Personalistic Theism, Divine Embodiment, and a Problem of Evil
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v11i2.2974Abstract
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.
References
Bishop, John. 2017. “The Divine Attributes and Non-Personal Conceptions of God”. Topoi 36, no. 4: 609–21.
Cartwright, Nancy. 1980. “Do the Laws of Physics state the Facts”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61, no. 1-2: 75–84.
Clayton, Philip. 1997. God and Contemporary Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.
—. 2006. Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Clayton, Philip, and Paul Davies, eds. 2008. The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Clayton, Philip, and Steven Knapp. 2011. The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, and Faith. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Cooper, John W. 2006. Panentheism, The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present. Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker Academic.
Davies, Brian. 2004. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
—. 2006. The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil. London: Continuum.
Hartshorne, Charles. 1976. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes and The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
—. 1984. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York.
Hick, John. 2001. “An Irenaean Theodicy”. In Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, edited by Stephen T. Davis. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
—. 2010. Evil and the God of Love. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hudson, Hud. 2009. “Omnipresence”. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, edited by Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea, 199–216. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Keener, Craig. 2011. Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker Academic.
Lacantius. 1979. Apocalyptic Spirituality. New York, NY: Paulist Press.
Leftow, Brian. 2016. “God, concepts of: Classical theism”. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/god-concepts-of/v-1/sections/classical-theism.
McFague, Sallie. 1993. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press.
Peacocke, Arthur R. 1995. “Chance and Law”. In Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, edited by Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur R. Peacocke, 123-145. Berkeley, CA: The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.
Polkinghorne, John. 2000. Faith, Science, and Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
—. 2002. Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
—. 2003. Belief in God in an Age of Science. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
—. 2008. Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
—. 2008. Theology in the Context of Science. London: SPCK.
Swinburne, Richard. 2016. The Coherence of Theism. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Taliaferro, Charles. 1994. Consciousness and the Mind of God. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Taliaferro, Charles, and Chad Meister. 2016. Contemporary Philosophical Theology. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Wainwright, William. 1987. “God’s Body”. In The Concept of God, edited by Thomas V. Morris, 72–87. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
—. 2010. “Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence”. In The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Philosophical Theology, edited by Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister, 46–65. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Ward, Keith. 2007. Divine Action: Examining God’s Role in an Open and Emergent Universe. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.
Wildman, Wesley. 2009. Science and Religious Anthropology: A Spiritually Evocative Naturalist Interpretation of Human Life. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
