Ex-Voto Publishing

21st Century Thinkers

Peter van Inwagen, “The Global Argument from Evil”

By the global argument from evil, I understand the following argument (or any argument sufficiently similar to it that the two arguments stand or fall together): We find vast amounts of truly horrendous evil in the world; if there were a God, we should not find vast amounts of horrendous evil in the world; there […]

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Paul Helm, “God’s Providence Takes No Risks”

This essay is a contribution to theodicy—the justifying of God’s ways to humankind—in the face of the many evils of our world. But it is offered as a modest contribution to such a project, in fact, a very modest contribution. One kind of evil consists of the personal evils that occur in a life which

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John Sanders, “God, Evil, and Relational Risk”

Open theism is a view of the divine nature and the God-world relationship that arises out of what may be called the free will tradition of Christian thought. Although this theology of openness is not new in most respects compared to traditional Christian theism, it contains particular emphases and several new elements that together render

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Michael Ruse, “Naturalism, Evil, and God”

What Is “Naturalism”? Let’s start in by talking about “naturalism,” for this is a word with many meanings. When I was a child, it meant nudism, going around without your clothes on. With some regret, this is not the topic of this essay, for it is rather with notions of naturalism that have to do

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John Fienberg, “The Religious Problem of Evil”

Why do bad things happen to good people? If God really loves us, why doesn’t he stop the bad things that befall us? How can I serve or even worship a God who rewards my faithfulness with affliction? Most of us have probably asked these questions at some time or other. In fact, these are

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M. Peterson, “The Evidential Argument from Evil”

For several decades, discussions of the “inductive” or “probabilistic” or “evidential” argument from evil have been major fare in philosophy of religion. The target of this type of argument is standard theism—the view that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being who created the world. Of course, theistic religions call this being “God.”

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