The doctrine of reincarnation is usually associated with Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern religions. But it has also been developed in Druzism and Judaism. The doctrine has been used by these traditions to explain the existence of evil within a moral order. Traversing the boundaries between East and West, we explore how Jewish mysticism has employed the doctrine to help answer the problem of evil. We explore the doctrine particularly as we respond to objections against employing it in a theodicy. (...) We show how it supplements traditional punishment, free will and soul-building theodicies, and helps these theodicies avoid various objections. (shrink)

In Descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: T1) God freely creates the eternal truths (i.e. the Creation Doctrine) and T2) The eternal truths are necessarily true. According to T1 God freely chooses which propositions to make necessary, contingent and possible. However the Creation Doctrine makes the acceptance of T2 tenuous for the Creation Doctrine implies that God could have acted otherwise--instantiating an entirely different set of necessary truths. Jonathan Bennett seeks to reconcile T1 and T2 by relativizing (...) modality to human understanding. I argue that Bennett’s approach to Cartesian modality is misplaced: One does not have to resort to conceptualism about modality in order to explain the subjective language found in Descartes or to reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine with the necessity of the eternal truths. After showing that Bennett’s argument implies that Descartes held the non-eternality of the eternal truths and the independence of the eternal truths from God, I show that if one understands Descartes’ use modal terms as indexed to God’s willing, then apparent contradictions vanish. In addition, I show that if one evaluates the truth value of modal propositions ‘non-bivalently’, then one can also unravel the apparent contradiction. One can reconcile Descartes’ Creation Doctrine (T1) and the necessity of the eternal truths (T2) without Bennett’s conceptualism. (shrink)

Nicola Hoggard Creegan has written a thoughtful and subtle work on the challenge of natural evil to the life of faith in a post-Darwinian age. She contends that “the problem of evil will not be solved just by clever arguments, but also by our stance toward nature and toward God” (8). To this end, Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil is a work intended to help Christian believers recognize the God of love at work in the universe. Although some (...) might be disappointed that Creegan does not attempt to provide the reader with a theodicy or a reason why God permits natural evil, she does deliver a theologically consistent way for believers to see God’s goodness in the natural world despite the manifest presence of violence and suffering. (shrink)