theodicy links

I recently had the honor of looking over a chapter on theodicy written by my friend Dr. Bill Keezer (you know him for the rightie memes he sends my way).  Bill is a trained scientist, but he's also a somewhat unorthodox Lutheran—religious, but not in the most traditional way.  Anyway, Bill has been spending his time on several book projects (he's further along on them than I am on mine), and the topic of theodicy came up some time ago.  Would I be willing to look over a chapter Bill had written on the topic?  I said yes, of course.

Theodicy is the answer to the question If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, how can evil exist?  The question has dogged Christian minds over the centuries, with very little headway having been made.  While some very clever theodicies (or "defenses," i.e., scaled-down versions of theodicies*) have been proposed, especially over the past century, none is universally accepted.  Perhaps the closest to universal acceptance is Alvin Plantinga's so-called "free-will defense," which simply denies there's any logical contradiction between God's nature and the existence of evil.  Plantinga or no, plenty of people have tried their hands at facing this problem, which requires one to think about the nature of God, the nature of reality, and the nature of evil.  

So my friend Bill finds himself in a long line of people who have faced the aporia.  As can be said of Zen koans, formulating a theodicy might be less about arriving at a clear logical conclusion and more about developing one's own character through the experience of wrestling with the problem.

All of this reminded me that I myself have written several posts on this blog about theodicy, back when I was in more of a religious-writing phase.  Click this link and scroll downward through the posts you see.  Possibly the best of the bunch is the first:  "On Theodicy."

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*For you persnickety types, a defense is different from a theodicy in that a theodicy attempts to justify God, somehow, in the face of the existence of evil, whereas a defense merely attempts to show that the apparent aporia is not, in fact, aporetic, i.e., God's nature and the existence of evil are not logically incompatible.