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ABSTRACT
A large part of the contemporary philosophy of religion concerns the so-called ‘problem of evil’. It is difficult to see how pain and wickedness, and all the calamities that afflict our poor world, could even happen in a world created and ruled by God as he is described in classical theism. The problem of evil would likely make the very existence of the God of theism very unlikely, if not logically and existentially absurd. There are, however, some dissenting strands in this almost complete unanimity about the enormous philosophical and religious importance of the problem of evil. It could be found in Herbert McCabe’s and Brian Davies’s works. What McCabe and Davies say is linked to their diagnosis of a certain creeping anthropomorphism in the understanding of divine action, which has particularly spread in modern and contemporary philosophy of God. It results from a certain metaphysical presupposition about God, which McCabe and Davies do not share with most analytical philosophers, whether friends or foes of Christianity; and it seems to me that one would find some close presupposition among many continental philosophers, even if it is expressed in a very different way.
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Notes
1. To get an idea of this, see, for example, Meister and Moser, Citation2017.
2. Our failure to recognize how the distribution of goods and evils is justified is at the heart of what is called ‘skeptical theism’ (Dougherty McBrayer, Citation2014).
3. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 13, 3. All references to the Summa Theologiae (abridged ST) in this paper indicate the part in the Summa, the question, the article, and a part in the article. The translation is taken, sometimes with modifications, from the edition by the English Dominicans published by Cambridge University Press.
4. See Davies (Citation2006, 105).
5. One might wonder what theist Swinburne is talking about, because in fact no classical theist actually says that!
6. See Pouivet (Citation2018a,Citationb)
7. Hewitt says ‘personhood’ (Citation2019; Citation2022).
8. See Schellenberg (Citation1993).
9. See MacIntyre (Citation1999).
10. Quietism was an important religious movement in the 17th century, linked to certain forms of mysticism. It is possible that there is a certain continuity with contemporary philosophical quietism: the idea that it would be appropriate to renounce metaphysics (even that metaphysics is closed) to return to a more human reality and to ‘experience’. Contemporary quietism is also a kind of anti-intellectualism, even if it is sometimes expressed in a very intellectual way.
11. See Davies (Citation2013).
12. I mean in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (I, 12–13) in the English Dominicans Edition, published by Cambridge University Press.
13. See O’Grady (Citation2020).
14. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3, 17, 2, r.
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Notes on contributors
Roger Pouivet
Roger Pouivet is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Lorraine and Invited Professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Among his publications: After Wittgenstein, saint Thomas (St Augustine’s Press, 2006), Épistemologie des croyances religieuses (Le Cerf, 2013), L’éthique intellectuelle, une épistémologie des vertus (Vrin, 2020), as well as numerous articles, some of them published in New Blackfriars. He recently translated Peter Geach’s The Virtues into French.