Alexander Pruss's Blog

From time to time I wonder why it is that we focus on big evils in discussing the problem of evil. After all, first consider this argument: ...

In his 1979 classic paper , Rowe says that a necessary condition for an “omniscient, wholly good ( O G ) being” to fail to prevent an evil s...

Alice and Bob are both bad people, and both believe in magic. Bob believes that he lives in an infinite universe, with infinitely many senti...

Suppose we keep fixed in our epistemic background K general facts about human life and the breadth and depth of evil in the world, and cons...

Suppose at 8 am, I promised you to call you before noon, and then I didn’t, even though I have no excuse. That’s an evil. When did this evil...

Nobody seriously runs an argument against the existence of God from trivial evils, like hangnails or mosquito bites. Why not? Here is a hy...

Frances Kamm uses her principle of triple effect to resolve the loop version of the trolley problem. On the loop version, as usual, the main...

It’s mildly interesting to note, when evaluating the evidential impact of evil, that there can be evil events that would be evidence for the...

The examples, like Rowe’s, of evils in the inductive argument from evil are chosen to make them have a certain epistemic feature F . And the...

Marilyn Adams famously defines horrendous evils as follows: Evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) co...

Start with this argument: Everything that exists is God or is created and sustained by God. God does not create and sustain anything esse...

If any complex artifacts really exist, instruments of torture really exist. Instruments of torture are essentially evil. Nothing that is ...

Taking the privation theory literally, evil is constituted by the non-existence of something that should exist. This leads to a lot of puzzl...

The metaphysical problem of evil consists in the contradiction between: Everything that exists is God or is created by God. God is not an...

I'm giving a Zoom talk against the privation theory of evil (with an alternative provided) for Liverpool University on Thursday at 9 am ...

Here is a puzzling asymmetry. It seems that: Typically, we should seek to remove serious physical pains, even when these pains are normal ...

If naturalism is true, Stalin is not lovable. Everyone is lovable. So, naturalism is not true. Here, by “lovable”, I don’t mean that it...

Bob and Carl are drowning and you can save only one of them. Bob is a human being in the prime of life, physically and mentally healthy, hig...

People sometimes wonder, perhaps in connection with the problem of evil, whether there is in total more good than evil in the world. The con...

Assume theism. Then, there is nothing in existence that is intrinsically bad. For everything that exists is either God or created by God, an...