What is the problem of evil? Start by marking “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God” as Want to Read: Error rating book. ), J.L. It is logically possible that a world with evils in the amounts and of the kinds found in this world is the best that He could do, Plantinga argues, given His aim of getting some moral goodness in the world. The book is a philosophical treatment of the problem of evil, especially in Christianity. The judgment that participation in e constitutes prima facie reason to believe that p’s life is ruined, stands and remains a daunting measure of e’s horror. Borrowing Chisholm’s contrast between balancing off (which occurs when the opposing values of mutually exclusive parts of a whole partially or totally cancel each other out) and defeat (which cannot occur by the mere addition to the whole of a new part of opposing value, but involves some organic unity among the values of parts and wholes, as when the positive aesthetic value of a whole painting defeats the ugliness of a small color patch) Roderick Chisholm, The Defeat of Good and Evil, chapter 3 of this volume, horrendous evils seem prima facie, not only to balance off but to engulf the positive value of a participant’s life. We suffer and are defiled because we straddle a metaphysical gap ourselves. Before that, she was Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University and also taught at UCLA for a number of years. Adams is adamant that the Christian theological tradition (particularly the Trinity and Incarnation) is justified in playing on its own turf, offering rich explanations for why God allows evil and what He has done about it. For it is the nature of persons to look for meaning, both in their lives and in the world. Buy Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion): Written by Marilyn McCord Adams, 2000 Edition, Publisher: Cornell University Press [Paperback] by Marilyn McCord Adams (ISBN: 8601417461471) from Amazon's Book Store. True/False. When confronted by horrendous evil, even the most pious believer may question not only life's worth but also God's power and goodness. When confronted by horrendous evil, even the most pious believer may question not only life's worth but also God's power and goodness. We’d love your help. Building on her previous argument ? Moreover, such general reasons are presented as so powerful as to do away with any need to catalog types of evils one by one, and examine God’s reason for permitting each in particular. Unfortunately, such an exercise fails to give satisfaction. Read reviews and buy Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God - (Cornell Studies in Philosophy Religion) by Marilyn McCord Adams (Paperback) at Target. £29.95 (Hbk). Because intimacy with God so outscales relations (good or bad) with any creatures, integration into the human person’s relationship with God confers significant meaning and positive value even on horrendous suffering. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God S. Sutherland 1. Adams’ proposal is interesting, but ultimately I’m afraid it strays too far from the biblical witness for me to endorse. Such reasonable doubt arises because it is so difficult humanly to conceive how such evils could be overcome. xi+220. I always appreciate Adams' insightfulness as she dissects complex topics. In the spirit of Ivan Karamazov, I am convinced that the depth of horrific evil cannot be accurately estimated without recognizing it to be incommensurate with any package or merely non-transcendent goods and so unable to be balanced off, much less defeated thereby. A distinguished philosopher and a practicing minister, Marilyn McCord Adams has written a highly original work on a fundamental dilemma of Christian thought?how to reconcile faith in God with the evils that afflict human beings. Once again, more explicitly, most people would agree that a person p’s doing or suffering of them constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether p’s life can be, given such participation, a great good to p on the whole. Adams defines "horrendous evils" as "evils that participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could (given their inclusion in it( be a great good to him/her on the whole" (26). ). Stewart Sutherland, "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God" Eleonore Stump, "The Mirror of Evil" Louise Antony, "For the Love of Reason" Part III: Knowledge and Reality. Philosopher and practising minister, Marilyn McCord Adams, explores the fundamental dilemma of Christian thought: how to reconcile faith in God with the evils … Contrary to what Sutherland suggests ( op.cit. I regard these as paradigmatic, because I believe most people would find in the doing or suffering of them prima facie reason to doubt the positive meaning of their lives. Again, the aim of perfect retributive balance confers meaning on evils imposed. Account en lijsten Account Retourzendingen en bestellingen. by Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright, Cornell University Press, 1986, pp. ISBN 0 8014 3611 7. For one way for God to be good to created persons is by relating them appropriately to relevant and great goods. The purchase of such a position is that God really is powerful enough to conquer evil in a final way. Since Mackie and his successors are out to show that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with each other, Mackie, op.cit ., pp. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence", Mind no. A distinguished philosopher and a practicing minister, Marilyn McCord Adams has written a highly original work on a fundamental dilemma of Christian thought--how to reconcile faith in God with the evils that afflict human beings. Relative to human nature, participation in horrendous evils and loving intimacy with God are alike disproportionate: for the former threatens to engulf the good in an individual human life with evil, while the latter guarantees the reverse engulfment of evil by good. Religion-neutral values are no longer the king of the hill when it comes to talking about evil. WHEN Marilyn McCord Adams died in 2017 I read in an obituary by her husband that, “the topic that most gripped her, and most inspired her intellectual work through the rest of her life was the theological problem of evil.”. Here Adams considers an especially thorny kind of evil, what she calls "horrendous evil". The questions raised are certainly relevant: how do believers account for those horrendous evils that have seemingly little or no redeeming value. She was an avowed Christian universalist, believing that ultimately all will receive salvation and restoration in Christ: Ultimately, I’m not satisfied by an account of suffering/evil that says our problem is we’re human. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God: Adams, Marilyn McCord: Amazon.sg: Books. Moreover, there are (ii) reasons we would be cognitively, emotionally, and spiritually equipped to grasp if only we had a larger memory or wider attention span (analogy: I may be able to memorize small town street plans; memorizing the road net-works of the entire country is a task requiring more of the same, in the way that proving Goudel’s theorem is not). But, Christian mysticism might claim, at least from the post-mortem perspective of the beatific vision, such sufferings will be seen for what they were, and retrospectively no one will wish away any intimate encounters with God from his/her life-history in this world. Cf. Mother Theresa of Calcutta seems to construe Matthew 25:31-46 to mean that the poorest and the least are Christ, and that their sufferings are Christ’s Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York 1960, pp.72-75). Some generic and global approaches insinuate that Divine permission of evils has motivating reasons of this sort. Yet, the only way unsupplemented global and generic approaches could have to explain the latter, would be by applying their general reasons-why to particular cases of horrendous suffering. They have agreed to debate the issue on the basis of religion-neutral values, and have focused on morals, an approach that--Adams claims--is inadequate for formulating and solving the problem of horrendous evils. To be sure, motivating reasons come in several varieties relative to our conceptual grasp: There are (i) reasons of the sort we can readily understand when we are informed of them (e.g., the mother who permits her child to undergo painful heart surgery because it is the only humanly possible way to save its life). –would constitute a reason compatible with perfect goodness for God’s creating a world with evils in the amounts and of the kinds found in the actual world. Likewise, the good of beatific, face-to-face intimacy with God is simply incommensurate with any merely non-transcendent goods or ills a person might experience. For by contrast with the best of earthly mothers, such Divine intimacy is an incommensurate good and would cancel out for the creature any need to know why. Marilyn McCord Adams: Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James - Empfohlen ab 22 Jahre. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published The two year old heart patient is convinced of its mother’s love, not by her cognitively inaccessible reasons, but by her intimate care and presence through its painful experience. Cf. ii. Keith DeRose - manuscript. Yet, I have signaled my preference for a version of Christianity that insists on both dimensions of Divine goodness, and maintains not only (a) that God will be good enough to created persons to make human life a good bet, but also (b) that each created person will have a life that is a great good to him/her on the whole. ... Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Although our world is riddled with them, the Biblical record punctuated by them, and one of them — viz., the passion of Christ; according to Christian belief, the judicial murder of God by the people of God — is memorialized by the Church on its most solemn holiday (Good Friday) and in its central sacrament (the Eucharist), the problem of horrendous evils is largely skirted by standard treatments for the good reason that they are intractable by them. HORRENDOUS EVILS AND THE GOODNESS OF GOD 301 to reflect ordinary moral intuitions (more to the point, I would add, Christian beliefs), and traces the abiding sense of trouble to the hunch that an omnipotent, omniscient being could have no The Reverend Professor Marilyn McCord Adams (1943— ) is an American philosopher of religion, a theologian and a writer on medieval philosophy. The created person’s experience of the beatific vision together with his/her knowledge that intimate Divine presence stretched back over his/her pre-mortem life and reached down into the depths of his/her worst suffering, would provide retrospective comfort independent of comprehension of the reasons-why akin to the two-year-old’s assurance of its mother’s love. Religion-neutra. Marilyn McCord Adams’s work on the problem of evil offers one of the most creative and sophisticated religious theodicies.1 Adams relies upon specifically Christian resources to explain how God is able to defeat horrendous evils within the context of each individual’s life by integrating the participant’s experience of suffering into their Marilyn McCord Adams’s work on the problem of evil offers one of the most creative and sophisticated religious theodicies.1 Adams relies upon specifically Christian resources to explain how God is able to defeat horrendous evils within the context of each individual’s life by integrating the participant’s experience of suffering into their When confronted by horrendous evil, even the most pious believer may question not only life's worth but also God's power and goodness. And a major consideration in determining whether an individual’s life is/has been a great good to him/her on the whole, is invariably and appropriately how it has seemed to him/her. ~ Afterall, Over the past thirty years, analytic philosophers of religion have defined the problem of evil in terms of the prima facie difficulty in consistently maintaining, (1) God exists, and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and She thinks that although Alvin Plantinga has solved the 'abstract' logical problem of evil, she does not think that the 'concrete' problem of evil can likewise be given the same solution because of what she calls horrendous evils. For too long philosophy of religion has tried to appeal to "all reasonable people" when it comes to dealing with the problem of evil. After a penetrating discussion of purity and defilement on Christianity and Judaism (see 86ff), Adams argues that in Christ, God “takes the… approach of joining us in our defilement [that is, our suffering of horrendous, individual evils]” (98). But philosophical and religious theories differ importantly on what valuables they admit into their ontology. My contention has been that it is not only legitimate, but, given horrendous evils, necessary for Christians to dip into their richer store of valuables to exhibit the consistency of (1) and (2). It is enough to show how God can be good enough to created persons despite their participation in horrors–by defeating them within the context of the individual’s life and by giving that individual a life that is a great good to him/her on the whole. Engulfing personal horrors within the context of the participant’s life would vouchsafe to that individual a life that was a great good to him/her on the whole. The question they are to answer about each world is whether they would willingly enter it as a human being, from behind a veil of ignorance as to which position they would occupy. 254 (1955); reprinted in Nelson Pike, God and Evil, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964, pp. Shop now. A profound philosophical text on the subject of evil, though not for the novice philosopher or theologian. Keith DeRose - manuscript. Divine respect for and commitment to created personhood would drive God to make all those sufferings which threaten to destroy the positive meaning of a person’s life meaningful through positive defeat. Cart All. 46-47. they can accomplish their aim only if they circumscribe the extension of ‘evil’ as their religious opponents do. 127-35. True/False. Finally, (iii) there are reasons that we are cognitively, emotionally, and/or spiritually too immature to fathom (the way a two-year old child is incapable of understanding its mother’s reasons for permitting the surgery). (Taschenbuch) - bei eBook.de What happened to Tolstoy? Hello Select your address All Hello, Sign in. Here are two claims that seem to be at odds. First, she claims that the problem of evil is that we are human. The ground rules accepted for the discussion have usually led philosophers to avert their gaze from the worst--horrendous--evils and their devastating impact on human lives. For example, philosophers have alleged that the desire to make a world with one of the following properties — the best of all possible worlds, Following Leibniz, Pike draws on this feature as part of what I have called his Epistemic Defense (Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Philosophers, pp. Solutions to the problem of evil have thus been sought in the form of counter-examples to this latter claim, i.e., logically possible reasons why that would excuse even an omnipotent, omniscient God! If redirected, philosophical reflection on evil can, Adams's book demonstrates, provide a valuable approach not only to theories of God and evil but also to pastoral care. Potential Companions or primers to this reading: THE MORAL LANDSCAPE by Sam Harris, POWER OF MYTH and THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES by Joseph Campbell, INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION by Bruce Davies (specifically the chapters covering evil and arguments for the existence of god)and various writings by Thomas Merton primarily found in the THOMAS MERTON READER. Marilyn McCord Adams - 1987 - Faith and Philosophy 4 (4):486-505. When confronted by horrendous evil, even the most pious believer may question not only life's worth but also God's power and goodness. I would go one step further: assuming the pragmatic and/or moral (I would prefer to say, broadly speaking, religious) importance of believing that (one’s own) human life is worth living, the ability of Christianity to exhibit how this could be so despite human vulnerability to horrendous evil, constitutes a pragmatic/moral/religious consideration in its favor, relative to value schemes that do not. Likewise, I suggest, to exhibit the logical compossibility of both dimensions of Divine goodness with horrendous suffering, it is not necessary to find logically possible reasons why God might permit them. Duns Scotus on the Goodness of God. In my judgment, such an approach is hopeless. Just as philosophers may or may not find the existence of God plausible, so they may be variously attracted or repelled by Christian values of grace and redemptive sacrifice. Horrendous evils can be overcome only by the goodness of God. As a Christian philosopher, I want to focus in this paper on the problem for the truth of Christianity raised by what I shall call horrendous evils. How could God do it? Nevertheless, that very horrendous proportion, by which they threaten to rob a person’s life of positive meaning, cries out not only to be engulfed, but to be made meaningful through positive and decisive defeat. 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