The Emotional Impact of Evil: Philosophical Reflections on Existential Problems

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky illustrates that encounters with evil do not solely impact agents’ beliefs about God (or God’s existence). Evil impacts people on an emotional level as well. Authors like Hasker and van Inwagen sometimes identify the emotional impact of evil with the “existential” problem of evil. For better or worse, the existential version of the problem is often set aside in contemporary philosophical discussions. In this essay, I rely on Robert Roberts’ account of emotions as “concern-based construals” to show that theistic philosophers can effectively address the existential problem (and so, the problem should not be set aside). In fact, addressing the emotional impact of evil is crucial, I argue, given that resolving just the impact of evil on agents’ beliefs about God constitutes an incomplete response to the problem of evil

Divine Foreknowledge and the Problem of Evil: Four Views

This paper examines the issues of divine foreknowledge and the Problem of Evil from the standpoint of four different theological systems: Open Theism, Arminianism, Molinism, and Calvinism. The author summarizes each view’s understanding of divine foreknowledge and then explains how this understanding applies to the view’s refutation of the Problem of Evil

On justifications and excuses

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them

Good and Evil: What\u27s the Problem?

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. In the world as we know it, God gave people free will. So He could create a free universe where man has to live for himself. In this and in this only, can God create a world where people are like God, because He has free will, He can do whatever He pleases and in His effort to create man in His likeness, He was forced to give free will to man. In doing so, God gave man the choice to be evil. ―The problem of evil‖ suggests that if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally good, He would be able to and would want to eliminate evil. Yet evil exists. A conclusion seems logical: either God is not all of those things, or He does not exist. In this brief essay I submit an alternative solution to the problem of evil

On the Metaphysical Necessity of Suffering from Natural Evil

Why does God permit suffering in the world? If God is wholly good, omnipotent, and omniscient, why would He not intervene to prevent us from suffering? These are questions that pertain to the problem of evil: how to reconcile the existence of God with the evil occurrences of this world, without sacrificing any of His divine attributes. The most potent version of the problem of evil is a recent formulation known as the evidential argument from evil. The evidential argument states that while the existence of God is not logically incompatible with the fact that there are evil occurrences, there are particular instances of suffering that lower the probability that God exists altogether. In the most noteworthy formulation of the evidential argument, William Rowe designates these particular instances of suffering as gratuitous suffering: any sort of unnecessary or pointless suffering that a being could undergo and which serves no greater good. Rowe declares that gratuitous suffering counts as evidence against the existence of God. I intend to offer an explanatory defense of God in light of Rowe’s evidential argument from evil. I will contend that no suffering is gratuitous and that Rowe’s argument is unsound

Moral Error Theory and the Problem of Evil

Moral error theory claims that no moral sentence is (nonvacuously) true. Atheism claims that the existence of evil in the world is incompatible with, or makes improbable, the existence of God. Is moral error theory compatible with atheism? This paper defends the thesis that it is compatible against criticisms by Nicholas Sturgeo

Anselm’s Metaphysics of Nonbeing

In his eleventh century dialogue De Casu Diaboli, Anselm seeks to avoid the problem of evil for theodicy and explain the fall of Satan as attributable to Satan’s own self-creating wrongful will. It is something, as such, for which God as Satan’s divine Creator cannot be held causally or morally responsible. The distinctions on which Anselm relies presuppose an interesting metaphysics of nonbeing, and of the nonbeing of evil in particular as a privation of good, worthy of critical philosophical investigation in its own right. Anselm’s concept of nonbeing does not resolve the philosophical problem of evil implied by Satan’s fall from grace, but is shown perhaps more unexpectedly to enable Anselm’s proof for the inconceivable nonexistence of God as the greatest conceivable intended object of thought to avoid Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason objection to the general category of ”ontological’ arguments

The Secular Problem of Evil: An Essay in Analytic Existentialism

The existence of evil is often held to pose philosophical problems only for theists. I argue that the existence of evil gives rise to a philosophical problem which confronts theist and atheist alike. The problem is constituted by the following claims: (1) Successful human beings (i.e., those meeting their basic prudential interests) are committed to a good-enough world; (2) the actual world is not a good-enough world (i.e., sufficient evil exists). It follows that human beings must either (3a) maintain a state of epistemic ignorance regarding the nature of the actual world or (3b) abandon their basic prudential interests. Theists resolve this problem by rejecting (2), only to confront the problem of evil as it is traditionally understood. Successful atheists also reject (2), but without adequate grounds for doing so

Wrong Tomorrow, Wrong Yesterday, but not Today: On Sliding into Evil with Zeal but without Understanding

Collaboration with systems of evil-the overall topic of this Symposium-is a problem as fresh as contemporary news accounts. The New York Times recently carried a front-page story about the dilemmas described by young Serbs who were evading military conscription because they understood the evil of Slobodan Milosevic\u27s genocidal policies against the Kosovar Albanians but nonetheless felt a patriotic duty to protect their country against foreign assaults. As one young man put it, \u27\u27\u27we\u27d like to see [Milosevic] hanging.\u27 But ... \u27[i]f the guys from NATO come here, we will shoot them.\u27 ! As wrenching as this kind of dilemma may be, it is not the problem of collaboration that I want to discuss. My concern is with a more difficult problem, as I see it-a problem that is more insidious and difficult to identify as such. The young Serbian resister knows that his President is an evil man, and he feels the moral conflict between his revulsion at this evil and his patriotic impulses. My concern is for circumstances where the evil is not understood as such by its perpetrators, where they are unaware at the time they are acting of the wrongfulness of the actions in which they are engaged