Evil and the complexity of history : a response to Durston

Kirk Durston recently presented an argument aimed against evidential arguments from evil predicated on instances of suffering that appear to be gratuitous; &lsquo;The consequential complexity of history and gratuitous evil&rsquo;, Religious Studies, 36 (2000), 65&ndash;80. He begins with the notion that history consists of an intricate web of causal chains, so that a single event in one such chain may have countless unforeseen consequences. According to Durston, this consequential complexity exhibited by history negatively impacts on our grasp of the data necessary to determine whether or not an evil is gratuitous. He therefore concludes that our epistemic condition poses an insurmountable barrier towards the inference from inscrutability to pointlessness. By way of reply, I contend that Durston\u27s argument is flawed in two significant respects, and thus the evidential argument emerges unscathed from his critique.<br /

Who is Nikos Kazantzakis' God?

The work of Kazantzakis is saturated with theological language, but disagreement continues as to how such language is to be understood. In some readings, Kazantzakis is interpreted as a non-religious, or even anti-religious, writer who rejects or is skeptical towards belief in God; while other readings emphasize the deeply religious character of his writings, seeing in them a ‘post-Christian’ or postmodern development of traditional Christian concepts. Critics, however, have surprisingly neglected a promising proposal, which would bring to the fore Kazantzakis’s lifelong engagement with Eastern religion. This proposal, although not denying that Kazantzakis was influenced by many of the streams of thought identified by others (e.g., evolutionary theory, process philosophy, apophatic theology, etc.), holds that Kazantzakis’s most fundamental commitment lay with a monistic and idealist worldview, prominent in Eastern philosophy and religious thought, which conceives reality as a unified whole that is ultimately spiritual in nature

Salvation in heaven?

The aim of this paper is to examine the difficulties that belief in a paradisiacal afterlife creates for orthodox theists. In particular, we consider the difficulties that arise when one asks whether there is freedom in Heaven, i.e., whether the denizens of Heaven have libertarian freedom of action. Our main contention is that this \u27Problem of Heaven\u27 makes serious difficulties for proponents of free will theodicies and for proponents of free will defences against arguments from evil

How to be an Agnostic

[Excerpt]In a famous trial in Dublin in 1937, Samuel Beckett took the stand in a libel case, not directed at him but rather at a local author, Oliver St. John Gogarty, for an antisemitic caricature he had recently made of Beckett’s Jewish relations. Gogarty’s barrister put the following question to Beckett: “Do you call yourself a Christian, Jew, or Atheist?” From the dock, Beckett replied: “None of the three.” To this extent, Beckett may be grouped with the ever-increasing number of today’s ‘nones’, those who regard themselves as ‘non-religious’, who are not affiliated with any religious tradition or community. It is primarily these nones to whom Schellenberg addresses his book. But what he seems to overlook is the distinctive, albeit unusual, way in which Beckett and many like him identify as religious ‘nones’. Beckett’s perspective on religion is notoriously difficult to categorise. And he is not unique in this respect: the world’s great writers tend to resist pigeonholes, especially with regard to religious belief. To ask, for example, whether Kafka was a theist is almost as illogical as many of the scenes depicted in his novels and short stories. Consider also Camus’ reaction to the frequent attempts made to label him an atheist: “I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet the words say nothing to me: for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” Even those who profess a fixed religious identity are often betrayed by their own writings. A good, albeit contested, example of this is Dostoevsky, whose affiliation with a quite conservative form of Christianity is well known, but who, at the same time, arguably undermined this very affiliation by putting forward some of the most powerful criticisms ever made against belief in God (for example, in the rebellious character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov)