The Book of Job treats of the Problem of Evil. It is divided into two documents: (1) the framework story, that is, the Prologue and the Epilogue (Job 1:1–2:13; 42:7–17); and (2) the speeches by Job, his friends, and God. In the framework story, Job is presented as a just man who serves God in good times and bad (Job 1:21; 2:10). In the speeches, God is accused by Job of ‘destroying the hope of man’ (Job 14:19). God replies with an ad hominem argument: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?’ (Job 38:4). If God argues that it is unfair for humans to judge God, Job argues that it is unfair for God to judge humans.

Using Moses Maimonides’ theodicy to respond to contemporary formulations of the problem of evil initially seems unpromising. Maimonides is committed to claims that make the task harder rather than easier. Chief among them is his belief that all suffering is deserved by the sufferer. But Maimonides is often misinterpreted: he does not hold that innocent people are never subject to bodily harm, but that it is possible to achieve a kind of ‘psychic immunity’ from suffering via intellectual enlightenment, and that failure to do so is blameworthy. I argue that while the Maimonidean psychic immunity theodicy has some attractive features, it struggles to explain ‘inculpably incomprehensible’ suffering: that of infants and people with serious cognitive disabilities. I propose two responses: defending Maimonides’ intellectual elitism using work on moral status from Singer and McMahan; and defending a more limited version of the theodicy grounded on ‘sceptical’ readings of Maimonides that emphasize the limitations of human knowledge. I conclude that the second is more promising, and that the limits of Maimonides’ theodicy point to more general limits on theodicies that insist on what I call ‘first-personal adequacy’ – the requirement that a theodicy provide a satisfying explanation of suffering to sufferers themselves.

Muslim philosophers commonly endorse a version of the so-called ‘privation theory of evil’ (PTE), according to which all essential evils consist in the non-existence of an entity or privation of a deserved perfection. In this article, I first provide a short sketch of PTE based on clarification of its main conceptual components. Then I examine the main reasons for the truth of PTE offered by Muslim philosophers and show that none of them is sufficiently plausible. Finally, I investigate the most significant objections against PTE and criticize the proposed responses.

This article concerns the problem of eternal hell in Islam as an aporetic problem of evil with a focus on Aijaz's description of the Islamic soteriology. I contest his description of Islamic culpability and his claim that all non-Muslims are regarded as kâfir and consigned to eternal hell. First, I aim to illustrate the pitfalls in his line of argumentation such as crude generalizations and selective reading of the Islamic sources, which seem to render his argument a strawman fallacy. I offer a more accurate analysis of the Islamic view, by arguing that only a limited group of people who fight against truth through evil actions are considered as kâfir. Second, building on my analysis of the notion of kâfir, I address the question whether God's perfect love and wisdom are compatible with limited salvific exclusivism. Thus, I aim to elaborate on the rationale behind the prescription of eternal punishment for the kâfir in the Quran in the rest of the article, by arguing that the kâfir is incapable of genuine repentance due to his character formed by his free choices. This, in turn, makes it impossible to achieve retributive justice through a finite punishment concerning the kâfir's evil actions.

This article outlines and defends an ‘Integral Advaitic’ theodicy that takes its bearings from the thought of three modern Indian mystics: Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo. Their Integral Advaitic theodicy has two key dimensions: a doctrine of spiritual evolution and a panentheistic metaphysics. God has created this world as an arena for our moral and spiritual evolution in which evil and suffering are as necessary as good. The doctrine of spiritual evolution presupposes karma, rebirth, and universal salvation. The doctrines of karma and rebirth shift moral responsibility for evil from God to His creatures by explaining all instances of evil and suffering as the karmic consequence of their own past deeds, either in this life or in a previous life. The doctrine of universal salvation also has important theodical implications: the various finite evils of this life are outweighed by the infinite good of salvation that awaits us all. After outlining this Integral Advaitic theodicy, I address some of the main objections to it and then argue that it has a number of comparative advantages over John Hick's well-known ‘soul-making’ theodicy.

Traditionally, the problem of evil, in its various formulations, has been one of the strongest objections against perfect being theism. In the voluminous literature on this problem, the motif of evil has usually been discussed with respect to human flourishing. In recent decades more focused attention has been paid to animal suffering and the philosophical problems that such suffering poses for perfect being theists. However, this growing body of literature, in Anglo-American philosophical milieus, is largely aimed at sketching a specifically Christian or Christianity-inflected theodicy that would reconcile animal suffering with the existence of an omni-God. In contrast, there are few, if any, systematic attempts to put forth a Hindu theodicy that aims to offer morally justifiable reasons that God has for allowing animal suffering. In this article, we address this scholarly lacuna by illustrating how a Hindu perfect being theist might respond to the problem of animal suffering.

The fluctuating maximal God thesis, developed by Jeffrey et al., offers a conception of God that removes the characteristic of divine immutability, allowing the degrees of God's great-making properties to change over time. This god-concept provides a substantial advantage over the ‘static’ maximal God thesis proposed by Yujin Nagasawa if it can adequately sidestep what I call ‘the problem of inconsistent evil’. This problem questions how a static god can be compatible with the inconsistent dispersion of evil in the world. It is founded on the observation that evil is distributed neither equally nor fairly across time, space, and individuals. I distinguish between temporally inconsistent, spatially inconsistent, and interpersonally inconsistent evil and argue that the fluctuating maximal God thesis can account for all types of inconsistent evil if God fluctuates not only through time but also through space.

The article aims to show that, if S5 is the logic of metaphysical necessity, then no state of affairs in any possible world constitutes any non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. There might well be states of affairs in some worlds describing extraordinary goods and extraordinary evils, but it is false that these states of affairs constitute any (non-trivial) evidence for or against the existence of God. The epistemological and metaphysical consequences for philosophical theology of assuming that S4 or Kσρ is the logic of metaphysical necessity are equally untenable. S4 guarantees that God does not exist if there is the slightest evidence against the existence of God. And Kσρ guarantees that God might survive the loss or acquisition of any essential property at all.