ANDREW GLEESON

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

Discussion of the problem of evil in the ‘analytic’ tradition has often rested on a sharp distinction between the ‘intellectual’ problem of evil and the ‘existential’ problem. The latter divides into various sub-problems, such as the personal problem of how to overcome evil in our own lives, or the pastoral problem of how to counsel people about the personal problem. The thought of philosophers and theologians, this tradition more or less explicitly assumes, is properly confined to the intellectual problem, and has, at best, only a distant and tangential bearing on the existential problems. The assumption is startlingly apparent in the claims of some philosophers that such things as twisted ankles (Van Inwagen), medicines with a slightly bitter taste (Mackie) and even the slightest toothache (Swinburne) generate the intellectual problem. By contrast, I maintain that the intellectual problem is inseparable from the human responses of terror and despair that make up the existential problem. It is only when confronted by evils that threaten to undermine our sense of the world as a place we can welcome and celebrate that we have an intellectual problem in any sense worth discussing. The tendency of philosophers to extract concepts like good, evil and God from the contexts of human life that give them their living sense, serves only to undermine our understanding of them.  

(To be presented at Philosophy in the Pub, Sun. 14th September 2008.)