Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T23:54:00.550Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Evil and the God of Abraham, Anselm, and Murphy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2017

PAUL DRAPER
PAUL DRAPER*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, 100 N. University St., West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA
*
e-mail: pdraper@purdue.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Mark Murphy's attempt to solve the problem of evil appeals to the hypothesis, which I call ‘Murphy's hypothesis’, that an Anselmian God only has justifying reasons and not requiring reasons to promote the well-being of Her sentient creatures. Given this hypothesis, the distribution of benefits and harms that we observe in the world is not unexpected on Anselmian theism. I argue that Murphy fails to solve the problem of evil for two reasons. First, he incorrectly equates the probability of the distribution of benefits and harms given theism with the probability of that distribution given theism conjoined with Murphy's hypothesis. Second, he fails to solve the evidential problem of immorality for Christian Anselmian theists and in fact his views make that problem significantly worse.

Type
Book Symposium
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 564 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bernstein, Mark (1998) ‘Well-being’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 35, 39–55.Google Scholar
Murphy, Mark (2017) God's Own Ethics: Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument from Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sober, Elliott & Wilson, David Sloan (1998) Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Swinburne, Richard (2004) The Existence of God, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press).Google Scholar