Is a Good God Logically Possible?

This article attempts to reframe the traditional account of the problem of evil for God’s existence. The philosophical debates about the problem of evil for the existence of God within the traditional framework do not exhaust the available options for conceiving of God’s perfection, including our understanding of God’s power and God’s relationship to the world. In responding to the problem of evil, rational theists should seek a reformulation of divine perfection consistent with God’s existence as both necessary and as morally relevant to human life in a manner that does not collapse in the face of the problem of evil. The neoclassical account of God’s nature as developed in the tradition of process philosophy is presented as an alternative that meets these requirements.

Section: The Aim Of the Essaymentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: A Little Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Aim Of the Essaymentioning

confidence: 99%

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God and the Problem of Evil: An Attempt at Reframing the Debate

Wilmot

2021

“…3 What gives rise to my focus on the concept of permission is the fact that it figures so prominently in the latest work of the guest editor of this special issue of Religions. I am referring to James Sterba's book (Sterba 2019). Over and over in this book, Sterba poses the problem of evil in the way so many others have done, namely, in terms of God's permission.…”

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confidence: 99%

Compassionate Deism and the Grammar of Permission

Hall

2021

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.

“…James Sterba has revived the playpen problem in his recent book, Is a Good God Logically Possible? (Sterba 2019). Sterba argues that God has a moral obligation to protect the kinds of political freedoms that would ideally be preserved in a just state, such as the freedom from assault, or the freedom to pursue a decent life for oneself (Sterba 2019, pp.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

God and the Playpen: On the Feasibility of Morally Better Worlds

Chen

2021

According to the free will defense, God cannot create a world with free creatures, and hence a world with moral goodness, without allowing for the possibility of evil. David Lewis points out that any free will defense must address the “playpen problem”: why didn’t God allow creatures the freedom required for moral goodness, while intervening to ensure that all evil-doing is victimless? More recently, James Sterba has revived the playpen problem by arguing that an omnipotent and benevolent God would have intervened to prevent significant and especially horrendous evil. I argue that it is possible, at least, that such divine intervention would have backfired, and that any attempt to create a world that is morally better than this one would have resulted in a world that is morally worse. I conclude that the atheologian should instead attack the free will defense at its roots: either by denying that the predetermination of our actions is incompatible with our freely per-forming them, or by denying that the actual world—a world with both moral good and evil—is more valuable than a world without any freedom at all.