Compassionate Deism and the Grammar of Permission

Abstract

Both theism and atheism assume that God permits evil. But neither theism nor atheism make this assumption with due attention to what I call, following Wittgenstein, the grammar of the term ‘permission’. When this grammar is examined, it becomes clear that this assumption cannot avoid the atheistic force of the argument from evil. To rescue belief in God, I propose the adoption of a position I call compassionate deism. This position is a combination of Christian theism and traditional deism. The combination is produced by making a slight deistic modification of Christian theism in the direction of non-intervention, and a slight modification of deism in the direction of compassion. Such a compassionate deism denies the common assumption made by both Christian theism and atheism, namely, that God permits evil, and thus avoids the theistic denial of the reality of evil and the atheist’s denial of God’s goodness.

Human Sovereignty and the Logical Problem of Evil

“…James Sterba's (2019Sterba's ( , 2020Sterba's ( , 2021 attempt to revitalize the problem of evil, in its 'logical' form, as an argument against the existence of God has been the subject of an enormous amount of literature. There are those who have contributed to the literature in order to endorse Sterba's atheistic conclusion (Ekstrom 2021), those who have contributed to suggest that the concept of God needs a radical rethink (Burns 2021;Hall 2021;Wilmot 2021), those who defend the Thomist view that God is not morally good (Huffling 2021;Bishop 2021;Fesser 2021), those who think the evils of the world are really not that bad, at least in any objective sense (Hall 2021;Reichenbach 2021) or who think that they are rendered irrelevant by the great goods that are to come (Walls 2021;Beaty 2021), those who say that Sterba's arguments go wrong by making an analogy between God and a just state (Almeida 2020;Attfield 2021;Hasker 2020Hasker , 2021, and others still. With a field so crowded, it is a tough undertaking to say something new, and I think an impossible one to say something wholly new.…”