Did the God of the Bible create a Darwinian world in which violence and suffering (disvalue) are the means by which the good (value) is realized? This is Christopher Southgate's insightful and dramatic formulation of the theodicy problem. In addressing this problem, the Exeter theologian rightly invokes the Theology of the Cross in its second manifestation, that is, we learn from the cross of Jesus Christ that God is present to nonhuman as well as human victims of predation and extinction. (...) God co‐suffers with creatures in their despair, abandonment, physical suffering, and death. What I will add with more force than Southgate is this: the Easter resurrection is a prolepsis of the eschatological new creation, and it is God's new creation which retroactively determines past creation. Although this does not eliminate the theodicy question, it lessens its moral sting. (shrink)

Kant’s late essay ‘The End of All Things’ (1794) establishes a distinctly modern field of inquiry that has fittingly been called ‘philosophical eschatology’ by asking, ‘why do human beings expect an end of the world at all?’ (AA 8:330) Interpretation of the essay’s purpose and argument have usually taken one of two routes: Kant is either understood as writing an esoteric political critique under the guise of the philosophy of religion, or as being focused largely on problems related to the (...) immortality of the soul as a postulate of pure practical reason. In contrast, I argue that the essay presents the end of all things as a cosmological idea of reason. In this essay I trace Kant’s idea of an end as its preconditions are established through the three Critiques, and finally made explicit in his late work. (shrink)