Can a Darwinian Be a Christian Ruse is a Canadian-British philosopher of biology who has spent his career examining the relationship between evolutionary theory and religion. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (2001) addresses the question directly: does accepting Darwin’s account of life — driven by competition, suffering, extinction, and…Read More
Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017) was an American philosopher and Anglican priest who taught at UCLA, Yale, and Oxford, working on medieval philosophy and the problem of evil. Her central contribution was the concept of “horrendous evils” — sufferings so severe that mere participation…Read More
The Problem of Evil (1985) Stump is Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, where her work spans medieval philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Her essay “The Problem of Evil” (1985) engages critically with the free will defenses of Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne before…Read More
CORNEA and Skeptical Theism Wykstra teaches at Calvin College and developed the CORNEA principle — Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access — in direct response to Rowe. The argument targets Rowe’s key inference: from “we can see no good reason for this suffering” to “there probably is none.” Wykstra argues that…Read More
The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism Rowe taught at Purdue and described himself as a “friendly atheist” — someone who believed the evidential case against theism was compelling while acknowledging that reasonable people disagreed. His 1979 paper shifted the debate from Mackie’s logical problem to the evidential…Read More
Selected Poems Three poems that approach suffering and loss from outside the philosophical tradition. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied” is a direct expression of grief’s irreducibility — suffering that does not yield to comfort, time, or consolation. Tony Harrison’s Long Distance…Read More
God Freedom and Evil Plantinga spent his career at Calvin College and Notre Dame, working at the intersection of modal logic and philosophy of religion. His Free Will Defense, developed most fully in The Nature of Necessity (1974), responds directly to Mackie: it is not within God’s power to create…Read More
Evil and the God of Love Hick was a British philosopher of religion who taught at Cornell, Cambridge, and Birmingham. Evil and the God of Love (1966) distinguished two broad theodicy traditions — the Augustinian, which grounds evil in the fall and the misuse of free will, and the Irenaean,…Read More
Evil and Omnipotence Excerpt Mackie was an Australian philosopher who taught at Oxford. His 1955 paper “Evil and Omnipotence” gave the logical problem of evil its canonical modern formulation: the propositions “God is omnipotent,” “God is wholly good,” and “evil exists” form an inconsistent triad. The paper set the terms…Read More
The Problem of Pain Lewis was a Belfast-born literary scholar who taught medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford for nearly thirty years, and at Cambridge until his death. He converted from atheism to Christianity in his early thirties. The Problem of Pain (1940) was his first systematic attempt to explain…Read More
Studies of Good and Evil — Selections Royce taught philosophy at Harvard for three decades and was the leading American exponent of Absolute Idealism — the view that ultimate reality is a single all-encompassing divine Mind. This position put evil at the center of his philosophical problem: if everything real…Read More
On the Genealogy of Morality — Selections Nietzsche was a German philologist-turned-philosopher who spent his career attacking Christianity, conventional morality, and what he saw as the self-deception at the heart of Western culture. His challenge to theodicy is not the standard one: he does not argue that evil is incompatible…Read More
On Nature — Selections Mill was a utilitarian philosopher and political economist. His essay On Nature approaches the problem of evil from a naturalistic standpoint, making an argument that is simple and devastating: the natural world is characterized by cruelty, indifference, and suffering that no benevolent creator could have intended…Read More
Notes from Underground — Selections Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1849, sentenced to death, led before a firing squad — and reprieved at the last moment, a mock execution ordered by the Tsar. He spent four years in a Siberian labor camp. His major novels are all shaped by this experience:…Read More
Letter to Asa Gray (1860) Darwin trained for the ministry before his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle, and returned with the observations that would eventually become On the Origin of Species (1859). The theory of evolution by natural selection reframed natural suffering in ways no theodicy had anticipated: competition, predation,…Read More
The Sickness Unto Death — Selections Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian who spent his career dismantling Hegel’s confident systematic philosophy in favor of something harder and more personal: the existential situation of the individual standing alone before God. The Sickness Unto Death (1849) diagnoses the human condition as…Read More
The Tragic Emerson was a former Unitarian minister who left the pulpit over matters of conscience and became the central figure of American Transcendentalism. His essay The Tragic (1844) tests his broadly optimistic spiritual philosophy directly: it acknowledges the genuine weight of grief and loss before arguing that the intellect…Read More
Cain: A Mystery — Selections Byron was a Romantic poet whose celebrity, exile, and scandal made him one of the defining figures of his age. His closet drama Cain: A Mystery (1821) draws on the biblical story of Cain and Abel to stage a direct philosophical confrontation with the problem…Read More
The World as Will and Representation — Selections Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) presents a metaphysics of thoroughgoing pessimism: at the root of reality is a blind, irrational, striving Will, and human existence is characterized by suffering, frustration, and unfulfilled desire. For Schopenhauer, the problem of evil…Read More
Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom — Selections Schelling was a central figure of German Idealism who broke with both Kant and Hegel to develop his own system — more speculative, more willing to find darkness at the heart of things. His Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of…Read More
Conjectural Beginning of Human History Kant’s three Critiques transformed the landscape of Western philosophy so thoroughly that virtually every philosopher since has had to position himself in relation to them. Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786) reconstructs the fall philosophically: the transition from instinct to reason was humanity’s liberation and…Read More
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion — Selections Hume was an Edinburgh-born philosopher whose empiricism led him to subject religious belief — theodicy included — to scrutiny that most of his contemporaries found liberating or scandalous. His private views almost certainly extended to disbelief in God, though he was careful never to…Read More
Poem on the Lisbon Disaster Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet — essayist, playwright, historian, and the most combative writer of the French Enlightenment. The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755, which killed between thirty and fifty thousand people on All Saints’ Day as they attended church, struck him…Read More
Theodicy — Selections Leibniz co-invented calculus independently of Newton, pioneered symbolic logic, and built one of the most ambitious metaphysical systems of the early modern period. His Theodicy (1710) — the only book he published in his lifetime — coined the word “theodicy” and defined the problem for modern philosophy:…Read More
Historical and Critical Dictionary — Selections Bayle was a French Calvinist who spent most of his life in exile in Rotterdam, persecuted for his faith — his brother died in a French prison because of Pierre’s religious activities. His Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) was among the most widely read…Read More
Treatise on Nature and Grace — Selections Malebranche was a French Oratorian priest and devoted follower of Descartes who developed occasionalism — the view that God is the sole direct cause of all events in the world, with created things serving merely as occasions for divine action. This position created…Read More
Paradise Lost — Selections Milton was a committed Puritan who served in Oliver Cromwell’s government, going blind in his forties and dictating Paradise Lost (1667) to his daughters. The poem retells the story of Satan’s rebellion, Adam and Eve’s temptation, and the loss of Eden, with the stated purpose of…Read More
The Flood Narrative The Bible contains not one but two fall stories, and this is the second. Genesis 3 locates the origin of evil inside humanity — a moral act of disobedience. Genesis 6 tells a completely different story. The “sons of God” — supernatural beings — cross the boundary…Read More
The Fall of Adam and Eve Genesis 3 narrates the fall of Adam and Eve: the serpent’s temptation, the eating of the forbidden fruit, and the consequences that follow — labor, pain, conflict between human beings, and death. Every theodicy in the Western tradition either builds on this story or…Read More
Psalm 10 The Psalms are the ancient prayer book of Israel — poems and songs covering the full range of human experience before God. Psalm 10 is a lament psalm, one of a distinct group that give voice to suffering, divine silence, and the apparent triumph of the wicked. The…Read More
Moralia in Job — Selections Gregory the Great served as pope from 590 to 604, reorganized the Western Church during a period of plague and political collapse, and is recognized as a Doctor of the Church. His Moralia in Job — a commentary on Job running to thirty-five books —…Read More
Book of Job — Selections The Book of Job, likely composed between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE, presents the story of a righteous man stripped of everything — wealth, family, health — who then demands an explanation from God. His friends insist the suffering must be deserved; Job insists…Read More
On Infants’ Early Deaths Gregory of Nyssa, younger brother of Basil the Great and the third of the Cappadocian Fathers, developed a richly Platonic Christian theology centered on the soul’s endless ascent toward God — a process he called epektasis, perpetual stretching forward into the divine. His treatise On Infants’…Read More
Homilies on Providence Basil was Bishop of Caesarea, monastic reformer, and one of the three Cappadocian Fathers who shaped the theology of the Eastern Church in the fourth century. He is recognized as a Doctor of the Church in both East and West. Basil argued that evil has no independent…Read More
On the Incarnation — Selections Athanasius served as Bishop of Alexandria and spent much of his career in exile for defending Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism — earning the epithet Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world. His early work On the Incarnation presents a systematic account of the fall and…Read More
Book of the Watchers The Book of the Watchers is the oldest section of 1 Enoch, a Jewish apocalyptic text from roughly the third to second centuries BCE, preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It takes Genesis 6 and fills in what that spare passage leaves out: the fallen angels,…Read More
Against Heresies — Selections Irenaeus served as Bishop of Lyon in the second century and was the chief theological defender of orthodox Christianity against Gnosticism. His major work, Against Heresies, dismantled Gnostic cosmologies that attributed creation to an ignorant or malevolent demiurge. On the problem of evil, Irenaeus developed what…Read More