Book Review
Dicey Theodicy
The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God
by D. Z. Phillips
Fortress Press, 2005
(280 pages, $20.00, paperback)
This ambitious, often insightful book by D. Z. Phillips, incumbent of the Danforth Chair in Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University in California, means to reshape the current debate about evil among major philosophers of the Anglo-American tradition (also known as “Analytic Philosophy”), to which, for decades, Phillips has been a major contributor.
A Responsible God
There are two parts to the case that Phillips lays before us. In the first half of the book, he shows why he thinks the assumption that Christian thinkers can exonerate God from any responsibility for the existence of evil and show that human affairs turn out well enough in the end, is untenable.
Attempts to construct arguments to this effect abound in Christian theology and philosophy, going back at least as far as Augustine’s City of God. They aim to produce a “theodicy,” a term coined in 1710 by the philosopher Leibniz, meaning a justification of God.
Phillips is not concerned with the likes of Augustine or Leibniz, but with the current laborers in that philosophical vineyard, such as John Hick, Alvin Plantinga, and Stephen Davis. But the problem is the old one: to show how the existence of evil is compatible with the omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence of God.
Many of the traditional answers have become part of every Christian’s stock of ideas, and sophisticated versions are still defended today by the philosophers of whom Phillips is critical. God is said to permit evil for the sake of developing our character, or because he so much values human freedom as to tolerate the existence of evil choices that free agents are liable to make, or because freedom gives us opportunities to act charitably toward one another, or because suffering makes possible learning and patience.
There is also the argument that, if we can put aside our natural fears and egotism, we will find that there is much less evil in the world than we formerly supposed. And, to mention one final familiar account, it is sometimes argued that the afterlife will more than compensate even the most abject sufferer for all the pain and disappointment of his present existence. Christians may, of course, hold several of these views or all at once.
An Insufficient God
Phillips’s attack on these theodicies is for that reason one of the most startling chapters of this unconventional book. In a chapter called “God’s Morally Insufficient Reasons,” Phillips argues that none of these traditional claims is logically tenable, if they are even intelligible. He suspects this mainstream tradition of being mistaken both about God and about his creation.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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