Are God and Christians Evil
A Critique of David Lewis’s “Divine Evil”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21580579 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dennis Lee Sansom (0000-0001-6195-3401, corresponding author), Philosophy Documentation Center |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 131-156 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy and Theology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0890-2461 • E-ISSN: 2153-828X |
| Publisher | Philosophy Documentation Center (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5840/philtheol2025826185 |
| OpenAlex | W7124577800 |
| Language | EN |
I show that David Lewis’s argument in “Divine Evil” has logical problems and also misrepresents Christianity. He offers a “straw figure” argument and with it commits an ad hominem against Christian people. In “Divine Evil” he fails to acknowledge that in the long and serious intellectual tradition of Christianity, his view of God is unrecognizable. In this tradition, evil is the deprivation of being and is parasitic on the goodness of being. God overcomes it through God’s redemptive actions and, thus, it’s impossible for God to do evil and philosophically irresponsible to say the Christian view of God is evil
Christian theology · Existence of God · Moral evil · Political ponerology · Problem of Evil · Theism · Karl Barth and Christian Theology · Theology and Philosophy of Evil · War, Ethics, and Justification
| Highly cited | No |
|---|