This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Some writers have used ‘theodicy’ as the name of the enterprise of showing God's actual reasons for allowing evil to occur, and have contrasted it with a ‘defence’ against the argument from evil to the non-existence of God, which merely shows that the argument doesn't work (see, e.g., Alvin Plantinga,The Nature of Necessity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, p. 192). Given this contrast, my concern is with ‘defence’ rather than with ‘theodicy’, a defence which consists is showing that there are available to God reasons enough to justify him in allowing evils to occur and so that their occurrence does not count against his goodness and so his existence as defined. I am not, however, claiming that the reasons which I give are his actual reasons. I believe that my use of ‘theodicy’ is that normal to the tradition (before 1974) of discussion of these issues.
See, for example, S.J. Wykstra, ‘The Humean obstacle to evidential arguments from suffering: On avoiding the evils of “Apperance”’,International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 73–93.
I plan eventually to write a full-length book on theodicy to be entitledProvidence, which will include the results of several separate papers and book chapters which I have written on the subject. A few of the paragraphs of this paper are the same as those of another paper, being published at about the same time but covering aspects of theodicy — ‘Some main strands of Theodicy’, in D. Howard-Snyder (ed.),The Evidential Argument from Evil (Indiana University Press). This latter paper is concerned to show that for many typical members of main classes of observable evils, my conditions (1) and (2) are satisfied.
See myThe Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 202–214; as defended against critics and expanded in ‘Knowledge from experience, and the problem of evil’ (in ed. W.J. Abraham and S.W. Holtzer,The Rationality of Religious Belief, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
This good, others have recognised, exists as a this-wordly good, quite apart from any reward for patriotic behaviour which might accrue in the after-life. The hope of such reward was not a major motive among Romans and Greeks who died for their country. ‘The doctrine of a future life was far too vague among the pagans to exercise any powerful general influence’ (W.E.H Lecky,History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, Longmans, Green and Co., 1899, Vol 2, p. 3), ‘The Spartan and the Roman died for his country because he loved it. The martyr's ecstacy of hope had no place in his dying hour. He gave up all he had, he closed his eyes, as he believed for ever, and he asked for no reward in this world or in the next’ (ibid, Vol 1, p. 178). The well-known lines of Horacedulce et decorum pro patria mori ‘it is sweet and proper to die for one's country’ (Odes 3.2.13), were written by a man whose belief in personal immortality was negligible — see the famous ode 3.30 in which he sees his ‘immortality’ as consisting in his subsequent reputation; and seems to convey the view that dying for one's country was a good for him who died. It was of course a Socratic view that doingjust acts was a good for him who does them (see Plato,Gorgias 479).
The example was originally put forward by William Rowe in his ‘The problem of evil and some varieties of Atheism’,American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979), pp. 335–41, as an example of an apparently pointless evil.
John Rawls developed this theory of justice by asking his readers which moral and legal principles they would see as the correct ones if they were planning a society in advance without knowing which people they would be in it and what role they would play in it. See hisA Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 17–22.
On this as one of the purposes of propositional revelation, see myRevelation (Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 71.
Acts 20.35
Mark 10. 42–5.
Acts 5.41.
I Corinthians 9.18.
John 3.19.
Cambridge University Press, 1989. I state their views using my terminology, e.g. ‘beneficiary’.
Op. cit, p. 32
Op. cit., pp. 117f.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Swinburne, R. Theodicy, our well-being, and God's rights. Int J Philos Relig 38, 75–91 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01322949
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01322949