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God and Evil 1

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The Speaking Lions   May 13th, 2023

Description

Philosophical discussion of the problem of evil usually takes this form: how can there be a good God when there is so much evil in the world? The discussion proceeds along certain now conventional lines, making assumptions about God, good and evil that are rarely challenged. This video describes those assumptions, but not for the purpose of contributing to the standard debate. Instead the aim -- in a series of videos of which this is the first -- is to subject the assumptions to increasingly searching criticism and to find a different understanding of God, good and evil.


If you are interested here is some further reading:


The papers by John Mackie, Alvin Plantinga and John Hick (in William Rowe ed. 'God and the Problem of Evil', Blackwell) make a good introduction to the conventional problem of evil. So too does chapter 6 of Richard Swinburne's 'Is There a God?' (Oxford University Press).


John Hick's 'Evil and the God of Love' (Palgrave Macmillan) is a readable book-length introduction to the problem as a whole.


Since I mention it in the video, my own book is 'A Frightening Love: Rethinking the Problem of Evil' (Palgrave Macmillan). This takes a very different approach to the problem and may be much harder to follow at this stage.