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Against Theodicy: A Response to Peter Forrest

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In responding to Peter Forrest’s defence of ‘tough-minded theodicy’, I point to some problematic features of theodicies of this sort, in particular their commitment to an anthropomorphic conception of God which tends to assimilate the Creator to the creaturely and so diminishes the otherness and mystery of God. This remains the case, I argue, even granted Forrest’s view that God may have a very different kind of morality from the one we mortals are subject to.

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Notes

  1. In-text pages references are to Peter Forrest, “Why Richard Swinburne Won’t ‘Rot in Hell’: A Defense of Tough-minded Theodicy,” Sophia 49(2010): 37-47.

  2. Andrew Gleeson, A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil (unpublished ms), ch. 1.

  3. David Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 220

  4. Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Nature of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 3.

  5. Phillips, Religion Without Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p.148. Cf. Phillips, ‘Religious Beliefs and Language-Games,’ in his Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 85.

  6. Phillips, ‘Faith, Scepticism, and Religious Understanding,’ in his Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 17–18. By ‘facts’ in this context Phillips has in mind what Hume called matters of empirical fact and existence

  7. Williams, ‘“Religious Realism”: On Not Quite Agreeing with Don Cupitt’, in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), pp. 242–43.

  8. Williams, ‘Redeeming Sorrows,’ in D.Z. Phillips (ed.), Religion and Morality (London: Macmillan, 1996), p.143.

  9. Brian Davies, ‘Letter from America’, New Blackfriars 84 (2003): 376.

  10. Davies, ‘Letter from America’, p.376. In an earlier article, Davies points to another consideration in Aquinas in support of this view: ‘Members of a class can only be understood by us as so many individuals because we can distinguish between them. Yet we cannot, so Aquinas thinks, distinguish between individuals in a class members of which are not material. Yet God, so he thinks, must be non-material—for God accounts for there being anything material and cannot, therefore, be something material.’ (‘The Mystery of God: Aquinas and McCabe,’ New Blackfriars 77 (1996): 341).

  11. Davies, ‘The Problem of Evil,’ in Davies (ed.), Philosophy of Religion: A Guide to the Subject (London: Cassell, 1998), p.181. Davies is fond of quoting Aquinas’ comment that ‘God is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms’ (Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On Interpretation’ I, XIV, 22), though this view is by no means unique to Aquinas within the Christian patristic and medieval tradition.

  12. Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 6.

  13. See 1 Samuel 5:11; Psalms 8:6; Isaiah 52:10; 2 Kings 19:16; Numbers 11:1; Genesis 32:30.

  14. See Psalms 2:4, 37:13; Genesis 8:21; Isaiah 7:18.

  15. See Deuteronomy 16:22; Isaiah 61:8; Exodus 22:24; Deuteronomy 32:35, 30:9; Isaiah 62:5; Genesis 6:6.

  16. Augustine, Sermon 52, 16; PL 38: 360. The full passage reads: ‘So what are we to say, brothers, about God? For if you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God. If you think you have been able to comprehend, your thoughts have deceived you.’ Translation by Edmund Hill, in Augustine, Sermons III (51–94) on the New Testament, ed. John E. Rotelle (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), p. 57.

  17. As Denys Turner points out, ‘Philosophers seem happy enough to say, after Aristotle, that philosophy begins in wonder. Alas, all too often their philosophy ends in its elimination’ (‘How To Be An Atheist,’ New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 332), and similar remarks can be made about contemporary philosophers of religion.

  18. Turner, ‘On Denying the Right God: Aquinas on Atheism and Idolatry,’ in Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt (eds), Aquinas in Dialogue: Thomas for the Twenty-First Century (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 142. The David Burrell reference is to Burrell’s ‘On Distinguishing God from the World,’ in Brian Davies (ed.), Language, Meaning and God: Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe OP (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), p. 77.

  19. Turner, ‘On Denying the Right God,’ p. 143, emphasis in the original.

  20. Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters ed. Brian Davies (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 3.

  21. Turner, ‘On Denying the Right God,’ p. 144, emphasis in the original. The Pseudo-Dionysius quote is from Divine Names 817D.

  22. Turner, ‘On Denying the Right God,’ p. 145.

  23. Michael Leunig, ‘Looking for Loki in all the wrong places’, The Age (Melbourne newspaper), A2 section, 9 June 2007, p. 16.

  24. Leunig, ‘Looking for Loki in all the wrong places’.

  25. I am here quoting from Leunig’s comment that, ‘The best cartoons are…philosophical and poetic by nature, rather than slick and expert; they are sublimely ambiguous, disorderly and vague, and their purpose is not to nail things down but to open things up. They must express what is repressed—both personally and culturally—and that can be messy and daggy’ (‘The Cartoonists’ Lot’, available from http://www.leunig.com.au/journal/journal_one.php).

  26. It is important to note that this demand that our talk and thought about God not be idolatrously onto-theological applies to theist and atheist alike. If the atheist’s denial of God is to have any genuine effect, it must be a denial of what the true believer affirms. And yet, as Turner points out, there are ‘innumerable ways in which one can “get God wrong”: worship the wrong God, pray to the wrong God, love the wrong God and even perhaps deny the wrong God’ (‘On Denying the Right God,’ p. 138, emphasis in the original). Denying the wrong God is, of course, what any theologian worth their salt should do, but—as the recent phenomenon of the ‘New Atheists’ has made clear—it is also what many atheists do before mistakenly proceeding to declare that the whole God business is finished. See also Denys Turner’s excellent essay, ‘How To Be An Atheist’.

  27. Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism,’ in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 92–93.

  28. Forrest does not disagree with this, but instead argues that the correct conclusion to be drawn is that we should make more use of the distancing strategies that theodicists often employ, for it is such strategies that help us to avoid moral coarseness [p. 41]. But this, in my view, would only aggravate the problem, rather than resolve it. The problem, I might add, is not merely one of moral coarseness, but of a philosophical approach that promotes an untenable dualism between the theoretical problem of evil and the practical problem of evil—and although, as Forrest allows, the one may have a bearing on the other, they are nevertheless regarded as distinct problems.

  29. Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 50.

  30. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 217. Cf. Swinburne, ‘The Problem of Evil,’ in Stuart C. Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 92, and Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 224.

  31. See also William Alston’s defence of the view that God has no obligations, in Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 253–73.

  32. Davies, ‘The Problem of Evil,’ p. 178. Davies defends this view in his recent book, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (London: Continuum, 2006). For earlier and shorter treatments, see Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 [first edition], pp. 22–24; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [second edition], pp. 47–53; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 [third edition], pp. 226–30). See also Davies, ‘How Is God Love?’ in Luke Gormally (ed.), Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994), pp. 100–6; and ‘Is God a Moral Agent?’, in D.Z. Phillips (ed.), Whose God? Which Tradition? The Nature of Belief in God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 97–122. Davies presents his views on God’s goodness as drawn in large part from Aquinas’ views on this matter, which are outlined in Davies’ Aquinas (London: Continuum, 2002), ch.14.

  33. Davies, ‘The Problem of Evil,’ p. 182.

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Correspondence to N. N. Trakakis.

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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 conference of the Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association at the University of Sydney. I am grateful to Peter Forrest for initiating this discussion, and to Brian Davies for his many helpful comments

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Trakakis, N.N. Against Theodicy: A Response to Peter Forrest. SOPHIA 49, 129–140 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0150-3

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