Volume 36, Issue 4, October 2019
Justin Mooney
Pages 442-462
https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil20191121132
How to Solve the Problem of Evil
A Deontological Strategy
One paradigmatic argument from evil against theism claims that (1) if God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil. But (2) there is gratuitous evil, so (3) God does not exist. I consider three deontological strategies for resisting this argument. Each strategy restructures existing theodicies which deny (2) so that they instead deny (1). The first two strategies are problematic on their own, but their primary weaknesses vanish when they are combined to form the third strategy, resulting in a promising new approach to the problem of evil.