Personalistic Theism, Divine Embodiment, and a Problem of Evil
One version of the problem of evil concludes that personalistic forms of theism should be rejected since the acts that one would expect a God with person-like qualities to perform, notably acts that would prevent egregious evils, do not occur. Given the evils that exist in the world, it is argued, i...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Innsbruck in cooperation with the John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham
[2019]
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| In: |
European journal for philosophy of religion
Year: 2019, Volume: 11, Issue: 2, Pages: 119-139 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Theism
/ God
/ Embodiment
/ Evil
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| RelBib Classification: | AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism NBC Doctrine of God |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (KW) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | One version of the problem of evil concludes that personalistic forms of theism should be rejected since the acts that one would expect a God with person-like qualities to perform, notably acts that would prevent egregious evils, do not occur. Given the evils that exist in the world, it is argued, if God exists as a person or like a person, God's record of action is akin to that of a negligent parent. One way of responding to this "argument from neglect" is to maintain that there is a good reason for the apparent neglect-namely, that God could not intervene even once with respect to suffering (the "not-even-once principle") without thereby incurring the responsibility of doing so on every occasion, which would be deleterious. So God never responds to evil. It is argued in this paper that a profoundly integrated, personalistic model of God and the God-world relation-one that is reflected in a soul-body analogy-provides a way of addressing the argument from neglect without affirming the not-even-once principle. |
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| Contains: | Enthalten in: European journal for philosophy of religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.24204/ejpr.v11i2.2974 |