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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
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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 

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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
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