Reexamining the Problem of Evil
When a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti in January, one television preacher declared that the disaster was God’s punishment of the wicked. Modern-day heirs of Voltaire and Hume cited the calamity as evidence that a God who would permit such destruction could not exist. Other philosophers and theologians mused that the ways of divinity are surely inscrutable to us mortals.
To Samuel Newlands, the associate director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, the reactions seemed all too familiar. Newlands studies early modern philosophy, and he notes that the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 produced similar strains of thought. “It was one of those watershed events in European culture,” says Newlands. “It wiped out an entire civilized region and showed the powerlessness of human ability in the face of it.”
The question of how a loving and all-powerful God could permit cruel events like the Haitian earthquake and the Holocaust has vexed humankind for centuries. Now, thanks to a three-year, $1.7 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, leading scholars in religion and philosophy will be coming together to discuss how modern and contemporary thinkers deal with the problem of evil.
This year marks the 300th anniversary of Gottfried Leibniz’s book Theodicy, the German philosopher’s attempt to reconcile the reality of suffering and evil with the existence of the Christian God. The Center for Philosophy of Religion is commissioning a new translation of this influential work, whose title, coined by the author, comes from the Greek and means “the justice of God.” With this volume, Leibniz, who grew up in Germany in the wake of the savage Thirty Years’ War, made a landmark contribution to Western thought. “All of the contemporary discussions and solutions to the problem of theodicy are rich variations on themes established in the early modern period,” says Newlands.
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| Michael Rea |
Samuel Newlands |
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The Center will also be holding a conference called “Leibniz's Theodicy: Context and Content” this fall and will provide several full-year Templeton Fellowships for independent research on related subjects by graduate students and junior and senior scholars. Another part of the project will focus on a view called "skeptical theism." Those who raise the problem of evil as an objection against the existence of God insist that many of the evils we confront in this world seem to be pointless—events that do not and could not possibly serve any greater good. And, the objectors argue, an all-powerful, all-loving God simply would not permit pointless evil. So-called "skeptical theists" (like Center director Michael Rea) raise doubts, however, about our ability to determine whether any given evil really is pointless. On their view, we simply do not know enough about the range of possible goods, or about the ways in which even horrendous evils might possibly serve higher divine purposes, to be able to say with any confidence that our world contains pointless evil.
Michael Murray, vice president for philosophy and theology at the Templeton Foundation, says “The single greatest obstacle to progress in the discovery of spiritual information arises from concerns about the existence of evil in the moral and natural domains.” Murray suggests that we cannot fully understand moral and spiritual goodness without also investigating the properties of moral and spiritual evil. He calls the Center for Philosophy of Religion “ground zero for this kind of work.”
Finding Tomorrow's Top Theologians
Applications for the 2011 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise are being accepted through May 31. The program, which recognizes outstanding work by young scholars, is administered by the Forschungszentrum Internationale und Interdisziplinaere Theologie (FIIT) at the University of Heidelberg. With the support of two John Templeton Foundation grants totaling over $2 million, FIIT is giving annual prizes of $10,000 each to the twelve best post-doctoral scholars on the basis of their doctoral dissertations or first post-doctoral book on the topic "God and Spirituality" as broadly defined in the fields of theology, philosophy, and religious studies. The award includes an additional stipend of up to $10,000 (for two years) per winner for public lectures at the invitation of academic institutions.
Past award winners have included Dominic Doyle, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Boston College's School of Theology and Ministry, for "The Promise of Christian Humanism: Thomas Aquinas on Hope"; Wai Hang Ng, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University, for "The Passion of Love: Scheler's Concept of Love as a Response to Nietzsche's Critique of Christian Morality and Its Soteriological Significance"; and Jeffrey Stackert, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School, for "Rewriting the Torah: Literary Revision in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Legislation."
FIIT director Michael Welker, a leading Protestant theologian, has overseen the Theological Promise Awards since their inception in 2007. A panel of 25 judges from across the world and a variety of religious perspectives contributes to the deliberations. Though primarily a prize for theological scholarship in any of the world's religious traditions, applications are welcome from all academic disciplines.
2010 Wolf Prize for Physics Awarded to Anton Zeilinger
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Anton Zeilinger |
Anton Zeilinger, a University of Vienna physicist and a member of the John Templeton Foundation's board of advisers, has won the 2010 Wolf Prize for Physics. He shares the award with two other scientists.
The prize, one of the most prestigious in the field, comes with a stipend of €100,000. Zeilinger and his colleagues, France's Alain Aspect and American John Clauser, were awarded the prize for their "conceptual and experimental contributions to quantum physics." Israeli President Shimon Peres will present the award in the Israeli Knesset in May. Zeilinger has been a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vienna Technical University, Munich University, Innsbruck University, Melbourne University, and the College de France in Paris. He has also led research at Los Alamos National Laboratory and at Oxford University’s Merton College. (Photo: Jacqueline Godany)
