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Theodicy is a philosophy classic by G. W. Leibniz.Leibniz was above all things a metaphysician. That does not mean that his head was in the clouds, or that the particular sciences lacked interest for him. Not at all--he felt a lively concern for theological debate, he was a mathematician of the first rank, he made original contributions to physics, he gave a realistic attention to moral psychology.Theodicy in its most common form, is an attempt to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil. Some theodicies also address the evidential problem of evil by attempting "to make the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good or omnibenevolent God consistent with the existence of evil or suffering in the world."[1] Unlike a defense, which tries to demonstrate that God's existence is logically possible in the light of evil, a theodicy attempts to provide a framework wherein God's existence is also plausible.[2] The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz coined the term "theodicy" in 1710 in his work Théodicée, though various responses to the problem of evil had been previously proposed. The British philosopher John Hick traced the history of moral theodicy in his 1966 work, Evil and the God of Love, identifying three major traditions.The problem was also analyzed by pre-modern theologians and philosophers in the Islamic world. German philosopher Max Weber (1864-1920) saw theodicy as a social problem, based on the human need to explain puzzling aspects of the world.[3] Sociologist Peter L. Berger (1929-2017) argued that religion arose out of a need for social order, and an "implicit theodicy of all social order" developed to sustain it.[4] Following the Holocaust, a number of Jewish theologians developed a new response to the problem of evil, sometimes called anti-theodicy, which maintains that God cannot be meaningfully justified. As an alternative to theodicy, a defense has been proposed by the American philosopher Al
Page Count:
408
Publication Date:
2016-01-24
Publisher:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10:
1523671041
ISBN-13:
9781523671045
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