d. z. phillips’ problems with evil and with god

Int J Philos Relig (2007) 61:151–160DOI 10.1007/s11153-007-9118-9

O R I G I NA L PA P E R

D. Z. Phillips’ problems with evil and with God

William Hasker

Received: 16 May 2006 / Accepted: 31 August 2006 / Published online: 28 March 2007© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract It is widely held that the logical problem of evil, which alleges an incon-sistency between the existence of evil and that of an omnipotent and morally perfectGod, has been solved. D. Z. Phillips thinks this is a mistake. In The Problem of Eviland the Problem of God, he argues that, within the generally assumed framework,“neither the proposition ’God is omnipotent’ nor the proposition ‘God is perfectlygood’ can get off the ground.” Thus, the problem of evil leads to the problem of God.Phillips goes on to provide an alternative response to the problem of evil, expoundedby means of his Wittgensteinian analyses of various concepts drawn from the Chris-tian tradition. I argue that his criticisms of the traditional conception of God eitherfail outright or are at best inconclusive. I also point out that the religious conceptsanalyzed by Phillips are not and cannot be the same concepts as those employed inthe Christian tradition from which they are supposedly drawn. For the concepts astraditionally employed presuppose the actual existence and activity of precisely thesort of being that, according to Phillips, “God cannot be.”

Keywords D. Z. Phillips · Wittgenstein · Problem of evi

D. Z. Phillips is the acknowledged leader of what seems to be a dwindling band ofWittgensteinian philosophers of religion. It is well known that the majority of recentwork in the analytic philosophy of religion has not followed the paths marked outby Wittgenstein and his followers. Not surprisingly, Phillips has issues with the repre-sentatives of this now-dominant analytic movement. He dislikes both their neglect ofWittgenstein-style conceptual analysis and their return to the fleshpots of metaphys-ics. It’s for this reason that Part I of his recent book, The Problem of Evil and the

W. Hasker (B)Department of Philosophy, Huntington College, Huntington, IN 46750, USAe-mail: [email protected]

152 Int J Philos Relig (2007) 61:151–160

Problem of God,1 is entitled “Our Problematic Inheritance.” This inheritance is foundin present-day analytic philosophy of religion, which in spite of all internal disagree-ments shares certain preconceptions which Phillips finds deeply suspect. For ease ofreference, I will speak here of this movement and its adherents as “the tradition.”2

I will argue, however, that some of the central commitments of “the tradition” goback deeper in time, and extend more broadly at present, than the few dozen or sophilosophers of religion Phillips has primarily in mind.

As the book’s title leads us to expect, the main focus of Part I is the problem of evil;specifically a particular approach to that problem which Phillips finds to be flawed.The “logical problem of evil” dates at least from Hume, but was famously formulatedby J. L. Mackie in the triad of propositions, “God is omnipotent; God is wholly good;and yet evil exists.” According to Mackie,

There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so thatif any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time allthree are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems,at once must adhere, and cannot consistently adhere to all three (3).

There is at present a widespread philosophical consensus, shared by atheists as wellas theists, that this problem has been satisfactorily answered by Alvin Plantinga’s FreeWill Defense. Accordingly, philosophical attention has shifted to other forms of theproblem of evil, forms which do not involve a charge of logical inconsistency. Phillipsasks, “Is this confident philosophical change of heart justified?” (5) The answer isNo—but this is not because the problem, as Mackie stated it, can be rehabilitated inthe face of Plantinga’s defense. On the contrary, the very terms in which the problemis cast are misconceived, and this means that the answer also is misconceived. Phillipsstates, “if we stay within the terms of reference in which the logical problem of evil isusually discussed, we shall find that neither the proposition ‘God is omnipotent’, northe proposition ‘God is perfectly good’, can get off the ground—and that for logicalreasons” (5). In view of this, the problem of evil leads to the “problem of God.”Showing that this is the case is the main agenda of Part I. Following a brief transition,Part II is devoted to “a particular religious response to the problem of evil,” one thatis presented “because it contrasts, sharply, with the philosophical discussions of theproblem of evil” emanating from the analytic tradition (xii).

Phillips’ objection to omnipotence begins with a common definition of that attri-bute, here quoted from Swinburne: “An omnipotent being is one who can do anythinglogically possible, anything, that is, the description of which does not involve a con-tradiction” (6).3 Phillips makes the familiar Wittgensteinian point that words andsentences have their meaning only in the context of a linguistic practice within whichthey are employed, and in view of this he paraphrases the definition as follows: “Tosay that God is omnipotent is to say that God can do anything describable in anypractice without contradiction” (11). But, he says, it’s obvious that God fails this test:

1 See Phillips (2004). SCM Press, 2004. Page references in the text are to this book. Emphasis inquotations is in the original, unless otherwise noted.2 Philosophers frequently mentioned by Phillips include Richard Swinburne, Stephen Davis, AlvinPlantinga, Marilyn Adams, and John Hick.3 Aquinas could also have been referenced: “If, however, we consider the matter aright, since poweris said in reference to possible things, this phrase, God can do all things, is rightly understood to meanthat God can do all things that are possible; and for this reason He is said to be omnipotent” (SummaTheologica I, XXV, 3).

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as counterexamples he proposes “riding a bicycle, licking and savouring a Häagen-Dasz ice-cream, bumping one’s head, having sexual intercourse, learning a languageand so on and on” (12).

An interesting list, without any doubt! But a good many of us would suppose thatGod did learn a language, did bump his head, and probably mashed his own fingerswith his carpenter’s mallet a few times while he was learning the trade! Ice cream andbicycles were not available, but if they had been he would have enjoyed both. Andwe believe he did not engage in sexual intercourse, but not because the idea does notmake sense.

It seems likely, though, that Phillips was not thinking about what could or couldn’tbe done by God the Son Incarnate, but rather what God could do through his owndivine nature, as opposed to an assumed creaturely nature. In that case, the task to beperformed, in the case of bumping one’s head, would be to “bring it about that Godbumps God’s head.” But, given that the divine nature is essentially immaterial (as itis on all standard conceptions), this is not something that is describable without con-tradiction—and so also for the rest of the items on Phillips’ list. This point is perhapsmore readily grasped in the light of another statement from Swinburne: “God cannotdo what is logically impossible for him to do, whatever the reason for that logicalimpossibility” (12). Phillips quotes this from Swinburne, and a similar qualificationfrom Stephen Davis—but oddly enough, he ignores the point completely in the rest ofhis discussion. Phillips’ attempt to show that omnipotence is incoherent is completelyunsuccessful.4

Having shown, as he supposes, that the concept of divine omnipotence as definedby Swinburne, Davis, and Aquinas “doesn’t even get off the ground,” he proceeds toargue the same thing with respect to the notion of perfect divine goodness. He cites adefinition of libertarian free will from Plantinga, and points out that if God has liber-tarian free will with respect to good and evil then God can’t be perfectly (essentially)good. That is quite correct, but it creates no difficulty for the tradition, since the mainproponents of the tradition do not hold that God is capable of choosing evil. (Thereis, to be sure, a remaining problem concerning the relation between divine choiceand libertarian freedom, a problem which is explored in William Rowe’s Can God BeFree? and the responses to Rowe’s argument.5)

All this, however, is a mere warm-up to Phillips’ main point, which is that, giventhe tradition’s view of divine power, the problem of evil logically rules out ascribingperfect goodness to God. His statement of his program is striking:

What I am going to argue is that even if we grant that things are as theodiciesand defences depict them, even if the ultimate good did necessitate all the evilin the world, and even if the ultimate good somehow redeems all evil, it wouldstill be impossible to attribute perfect goodness to God (35).

Stripped to essentials, the central idea is that it is morally outrageous to supposethat God might have a morally adequate reason for permitting the Holocaust, assum-ing that it was in his power to prevent it. It’s not that the believer is unreasonable,or straining faith too far, in asserting that God has such a reason. On the contrary:

4 Not everyone would agree that Swinburne’s definition of omnipotence is adequate; there has beena vigorous discussion on this subject, and a number of alternative definitions have been proposed.This fact does nothing, however, to rescue Phillips’ critique or the sweeping negative conclusion hederives from it.5 See Rowe (2004), Kraay (2005), Hasker (2005) and Langtry (2006).


even to contemplate the possibility that there might be such a reason is morally unac-ceptable, showing great ethical insensitivity (at the least) on the part of one who putsforward such an idea. Phillips does try to cushion the shock a little; in his commentson Stephen Davis he suggests that Davis may not be as morally insensitive in reallife as he is in his endorsement of the free will defense. But “to describe redemption[from evils] in the way Davis suggests is to include in its effects a dulling of the mostelementary moral reactions to horrendous evils” (39).6

I find this entire approach highly problematic. I see no evidence that those whoreject belief in God as understood by the tradition are morally superior to believers inthe way implied by Phillips, and I see little promise in this approach as a constructivemeans of resolving philosophical disagreement. Phillips, however, attempts to supporthis case on logical grounds,7 and his argument must be examined. The centerpiece ofthe argument is the fictional case of Sophie Zawistowska, made famous in WilliamStyron’s novel Sophie’s Choice and the movie based on it. Forced to choose one of hertwo children to be spared from the gas chamber (if she had refused to choose, bothwould have died), she “let Eva go” and saved her son Jan. But although the horriblechoice was forced upon her, “Sophie never thinks of handing Eva over as an act to beexcused in the light of the total situation” (42). In 1947, two years after her releasefrom the death camp, she took her own life.

Phillips is quite clear that we, as bystanders, could never think of blaming or con-demning Sophie for her choice. Yet at the same time he thinks we should endorse8 herself-judgment of moral condemnation: “She cannot eliminate the moral significanceof letting Eva go” (42). The lesson drawn from this is that one who consents to theoccurrence of great evil, even in order to avoid a still greater evil or to secure a com-mensurately great good, cannot emerge morally unscathed. Sophie is morally stainedby the choice she was forced to make; a fortiori, God is morally stained for havingallowed such choices, and many other horrendous evils, to occur, even if the most

6 I believe Phillips is seriously unfair in his use of quotations from Davis. In citing Davis’s remarksabout the redemption of evils, he omits a crucial sentence: “The biblical vision is that despite thepain that all people have endured, and despite the horrible pain that some people have endured, thevision of the face of God that we will then experience will make all previous suffering such that thepain will no longer matter” (from Davis 2001, p. 85). This statement hardly minimizes suffering! Thetrivial example Davis gives (of being forced to wear an excruciatingly awful pair of pants to juniorhigh school) is not selected because it is comparable to the Holocaust (which would be absurd), butbecause this is a case in which we can readily see how pain and suffering can be overcome so that it isno longer troubling—something we admittedly cannot now see in the case of truly horrendous evils.Finally, Phillips claims that “this language is meant to have a beneficial effect now on those who havesuffered the horrendous evil” (59), but I see nothing in the text that justifies attributing this intentionto Davis. Not everything that can properly be said in a philosophical discussion of the problem of evilis suitable for use in grief counseling, and I believe Davis is well aware of this fact. (I do not deny that,in attempting the difficult task of theodicy, philosophers have sometimes said morally objectionablethings. Davis, however, is not deserving of the harsh treatment he receives from Phillips; on this seeespecially his response to John K. Roth in Davis 2001, pp. 20–23.)7 All else aside, what makes the considerations appealed to here logical? Phillips’ main point seems tobe that the tradition’s handling of this topic is unacceptably consequentialist, and he counts this issueof ethical principle as being a matter of “logic.” To many this will seem an unreasonable over-extensionof the boundaries of logic.8 What he actually says is that “it is possible to understand the personal judgment she makes atthe end” (42, emphasis added). This much is surely true, but if that were all he was claiming such“understanding” on our part would be consistent with the further judgment, “but she was mistaken inthinking she was morally at fault over Eva’s death.” Phillips’ argument requires us to reject this furtherjudgment, so he is committed to endorsing (and not merely “understanding”) her self-judgment.


extravagant claims of the theodicists are correct and all of this evil is strictly necessaryfor enormously valuable goods that could not be obtained in any other way. And thisis why the claim that God is morally perfect (given the belief in omnipotence) doesn’tget off the ground.

It seems to me that Sophie’s choice, and the judgment Phillips would have us makeabout it, is an extraordinarily fragile basis for his conclusion that the notion of divinemoral perfection is logically incoherent. One can, as he says, perfectly well under-stand how Sophie “could never forgive herself” for having given up her daughter tothe gas chamber. But this is consistent with holding, as one might very well hold, thatSophie was in no way morally at fault, or morally defective, for her conduct in thathorrendously evil situation. In discussion,9 Phillips declined to say what Sophie oughtto have done, instead of making the choice she actually made. But he continued toinsist that her choice was morally horrendous and that she was morally tainted bywhat she had done. I submit that one can perfectly well dissent from these judgmentswithout being guilty of either logical confusion or moral turpitude. And it is preciselythe generalization of these judgments to divine action that is the nerve of Phillips’argument.10,11

There is another assumption, said to be implicit in the tradition, which I have leftunmentioned until now, although Phillips lays considerable emphasis on it. This is theassumption that God is “a member of the same moral community” along with us. Nowthe meaning of this phrase is not exactly transparent, and I think it is unfortunate that,throughout the first half of his book, Phillips uses it without giving any explanation.However, the explanation does finally arrive, conveyed in a quotation from R. F.Holland:

It makes sense for us to have or fail to have moral reasons for our doings andrefrainings because as human beings we are members of a moral community.We have been born and brought up into a shared form of life in which thereare . . . customs and traditions; ideas . . . about what it is for instance to keepor break faith with another, . . . what it is to treat someone well or badly, whatjustice and injustice are . . . But God is not a member of a moral community orof any community . . . To credit the one true God with having a moral reasonfor doing anything is to conceive Him . . . as a one among many . . . subjectableto moral judgement; and within a moral community of course it would makeperfectly good sense for the one by whom, or let us say the chief one by whomwe are judged, to be submitted to our moral judgement (148–149).

Another quite illuminating comment is quoted from Rowan Williams:

Plenty of theologians and philosophers have pointed out that, if God is conceivedas acting in a punctiliar way, the divine action is determined by something other

9 At the Society for Philosophy of Religion, February 25, 2006; Phillips was responding to questionsraised by George Mavrodes.10 Another case cited by Phillips, of a pacifist who killed a gangster who was about to murder aninnocent girl, strikes me as less problematic. One might perfectly well conclude that the man’s pacifistbelief was mistaken, and that his action in defense of innocent life was entirely justified and proper. Ifon the other hand we endorse his absolute pacifism, we would think he was wrong to use deadly forceeven in such a situation, while feeling deep compassion over the intolerable circumstance in which hefound himself.11 For the purpose of this review essay, I skip over ch. 3, “God’s Morally Insufficient Reasons,” inwhich Phillips gives his critique of traditional theodicies and defenses. This material is worth attendingto, but much of it is familiar and can be found elsewhere.


than itself; likewise if God is conceived as ‘reacting’ to anything. If either ofthese conceptualities gets a foothold in our thinking about God, we ascribe toGod a context for God’s action: God is (like us) an agent in an environment,who must ‘negotiate’ purposes and desires in relation to other agencies andpresences. But God is not an item in any environment, and God’s action hasbeen held, in orthodox Christian thought, to be identical with God’s being – thatis, what God does is nothing other than God’s being actively real (150–151).

By way of summary, we can say that God’s being a member of our moral communityentails the following two propositions:

1. God is an agent, one who can and does act in particular times and places and withrespect to particular configurations of persons, circumstances, and events.

2. God’s actions can be described in terms implying moral evaluation; for instance,God can make and keep promises, treat persons justly according to their desertsor graciously beyond their deserts, can be lenient or severe with persons, and soon.

There is one point in the Holland quotation that requires special mention, namely theidea of God’s being “subjectable to our moral judgment.” Probably most believerswould object to this, but their reasons for objecting would not be that they dissentfrom either (1) or (2). That is to say: it is not that God does not act in particularsituations, or that his actions are “beyond morality” in such a way that the sorts ofjudgments about them specified in (2) would be inappropriate. Rather, the idea isthat God is so great, so much wiser and better than we are, that the idea that weare qualified to pass judgment over him makes no sense. A difficulty arises, however,when those who promote the argument from evil maintain that, in view of the actualcourse of events, God cannot be supposed to have morally acceptable reasons forthe things he is alleged to have done. If the believer is not simply to opt out of thediscussion, she is pretty well forced to argue either (a) that it hasn’t been shown thatGod could not have morally acceptable reasons (defense), or (b) that it is possiblefor us to think of reasons that may be at least part of the morally sufficient reasonsfor which God does some of the things we find problematic (theodicy). The defenderand the theodicist need not (and should not) be committed to “putting God in thedock,” but they must be prepared to argue that those who have attempted to do justthat have not succeeded in making their case against God.

Given this caveat, it is perfectly evident that the tradition is firmly committed toboth (1) and (2). The omnipotence it ascribes to God includes the ability to performparticular acts as stated in (1). And the perfect moral goodness of which it speaksentails that God has morally acceptable reasons for his actions, including reasons ofthe sort mentioned in (2). But it is not only a recent tradition in philosophy of religionthat is committed to these propositions. Who can doubt for a moment that the Bibleis full of descriptions of particular divine actions, and characterizes these actions interms of precisely the sorts of moral concepts invoked here? And insofar as it takesthe Bible seriously, orthodox or mainstream Christianity is also committed to them.(If we are really going to avoid letting “these conceptualities get a foothold in ourthinking about God,” it looks very much as though we shall need to keep from readingthe Bible, or at least avoid taking it at all seriously.) Phillips, on the other hand, rejectsboth (1) and (2). God does not, in his view, perform “punctiliar” actions, or for thatmatter any kind of actions at all, and thus the question of God’s having moral reasonsfor his actions never arises.


Now, there is a complication here, in that some—not all, by any means—orthodoxChristian thought has also been committed to the doctrine of divine simplicity, whichholds that there are no real distinctions between God, God’s attributes, and God’sactions. Williams takes this to mean that God’s action is “identical with God’s being—that is, what God does is nothing other than God’s being actively real.” Is divinesimplicity consistent with God’s acting at particular times and places? The orthodoxtradition (insofar as it has embraced simplicity) has thought that it is, but explainingthe consistency between the two sets of claims presents a challenging problem, onethat cannot be addressed here. However that may be, these ideas appear to representa certain convergence between Phillips’ thought and that of the Thomistic tradition,suggesting that the two might be able to make common cause against the dominantanalytic mainstream in philosophy of religion that is Phillips’ target. Thus, in a pub-lisher’s flyer for the present volume Fergus Kerr states that it “clears the groundfor serious engagement with traditional Catholic Christian doctrine and especiallythe theology of Thomas Aquinas.” It will be interesting to follow the course of theproposed conversation!

Shortly after citing the passages from Holland and Williams, Phillips presents aWittgensteinian explanation of why the notion of God as a non-embodied conscious-ness does not make sense. Roughly stated, the argument goes like this: Human con-sciousness is embedded in a context of a natural and social environment and bodilyaction, and our talk about human consciousness presupposes this context. Therefore,the notion of an unembodied divine consciousness is incoherent. (Interested readersare invited to supply for themselves the (presumably rigorous) chain of reasoningleading from premise to conclusion.) Now, we have already excluded the idea ofGod’s having a physical body. It thus becomes evident that whatever else he (or she,or it) may be, God is not any sort of conscious entity at all. A bit later, Phillips acceptsthat the conclusion of his argument so far is a “purifying atheism.” He has provided,he claims, a conceptual proof of “what God cannot be” (156); he seems to hope thatthis may be seen as “a prelude to turning in a different religious direction, or as thenecessity to appreciate a different religious direction already recognized” (158). Hewrites, “No doubt there will be enormous resistance from within the philosophicaltraditions I have criticized, although one hopes that a strategy of silence in the faceof challenge will give way to creative debate” (156). The difficulty here is that mostinterested philosophers have concluded that the challenge Phillips refers to playeditself out some time in the 1970s.12 It seems unlikely that rehearsing once again thosesame arguments will strike very many as a hopeful prelude to “creative debate.”

In the last few chapters of the book Phillips sets for himself the constructive taskof illustrating the “different religious direction” by elucidating religious conceptsgrouped under the headings of “God’s Absence and Presence,” “Faith and Expecta-tion,” “Sacrifice,” and “Last Things.” These concepts, all of them important compo-nents in Christian faith and practice, are indeed difficult and puzzling, and thus goodcandidates for the sort of elucidation Phillips seeks to provide. Some of his remarks Ifind illuminating, insightful, and challenging, while others seem difficult and elusive.My main concern about these chapters, however, goes in a slightly different direction.The concepts in question are said, rightly, to arise within the context of Christianlife and practice. But more needs to be said, I think, about the way in which their

12 For some comments on the alleged unintelligibility of the notion of a disembodied consciousness,see Hasker (Spring 2006).


meaning is constrained by that context. Now I personally have known a good num-ber of “ordinary Christians” (some of them quite extraordinary in their own ways),the sorts of persons whose religious practice is presumably relevant to the conceptsPhillips is elucidating. Most of them are uninfluenced by philosophy, and are thus freefrom the suspicion that they have been contaminated by “the tradition.” I have to say,however, that the religious outlook of these ordinary believers is rather drasticallydifferent from the one Phillips is promoting in these chapters. A simple way of puttingit is that while he puts forward a “purifying atheism” (albeit not as his last word),they are not atheists of any description whatsoever. And if they were to accept hispurifying atheism, what they would be “purified” of would include much of what theynow regard as the most vital and meaningful elements of their faith. They really dobelieve that there is a wise and very powerful, living, personal being, distinct from youand me and the lamppost, who thinks about us and our lives, desires our everlastinghappiness, and acts in space and time in order to bring that about.13 Some advancedreligious thinkers may regard such beliefs as naive or even idolatrous, but that is notin question here, only that they really do hold such beliefs.

Probably Phillips would not disagree with this, though he may not like my way ofputting it. But here is the point that needs to be emphasized: Insofar as these differ-ences obtain, the religious concepts of these ordinary believers are not and cannot bethe concepts Phillips is analyzing. For their use of these concepts entails a belief inthe actual existence and activity of just the sort of being that, according to Phillips,“God cannot be.” I don’t see how anything could be plainer—yet the point is notat all clearly acknowledged in Phillips’ writing. Chapter 8, for instance, begins: “Alltheistic religions have spoken of the distance that separates God from human beings.That notion of ‘distance’ may puzzle us. How is it to be understood?” (164) Thisway of speaking suggests that there is a single notion of distance in question, onewhich merely awaits the application of the appropriate techniques of logical analysisto reveal its secrets. My contention is that this suggestion is seriously misleading. Andthis is by no means an isolated example. It fairly often happens that a Wittgensteinianis challenged by a philosopher from the tradition, the latter saying something along thelines of “It looks as though you are denying so-and-so.” The Wittgensteinian replies,“Not so, but we need to look carefully and see what it means to affirm so-and-so.” Theappropriate counter-question, at this point, is “Whose concept of so-and-so is it thatwe will be analyzing?” The pretense that there is a single religious concept, commonto the Wittgensteinian and the traditionalist, which simply waits to be analyzed, doessecure a dialectical advantage for the Wittgensteinian, by making it appear that thedifference between them concerns a conceptual analysis which the Wittgensteinianhas performed and the traditionalist has neglected.14 But assuming such a single,common concept is a pretense, and the advantage it affords is unearned.

It is possible to reach a somewhat similar conclusion along a different route. Ina sense, Phillips’ bottom-line objection against the philosophers of the tradition is

13 The point I am making is not addressed by what Phillips says about “God’s Grammatical Predi-cates” on pp. 186–91. I am not here disputing that Phillips’ way of construing words allows him somesense in which he can speak about “God.” I am only saying – and how can he possibly disagree? – thathis way of using the word is very different from that of these “ordinary believers.”14 Of course I don’t mean to deny that it would be possible to use Wittgensteinian techniques toanalyze the religious concepts actually employed by ordinary believers in their religious lives. Suchanalyses would not be subject to the criticisms made here. These analyses would also, I suspect, turnout quite differently than the ones we are usually offered.


that they pay insufficient attention to the religious context of the concepts they areemploying. They assume, for instance, that we know what “power” means quite apartfrom God, and need only apply that conception of power to God when speaking ofdivine power. What is needed, on the contrary, is to pay much closer attention toreligious practice: “The philosophical lesson to be learned . . . is that the meaning of‘God is omnipotent’ is, of necessity, to be found in the religious contexts in which it isexpressed” (12). It is just this religious context which is neglected by the philosophersof the tradition, with unfortunate results.

This diagnosis, however plausible in the abstract, becomes puzzling when we thinkabout the actual individuals involved. Has Phillips never heard Steve Davis pray, orbeen in the congregation when Marilyn Adams preached a sermon? Even if he hasnot, I think he would not deny that among the philosophers of the tradition there aresome deeply devout individuals, persons who sincerely and persistently endeavor, notjust to philosophize about religion, but to live lives of faith. These persons are also, ofcourse, highly intelligent as well as philosophically gifted. But given all that, would itnot be surprising if there were, unnoticed, such a yawning gulf between their spiritualpractice and their philosophical practice as Phillips supposes?

Still, the existence of such a disconnect is not strictly impossible. We can imaginethe following scenario: Steve Davis has been reading Wittgenstein, or Rush Rhees, orD. Z. Phillips, and suddenly he claps his hand to his forehead and exclaims, “At lastI see it! The concept of God I’ve been trying to elucidate makes no sense, because ithas nothing to do with my actual religious practice, and that of my faith community.The propositions I’ve been defending not only aren’t true, they aren’t even false; theyare actually meaningless strings of words, and not real propositions at all.15 There’snothing for it but to start over again right from the beginning.”

In fact, of course, this has not happened. What can we learn from the fact that ithasn’t? We might conclude that Davis’s failure to reach this point reflects merely astubborn refusal to change, together with a certain amount of logical obtuseness andperhaps (still more regrettable) moral obtuseness as well. But this conclusion isn’tforced upon us. We might just think that the reason Davis and the others don’t reachthis conclusion is that, by and large, their conception of God and the things they aresaying about God do make sense in terms of their own religious practices and thoseof their faith community. Note that we can perfectly well say this even if we ourselvesdo not participate in their community or agree with its beliefs and practices. If we setany store by charity as a virtue in philosophical debate, we might prefer to understandthe situation in a way that does not massively impugn the logical acumen and moralcharacter of a good many of our friends and colleagues.

This does not mean that Phillips is entirely wrong. It remains open that there isanother community, and another set of religious practices, within which the assertionsmade by Davis, and others, are as meaningless as Phillips says they are. It wouldseem, in fact, that it is the aim of the second part of his book to demonstrate thatthis is indeed the case. And it may be that it is this latter sort of community in whichD. Z. Phillips participates, and in which Wittgenstein would have participated if hehad been religiously affiliated. The important step we would need to take, then, wouldbe precisely to recognize that we have here two distinct religious communities, and

15 Compare the following from Wittgenstein, quoted on p. 19: “when we are tempted in philosophyto count some quite useless things as a proposition, that is often because we have not considered itsapplication sufficiently.”


two significantly divergent sets of religious practices, such that from the standpoint ofone of the communities Phillips’ objections are compelling and from the standpointof the other they are not.16

Once this is recognized, we could go on to ask further questions about these twocommunities. We could conduct separate, and parallel, analyses of the religious con-cepts employed by the communities, in order to see how (in some cases) the sameor similar words are incorporated in quite different religious practices. Some wouldwish to go further, and make comparisons between the respective sets of beliefs withrespect to rationality, warrant, and even truth. But however that may go, recognizingthe disparity between the communities and their practices is already a first, major stepon the road to philosophical clarification.17

References

Davis, S. T. (Ed.). (2001). Encountering evil: Live options in theodicy, a new edition. Louisville: West-minster John Knox Press.

Hasker, W. (2005). Can God be free?: Rowe’s dilemma for theology. Religious Studies, 41, 453–462.Hasker, W. (2006). After life. In E. M. Zolta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Available

from http://plato. stanford. edu/entries/afterlife/.Kraay, K. J. (2005). Willam Rowe’s a priori argument for atheism. Faith and Philosophy, 22(2), 211–234.Langtry, B. (2006). God and infinite hierarchies of creatable worlds. Faith and Philosophy, 23(4).Phillips, D. Z. (2004). The problem of evil and the problem of God. London: SCM press.Rowe, W. (2004). Can God be free? Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

16 I greatly oversimplify, of course, in supposing that there are just two communities involved. Thephilosophers of the tradition stem from many different faith-communities, with significantly differentreligious practices among them. (Davis and Adams, for example, are hardly peas from the same theo-logical pod.) However, I believe that many of these communities share the fundamental commitmentsidentified here as characteristic of “the tradition,” so for present purposes the oversimplification is notharmful. I will leave it to others to characterize in more detail the alternative community representedby Phillips.17 My thanks to Stephen Davis, James Keller, Charles Taliaferro, and William Wainwright for valuablecomments on an earlier version of this review essay.

d. z. phillips’ problems with evil and with god

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