Problem of Evil

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course is not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who want to think honestly about suffering and the damage that human beings do to one another. No one has to be religious to be troubled by “the ethical irrationality of the world,” and we will examine the accounts offered by Camus, Freud, and Girard. Suffering and injustice can, however, be doubling troubling for persons of faith. The theological “problem of evil” finds its place in two different constellations of concern: (1) It figures among the rationalists’ objections to theism insofar as atheists argue that pain, deprivation, and wickedness constitute definitive evidence of the falsity of belief in a benevolent, omnipotent deity. (2) However, the problem of evil also figures within the on-going life of the Christian community to perpetually reawaken questions about the adequacy of our conception of God, the coherence of our thematization(s) of God’s relationship to history, and the meaning of redemption. Augustine and Leibnitz provide two of the dominant Christian responses. There are no fully satisfying answers, but the authors hold out hope.