Atle Ottesen Søvik, The Problem of Evil and the Power of God (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), 272 pp., EUR 110.00 / US$ 151,00, ISBN 9789004205604.

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-364
Author(s):  
Bert van Veluw
Author(s):  
Muhammad Nur Prabowo Setyabudi

Theodicy was born as a response to the problem of evil and its relationship to the power of God, and at the same time, as an assertion of Omnipotence, Omnibenevolence, and Omniscience of God. This article presents the interpretation of Frithjof Schuon's thought or Shaykh Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad as a Muslim thinker of the tradition of Perennialism philosophy that emphasizes universalism and esoterism. The article describes Schuon's principal thought concerning theodicy, especially how esoteric Islamic theodicy sees the nature of evil, the relationship of evil with the free will of humans and determination of God (predestination). Furthermore, this article tries to draw the extent to which esoterism is supportive and coherent with texts that are exoterically expressed in the Qur'an. Basically, esoteric Islamic theodicy parallels with the principle of Islamic mysticism. In the last part, this article tries to take the moral significance of the notions of esoteric Islamic theodicy.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashok Nagpal ◽  
Ankur Prahlad Betageri

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-131
Author(s):  
Bruce Russell

I begin by distinguishing four different versions of the argument from evil that start from four different moral premises that in various ways link the existence of God to the absence of suffering. The version of the argument from evil that I defend starts from the premise that if God exists, he would not allow excessive, unnecessary suffering. The argument continues by denying the consequent of this conditional to conclude that God does not exist. I defend the argument against Skeptical Theists who say we are in no position to judge that there is excessive, unnecessary suffering by arguing that this defense has absurd consequences. It allows Young Earthers to construct a parallel argument that concludes that we are in no position to judge that God did not create the earth recently. In the last section I consider whether theists can turn the argument from evil on its head by arguing that God exists. I first criticize Alvin Plantinga’s theory of warrant that one might try to use to argue for God’s existence. I then criticize Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian argument to the same conclusion. I conclude that my version of the argument from evil is a strong argument against the existence of God and that several important responses to it do not defeat it.


Author(s):  
Mark C. Murphy

This Introduction raises the problem of divine ethics and how it bears on the problem of evil (or ‘argument from evil’). It notes the importance of distinguishing among three conceptions of God: God as maximally great being (as ‘an Anselmian being’), God as that being who is supremely worthy of worship, and God as that being who is fully worthy of allegiance. This book treats the first conception to be the most explanatorily basic, and thus it is the sole focus of inquiry for most of the book (Chapters 1 through 6); the second and third conceptions are considered in the second part of the book (Chapters 7 through 9).


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