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    [fullTitle] => Personalistic Theism, Divine Embodiment, and a Problem of Evil
    [abstract] => 
One version of the problem of evil concludes that personalistic forms of theism should be rejected since the acts that one would expect a God with person-like qualities to perform, notably acts that would prevent egregious evils, do not occur. Given the evils that exist in the world, it is argued, if God exists as a person or like a person, God’s record of action is akin to that of a negligent parent. One way of responding to this “argument from neglect” is to maintain that there is a good reason for the apparent neglect—namely, that God could not intervene even once with respect to suffering (the “not-even-once principle”) without thereby incurring the responsibility of doing so on every occasion, which would be deleterious. So God never responds to evil. It is argued in this paper that a profoundly integrated, personalistic model of God and the God-world relation—one that is reflected in a soul-body analogy—provides a way of addressing the argument from neglect without affirming the not-even-once principle.
 

    [authors] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [givenName] => Chad
                    [affiliation] => 
                )

        )

    [keywords] => Array
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        )

    [doi] => 10.24204/ejpr.v11i2.2974
    [datePublished] => 2019-06-20
    [pdf] => https://www.philosophy-of-religion.eu/menuscript/index.php/ejpr/article/view/2974/version/632/2330
)
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Personalistic Theism, Divine Embodiment, and a Problem of Evil

Chad

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v11i2.2974

Abstract

One version of the problem of evil concludes that personalistic forms of theism should be rejected since the acts that one would expect a God with person-like qualities to perform, notably acts that would prevent egregious evils, do not occur. Given the evils that exist in the world, it is argued, if God exists as a person or like a person, God’s record of action is akin to that of a negligent parent. One way of responding to this “argument from neglect” is to maintain that there is a good reason for the apparent neglect—namely, that God could not intervene even once with respect to suffering (the “not-even-once principle”) without thereby incurring the responsibility of doing so on every occasion, which would be deleterious. So God never responds to evil. It is argued in this paper that a profoundly integrated, personalistic model of God and the God-world relation—one that is reflected in a soul-body analogy—provides a way of addressing the argument from neglect without affirming the not-even-once principle.

 

Keywords:

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