Abstract
This article attempts to reframe the traditional account of the problem of evil for God’s existence. The philosophical debates about the problem of evil for the existence of God within the traditional framework do not exhaust the available options for conceiving of God’s perfection, including our understanding of God’s power and God’s relationship to the world. In responding to the problem of evil, rational theists should seek a reformulation of divine perfection consistent with God’s existence as both necessary and as morally relevant to human life in a manner that does not collapse in the face of the problem of evil. The neoclassical account of God’s nature as developed in the tradition of process philosophy is presented as an alternative that meets these requirements.
Highlights
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The argument suggests that attentiveness to the many horrendous moral and natural evils we find in the world cannot help but undermine belief in the God of traditional theism, in whom the virtues of omnipotence, omniscience, and moral goodness are thought to coincide
I want to advocate for a version of “neoclassical theism” in the vein of Charles Hartshorne’s process philosophy as one such alternative that I believe avoids the pitfalls of the problem of evil while providing a compelling account of God’s perfection, including God’s necessary existence and relevance for the moral lives of human beings
Summary
J.B.: “If God is good, he is not God; if God is God, he is not good; take the even, take the odd.” (MacLeish 1958). James Sterba’s (2019) recent book revisits the perennial theodicy debate within traditional theism and responds to a range of contemporary efforts to defend the logic of God’s existence in the face of the presence of horrendous evil in the world (both moral and non-moral). At the heart of this debate is the question of whether our experience of evil in the world counts against the existence of God understood as all powerful, all knowing, and perfectly good. The argument suggests that attentiveness to the many horrendous moral and natural evils we find in the world cannot help but undermine belief in the God of traditional theism, in whom the virtues of omnipotence, omniscience, and moral goodness are thought to coincide. This essay is an attempt to present and clarify how that approach to God’s existence avoids the problem of evil and justifies our continued affirmation of the existence of God
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