Augustinian accounts of ‘primal sin’ face a dilemma: either ‘Lucifer’s’ fall is arbitrary, or it results from God creating a flawed creature. Augustine and others hold that an omnipotent God faces unavoidable limits in creating creatures. In particular, creatures cannot enjoy God’s own first-person awareness of God’s goods, but must experience them second-personally. The resulting qualitative phenomenological difference between (1) the first-person awareness Lucifer had of the goods of his own being, and (2) his second-person awareness of the goods of God means that self-regarding goods would ‘light up’ for Lucifer very differently than other-regarding goods. This opens a psychologically resonant and metaphysically potent account of how the pre-Fall Lucifer could have faced a genuine value conflict – a conflict for which God is not culpable – in which Lucifer might come to love the goods presented first-personally (his own) over the goods presented second-personally (God’s).

There is this view propounded by some theorists which claims that some conceptions of the nature of time are incompatible with the Christian position on the defeat of evil. The aim of this article is twofold. First, to clarify exactly which thesis about time’s nature is taken to be problematic for the defeat of evil. And second, to show that scriptural support for understanding the defeat of evil as requiring that evil not be in the range of the existential quantifier, something implicitly contended by those who put forward this problem, is weak and that these passages can be read in plausible ways which are affirmable by those who endorse the ‘problematic’ thesis.

Can the best arguments for a privation theory of evil be parodied, with equal plausibility, as arguments for a privation theory of good? The privation theory of evil claims that evil has no positive existence, and it is but a privation of good. The privation theory of good claims the opposite. I approach this topic as one element in the so-called evil-God Challenge. Stephen Law has argued that the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect God (theism) is on a par with the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, but completely evil-God (maltheism). In fact, he concludes, the arguments for an evil God are symmetrical with, and isomorphic to, those for a good God. The privation theory of evil has often been used to defend theism against the argument from evil. Thus, part of the evil-God Challenge is to evaluate arguments for the privation theory of evil for their vulnerability to maltheist parody. I consider a broad range of arguments for the privation theory of evil, and I argue that most of them are vulnerable to parodic neutralization. Furthermore, I argue that although the thesis of the convertibility of being and goodness is often held to entail the privation theory of evil, or to be entailed by it (or to be equivalent to it), it is independent of the privation theory. I do find that David Oderberg’s recent argument for the privation theory of evil resists any easy maltheist parody, but I argue that it has a defect. I sketch an argument according to which his good-as-fulfillment account is compatible with a perfectly evil god. My tentative conclusion is that the privation theory of evil enjoys little more plausibility than does the privation theory of good.

This essay highlights the centrality of ‘the demonic’ in human experience, both collective and personal. It argues in favour of the possibility of explaining it; it dismisses its personification into a demon or several demons; it then proceeds towards a definition and a phenomenology of it; it examines its effects; and it portrays a final feature, namely resentment and revenge, as well as a religious response.

An overview of findings from an in-depth inductive study of ‘the lexical, exegetical, conceptual, and theological study of evil from the Hebrew text of Genesis’ provides key insights into the broad use of the primary lexeme(s) for evil (ra as an adjective, raa as a verb, and raah as a noun). The use of evil is followed sequentially through each occurrence in Genesis to assess its meaning and concept contextually. The plot conflict of good and evil is observed from the beginning to its bookend. Evil is never called good nor found to be the absence of good, but rather, the corruption of creational and covenantal goodness. God is found to work in and through flawed and dysfunctional humans to overturn evil and accomplish his good creational and covenantal purposes.

In the first part of this paper I draw on some reflections offered by Descartes and Malebranche on the dangers of anthropomorphic conceptions of God, in order to suggest that there is something misguided about the way in which the so-called problem of evil is commonly framed. In the second part, I ask whether the problem of evil becomes easier to deal with if we adopt a non-personalist account of God, of the kind found in Aquinas. I consider the sense in which God is termed ‘good’ on this latter conception, and while not proposing that it can justify or explain the evil and suffering in the world, I suggest that the world’s manifest imperfections are compatible with the existence of a loving creator who is the source of the existence of the world and of the goodness found in created things.

Religious protest, such as the protest that Job expresses, reveals the manners in which believers experience the absurd while hanging on to God. The purpose of this article is to explore the “grammar” of this paradoxical faith stance by bringing Kierkegaard and Camus to bear upon it, and thereby to show the “family resemblance” between Job, Camus’s “absurd man,” and the Kierkegaardian believer. I begin with a discussion of experiences of the absurd that give rise to religious protest. I then turn to Kierkegaard to explore the manners in which “faith’s thought” renders the “experience of the absurd” a religious one, while pushing the believer further into the absurd. I end with a discussion of Job as an absurd rebel in Camus’s sense.

The Quran contains numerous references to evil and some of these indicate that the responsibility of some instances of evil, which I call self-inflicted evil, lies with human beings rather than God. This idea of evil leads to an exploration of two interconnected issues in philosophical and theological discussions, moral responsibility and desert, along with the related tension between freedom of action and divine determinism. The article delves into this tension as it appears from the Quran and prevailing standpoints in Islamic theology. I propose that the tension between freedom of action and divine determinism resists a satisfactory reconciliation, which ultimately affects the plausibility of the idea of evil as self-inflicted. I further propose that embracing the contradictions arising from verses expressing freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and those indicating divine determinism, on the other, could be a viable approach for the theologian.

If you believe in the existence of an infinitely good, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity (‘God’), how do you explain the reality of evil – including the inexpressible suffering and death of innocents? Wouldn't God be forced to vanquish such suffering due to God's very nature? Alvin Plantinga has argued, convincingly, that if the possibility of ultimate goodness somehow necessarily required that evil be allowed to exist, God, being omnibenevolent, would have to allow it. But as John Hick has noted, the mere logical possibility of such a situation might not be enough to console the doubting theist. We need a positive reason to believe that evil as we know it is compatible with God's existence. So, Hick offers a ‘soul-making’ theodicy – or vindication – of God, suggesting that the human soul cannot fully progress to spiritual maturity (a kind of ultimate good on his account) without grappling with evil. In this short piece I argue that, if we accept Hick's premises about souls and soul-making, we can indeed make sense of evil to some extent. But, I suggest, his account cannot justify the type or amount of evil we see in the world, so his theodicy does not succeed

Our focus in this article concerns Leibniz's views on evil. Our goal is to examine which are the consequences of his conception of moral agency for the moral psychology of the genuinely evil person. For Leibniz, moral failure is an epistemic error since it involves some false practical judgement. Moral maxims may be represented in blind or symbolic cognitions, but then moral agents can misrepresent the evil consequences of their behaviour. Finally, we discuss Leibniz's view on habits that may help virtuous persons strive for perfection but also enable evil persons to continue sinning.