The God Beyond Belief: In Defence of William Rowe'S by Nick Trakakis

By Nick Trakakis

Why might a loving God who's omnipotent and all-knowing create a global like ours that is marred by means of all demeanour of evil, ache and injustice? this query has turn out to be often called ‘the challenge of evil’ and has bothered either traditional folks and expert philosophers and theologians for hundreds of years, with out solution possible in sight.

However, in a sequence of guides from the overdue Nineteen Seventies onwards, Professor William Rowe – one of many best philosophers of faith this day – has recommend a robust case in aid of the view that the horrors littering our planet represent robust proof opposed to the lifestyles of God. during this publication, the 1st prolonged research of Rowe’s safeguard of atheism at the foundation of evil, Nick Trakakis comprehensively assesses the big physique of literature that has built in accordance with Rowe’s paintings, paying specific recognition to 2 recommendations hired via critics: to start with, the entice secret – the concept that God may possibly have purposes for allowing evil that lie past our comprehension; and secondly, the attract theodicies, the place this includes delivering causes as to why God permits evil to abound in his construction (free will theodicies, for instance, argue that God couldn't hinder us from performing wrongly with out even as curbing or removal our loose will). Trakakis finds major problems in either techniques, and concludes that – absent any facts in aid of theism – the God of theism needs to be judged to be "beyond belief".

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Additional resources for The God Beyond Belief: In Defence of William Rowe'S Evidential Argument from Evil

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To dehumanize, as the word implies, is to strip another person of their humanity. 24 26 CHAPTER 2 Dehumanization, then, involves pushing others (normally those powerless to respond or retaliate) outside the boundaries of the human community, redefining them as less-than-human and thus not deserving of the protection and dignity due to members of the human species. 25 Dehumanization, however, may not only involve the removal of the victim’s (and the perpetrator’s26) dignity, but also the eradication of meaning, purpose and value from the victim’s life.

53 The second key assumption made in the present work relates to normative ethics rather than meta-ethics: Arguments from evil, especially Rowe’s evidential argument, can be stated in such a way as to be neutral with respect to the truth of some specific normative ethical theory – for example, consequentialism, egoism, deontology, virtue theory. 1), this view is mistaken. Indeed, I will assume that arguments from evil – or at least Rowe’s evidential argument examined here – can be made consistent with most positions in normative ethics.

This is because, even though pieces of evidence may individually disconfirm a hypothesis, the conjunction of this (negative) evidence may in fact confirm the hypothesis. It is unlikely, however, that such a situation could arise in relation to evidential arguments from evil. For if the evidence of evil E1 disconfirms theism, and some other evidence E2 also disconfirms theism, it is difficult to see how the conjunction of E1 and E 2 could serve to confirm theism. The second point I wish to make is that it is wrong to suppose that any position whatever can be supported by focusing exclusively on some piece of evidence.

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