Abstract
In his recent paper in Sophia, ‘Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?’ Nick Trakakis endorses the position that theodicy, whether intellectually successful or not, is a morally obnoxious enterprise. My aim in this paper is to defend theodicy from this accusation. I concede that God the Creator is a moral monster by human standards and neither to be likened to a loving parent nor imitated. Nonetheless, God is morally perfect. What is abhorrent is not tough-minded theodicy but the hubris of imitating God. I further claim that it is no accident that the same sort of objection is made to act utilitarianism as to tough-minded theodicy if the latter is misinterpreted as implying a guide for human action.
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Notes
By the experience of X I do not mean, ‘grasping the essence of’ X, but being aware of X (‘intuiting X’ in Kant’s sense) as X appears to us. So there is a sense in which neither the theoretical belief about God nor the experience of God is adequate to its object.
I am indebted to Tony Lynch for a discussion of the difference between pity and compassion. It is not absurd to have compassion for a God who suffers. To pity is to treat the object of pity as in some way inferior. So Christians might have compassion for Christ crucified but not pity.
I do not pretend that my list is complete. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on ‘Consequentialism’ for a discussion of such incommensurability.
Here I am assuming it is coherent to maximize expected utility. I am grateful to Arcady Blinov for reminding me that this assumption is controversial.
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I am indebted to Tony Lynch and to Nick Trakakis for persuading me to take anti-theodicy seriously, and to those who participated in the discussion when I read a version of this paper to the APRA Conference in Sydney, July 2008.
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Forrest, P. Why Richard Swinburne Won’t ‘Rot in Hell’: A Defense of Tough-minded Theodicy. SOPHIA 49, 37–47 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0157-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0157-9