2025.07.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
James Sterba and Richard Swinburne, Could A Good God Permit So Much Suffering? A Debate, Oxford University Press, 2024, 143pp., $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192848543.
Reviewed by Samuel Lebens, University of Haifa
As J. L. Mackie (1955, 200) formulated the so-called logical problem of evil:
God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must and cannot consistently adhere to all three.
In response to this challenge, Alvin Plantinga (1974) argued that it might not be feasible—given the nature of free will, and its relationship with moral facts—for God to create a world containing moral good without it also containing some moral evil. As James Sterba and Richard Swinburne…
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