Much contemporary analytic philosophy understands the power of God as belonging to the same logical space as the power of human beings: a power of efficient causation taken to the maximum limit. This anthropomorphic picture is often explicated in terms of God’s capacity to bring about any logically possible state of affairs, so-called omnipotence. D.Z. Phillips criticized this position in his last book, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God. I defend Phillips’s argument against recent criticism by William (...) Hasker, contending that the omnipotence thesis is either false or trivial. I trace the superficial plausibility of the thesis to a Cartesian understanding of personal agency, in the light of which God’s power over the whole material world is an inflated version of our more modest power over our own bodies: it is the power of immaterial souls to control material phenomena. This comparison is expressed to perfection in the work of Richard Swinburne, my main target. I argue that by making God a force among other possible forces, in-principle able to be resisted, however feebly, by contrary forces, this picture reduces the Creator to a creature. (shrink)

The paper discusses the unique approach to the problem of evil employed by the Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and ethics that is primarily represented by D. Z. Phillips. Unlike traditional solutions to the problem, Phillips’ solution consists in questioning its meaningfulness—he attacks the very ideas of God’s omnipotence, of His perfect goodness and of the need to ‘calculate’ God’s goodness against the evil within the world. A possible weakness of Phillips’ approach is his unreflected use of what he calls ‘our (...) religious language’, against which he measures the meaningfulness of theodical conceptions. He apparently underestimates both the heterogeneity of the ‘ours’ and how philosophical ideas pervade and inform the actual practice. On the other hand, Phillips rightly identifies the fact that some theodical conceptions, if understood as general doctrines, commit the sin of insensitivity and do not pay appropriate respect to human suffering. The reason is that they neglect the seriousness and importance of the difference between issuing the theodical accounts in the first person and in the third person. He may, however, thereby accuse theodicies of failing in a task that theodicists never intended to undertake. Possible problems are also involved in Phillips’ use of the Holocaust as the central discussion example. (shrink)

In this research, we discussed the types of evil: moral and natural, which are cited by atheistic philosophers as evidence against the existence of God. The so-called evidence from evil has been used by the atheistic and other non-theistic scholars to raise hypothesis on evaluating the possibility or likelihood that an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God exists in a world that is littered with evil. Moral evil is evil that arise from the misuse of free will by moral agents, (...) while natural evils are natural disasters such as: earthquakes, famine, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes etc. We discussed moral evil and Plantinga’s free will defense. We also discussed the natural evil and how it poses threat to theism. The logical and the evidential arguments from evil are the forms of arguments developed from moral and natural evils. While many scholars have agreed that Plantinga’s free will defense adequately responds to the problem of logical evil, the same consensus does not necessarily apply to the evidential argument from evil. We also examined William Rowe’s evidential argument which he developed from cases of intense animal and human sufferings considered by him to be pointless or gratuitous with no known reasons or goods for which God should have allowed the visceral experience of such sufferings. The work of Rowe and other non-theistic philosophers have made evidential evil a relevant and predominantly modern argument, addressing real life cases of animal and human sufferings, thereby making a case for atheism and also creating an awareness for not just the irrationality of theism but also the problem of the probity, morality, or rightness of doing theodicy. We also considered the works of other atheistic, and even some theistic scholars, who argue against the morality and rightness of doing theodicy. Some of these scholars consider theodicy to be a failed enterprise simply because, according to them, it ignores or suppresses the effects of horrendous and terrible evils that human beings and animals experience. Many theistic scholars on the other hand reject the notion that theodicy ignores suffering by developing various positively moral reasons to support not just the plausibility of theism but also to demonstrate that theodicies have successfully provided answers to problem of evil. The thesis of this research examines various problems associated with evils and the effects of Rowe’s instances of intense suffering on the enterprise of theodicy. It challenges the act of theodicy and questions its morality on the basis of its purposes, goals, attitudes, problems, truth, and accomplishment. This research concludes that theodicy is not a failed enterprise, but it is the only rational explanation to the problem of evil and the only option that gives hope and comfort with respect to the effects of various intense and horrendous evil in our world. (shrink)