An engagement with Marilyn McCord Adams's Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God

Abstract

I may have agreed to review this work under false pretenses. In a book I wrote called The Domestication of Transcendence, and elsewhere, I raised two sorts of objections to many of the contemporary discussions of the problem of evil among Anglo-American philosophers of religion. First, they often defend an abstract philosophical theism which I think has quite different implications from Christianity, or for that matter from Judaism or Islam or any other major world religion. So, as a Christian theologian, I find myself doubting that their detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments they consider is really worth the trouble, given that the results may not have much to do with what religious folk actually believe.