Comments on: Philosophy of Religion 11: Which problem of evil?

By: Mike Almeida

Mike Almeida — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:54:00 +0000

I’m not sure I follow the introductory comments. The message seems to be that there are clumsy ways to read the bible. I agree. But you say at the close,
Is the existence of the God of the Philosophers . . . logically incomptable with (or is it at least rendered probabilistically improbable by) the existence of so much evil in the world? Well, this is familiar territory. How do they cope?
Well, some of it is familiar, and much of it isn’t. Rowe’s last version of the evidential argument–25 yrs. later–is not much like his early versions. It raises lots of new questions, for instance, about the nature of undercutting defeaters that in my view go beyond much of what Pollock said on the issue. It also raises some interesting issues on quaranteening skepticism, as some theists have wanted to do here. So, it is “familiar territory” I suppose only in the sense that all philosophical topics are familiar territory.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:58:00 +0000

The evils we encounter in our world are indeed horrendous. However, I think it's necessary to point out that all suffering lasts for a fixed period. It comes to an end. And no amount of evil has yet rendered good and goodness impossible.

You could use the horrendousness of the evils you see as an index against which to think of the corresponding goodness which God would need to exemplify to be a morally acceptable agent. Jews and Christians believe that God will ultimately overcome all evils: presumably this means that however horrendous the evils we encounter may be, God is equally good (and able to address them in ways unbeknown to us) - and then some.

Obviously that sounds a difficult to believe. But the Judaeo-Christian conviction that God is perfectly good at least offers a way to go.

As for your point about the God of the OT and NT and his morally reprehensible character, this is obviously familiar territory. Suffice to say that Jesus himself was prepared to emphasise certain of God's characteristics as depicted in the Hebrew scriptures. If you're a Christian, it's clear that 'cherrypicking' is part of your tradition. The same goes too for many in Rabbinic Judaism.

What I don't understand is your rather crestfallen dismissal of 'cherrypicking' as not a particularly credible way to go. What kind of Bible would be an ideal one, do you think?

By: Enigman

Enigman — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:50:00 +0000

Re what you aren't going to pursue, that is the important problem of evil, I think, the fact that evil should not be. I'm totally with you and Mill (and Dostoevsky) on that. I was also unimpressed with Christian theodicies, whence I've had to make up my own theodicy (basically, I can't see how the world's evils could be real, and allowed by a worthwhile God, unless we volunteered, to be vulnerable to them, for what seemed like a good reason to us when we were in some epistemically superior position).

Why did I have to make one up? Well, we seem to have evil whatever we think - we can try to avoid it, but even when we achieve nice lives there it is, in others' lives, making a mockery of all our achievements: It is at the best of times that I really want there to be more to life than this, and I need a theodicy for that to be even possible. Sometimes I don't really care (e.g. when I'm suffering I like the idea of annihilation) but still, also at the worst of times:

someone -- perhaps witnessing the prolonged death agony of a close relative -- comes to think "this just makes no sense; if accepting God is accepting this, then I want no more part of it"

What can never make any sense is that the life of a beloved, with all that suffering, amounts to dust eventually. Accepting God can just be accepting that the close relative might remain a living soul, for which as good a God as possible would be a fine thing. It does not have to mean accepting suffering as a good thing, it requires only that it is somehow justified.