Abstract

From Dostoevski's passionate rejection of divine harmony and Hume's urbane discussion of the relevance of empirically familiar misery to the divine attributes, this set of readings passes on to some contemporary analytic discussions of the question whether the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God. The general upshot seems to be that a strictly logical incompatibility cannot be generally proven, but that all of the ordinary suggestions for removing the apparent incompatibility are both defective and inadequate. No attempts at a systematic philosophical or theological solution to the problem, classical or contemporary, are included in the readings.—E. W.