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In 1791, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), one of the preeminent German philosophers of the Enlightenment, addressed the problem of evil in an essay titled, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy.” In it, Kant categorizes theodicies into three general approaches: First, a theodicy can argue that what mankind considers to be “evil” is not, […]
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The Scottish philosopher and essayist David Hume (1711–1776) is known for his criticisms of various claims to religious knowledge, as well as for his naturalistic explanations of the origins of religious belief. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, three philosophers—Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes—debate different arguments for the existence of God, along with various
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In 1756, Swiss-born philosopher and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) wrote a letter responding to Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake—a poem in which Voltaire expressed a mix of intellectual and emotional discontent with the idea that human suffering on the scale of Lisbon’s can be reconciled with the existence of an omnipotent, beneficent God
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The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is one of the most significant earthquakes in recorded history, killing tens of thousands in Lisbon, thousands more elsewhere in Portugal, and additional thousands in Spain and Morocco. While other earthquakes have resulted in more victims, none have produced greater intellectual shockwaves than the one in Lisbon. In the months
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First published in 1733, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man became an international best-seller, appearing in over a hundred editions in eighteen languages across Europe. Pope’s response to the problem of evil in this poem relies heavily on the thought of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers (with an emphasis on Stoic and Plotinian thought), as well as medieval Christian theologians
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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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