Date

5-2022

Department

Rawlings School of Divinity

Degree

Master of Arts in Christian Apologetics (MA)

Chair

Edward Martin

Keywords

Cognitive Science, Cognitive Science of Religion, Bias, Evidential Problem of Evil, Confirmation Bias

Disciplines

Psychology | Religion

Abstract

Evidential evil is an encompassing title for moral evil, natural disasters, disease, famine, divorce, suffering, or other calamities in life that yield dissatisfaction or discernable discomfort. This area of evidential evil is the focus of this paper generally, including the argument posed by William Rowe from evidential evil and contemporary treatments offered by Bruce Russell. The argumentation is God’s nonexistence from the platform, or derivative of no greater good observed or known, of the justification or allowance of evil. It is not a refutation of the premises, per se, but instead, the biases associated with them are de facto statements of seeming certainty absent the claim of certain knowledge. In like manner, the contemporary work of Bruce Russell, specifically the 2018 essay “The Problem of Evil and Replies to Some Important Responses,” will be critiqued in chapter three. This critique will point to a specific bias and evaluate this bias for objective discourse. This, then, is the heart of this thesis, the specificity of the ontology of bias as a worldview engine as it pertains to the Problem of Evil and addressing this bias to determine the incoherence to reality to instantiate warranted belief in God’s existence.

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