Divine Evil?

Adherents of the Abrahamic religions have traditionally held that God is morally perfect and unconditionally deserving of devotion, obedience, love, and worship. The Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures tell us that God is compassionate, merciful, and just. As is well-known, however, these same scriptures contain passages that portray God as wrathful, severely punitive, and jealous. Critics furthermore argue that the God of these scriptures commends bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia, condones slavery, and demands the adoption of unjust laws-for example, laws that mandate the death penalty for adultery and rebellion against parents, and laws institutionalizing in various ways the diverse kinds of bigotry and oppression just mentioned. In recent days, these sorts of criticisms of the Hebrew Bible have been raised in new and forceful ways by philosophers, scientists, social commentators, and others. This volume brings together eleven original essays representing the views of both critics and defenders of the character of God as portrayed in these texts. Authors represent the disciplines of philosophy, religion, and Biblical studies. Each essay is accompanied by comments from another author who takes a critical approach to the thesis defended in that essay, along with replies by the essay's author.

Michael Bergmann is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He received his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Waterloo and his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame. He has held fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Pew Charitable Trusts. He has published numerous articles in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion as well as a book, Justification without Awareness. Michael J. Murray is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor in the Humanities and Philosophy at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA). He received his B.A. at Franklin & Marshall College, and his M.A, and Ph.D at the University of Notre Dame. He has held fellowships from the Institute for Research in the Humanities (Madison, Wisconsin), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion. His recent publications include Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, and The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion (edited with Jeffrey Schloss). Michael C. Rea is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. He received his B.A. at UCLA and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame. He has published numerous articles in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion and is author or editor of more than ten books, including Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (with Oliver Crisp), Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology, and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (with Thomas Flint).