Atheism in Five Minutes - Teemu Taira
51. How Do Atheists Deal with the Problem of Evil?
Atheism in Five Minutes - Teemu Taira
Sami Pihlström [+]
University of Helsinki
Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published widely on pragmatism, realism, ethics, metaphysics, transcendental philosophy, and philosophy of religion. His recent books include Kantian
Antitheodicy (with Sari Kivistö, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Death and Finitude (Lexington, 2016), Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy (Helsinki University Press, 2020), and Why Solipsism Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Description
The reality of evil is, according to many atheists, one of the strongest reasons for rejecting any theistic belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. The chapter discusses the argument from evil in its atheistic employment, while also drawing attention to the opposition between theodicism and antitheodicism, which can be argued to cut across the one between theism and atheism.