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The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) authored one of the most influential works on the problem of evil: Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. The term “theodicy”—a combination of the Greek words theos (God) and dike (justice)—can be defined as “justifying the ways of […]
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Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) was a Huguenot (a group of persecuted French Calvinists) who wrote the massive philosophical and lexical work known in English as the Historical and Critical Dictionary. Bayle’s entries in his Dictionary focus on a vast array of subjects, including a number of controversial religious and theological subjects. His most provocative ideas were
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Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), a French Oratorian priest in the Catholic Church, was one of the most highly-regarded philosophers of his era. A prolific writer, Malebranche displayed a deep concern about the problem of evil throughout his philosophical works. His most thorough treatments of the problem of evil appear in Treatise on Nature and Grace and Dialogues on Metaphysics
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Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) was an intellectual leader of the philosophical school known as Cambridge Platonism, a group of University of Cambridge theologians and Platonist philosophers who were influential during the 17th century. In The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Cudworth describes various atheistic arguments in detail before attempting to refute them in the final
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Baruch Spinoza was one of the seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment. Born into the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1632, Spinoza eventually developed heterodox ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of God. His controversial positions led Amsterdam’s Jewish religious authorities to issue a “herem” against him—a Jewish ecclesiastical censure similar
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Paradise Lost is an epic poem written by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The poem dramatizes the biblical account of the fall of man, using two narrative arcs: one about Satan, the other about Adam and Eve. The concluding book of Paradise Lost appears below. In it, the Archangel Michael comes to Adam in a
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In the excerpt below from Leviathan, the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) takes up the problem of evil, focusing his attention on the case of Job. Hobbes asserts that, in the Book of Job, the justification for Job’s affliction centers on God’s power. Hobbes uses this interpretation of Job to further his political philosophy
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John Calvin (1509–1564) was a French theologian, ecclesiastical statesman, and leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. His Institutes of the Christian Religion is a manual of Calvinist Protestantism, a movement which has had a major impact on the formation of the modern Western world. The excerpts below address several issues related to the problem of evil,
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Martin Luther (1483–1546), the great intellectual leader of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, viewed human existence as a spiritual battlefield, with each person’s eternal fate hanging in the balance. To properly equip individuals for the spiritual trials they will face, Luther believed that everyone has both a right and a need to direct access to
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Thomas Kempis (1380–1471) was a German-Dutch cannon regular, a category of clerics in the Catholic Church who live together in a vow-based religious community. He is credited with authorship of the devotional manual The Imitation of Christ, which emphasizes the importance of focusing on one’s interior life and maintaining strict dedication to Christ. With his
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