The Problem of Evil

ISBN: 9780199245604 出版年：2007 页码：198 van Inwagen, Peter Oxford University Press

[2] In content the book is, as its subtitle indicates, the edited text of his Gifford Lectures from 2003. Those lectures were themselves based on the Wilde Lectures from 2000, whichwere in turn an expanded version of the F.D.Maurice Lectures at the University of London from 1999. Other lectures that are related to the book’s material that van Inwagen gave are the Stewart Lectures at Princeton from 2002. So it may well be that many readers of this review (like the reviewer) first came across the content in spoken form. The chapters of the book wear their origin on their sleeve, frequently using phrases such as ‘in the previous lecture’. [3] In the first chapter, van Inwagen rejects as not useful the distinction between the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil, focussing instead on the distinction between the global argument and the local argument. [4] In the second chapter, van Inwagen lays out a fairly standard conception of God by describing the individual attributes that he is assuming that God possesses, though it seems to me that some of the details of his treatment are worth discussion. [5] For example, van Inwagen defines ‘omniscience’ thus: ‘an omnipotent being is also omniscient if it knows everything it is able to know’ (p. 82). It is not explained why the definition is framed only for an omnipotent being, but the definition will not suffice in full generality (‘a being is omniscient if it knows everything it is able to know’), as it would then be subject to a version of Plantinga’s famous McEar objection: it is metaphysically possible that there be a being, McStupid, that is able to know only that it is McStupid, which fact it does know.