Abstract

In Rethinking the Philosophy of Religion Today, this paper would like to advance the atheist solution to the problem of evil that has occasionally in the past been suggested by philosophers, but has largely been neglected in the Philosophy of Religion. In discussing this solution, the paper focuses on the reasons upon which philosophers regard the giving up of one or more of the attributes of God in theism to be an adequate solution to the problem of evil. Concerning the more negative of these reasons, it shows that the latter revolves around the argument of the logical inconsistency of the theistic theory. Concerning the more positiveof these reasons, the focus is on the efforts of philosophers that have been following the suggestions of David Hume and that have started to experiment with solutions wherein at least one of the attributes of God is given up. The paper closes by showing that there exist an even more fundamental reason upon which it can be claimed that the problem of evil can be solved along this way without serious implications for a belief in God.