By bringing three narratives about creation and life found in the Hebrew Bible into conversation with the Gaia hypothesis, this chapter offers a Jewish response to contemporary planetary science. Adumbrated by the influence of concepts taken from Lurianic Kabbalah and Hasidism in Hans Jonas’ and Martin Buber’s respective philosophies, the chapter argues that the conceptions of creation and life put forth by the book of Job offer poetic and theological expression to a commitment to the enduring value of life on a living planet.

Articulating George MacDonald’s theology is a complicated project, given his well-known resistance to theological systems and the allusive character of his writing. Explicit theological statements are replete in his sermons and letters, although they usually emerge suggestively, in contrast to particular foils in Victorian Christianity. In his imaginative works, a variety of fictive voices emerges alongside the voice of a pastoral narrator; these voices are sometimes difficult to distinguish. The variety of sources that shaped his theological imagination and the extent to which he adhered to Christian orthodoxy (variously conceived) remain matters for debate. This chapter distils key themes of MacDonald’s theology across his body of work, including: the generative love of God as the deepest reality, the epistemological priority of ‘childlike imagination’ in response, and the soul-shaping journey of suffering leading to glory. It also notes tensions in MacDonald’s theology regarding divine providence, theodicy, and the possibility of universal reconciliation.

In this chapter, a theodicy that addresses the hard questions about innocent and horrendous suffering is presented and defended in dialogue with analytic philosophers of religion. It is argued that, possibly, every case of innocent, nonsacrificial suffering will retrospectively be transformed into sacrificial suffering that enables a greater intimacy with God. This could take place if God were to offer all innocent sufferers the opportunity to present – if necessary, from a postmortem state – their previous suffering to God as a sacrifice that perfects their love and unites them closely with him.

This chapter introduces the notion of theodicy, addresses objections against the legitimacy of theodicy, and summarizes the main argument of the book. The relationship between human and divine love is also thematized, and it is argued that the former but not the latter has an essential relation to suffering.

This chapter offers an interpretation of early Greek conceptions of divine and human as a coherent constellation of ideas organised around the core notions of human vulnerability, short-sightedness and mutability. Beginning with Achilles’ speech to Priam in Iliad 24, I discuss these key principles and their expressions in genres including epic, elegy, choral lyric, philosophy and historiography. I analyse some of their specific formulations and inflections, with a particular focus on perceptions of the unpredictable and unstable nature of human affairs, the conception of human beings as ephēmeroi (‘creatures of the day’), ideas of divine retribution and the ‘archaic chain’ linking prosperity, greed, arrogance, delusion and disaster. In a second step, I examine the relationship between these ideas and the narratives in which they are embedded, mainly using the examples of the Iliad and Solon’s Elegy to the Muses (fr. 13W).

This chapter begins with an interpretation of the final sections of the ‘Spirit’ chapter of the Phenomenology. Here, Hegel diagnoses the paradoxes of Kantian theodicy before going on to elaborate, in a highly allegorical idiom, how he envisages overcoming the dichotomy between divine and human standpoints that plagued his Leibnizian and Kantian predecessors. By developing the thesis that evil is a structural possibility of rational self-conscious, the culminating dialectic of ‘conscience’ posits an essential relation between human freedom and the historicity of the good; the ideal of conscience, of a unity between natural and ethical wills, is their continually coming apart. The chapter then moves away from the Phenomenology to elaborate the resulting picture of Hegelian theodicy in its own terms, drawing also on Hegel’s preface to his Philosophy of Right. Hegelian theodicy stands revealed as reconciling us to reality by fulfilling a primarily diagnostic function, resolving our theodical puzzlement by explaining its mistaken, but intelligible, origins. To bring out the specificity of this view of Hegel’s project, the chapter ends by contrasting it with two recent alternatives, Michael Rosen’s ‘right Hegelian’ and Robert Brandom’s ‘left Hegelian’ interpretations.

Following Allen Wood, Leibniz’s theodicy can be seen as both totalitarian – it claims that divine wisdom informs every single part of creation – and wholesale – it proves this only in general terms. This chapter explores the criteria Leibniz considers to be criteria of goodness and how he argues, in wholesale fashion, for their instantiation. Leibniz’s criteria can be divided into two categories: metaphysical, which concern properties and features of being as such, and anthropocentric, which bear on the morality and happiness of human beings. What unites them is an overarching conception of goodness as rational intelligibility: a maximally good world provides a maximal number of actual opportunities for rational creatures to appreciate its goodness and thereby perfect themselves. Closer attention to Leibniz’s handling of criteria, however, reveals a danger that anthropocentric ultimately dissolve into metaphysical criteria, the practical into the theoretical. As a result, Leibniz’s project is threatened with dialectical contradiction: the existential concerns that govern his theodicy’s underlying motivation cannot be articulated in the theoretical terms of its execution.

This chapter begins by setting out various axes along which to categorise different kinds of theodicy. In particular, it is useful to distinguish between the kind of puzzle to which a theodicy responds and the kind of solution it proposes; between theodicies with theoretical and theodicies with existential motivations; and between theodicies that offer defences of religious doctrines and theodicies that endeavour to explain how those doctrines should be understood. With this framework in place, the chapter outlines certain central traits of the theodicy tradition prior to Leibniz, in order to bring out the historical peculiarity and radicality of Leibniz’s own enterprise. A brief look at the example of Augustine allows us to make two further crucial distinctions: between the project of explaining how God can be causally implicated in evil and that of addressing the apparent inadequacy of creation; and between theodicies that begin with fixed axiological criteria and those that think the nature of goodness must be gradually revealed.

The introductory chapter compares two systems: the cosmological system of the Cherokee Nation and the Ogallala aquifer in Kansas. Ontological and epistemological systems are used to illustrate a new method of comparing phenomena across distinct cultural systems. Comparison is not based on the similarity between cultural or religious phenomena but on the analogy or homology of element function within distinct systems.

This chapter turns to the execution of Kantian theodicy. Concentrating on the external obstacles to realising the highest good, it surveys the various theological commitments Kant regards as concomitants of hoping for their removal. Of especial importance is Kant’s socio-historical theodicy, which exploits a notion of purposiveness to explain how human social dynamics facilitate an imminent, historical progression towards the realisation of the good. Attention to the content of Kantian theodicy, however, shows how it not only reintroduces central elements of its Leibnizian predecessor, albeit within a radically altered epistemic framework, but involves a structural invocation of divine freedom that reveals fundamental continuities with Kant’s own pre-critical theodicy. This invocation in fact leads to a paradox at the heart of Kantian theodicy: echoing the dialectical contradiction between motivation and execution that afflicted Leibnizian theodicy, the finite, practical perspective that motivates Kantian theodicy proves impossible to maintain in light of the divine, infinite perspective integral to its execution. With this paradox in mind, we can ask whether Kant’s own critical, ‘authentic’ theodicy in fact survives the critique launched in On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy.

This chapter charts the evolution of Kant’s thinking about theodicy and explains the fundamental shifts in his attitude towards the project. It begins by examining his pre-critical sketch for a theodicy that remains firmly within the Leibnizian mould while repairing its structural inconsistencies and gaps. At the heart of his reparative measures is a different conception of divine freedom, one that Kant will retain throughout his critical period. The chapter ends with a consideration of his late essay On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy of 1791, in which he rejects the entire tradition of rationalist theodicy, whilst still maintaining the importance of an ‘authentic’ alternative. The basis of his rejection of previous theodicies is moral: the very pursuit of such a theodicy involves sacrificing individual freedom and rejecting an autonomous stance. Accordingly, the central sections of the chapter explain Kant’s critical concept of autonomy and how the theory of normativity it entails is fundamentally incompatible with a rationalist conception of value.

After sorting out a half-dozen forms of the problem of evil , the chapter examines several particularly striking facets of Jewish discussions of evil, such as “protest literature,” “afflictions of love, ” and “antitheodicy” (according to which it is wrong in some way-- religious, moral, pragmatic-- to engage in theodicy).