaborated in the sequel to the Republic, the dramatic cosmological story of the Timaeus. In both dialogues, Plato advances a dualistic account of the origin of the universe. There is not a single, supremely powerful, and perfectly good original cause that is responsible for all that exists, and that must therefore be justified in the face of so much evil in the world; instead, Plato conveniently places all the blame for evil on a second eternal cause, which can be “persuaded” by the power of the good cause only to a limited extent.

In the Timaeus, the two original causes of the universe are named “Mind” and “Necessity.” Mind acts on Necessity (by which Plato means the eternal disorderly motion of an unformed mass) “persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best” (Plato [1250] 1997; 48a). The Demiurge, the anthropomorphic representation of Mind in the dialogue, first created because “He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible” (Plato [1236] 1997; 29e). In so far as the universe was created by the Demiurge, therefore, it is “as excellent and supreme as its nature would allow” (Plato [1236] 1997; 30b). But the Demiurge, though powerful, is not omnipotent, so disease1 and vice, both of which arise from the eternal and corruptive disorderly motion of matter, still exist. Even moral evil is blamed in Plato's Timaeus on Necessity: “[J]ust about every type of succumbing to pleasure is talked about as something reproachable, as though the evils are willfully done. But it is not right to reproach people for them, for no one is willfully evil. A man becomes evil, rather, as a result of one or another corrupt condition of his body and an uneducated upbringing” (Plato [1286] 1997; 86d–e).

Evil is not presented in the Timaeus as a possible threat to belief in the Demiurge. Nor is the Demiurge's goodness or activity in the world ever doubted on the basis of evil: “the existence of evil is not of the Demiurge's choosing; it exists in spite of the best demiurgic actions” (Mohr 1978, 575). Plato's Timaeus is certainly not, therefore, the first text to raise an argument from evil.

There are at least two separate statements of problems of evil, however, in the later Laws, in the theological 10th book of that dialogue. The origin and extent of evil becomes undeniably problematic for Plato in this work because his earlier dualism is largely set aside in this new account of the governance of the universe, summarized in this passage: “A soul or souls – and perfectly virtuous souls at that – have been shown to be the cause of all [celestial] phenomena, and whether it is by their living presence in matter that they direct all the heavens, or by some other means, we shall insist that these souls are gods” (Plato [1556] 1997; 899b). Whereas in the Timaeus, disorderly matter was coeternal with and independent of the benevolent Demiurge, in Laws X “soul is prior to matter, and … matter came later and takes second place. Soul is the master, and matter its natural subject” (Plato [1553] 1997; 896c).

The dualistic dissolution of the problem of evil still tempts Plato in Laws X, however, where an evil World Soul is posited in addition to the good World Soul: “[Is there] one soul, or more than one? I'll answer for you both: more than one. At any rate, we must not assume fewer than two: that which does good, and that which has the opposite capacity” (Plato [1553] 1997; 896e). This dualism is not exploited by Plato, however, for he believes the whole rational order of the universe points to the predominant activity of the good World Souls, who are described as “supremely good” gods who “know and see and hear everything”; who “can do anything which is within the power of mortals and immortals”; who are “supremely wise, and willing and able to superintend the world”; and who, like a good physician, look after the whole body, but also after every minor detail of it in order to keep it healthy (Plato [1558–1560] 1997; 901d–903a). Goodness is effectively unlimited and omnipotent in Laws X.

Given the supremacy of the virtuous gods in Laws X, it is unsurprising that Plato was forced to raise explicit problems of evil against this causal theory. The first he puts into the mouths of people who believe that the gods exist, but who claim that they take no notice of human affairs. In other words, the presence of evil is used as a reason to deny divine Providence. The particular evils that drive people to such “impiety” are “the good fortune of scoundrels and criminals in private and public life” and “the many ghastly acts of impiety which … are the very means by which some of these people have risen from humble beginnings to supreme power and dictatorship” (Plato [1556–1557] 1997; 899d–900a). When the problem of evil first explicitly enters Western thought, therefore, it has anti-Providential, not fully atheistic, force.

The second problem of evil in the Laws likewise challenges...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.1.2014
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
• Schlagworte: apparent existence • arise • Blackwell • Central • Collection • Companion • contain • contributed • Deal • Essays • Evil • evilsome • follows • God • Good • Great • much evil • Original • perfectly • Philosophie • Philosophy • Philosophy of Religion • Powerful • Problem • Problems • Range • Religionsphilosophie • scholars • wide • World
• ISBN-10: 1-118-60797-X / 111860797X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-60797-8 / 9781118607978