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 /

Review Essay: Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection

A review of Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection,trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012)

Review Essay: Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection

A review of Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection,trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).</em

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