"The Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought" is a project dedicated to exploring the cogence and signifiance of various answers to the problem of evil. This multi-faceted, four-year Project, spearheaded by the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion, with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation, funds historical and conceptual research on the problem of evil. Through a wide-ranging series of research initiatives, including fellowships, conferences, seminars, workshops, publications, translations, contests, and public events, we hope to stimulate and promote new work on the problem of evil that will be relevant to both the scholarly community and to a larger public audience.

We are very excited about the opportunities for scholarship, study, and discussion that this project will generate. We invite you to look around the website for more details, including some press release information. As the project gets underway in January 2010, we will continue to update this site, so check back regularly for the latest ways to get involved.

In the meantime, please feel welcome to contact us with questions or comments at cprelig@nd.edu.

Prior to the 19th century, the predominant Western understandings of the natural world — from the refrain of "it is good" in the first chapter of Genesis, to the affirmation of a cosmos rather than chaos in Greek traditions — have tended to view nature as beautiful and morally well-ordered. This celebration of the goodness and wondrous structure of the universe fueled both religious beliefs in a supernatural designer and scientific attempts to expose and understand nature's order.

Our ancestors were not, of course, ignorant of the vast arrays of evils that plagued their world. Seventeenth century Europe, for instance, witnessed its fair share of large-scale horrors: religious wars, genocidal conquests, tyrannical oppression, persecution, plagues, natural disasters – not to mention the prosaic evils encountered and committed in everyday life. As Bayle put it near the end of the 1700s:

Man is wicked and miserable. Everyone is aware of this from what goes on within himself, and from the commerce he is obliged to carry on with his neighbor. It suffices to have been alive for five or six years to be completely convinced of these two truths…monuments to human misery and wickedness are found everywhere – prisons, hospitals, gallows, beggars…Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race. (Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard Popkins (Indianapolis: Hackett), 146-7)

But most believed that the existence, magnitude and distribution of such evils could be coherently integrated into a Divinely orchestrated universe, and the seventeenth century (like others) abounded in attempts to explain how.

Yet in the last hundred and fifty years, the picture of the world presented by the natural sciences in particular has begun to call these conclusions into question. Reflecting on the course of natural history as revealed by its evolutionary heritage led Darwin, for example, to famously exclaim,

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature (Darwin, 1856, Letter to Hooker)

This change has taken on renewed urgency as recent critics of religious belief have argued with increasing ardor, rancor, and prominence that the nature, duration, and quantity of evil, especially so-called "natural evil," shows us that the world is, after all, blind, pitiless, and indifferent. As David Hull has poignantly asked,

What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin’s Galápagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. . . . Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, He is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about His productions. . . . The God of the Galápagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray. (David L. Hull, The God of the Galápagos. 1991. Nature 352:485f.)

The challenges that moral and natural evils pose for belief in the existence of a loving God have been collected under the name "the problem of evil." In its most general form, the problem of evil concerns the relation between God and the broken world around us. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, whence evil?

Philosophers and theologians have proposed wide-ranging answers. Exploring the cogence and significance of some of these answers is the overall goal of "The Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought." This multi-faceted, four-year Project, spearheaded by the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion, with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation, funds historical and conceptual research on the problem of evil. Through a wide-ranging series of research initiatives, including fellowships, conferences, seminars, workshops, publications, translations, contests, and public events, we hope to stimulate and promote new work on the problem of evil that will be relevant to both the scholarly community and to a larger public audience.

The project explores the problem of evil from both historical and contemporary angles, demonstrating how historical research can help inform contemporary discussions and how contemporary insights can illuminate the problems and proposed solutions of previous generations of philosophers and theologians. The seventeenth century was one of the most vibrant periods of philosophical and theological reflection on the relations between God and evil, most famously marked by Leibniz's seminal Theodicy (1710). This project celebrates the 300th anniversary of that famous work by funding a new translation of the Theodicy, several international conferences and workshops, a special summer seminar, and several faculty research and dissertation fellowships for projects in early modern philosophy of religion. In contemporary philosophy of religion, so-called "skeptical theism" has emerged as a leading form of reply to objections from evil, though it faces new and residual challenges. Thus, the project will also fund independent research on the prospects and pitfalls of skeptical theism through fellowships, workshops, and public events.

By funding simultaneous research in 17th century early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and epistemology, this project has the potential to discover new connections between philosophy and its history that will have long-term impacts on all our sub-fields. Given the central importance of this topic for all of us, it also has the potential to engage a wider public audience on these perennial questions.

Because of the traditional strengths of the University of Notre Dame in the philosophy of religion, the history of modern philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and theology, hosting this project in the University’s Center for Philosophy of Religion is a natural fit.

We are very excited about the opportunities for scholarship, study, and discussion that this project will generate. We invite you to look around the website for more details, including some press release information. As the project gets underway in January 2010, we will continue to update this site, so check back regularly for the latest ways to get involved.

In the meantime, please feel welcomed to contact us with questions or comments at cprelig@nd.edu