Many distinct, controvertial issues are to be found within the labyrinthine\ntwists and turns of the problem of evil. For philosophers of the\nseventeenth and early eighteenth centures, evil presented a challenge\nto the consistency and rationality of the world-picture disclosed\nby the new way of ideas. In dealing with this challenge, however,\nphilosophers were also concerned with their positions in the theological\ndebates about original sin, free will, and justification that were\nthe legacy of the Protestant Reformation to European intellectual\nlife. Emerging from a conference on the (...) problem of evil in the early\nmodern period held at the University of Toronto in 1999, the papers\nin this collection represent some of the best original work being\ndone today on the theodicies of such early modern philosophers as\nLeibniz, Suarez, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle. (shrink)

We formulate a version of the Cosmological Argument that deploys an epistemic principle of explanation in place of the traditional Principle of Sufficient Reason. The epistemic principle asserts that if there is a possible explanation of a fact, and some proposition is entailed by that explanation and by every other possible explanation of that fact, it is reasonable to accept that proposition. We try to show that there is a possible explanation of the fact that there are contingent beings and (...) that any possible explanation of this fact presupposes that there is a necessary being. We conclude that it is reasonable to believe that there is a necessary being. (shrink)