J.L. Schellenberg’s Argument from Divine Hiddenness maintains that if a perfectly loving God exists, then there is no non-resistant non-belief. Given that such nonbelief exists, however, it follows that there is no perfectly loving God. To support the conditional claim, Schellenberg presents conceptual and analogical considerations, which we subject to critical scrutiny. We also evaluate Schellenberg’s claim that the belief that God exists is logically necessary for entering into a relationship with the Divine. Finally, we turn to possible variants of (...) Schellenberg’s case, and argue that the modifications necessary to accommodate our criticismas leave those variants with much less of a sting than originally suggested by his provocative formulation. (shrink)

The celebrated free-will defence was designed to show that the ideal-world thesis presents no challenge to theism. The ideal-world thesis states that, in any world in which God exists, He can actualize a world containing moral good and no moral evil. I consider an intriguing two-stage argument that Michael Bergmann advances for the free-will defence, and show that the argument provides atheologians with no reason to abandon the ideal-world thesis. I show next that the existence of worlds in which every (...) essence is transworld untrustworthy provides atheologians with no better reason to abandon the ideal-world thesis. I conclude that neither the free-will defence nor Bergmann's revised free-will defence is a convincing response to the atheological challenge. (Published Online February 17 2004). (shrink)

According to the much-discussed argument from divine hiddenness, God's existence is disconfirmed by the fact that not everyone believes in God. The argument has provoked an impressive range of theistic replies, but none has overcome – or, I suggest, could overcome – the challenge posed by the uneven distribution of theistic belief around the world, a phenomenon for which naturalistic explanations seem more promising. The ‘demographics of theism’ confound any explanation of why non-belief is always blameworthy or of why God (...) allows blameless non-belief. They also cast doubt on the existence of a sensus divinitatis: the awareness of God that Reformed epistemologists claim is innate in all normal human beings. Finally, the demographics make the argument from divine hiddenness in some ways a better atheological argument than the more familiar argument from evil. (Published Online April 7 2006). (shrink)

An argument against the rationality of desiring to go to heaven might be put in the form of a trilemma: (1) any state of being that both lasts eternally and preserves me as the person I am would be hellish and therefore would not be a state of being that I could have any reason to desire; (2) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into a non-person would not be (...) a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire; and (3) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into some other person would not be a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire. This paper offers defenses of each of the three horns of this trilemma and concludes that there is no rationally compelling reason for any human being to desire to go to heaven. (shrink)

What should individuals do when their firmly held moral beliefs are prima facie inconsistent with their religious beliefs? In this article we outline several ways of posing such consistency challenges and offer a detailed taxonomy of the various responses available to someone facing a consistency challenge of this sort. Throughout the paper, our concerns are primarily pedagogical: how best to pose consistency challenges in the classroom, how to stimulate discussion of the various responses to them, and how to relate such (...) consistency challenges to larger issues, such as whether Scripture is, in general, a reliable guide to truth. (shrink)

In this second of two essays responding to critical discussion of my "Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason," I show how an 'accommodationist' strategy can be used to (...) defuse objections that were not exposed as irrelevant by the first essay. This strategy involves showing that the dominant concern of reasons for divine withdrawal can be met or accommodated within the framework of divine-human relationship envisaged by the hiddenness argument. I conclude that critical discussion leaves the argument very much alive and kicking, and indeed strengthened as it moves into its second decade of life. (shrink)

More than a few philosophers have sought to answer the atheistic argument from reasonable non-belief (a.k.a. the argument from divine hiddenness or the hiddenness argument) presented in my 1993 book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. In this first of two essays in response, I focus on objections sharing the defect – sometimes well-hidden – of irrelevance, using their shortcomings to highlight important features of the argument that are commonly overlooked.

In Part 1 of this book, the first full-length treatment of its topic, J. L. Schellenberg argues that when we notice how.

The focus of this paper is the virtual certainty that much of what we must prize in loving any human person would not have existed in a world that did not contain much of the evil that has occurred in the history of the actual world. It is argued that the appropriate response to this fact must be some form of ambivalence, but that lovers have reason to prefer an ambivalence that contextualizes regretted evils in the framework of what we (...) welcome in human life. (shrink)

In this reply I consider David O’Connor’s article “A Variation on the Free Will Defense” in which he tries to show that natural evil is necessary for free will by showing that it is required for the possibility of “morally creditable free choice.” I argue that O’Connor’s reply to an anticipated objection was unsuccessful in showing that humans can be moral without the property he calls “p.” that an altered understanding of what “morally creditable free choice” is would not help. (...) and finally, that if God’s moral condition is fundamentally different than ours, it could not be used as an example of p being inessential for humans being moral. (shrink)

Proponents of The Free Will Defense frequently argue that it is necessary for God to create self-directing beings who possess the capacity for producing evil because, in the words of F.R. Tennant, “moral goodness must be the result of a self-directing developmental process.” But if this is true, David Paulsen has recently argued, then the proponent of the Free Will Defense cannot claim that God has an eternally determinate nature. For if God has an eternally determinatenature and moral goodness must (...) be the result of a developmental process, then God cannot be considered morally good. In response, I argue that (1) many contemporary Free Will theists do not affirm a developmental concept of morality and thus avoid Paulsen’s criticism and that (2) even those who affirm a developmental concept of morality on the human level need not grant that divine morality is also developmental in nature. (shrink)

The existence of evil and suffering in our world seems to pose a serious challenge to belief in the existence of a perfect God. If God were all-knowing, it seems that God would know about all of the horrible things that happen in our world. If God were all-powerful, God would be able to do something about all of the evil and suffering. Furthermore, if God were morally perfect, then surely God would want to do something about it. And yet (...) we find that our world is filled with countless instances of evil and suffering. These facts about evil and suffering seem to conflict with the orthodox theist claim that there exists a perfectly good God. The challenged posed by this apparent conflict has come to be known as the problem of evil. (shrink)

In reply to Michael Bertrand, I clarify my view that the problem of evil is not an a priori problem but an a posteriori one.

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 (...) appeals to value commitments theists themselves are likely to endorse. The ultimate success of this NRLAFE will rest on developing a theological ethics of right relationship that rejects as morally flawed the exercise of omnipotence first to sustain horrors and then to redeem them. Yet a vindicated NRLAFE of this sort need not require atheism, but only rejection of the standard conception of God as a personal omniGod. (shrink)

1. The Down Under Logical Disproof of the Theist's God 1.1 Plantinga's Attempted Refutation of the Logical Disproof 1.2 Plantinga Refuted and God Disproved: A Preview 2. Plantinga's Formal Presentation of his Free Will Defense 3. First Formal Flaw: A Non Sequitur Regarding the Consistency of (3) with (1) 4. Further Flaws Regarding the Joint Conditions of Consistency and Entailment 4.1 A Non Sequitur Regarding the Entailment Condition 4.2 Telling the Full Story in Order to Satisfy the Entailment Condition 4.3 (...) Two Non Sequiturs Involving the Consistency Condition 4.4 The Russell Scenario: A Refutation by Logical Analogy 5. Plantinga's Leibnizian Definition of Omnipotence 5.1 Logical Consequences of the Definition 5.2 Why Leibniz Didn't Lapse 5.3 A Fatal Equivocation Over the Scope of Transworld Depravity 5.4 It Was All "Up to God" 5.5 The Distinction Between Absolute and Consequential Modalities 5.6 Plantinga's Ploy 5.7 Plantinga's Modal Muddle 5.8 Interlude on the Prevalence of the Modal Muddle 5.9 Back to Plantinga's Modal Muddle 5.10 Interim Verdict 6. Judgment Day: God Almighty and All Knowing Not Morally Perfect.. (shrink)

According to the free-will defence, the exercise of free will by creatures is of such value that God is willing to allow the existence of evil which comes from the misuse of free will. A well-known objection holds that the exercise of free will is compatible with determinism and thus, if God exists, God could have predetermined exactly how the will would be exercised; God could even have predetermined that free will would be exercised sinlessly. Thus, it is held, the (...) free-will defence cannot be used as a partial account of why God should have allowed evil to exist. I investigate this objection using Kripke's apparatus for treating modalities and natural kinds to explore the nature of the incompatibilism required by the free-will defence. I show why the objection fails even if the standard arguments for compatibilism are acceptable. This is because the modality involved in the incompatibilism needed by the free-will defence differs from the modality involved in the compatibilism that is supported by standard compatibilist arguments. Finally, an argument is sketched for a variety of incompatibilism of the kind needed by the free-will defence. (shrink)

In a previous issue of Philo, Michael Almeida claimed to have “defeated” William Rowe’s “New Evidential Argument from Evil” againstthe existence of a benevolent god. However, Almeida’s argument suffers from serious logical errors and even logical absurdities, leaving Rowe’s argument intact and quite unthreatened by anything Almeida argues.

I respond to two sets of objections to my characterization of infant suffering and the problem that it presents to traditional theism. My main theses were that infant suffering to death is not ‘horrendous’ in the technical sense defined, and that a good God need only balance off rather than ‘defeat’ such suffering. David Basinger, on the other hand, claims that some infant suffering should be considered horrendous, while Nathan Nobis suggests that such suffering must be defeated by God rather (...) than merely balanced off. -/- . (shrink)

The problem of infant suffering and death is one of the most difficult versions of the problem of evil, especially when one considers how God can be thought good to the infant victims by the infant victims. In the first portion of this paper, I examine two theodicies that aim to solve this problem but (I argue) fail. In the final section, I suggest that the problem is better handled by maintaining not that God must redeem the suffering of such (...) children, but that such children are not the sort of beings whose suffering a good God can or should redeem. (shrink)

The argument from evil, though it is the most effective rhetorical argument against orthodox theism, fails to demonstrate its conclusion, since we are unavoidably ignorant whether there is more evil than could possibly be justified. That same ignorance infects any claims to discern a divine purpose in nature, as well as recent attempts at a broadly Irenaean theodicy. Evolution is not, on neo-Darwinian theory, intellectually, morally, or spiritually progressive in the way that some religious thinkers have supposed. To suppose so, (...) indeed, is to misidentify the evils we should fear. But though we should neither conceal the evils of the world nor offer any consequentialist justification of them, we may still reasonably maintain an orthodox theism. Evil is not created so that otherwise unattainable goods may come, but is an unavoidable byproduct of creation which it is – or may be – God's purpose to redeem. (Published Online April 21 2004). (shrink)

I start from Mill's words about Mansel and the problem of evil. In this dispute Mansel has generally been thought to have come off worst. However, Mansel was clearly right to this extent: that what would make a man a good man would not be the same as what made God good. This is because, quite generally, what makes something good of its kind, where we can talk about goodness at all, varies with the kind. With Aristotle we must say: (...) the criteria are fixed by the thing's ergon, or at least by something analogous. On this account, it would seem that God must be perfect, since as an intelligent agent He does supremely well what is in the nature of an intelligent agent to do. This seems to lead to the right solution to the problem of evil. But Mill also had something useful to contribute. He saw that there would be a consequent difficulty in regard to revelation. This difficulty seems to be severe and insufficiently discussed. (shrink)

Virtually all monotheistic religions profess that there is a divine being who is extremely powerful, knowledgeable, and good. The evils of this world present various challenges for such religions. The starkest challenge is directed toward views that posit a being whose power, knowledge, and goodness are not just immense, but are as great as can be: an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being (for short, an oopg being). For it would seem that such a being would have the power, the (...) knowledge, and the moral disposition to prevent any evil whatsoever, and from this one might readily conclude that if there were such a being, there would be no evil at all. On one version of this challenge, the coexistence of evil with a God defined in this way is claimed to be logically impossible. This has come to be called the logical problem of evil. Another is that the existence of such a God is improbable given the evils of this world, or at least that the existence of these evils significantly lowers the probability that such an oopg God exists. The concern expressed is that these evils provide good evidence against the existence of such a God. This version is known as the evidential problem of evil. (shrink)

Plantinga construes the “atheologian” as claiming that “the conjunction of these two propositions is necessarily false, false in every possible world,” while Plantinga “aims to show that there is a possible world in which (1) and (2) are both true.”.

This is a book primarily for students on the problem of gratuitous evil. It assumes no philosophical background but examines the problem thoroughly. It introduces the problem, presents the five main theistic responses to the problem, offers evaluations of those responses, and makes some tentative conclusions.

Leibniz's best-of-all-possible worlds solution to the problem of evil isdefended. Enlightenment misrepresentations are removed. The apparentobviousness of the possibility of better worlds is undermined by the muchbetter understanding achieved in modern mathematical sciences of howglobal structure constrains local possibilities. It is argued that alternativeviews, especially standard materialism, fail to make sense of the problem ofevil, by implying that evil does not matter, absolutely speaking. Finally, itis shown how ordinary religious thinking incorporates the essentials ofLeibniz's view.

• It would be a moral disgrace for God (if he existed) to allow the many evils in the world, in the same way it would be for a parent to allow a nursery to be infested with criminals who abused the children. • There is a contradiction in asserting all three of the propositions: God is perfectly good; God is perfectly powerful; evil exists (since if God wanted to remove the evils and could, he would). • The religious believer (...) has no hope of getting away with excuses that evil is not as bad as it seems, or that it is all a result of free will, and so on. Piper avoids mentioning the best solution so far put forward to the problem of evil. It is Leibniz’s theory that God does not create a better world because there isn’t one — that is, that (contrary to appearances) if one part of the world were improved, the ramifications would result in it being worse elsewhere, and worse overall. It is a “bump in the carpet” theory: push evil down here, and it pops up over there. Leibniz put it by saying this is the “Best of All Possible Worlds”. That phrase was a public relations disaster for his theory, suggesting as it does that everything is perfectly fine as it is. He does not mean that, but only that designing worlds is a lot harder than it looks, and determining the amount of evil in the best one is no easy matter. Though humour is hardly appropriate to the subject matter, the point of Leibniz’s idea is contained in the old joke, “An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and a pessimist thinks.. (shrink)

The unfolding of the task -- Freedom, pantheism, and idealism -- The account of the possibility of evil -- The account of the actuality of freedom -- The description of the manifestation of evil in man -- God as moral beingthe nature of the whole with respect to freedom -- Indifference and the birth of love.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra expresses a revolt against the quest for “afterworlds.” Nietzsche is seen transferring rationality to the body, welcoming the many in a kingdom of the un-unified multiple, with a burst of enthusiasm at the figure of recurrence. At first, he values an acceptation of suffering through reconciliation with time, and puts the onus on the divine to refute the dismembering of the oneness of meaning and unity of the soul’s quest for joy in eternity. Then confronting Christianity, he (...) sees its refusal to sacrifice anyone, at the cost of making all sick with a unique healer, and rejects it as incompatible with his ideal of plenitude. In the absence of an ontology of the person, the affirmation of the individual and his value, opposed to the antagonistic affirmation of the many put in front of the one God and destroyed by him, ends up dislocating the reality of the self. The Nietzschean option resisted any leveling down—this is its merit—yet the mystery of the Trinity needs to be brought into the reflection to respect Nietzsche’s own terms in defining the final problem which is also the one option: Dionysus or the Crucified? (shrink)

It is my purpose to explore some of the problems concerning the relation between divine creation and creaturely freedom by criticizing various versions of the Free Will Defense (FWD hereafter).1 The FWD attempts to show how it is possible for God and moral evil to co-exist by describing a possible world in which God is morally justified or exonerated for creating persons who freely go wrong. Each version of the FWD has its own story to tell of how it is (...) possible that God be frustrated in his endeavor to create a universe containing moral good sans moral evil. The value of free will is supposed to be so great that God is morally exonerated under such circumstances for creating the Mr. Rogers type persons you know, the very same people who are good sometimes are bad sometimes. If it is objected that God could not be unlucky in this manner, that it necessarily is within his power to create goody-goody persons, either by supernaturally willing in his own inimitable manner that it be so, which is the theological compatibilist objection, or by a judicious selection of the initial state of the universe and operant causal laws which together entail that every free action be morally right, which is the causal compatibilist objection, the response is that it is logically incompatible that a creaturely free action be determined by God or by anything external to the agent, such as causes outside of the agent. (shrink)

Augustine’s first conversion is to the Christian Platonism of his day, which brought along with it a free-will defence to the problem of evil. Formative as this philosophical influence was, however, Augustine’s own experience of sin combines with his sense of God’s sovereignty to lead him to modify the views he inherited in significant ways. This transformation is demonstrated by setting Augustine’s evolving position against that of Gregory of Nyssa.

‘Hello, this is the Women’s Center, may I help you?’ ‘Yeah, uh, hi. I don’t really know if I should be calling you, but a friend of mine told me to call. She thought it was a good idea.’ ‘Sure. Let me ask before we go on – are you in a safe place to talk? Are you in any immediate danger?’ ‘I think I can talk. I dunno, I guess I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t think he’s here (...) right now, but he’s always keeping an eye on me. I never really know if he’s watching or not. I don’t think I’m in immediate danger.’. (shrink)

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 (...) to the problem of God. Phillips goes on to provide an alternative response to the problem of evil, expounded by means of his Wittgensteinian analyses of various concepts drawn from the Christian tradition. I argue that his criticisms of the traditional conception of God either fail outright or are at best inconclusive. I also point out that the religious concepts analyzed by Phillips are not and cannot be the same concepts as those employed in the Christian tradition from which they are supposedly drawn. For the concepts as traditionally employed presuppose the actual existence and activity of precisely the sort of being that, according to Phillips, “God cannot be.”. (shrink)

David Ciocchi has charged that ‘open’ or free-will theism is religiously inadequate. This is it is because it is unable to affirm the ‘presumption of divine intervention in response to petitionary prayer’ (PDI), a presumption Ciocchi claims is implicit in the religious practice of ordinary Christian believers. I argue that PDI and Ciocchi's other assumptions concerning prayer are too strong, and would upon reflection be rejected by most believers. On the other hand, God as conceived by free-will theism has extensive (...) resources for answering petitionary prayers, including prayers whose fulfilment depends on the free responses of other persons. (shrink)

the difference, within the field of physically undetermined events, between the random and the non-random is the presence or absence of a prior mental event ...

Suppose God and evil are incompatible; then, since there clearly is evil, we have enormously strong evidence for atheism. Very few philosophers today who study our topic would endorse this argument, however. Why? Because it seems that God and evil are, strictly speaking, compatible. We can think of various reasons God might have to permit a fair bit of evil; and to the extent that we cannot think of any reason for God to permit so much, we have no good (...) grounds to think that there could not be a justifying reason we do not know of. (shrink)

Not long ago, an issue of my local paper reminded its readers of Susan Smith, the Carolinan mother who rolled her Mazda into a lake, drowning her two little sons strapped inside. It also reported the abduction and gang rape of an eleven-year old girl by eight teenage members of Angelitos Sur 13, and the indictment of the "Frito Man" on 68 counts of sexual abuse, a fortyfive year old man who handed out corn chips to neighborhood children in order (...) to lure them to a secluded location. More recently, the headlines announced the untimely death of Ashley Jones, a twelve-year old girl from nearby Stanwood, Washington—she was raped and bludgeoned to death while babysitting her neighbor's kids. These are particularly disgusting, appalling cases of evil, all the more so because children are the victims. One might think that such cases occur only very rarely. I wish that were so. ABC News recently reported that in the United States a child dies from abuse by a parent or guardian every six hours. One is left with the disturbing thought: if that is how frequently a child dies from abuse in the US, how frequently are children merely abused? A sinister side-effect of familial abuse is that abused children are much more likely to abuse their own children; and so the attitudes and habits of abuse pass from generation to generation, a cycle of evil and suffering from which it can be enormously difficult to extricate oneself. Frequently, a child's suffering is unintentionally caused by those who love them most. Alvin Plantinga recalls a story about.. (shrink)

Not long ago, an issue of my local paper reminded its readers of Susan Smith, the Carolinan mother who rolled her Mazda into a lake, drowning her two little sons strapped inside. It also reported the abduction and gang rape of an eleven-year old girl by eight teenage members of Angelitos Sur 13, and the indictment of the "Frito Man" on 68 counts of sexual abuse, a fortyfive year old man who handed out corn chips to neighborhood children in order (...) to lure them to a secluded location. More recently, the headlines announced the untimely death of Ashley Jones, a twelve-year old girl from nearby Stanwood, Washington--she was raped and bludgeoned to death while babysitting her neighbor's kids. (shrink)

It used to be widely held by philosophers that God and evil are incompatible.1 Not any longer. Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense is largely responsible for this shift. Indeed, Robert Adams avers that "it is fair to say that Plantinga has solved this problem. That is, he has argued convincingly for the consistency of [God and evil]."2 And William Alston writes that "Plantinga...has established the possibility that God could not actualize a world containing free creatures that always do the right (...) thing."3 You might expect praise like this from Christian philosophers. You might not expect it from William Rowe, one of the foremost atheistic philosophers of our day, but this is precisely what we find. Rowe writes. (shrink)

Following Hume’s lead, Paul Draper argues that, given the biological role played by both pain and pleasure in goal-directed organic systems, the observed facts about pain and pleasure in the world are antecedently much more likely on the Hypothesis of Indifference than on theism. I examine one by one Draper’s arguments for this claim and show how they miss the mark.

Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brummer recently wrote: In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even more vulnerable (...) than we do, since he cannot count on the steadfastness of our love the way we can count on his steadfastness.... If God did not grant us the ability to sin and cause affliction to him and to one another, we would not have the kind of free and autonomous existence necessary to enter into a relation of love with God and with one another.... Far from contradicting the value which the free will defence places upon the freedom and responsibility of human persons, the idea of a loving God necessarily entails it. In this way we can see that the free will defence is based on the love of God rather than on the supposed intrinsic value of human freedom and responsibility.1 And Peter van Inwagen recently put the same point this way. (shrink)

Peter Hare and Edward Madden's collaborative book Evil and the Concept of God (968) has become a staple in literature about the problem of evil and remains frequently cited by supporters and critics alike. The major concepts of the work arose out of earlier papers in which they first began to formulate their arguments about the problem of evil. Their article "Evil and Unlimited Power" embodies many of their arguments against quasi-theist attempts to resolve the problem of evil.1 Assembled from (...) these and other papers, their compendium frames a thorough synthesis of the long history of debate regarding the problem of evil, and contributes their own exhaustive, point-by-point attack on modern defenders of three main .. (shrink)

I defend the first premise of William Rowe’s well-known arguments from evil against influential criticisms due to William Alston. I next suggest that the central inference in Rowe’s arguments is best understood to move from the claim that we have an absence of evidence of a satisfactory theodicy to the claim that we have evidence of absence of such a theodicy. I endorse the view which holds that this move succeeds only if it is reasonable to believe that (roughly) if (...) there were such a theodicy, we would probably know it. After conceding that there may be modest prima facie support for this latter claim via the Principle of Credulity, I consider and reject four more ambitious arguments in its favour. I conclude that this necessary condition on Rowe’s crucial inference has not been shown to be satisfied. (shrink)

William Rowe’s a posteriori arguments for the non-existence of God are well-known. Rather less attention has been given, however, to Rowe’s intriguing a priori argument for atheism. In this paper, I examine the three published responses to Rowe’s a priori argument (due to Bruce Langtry, William Morris, and Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, respectively). I conclude that none is decisive, but I show that Rowe’s argument nevertheless requires more defence than he provides.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Spring, 1980, 123-32.

The main conclusion of the paper is that the prospects for a successful Free Will Defence employing Alvin Plantinga’s basic strategy are poor.

The evidential argument for atheism from evil may be appealing because it seems both less naïve and more enlightened than theism. However, implicit in the argument that the world contains so much evil that it could not have been created by God is the tacitnihilistic proposition that the world is so bad that it would be better that it not exist at all. Besides entailing an unattractive rejection of the worth of the existence of the world, atheism motivated by the (...) argument from evil is also embroiled in moral inconsistencies that make it difficult or impossible for the atheologian to live and act in the world with moral consistency and seriousness. (shrink)

Christianity teaches that whenever evil is done, God had ample warning. He could have prevented it, but He didn't. He could have stopped it midway, but He didn't. He could have rescued the victims of the evil, but - at least in many cases - He didn't. In short, God is an accessory before, during, and after the fact to countless evil deeds, great and small. An explanation is not far to seek. The obvious hypothesis is that the Christian God (...) is really some sort of devil. Maybe He is a devil as popularly conceived, driven' by malice. Or maybe He is unintelligibly capricious. Or maybe He is a fanatical artist who cares only for the aesthetic quality of creation - perhaps the abstract beauty of getting rich variety to emerge from a few simple laws, or perhaps the concrete drama of human life with all its diversity - and cares nothing for the good of the creatures whose lives are woven into His masterpiece. Oust as a tragedian has no business providing a happy end out of compassion for his characters.) But no; for Christianity also teaches that God is morally perfect and perfectly benevolent, and that He loves all of His creatures; and that these things are true in a sense not a million miles from the sense in which we attribute morality, benevolence, or love to one another. (shrink)

In this volume, eighteen of the world's leading scholars present original essays on various aspects of atheism: its history, both ancient and modern, defense ...

In this paper, I consider various arguments to the effect that natural evils are necessary for there to be created agents with free will of the sort that the traditional free-will defence for the problem of moral evil suggests we enjoy – arguments based on the idea that evil-doing requires the doer to use natural means in their agency. I conclude that, despite prima facie plausibility, these arguments do not, in fact, work. I provide my own argument for there being (...) no possible world in which creatures enjoying this sort of freedom exist yet suffer no natural evil, and conclude that the way is thus open for extending the free-will defence to the problem of natural evil. (Published Online February 17 2004). (shrink)

Once it is appreciated that it is not possible for an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God to exist, the important question arises: What does exist that is closest to, and captures the best of what is in, the traditional conception of God? In this paper I set out to answer that question. The first step that needs to be taken is to sever the God-of-cosmic-power from the God-of-cosmic-value. The first is Einstein’s God, the underlying dynamic unity in the physical universe which (...) physics seeks to depict by means of a true, unified, physical “theory of everything”. Science has already achieved some theoretical knowledge of this God-of-cosmic-power. The second is what is of most value in our human world, and in the world of sentient life more generally. Having cut God in half in this way, our fundamental problem, intellectual and practical, becomes: How can the God-of-cosmic-value (as it is represented on earth at least) exist and best flourish within the God-of-cosmic-power? Or, in other words: How can what is of value associated with human life – and sentient life more generally – exist and best flourish within the physical universe? Clearly acknowledging that this is our fundamental problem, in academic inquiry, and in all that we do, might help what is of value in life to flourish rather better than it does at present. (shrink)

In order to solve the problem of the monstrous acts that an all-powerful, all-knowing God would daily be performing, we need to sever the God of Power from the God of Value. The former is the underlying dynamic unity in the physical universe, eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful, but an It, and thus not capable of knowing what It does. It can be forgiven the terrible things It does. The latter is what is of most value associated with our human world - (...) or the world of sentient life more generally. Having performed this surgical operation on God, the problem then becomes: How can we put the two halves of God together again? How can our human world, imbued with experiential qualities, consciousness, free will meaning and value, exist and best flourish, embedded as it is in the physical universe? This is our fundamental problem - philosophical, intellectual and practical. It is our fundamental religious problem. (shrink)

Tim Mawson argues that the ability to choose what one knows to be morally wrong is a power for some persons in some circumstances, but that it would be a mere liability for God. The lynchpin of Mawson's argument is his claim that a power is an ability that it is good to have. In this rejoinder, I challenge this claim of Mawson's, arguing that choosing a course of action is always an exercise of power, whether or (...) not it is good for one to have that power. I then go on to develop an argument for saying that if (for the reasons presented by Mawson) it is not good for God to have the ability to make evil choices, then it isn't good for us to have it either, in which case the free-will defence is unsustainable. (shrink)

This volume is required reading for those seeking a compelling defense of the Christian faith.

Philosophical naturalism is a cluster of views and impulses typically taken to include atheism, physicalism, radical empiricism or naturalized epistemology, and some sort of relativism, subjectivism or nihilism about morality. I argue that a problem arises when the naturalist offers the argument from evil for atheism. Since the argument from evil is a moral argument, it cannot be effectively deployed by anyone who holds the denatured ethical theories that the naturalist typically holds. In the context of these naturalistic ethical theories, (...) the argument from evil typically fails to provide good reason for either the naturalist or the theist to disbelieve in the God of theism. This does not prove that naturalism is false, or that the argument from evil is unsound, but rather that certain naturalists’ use of the argument has been misguided. (shrink)

A proposition that theism has traditionally tried to establish, as part of its general effort to reconcile the existence of God and that of evil in the (supposedly God-made) world, is the following; that natural evil is logically a precondition of freedom of choice. Often the approach to this task has been through the free will defense. In my paper I argue that the standard formulation of that defense will not succeed in the specific task mentioned, and propose a variation (...) upon the standard formulation. Then I try to defend the variation against some powerful objections. (shrink)