”Anti-theodicy” and Antitheodicies

Authors

  • Lauri Snellman University of Helsinki

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v11i1.2579

Keywords:

problem of evil, antitheodicy, metaphysics, philosophical methodology, Betenson, Toby

Abstract

The article reviews different antitheodicies in response to Toby Betenson’s article “Anti-Theodicy”. Antitheodicies involve rejecting the position that God or meaning exist only, if evils have justifying morally sufficient reasons. The article builds on Betenson’s division into moral and conceptual antitheodicies and his characterization of antitheodicies as a metacritique of the problem of evil. Moral antitheodicies are problematic, as they do not address the key conceptual issues and might end up in question-begging or moralism. Dissolving the problem of evil requires a conceptual antitheodicy that exposes its presuppositions as speculative metaphysics. Religious conceptual antitheodicies help to focus on different ways of sense-making that do not fall into theodicism.

References

Beiser, Frederick. 1987. The Fate of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Betenson, Toby. 2016. “Anti-Theodicy”. Philosophy Compass 11, no.1, 56–65. doi:10.1111/phc3.12289.

Betz, John: After Enlightenment. 2008. Wiley: Oxford.

Camus, Albert. 1960/1980 The Plague. Translated into English by Stuart Gilbert. London: Penguin. Translated into Finnish by Jukka Mannerkorpi. Helsinki: Otava.

Griffith-Dickson, Gwen. 1995. Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism. Berlin: de Gryuter.

— . 2000. Human and Divine. London: Duckworth.

Hamann, J. G. 1955. Briefwechsel 1. Eds. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel. Stuttgart: Insel-Verlag.

— . 1965. Briefwechsel 5. Ed. Arthur Henkel. Stuttgart: Insel-Verlag.

— . 2007. Writings on Philosophy and Language. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

— . 1791. “Über das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee”, in Gesammelte Schriften. Akademie-Ausgabe 8, 254–275.

Leibniz, G.W. 1989. “The Ultimate Origination of Things”, in Philosophical Essays. Translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Neiman, Susan. 2015. Evil in Modern Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Perdue, Leo. 1991. Wisdom in Revolt. Metaphorical Theology in the Book of Job. Sheffield: Almond Press.

Peterson, Michael, Hasker, William, Reichenbach, Bruce and Basinger, David. 2003. Reason and Religious Belief. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Pihlström, Sami and Kivistö, Sari. 2016. Kantian Antitheodicy, Palgrave MacMillan.

Phillips, D. Z. 2004. The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God. Lontoo: SCM Press.

van Fraassen, Bas. 2002. The Empirical Stance. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wright, N. T. 2006. Evil and the Justice of God. London: SPCK.

Downloads

Published

2019-03-17

How to Cite

Snellman, Lauri. 2019. “”Anti-theodicy” and Antitheodicies”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (1):201-11. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v11i1.2579.

Issue

Section

Discussion and Replies