Download or read book Nonbelief Evil written by Theodore M. Drange and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can God's nonexistence be established? According to author Theodore M. Drange, it all depends on what is meant by "God". This book expands the frontiers of philosophy by exploring atheism, evil, and the nonexistence of God. Included are examinations of free-will, the possibility of an afterlife, arguments by theists, and more.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil written by Chad Meister and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers a state-of-the-art contribution by providing critical analyses of and creative insights on the problem of evil.
Download or read book The Improbability of God written by Michael Martin and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the authors bring together for the first time an extensive collection of papers by many distinguished scholars who present a variety of arguments that the existence of God is improbable.
Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief written by Tom Flynn and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 911 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Successor to the highly acclaimed Encyclopedia of Unbelief (1985), edited by the late Gordon Stein, the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief is a comprehensive reference work on the history, beliefs, and thinking of America''s fastest growing minority: those who live without religion. All-new articles by the field''s foremost scholars describe and explain every aspect of atheism, agnosticism, secular humanism, secularism, and religious skepticism. Topics include morality without religion, unbelief in the historicity of Jesus, critiques of intelligent design theory, unbelief and sexual values, and summaries of the state of unbelief around the world.In addition to covering developments since the publication of the original edition, the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief includes a larger number of biographical entries and much-expanded coverage of the linkages between unbelief and social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, including the labor movement, woman suffrage, anarchism, sex radicalism, and second-wave feminism.More than 130 respected scholars and activists worldwide served on the editorial board and over 100 authoritative contributors have written in excess of 500 entries. The distinguished advisors and contributors--philosophers, scientists, scholars, and Nobel Prize laureates--include Joe Barnhart, David Berman, Sir Hermann Bondi, Vern L. Bullough, Daniel Dennett, Taner Edis, the late Paul Edwards, Antony Flew, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Peter Hare, Van Harvey, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Susan Jacoby, Paul Kurtz, Gerd Lüdemann, Michael Martin, Kai Nielsen, Robert M. Price, Peter Singer, Victor Stenger, Ibn Warraq, George A. Wells, David Tribe, Sherwin Wine, and many others. With a foreword by evolutionary biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins, this unparalleled reference work provides comprehensive knowledge about unbelief in its many varieties and manifestations.
Download or read book The Evidential Argument from Evil written by William L. Rowe and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-17 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is evil evidence against the existence of God? A collection of essays by philosophers, theologians, and other scholars. Even if God and evil are compatible, it remains hotly contested whether evil renders belief in God unreasonable. The Evidential Argument from Evil presents five classic statements on this issue by eminent philosophers and theologians, and places them in dialogue with eleven original essays reflecting new thinking by these and other scholars. The volume focuses on two versions of the argument. The first affirms that there is no reason for God to permit either certain specific horrors or the variety and profusion of undeserved suffering. The second asserts that pleasure and pain, given their biological role, are better explained by hypotheses other than theism. Contributors include William P. Alston, Paul Draper, Richard M. Gale, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Alvin Plantinga, William L. Rowe, Bruce Russell, Eleonore Stump, Richard G. Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, and Stephen John Wykstra.
Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Download or read book Divine Hiddenness written by Daniel Howard-Snyder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness.
Download or read book Divine Hiddenness written by Veronika Weidner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element provides an introduction to the hiddenness argument, as presented by John Schellenberg, and its up-to-date discussion in a comprehensible way. It concludes with a brief assessment of where things stand, from the author's point of view, and why divine hiddenness should not reduce a reflective theist's confidence in theism.
Download or read book The Free System Corollary written by Peter J. Morgan and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone has experienced pain. No one is immune from loss and suffering. With all of the evil in this world, how can anyone rationally believe in a good and loving God? People who believe in God experience intense evil, yet they still retain their faith, claiming that God helps them in times of need. Still others claim that this same evil is proof that God does not exist; that if God were real, he would limit the suffering. If you have ever thought that it seems that things should be a certain way, that you are inclined toward believing, or not believing, in God because of the existence of evil, you are part of the conversation of the abductive problem of evil. This book does more than just explore what modern philosophers on both sides of the aisle have claimed about God and evil. It also illuminates an intricate world that is crafted for people having free will, for people who make moral choices. For it is within the realm of this intricate world that we may find the answers we seek.
Download or read book The Hiddenness Argument written by J. L. Schellenberg and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many places and times, and for many people, God's existence has been rather less than a clear fact. According to the hiddenness argument, this is actually a reason to suppose that it is not a fact at all. The hiddenness argument is a new argument for atheism that has come to prominence in philosophy over the past two decades. J. L. Schellenberg first developed the argument in 1993, and this book offers a short and vigorous statement of its central claims and ideas. Logically sharp but so clear that anyone can understand, the book addresses little-discussed issues such as why it took so long for hiddenness reasoning to emerge in philosophy, and how the hiddenness problem is distinct from the problem of evil. It concludes with the fascinating thought that retiring the last of the personal gods might leave us nearer the beginning of religion than the end. Though an atheist, Schellenberg writes sensitively and with a nuanced insider's grasp of the religious life. Pertinent aspects of his experience as a believer and as a nonbeliever, and of his own engagement with hiddenness issues, are included. Set in this personal context, and against an authoritative background on relevant logical, conceptual, and historical matters, The Hiddenness Argument's careful but provocative reasoning makes crystal clear just what this new argument is and why it matters.
Download or read book The Problem of Evil written by Daniel Speak and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most forceful philosophical objections to belief in God arise from the existence of evil. Bad things happen in the world and it is not clear how this is compatible with the existence of an all-powerful and perfectly loving being. Unsurprisingly then, philosophers have formulated powerful arguments for atheism based on the existence of apparently unjustified suffering. These arguments give expression to what we call the problem of evil. This volume is an engaging introduction to the philosophical problem of evil. Daniel Speak provides a clear overview of the main lines of reasoning in this debate and argues for the defensibility of theistic belief in the face of evil. He fleshes out the distinction between theodicy and defense and guides the reader through the logical, evidential, and hiddenness versions of the problem. In an accessible and beautifully written account, Speak describes the central issues surrounding the problem of evil in a way that clarifies both the complex reasoning and specialised terminology of the topic. The Problem of Evil is an ideal introduction to contemporary debates over one of the most gripping perennial questions. Read either on its own or alongside the primary materials it deftly covers, students and scholars will find this volume a terrific resource for understanding the challenges to religious belief raised by evil.
Download or read book Evil and a Selection of its Theological Problems written by Benjamin Arbour and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent formulations of the inductive, continual problem of evil require us to consider new responses to the charge that there is something irrational about believing in God, given the type and amount of evil in the world. Furthermore, fresh approaches to the problem of evil offer suggestive ways to enter a new line of inquiry, in regards to both theistic defences against various articulations of the problem of evil and also theodicy. Finally, developments in contemporary theology, especially analytic philosophical theology, likewise require new treatments of the problem of evil. This volume, on the problem on evil, presents a series of essays that incorporate responses to these developments. The articles fall into three broad sections. The first critiques and examines the analytic, inductive problem of evil on the basis of its modal underpinnings, the discourse of possible worlds, and issues related to hiddenness and vagueness. The second part presents a narrative response to the problem of evil. Its approaches attempt to show the way in which peculiar features of narrative such as dramatic irony, verisimilitude, and distinctions between person-type propositions offer fresh ways to encapsulate our feelings about evil and our response to the theological problems raised by encounters with evil. Such existential concerns are valuable for our thinking about these matters. The third section relates the problem of evil to developments in contemporary analytic theology, such as open theism, idealism and the felix culpa theodicy.
Download or read book The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil written by Justin P. McBrayer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil presents a collection of original essays providing both overview and insight, clarifying and evaluating the philosophical and theological “problem of evil” in its various contexts and manifestations. Features all original essays that explore the various forms of the problems of evil, offering theistic responses that attempt to explain evil as well as discussion of the challenges facing such explanations Includes section introductions with a historical essay that traces the developments of the issues explored Acknowledges the fact that there are many problems of evil, some of which apply only to those who believe in concepts such as hell and some of which apply to non-theists Represents views from the various religious traditions, including Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
Download or read book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason written by J. L. Schellenberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this clearly written and tightly argued book, J. L. Schellenberg addresses a fundamental yet neglected religious problem. If there is a God, he asks, why is his existence not more obvious? Traditionally, theists have claimed that God is hidden in order to account for the fact that the evidence of his existence is as weak as it is. Schellenberg maintains that, given the understanding of God's moral character to which theists are committed, this claim runs into serious difficulty. There are grounds, the author writes, for thinking that the perfectly loving God of theism would not be hidden, that such a God would put the fact of his existence beyond reasonable nonbelief. Since reasonable nonbelief occurs, Schellenberg argues, it follows that there is here an argument of considerable force for atheism. In developing his claim, Schellenberg carefully examines the relevant views of such theists as Pascal, Butler, Kierkegaard, Hick, and others. He clarifies their suggestions concerning Divine hiddenness and shows how they fall short of providing a rebuttal for the argument he presents. That argument, he concludes, poses a serious challenge to theism, to which contemporary theists must seek to respond. The first full-length treatment of its topic, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason will be of interest to anyone who has sought to reach a conclusion as to God's existence, and especially to theologians and philosophers of religion.
Download or read book Why I Became an Atheist written by John W. Loftus and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For about two decades John W. Loftus was a devout evangelical Christian, an ordained minister of the Church of Christ, and an ardent apologist for Christianity. With three degrees--in philosophy, theology, and philosophy of religion--he was adept at using rational argumentation to defend the faith. But over the years, doubts about the credibility of key Christian tenets began to creep into his thinking. By the late 1990s he experienced a full-blown crisis of faith. In this honest appraisal of his journey from believer to atheist, the author carefully explains the experiences and the reasoning process that led him to reject religious belief. The original edition of this book was published in 2006 and reissued in 2008. Since that time, Loftus has received a good deal of critical feedback from Christians and skeptics alike. In this revised and expanded edition, the author addresses criticisms of the original, adds new argumentation and references, and refines his presentation. For every issue he succinctly summarizes the various points of view and provides references for further reading. In conclusion, he describes the implications of life without belief in God, some liberating, some sobering. This frank critique of Christian belief from a former insider will interest freethinkers as well as anyone with doubts about the claims of religion.
Download or read book The God Beyond Belief written by Nick Trakakis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-11-03 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Professor William Rowe’s defense of atheism on the basis of evil assesses the literature that has developed in response to Rowe’s work, closely examining two strategies: mystery – the idea that God may have reasons beyond our comprehension for permitting evil; and theodicy - explanations as to why God allows evil to flourish. The book unearths difficulties in both, concluding that the God of theism must be "beyond belief."
Download or read book The Transmission of Knowledge written by John Greco and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we transmit or distribute knowledge, as distinct from generating or producing it? In this book John Greco examines the interpersonal relations and social structures which enable and inhibit the sharing of knowledge within and across epistemic communities. Drawing on resources from moral theory, the philosophy of language, action theory and the cognitive sciences, he considers the role of interpersonal trust in transmitting knowledge, and argues that sharing knowledge involves a kind of shared agency similar to giving a gift or passing a ball. He also explains why transmitting knowledge is easy in some social contexts, such as those involving friendship or caregiving, but impossible in contexts characterized by suspicion and competition rather than by trust and cooperation. His book explores phenomena that have been undertheorized by traditional epistemology, and throws new light on existing problems in social epistemology and the epistemology of testimony.
