Anti-Theodicy

This work is a philosophical and historical exploration of religious transformation among Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The research includes a substantial amount of unique survivor testimonial material from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. These recorded interviews provide a variety of anecdotes from eyewitnesses, which require a certain caution when utilizing as source material. Although some Jewish survivors obtained a newfound spiritual strength through their experiences, this particular investigation focuses on those who were at one point connected with their religious traditions and have since abandoned their belief in God completely. For contextual coherence, the testimonial material is organized alongside the historical events of World War II, specifically the rise of Hitler, the escalation of the Nazi occupation in Europe, and the mass extermination of the Jews that followed.
This exploration highlights the dramatic modifications and additions to Jewish spiritual thought, especially in regards to the notion of theodicy. This work discusses various positions of Holocaust theology, and how survivor testimonial information can serve as an outlet for interpretation in the effort to answer the difficult questions surrounding the concept of faith in light of the Shoah. Analyzing the personal experiences and convictions of Holocaust survivors allows for a deeper understanding of their religious metamorphosis. Prior to the Holocaust, Jewishness was defined much more precisely than how it is today. This work argues that Jewish atheism, however contradictory as it may seem, assuredly deserves to stand among any other recognized philosophy. First-hand experiences with utter inhumanity have led many Jews to reject the validity of God’s covenant. This work demonstrates how the horrors of genocide have provided a transformational vessel towards the abandonment of faith.


Recommended Citation
Lassley, Jennifer (2015) "A Defective Covenant: Abandonment of Faith among Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust," International Social Science Review: Vol. 90: Iss. 2, Article 3.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/issr/vol90/iss2/3

Kant’s critical philosophy represents a rudimentary existentialism, or a proto-existentialism, in the following respects: He emphasizes human finitude, limits our knowledge, and argues that human consciousness is characterized by mineness (Jemeinigkeit). He introduces the influential concept of autonomy, something that lead to controversies about constructivism and anti-realism in meta-ethics and anticipated problems concerning decisionism in Existentialism. Kant makes human freedom the central philosophical issue, arguing (in the incorporation thesis) that freedom is inescapable for human agents. He even holds that awareness of freedom leads to anxiety (as opposed to fear), and that anxiety precedes the fall into evil. In the doctrine of radical evil, he argues that human agents are always already suffering from self-deception because of this fall. In order to overcome self-deception and evil, Kant proscribes a radical self-choice in which the agent takes over himself and society by thinking independently and consistently. However, this is not only a moral issue for Kant but also something that concerns religious faith and hope, since Kant argues that we need religion to overcome not only moral evil but also despair. Although he criticizes traditional natural theology, Kant develops a practical (moral) interpretation of religion that anticipates religious Existentialism. In this context, he developed an influential critique of philosophical theodicies and a notion of the hiddenness of God that emphasizes the importance and inscrutability of evil. By doing this, and by introducing philosophy of religion and philosophical anthropology as new disciplines, Kant prepared the ground for Existentialism.

From a theoretical standpoint, the problem of human suffering can be understood as one formulation of the classical problem of evil, which calls into question the compatibility of the existence of a perfect God with the extent to which human beings suffer. Philosophical responses to this problem have traditionally been posed in the form of theodicies, or justifications of the divine. In this article, I argue that the theodical approach in analytic philosophy of religion exhibits both morally and epistemically harmful tendencies and that philosophers would do better to shift their perspective from the hypothetical “God’s-eye view” to the standpoint of those who actually suffer. By focusing less on defending the epistemic rationality of religious belief and more on the therapeutic effectiveness of particular imaginings of God with respect to suffering, we can recover, (re)construct, and/or (re)appropriate more virtuous approaches to the individual and collective struggle with the life of faith in the face of suffering.

Avicenna’s Neoplatonic account of divine providence and theodicy was hugely influential on later philosophical and religious thought in the Islamic world. However, it was severely criticised by one of his earlier commentators, the theologian-philosopher Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210). While Avicenna champions an optimist theodicean thesis of a plenitude of good to support the theory of providence integrated into his cosmogony, his commentator counters by arguing for a plenitude of evil and an overall pessimist anti-theodicy. Rejecting Avicenna’s ontological-cum-cosmological account of evil, al-Rāzī argues that a theodicy must be strictly subject-centred and is ultimately a futile exercise. This article includes a study and translation of the relevant section in his commentary on Avicenna’s al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt (Pointers and Reminders).

ABSTRACT : This paper examines in what way Hegel deals with the representation of God’s properties, with particular reference to two traditional problems: the problem of their compatibility and the problem of the equivocality or univocity between Divine and human attributes. The following hypotheses will be defended: Hegel refuses the pretention of knowing God by attributing him many predicates - which he considers the fundamental mistake of the rational theology - but he doesn’t considers all the divines attributes as representations which have no speculative value and have also to disappear in the transition from the religious Representation to the Concept; he affirms on the contrary the correspondence between the predicates of omnipotence, goodness, justice and wisdom with the determinations of the Concept; the speculative transposition of these attributes has to be regarded as a constitutive part of Hegel’s theodicy, because it represents a reply - alternative to Leibniz’s one - to Bayle’s anti-theodicy, grounded on the affirmation of an insoluble contradiction between divines goodness, justice and all-power; finally, the clarification of the dialectic relationship that Hegel establish between God’s justice and wisdom - through their speculative interpretation - allows to gain a clear view on the way he conceives the relationship between human and divine justice, which is here examined through an analysis of his interpretation of Job’s book.

- چندی پیش دکتر محسن کدیور سخنرانی ­ای در باب «خدا و شرّ» در سه بخش و در طول چندین هفته ارائه کردند، که در طی آن رویکردهای منطقی و فلسفی به شرّ و همچنین پاسخ های سنت اسلامی به این مسئله را بدون هیچ بازاندیشی و بازخوانی تکرار کرده، رویکردهای اگزیستانسی/ وجودی به شرّ را به باد انتقاد گرفتند.
- آنچه ایشان مدافع و مروّج آنند در بیان تخصصی «تئودیسه» خوانده می شود و در دهه های اخیر اشکالات اخلاقی و گفتمانی بسیاری بر آن وارد شده است.
- در این نوشتار به نقدهایی را که به گفتمان تئودیسه به صورت کلی و به بیان دکتر کدیور به شکل خاص وارد است پرداخته ام.
- این یادداشت در واقع درخواستی است از متفکران اسلامی، و به خصوص روشنفکران دینی، که رویکرد اگزیستانسی به شرّ را جدی گرفته، و به جای ارائه پاسخ های فلسفی و منطقیِ خشک و بی روح و انتزاعی، به دنبال مرهم و التیامی در دین برای «رنج بشر» و «معنایی» در این طوفان بی معنایی باشند.
https://3danet.ir/god-and-evil-re-kadivar/

This article is an exploration of two forces that come into play in the
development of epistemic and legal practices of exclusion: (1)
invisibility conditioned by racial criminalization and (2) its disenfranchising effect on particularly black people well into the present.

Go to tobybetenson.com for my recent work. Certain theodical responses to the problem of evil exhibit a profoundly consequentialist means-ends justification. These theodicies claim that it is permissible for God to allow some evil to occur if a ‘greater good’ will result. I label these theodicies ‘consequentialist theodicies’. Traditional theists are commonly not consequentialists; traditional theists do not commonly believe that consequentialism is true. I offer a brief empirical defence of this uncontroversial intuition. Yet, these consequentialist theodicies rely upon the truth of consequentialism. I offer an argument that provides logical support for the necessity of this implication. Therefore, the traditional theist that proposes a consequentialist theodicy whilst maintaining a non-consequentialist ethical belief system is maintaining an untenably inconsistent position.

The Unbearable Weight of Luck. On Primo Levi’s Atheism. This article aims to deepen the question of atheism within Primo Levi’s work from a philosophical point of view. Taking into account the current debate on the «sacred» in Levi’s moral reflection, instead I propose an opposite perspective, according to which atheism stands for both the conditio sine qua non and the landing place of his ethics. At first, I aim to reconstruct the way in which Levi articulates the disassociation between God and Evil, underling how, according to Levi, the concept of Providence is not only illogical, but particularly immoral. Such a perspective evokes a certain affinity with the atheistic tradition which opposed to Christian theodicy over modern philosophy. The conclusion is devoted to an in-depth analysis of the meaning of «Luck» as the only plausible ethical reason for survival.

It is usually thought that only one being can be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. Challenging this monotheist conviction, I propose a universe ruled by two deities: ‘day shift God’ oversees the events that occur while the sun is up, whereas ‘night shift God’ oversees the events that occur while the sun is down. I survey objections to this proposal and conclude that the real obstacle is not an argument, but an aesthetic preference.

Go to tobybetenson.com for my recent work. I argue that the problem of evil can be a distinctively moral objection to theistic belief. The thesis has three broad sections, each establishing an element in this argument. Section one establishes the logically binding nature of the problem of evil: The problem of evil must be solved, if you are to believe in God. And yet, I borrow from J. L. Mackie’s criticisms of the moral argument for the existence of God, and argue that the fundamentally evaluative nature of the premises within the problem of evil entails that it cannot be used to argue for the non-existence of God. Section two establishes the moral objectionability of many responses to the problem of evil (theodicies). I discuss the work of the moral ‘anti-theodicists’, and support some of the key premises within their arguments via appeal to the moral philosophy of Raimond Gaita. I combine the claims of section one and section two, and conclude that theism inherits the moral objectionability of theodicy. In section three, I establish the plausibility of a morally motivated non-cognitive atheism, offering an example (Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov), before finally distilling the central claims of this thesis into the form of a slogan: God lacks humanity.

Cet article explore certaines des relations entre la philosophie
de la culture et l’existence noire et, par extension, entre cette dernière
et la philosophie de l’africanité. Une large part de cette discussion
sera métaphilosophique – elle portera sur la philosophie –
mais sa propre signification philosophique devrait apparaître chemin
faisant.

In this essay, moral anti-theodicy is characterized as opposition to the trivialization of suffering, defined as the reinterpretation of horrendous evils in a way the sufferer cannot accept. Ambitious theodicy (which claim goods emerge from specific evils) is deemed always to trivialize horrendous evils and, because there is no specific theoretical context, also harm sufferers. Moral anti-theodicy is susceptible to two main criticisms. First, it is over-demanding as a moral position. Second, anti-theodicist opposition to least ambitious theodicies, which portray God's decision to create as an ‘all-or-nothing’ scenario, requires a moral commitment to philosophical pessimism. Thus anti-theodicists should not be quick to take the moral high ground. However, this should not encourage theodicists, since theodicies may well be self-defeating in so far as they attempt to provide comfort.

Go to tobybetenson.com for my recent work. Ivan Karamazov is frequently used, and misused, in discussions concerning the problem of evil. The purpose of this article is to correct some pervasive misinterpretations of Ivan’s statement, as found in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I criticise some common misinterpretations, as exemplified in the theodical work of Marilyn Adams and John Hick, as well as the more nuanced interpretation of Stewart Sutherland. Though Sutherland’s interpretation is the strongest, it nevertheless misses the mark in identifying Ivan as a positivist. I argue that Ivan Karamazov is not a positivist, but a romantic, and a hopeless one at that. We should, therefore, not read Ivan as stating an argument for the non-existence of God, but instead see him as a representative of a very particular and robust form of non-cognitive atheism.

Antitheodicy objects to all attempts to solve the problem of evil. Its objections are almost all on moral grounds-it argues that the whole project of theodicy is morally offensive. Trying to excuse God's permission of evil is said to deny the reality of evil, to exhibit gross insensitivity to suffering and to insult the victims of grave evils. Since antitheodicists urge the avoidance of theodicies for moral reasons, it is desirable to evaluate the moral reasons against theodicies in abstraction from the intellectual reasons for and against them. It is argued that the best-known theodicies such as those based on soul-making and free will are guilty of moral faults as alleged. But Leibniz's best of all possible worlds theory, often thought to be the most morally offensive "Panglossian" theodicy, is morally blameless because it excuses God by the absolute impossibility of his choosing any world better than the present one. Theodicy should not be conceived of as a search for greater goods which may excuse God's permitting evils. From the divine point of view, creation is an upfront choice between scenarios-in modern parlance, a Trolley problem rather than a Transplant problem. In cases of forced choice among scenarios, it is morally improper to criticize someone who chooses the best.

This paper deals with the project of meta-theodicy, which is offered as an alternative to the extreme points of view of (1) justifying evil to prove the existence of God or (2) re­fusing the very possibility of meaningful research of the relationship between suffering and God. The author summarizes the history and logic of theodicy briefly, and then ex­plains its modern alternative, called anti-theodicy. The author argues that, firstly, meta-theodicy can be viewed as an interdisciplinary project in which a large amount of differ­ent scholastic data can be ordered into a single whole; secondly, that meta-theodicy should clarify how the question of suffering and God’s silence can be raised; thirdly, that one methodological advantage of meta-theodicy is that a researcher does not take a cer­tain position, but tries to consider different approaches to the problem.

Was passiert mit klassischen Fragen, wenn wir die Religionsphilosophie neu denken?

https://www.praefaktisch.de/religion/das-theodizeeproblem-oder-ein-problem-mit-der-theodizee-was-passiert-mit-klassischen-fragen-wenn-wir-die-religionsphilosophie-neu-denken

Can we understand the reasons why an all good and all powerful God permits the existence of horrendous evils in the world? If so, what is the nature and limits of that understanding? Is philosophy an adequate tool to find an ultimate meaning to suffering and pain? What is the real difference between a ‘theodicy’ and ‘defense’ as strategies against atheistic arguments from evil? Can every theodicy be mirrored by a corresponding anti-theodicy that puts in question the goodness of God? This workshops aims to tackle these and other related questions, exploring the significance, the scope, and the prospects of success of theodicy as an intellectual enterprise.

: This paper examines in what way Hegel deals with the representation of God’s properties, with particular reference to two traditional problems: the problem of their compatibility and the problem of the equivocality or univocity between Divine and human attributes. The following hypotheses will be defended: Hegel refuses the pretention of knowing God by attributing him many predicates - which he considers the fundamental mistake of the rational theology - but he doesn’t considers all the divines attributes as representations which have no speculative value and have also to disappear in the transition from the religious Representation to the Concept; he affirms on the contrary the correspondence between the predicates of omnipotence, goodness, justice and wisdom with the determinations of the Concept; the speculative transposition of these attributes has to be regarded as a constitutive part of Hegel’s theodicy, because it represents a reply - alternative to Leibniz’s one - to Bayle...