Beyond the Problem of Evil: Derrida and Anglophone Philosophy of Religion 9781498555722, 9781498555739, 1498555721

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Beyond the Problem of Evil

Beyond the Problem of Evil Derrida and Anglophone Philosophy of Religion Nathan R. B. Loewen

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-4985-5572-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-5573-9 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Abbreviations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Reconsidering Evil: Beyond the Discourse of Theism

1

1 2 3 4 5

A Problem of Persuasion A Discourse on Evil within the Limits of Theism Alone Orthodoxy and Others Subjectivity, Sovereignty, and Law Violence and Responsibility

19 41 57 77 103

Conclusion

121

Bibliography

131

Index

145

About the Author

151

v

List of Abbreviations

All sources by Jacques Derrida. AnIA

“The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” 2002

AoR

Acts of Religion, 2002

ArF

Archive Fever, 1995

ARSS

“Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” 2003

C

“Circonfession,” 1993

Di

Dissemination, 1981

EtC

“Et Cetera . . . (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.),” 2000

FK

“Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion . . . ,” 1998

FLa

“Force of Law,” 1992

FWT

& Elisabeth Roudinesco, “For What Tomorrow . . . ,” 2004

GiD

Gift of Death, 1995

HAS

“How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 1987

LI

Limited Inc., 1988

LOB

“Living On: Border Lines,” 1988

LoRe

“The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” 2007

MdM

Mémoires for Paul de Man, 1986 vii

viii

List of Abbreviations

MOP

“Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin,” 1998

N

Negotiations, 2002

ODD

“The Original Discussion of ‘Différance,’” 1988

OG

Of Grammatology, 1974

ON

On the Name, 1995

OTNH

“Onto-Theology of National-Humanism . . . ,” 2007

P

Positions, 1981

PaM

Paper Machine, 2005

PIO

Psyché: Inventions of the Other, 1989

PoF

Politics of Friendship, 1997

Pts

Points, 1995

R

Rogues, 2005

S

Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, 1978

SMa

Specters of Marx, 1994

TBa

“Des Tours de Babel,” 1985

TfS

“I Have a Taste for the Secret,” 2001

TrP

The Truth in Painting, 1987

WAl

Without Alibi, 2002

WD

Writing and Difference, 1978

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many for helping me realize this project. The University of Alabama’s Research Grants Council generously provided me with funding and time to do archival research and writing in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine. In the same year, the College of Arts and Sciences at UA provided support through their Publisher Residence program. In the bookwriting process, I have frequently relied upon my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies, and I am indebted to them for their encouragement and counsel. Special thanks goes to Jana Hodges-Kluck, whose patient and instructive editorial guidance at Rowman & Littlefield has seen this project through to completion. One narrative for the sufficient causes of this project begins in 1997 with the faculty at St. Andrew’s College at the University of Saskatchewan. Their contributions to my master’s degree program set the direction for my doctoral work. Marta Frascati set aside her evenings for close readings of Heidegger, Derrida, and Vattimo. David Jobling introduced me to literary criticism generally, as well as the specifics of deconstruction in the course of cowriting my first academic article. Don Schweitzer saw me through a first solo attempt to perform an original application of Derridean concepts to an ethical problem. I owe these people so much gratitude. I am particularly indebted to Marta for introducing me in 2002 to her doctoral advisor, Maurice Boutin. As a doctoral student at McGill University, I had the opportunity to read more widely and closely under his simultaneously generous and uncompromising encouragement. Another of his former students, Jim Kanaris, became my mentor for thinking about how to teach the philosophy of religion at a college level. While in Montreal, I was incredibly fortunate to earn tenure at Vanier College, an institution whose collegiality saw me through my doctoix

x

Acknowledgments

ral defense. Among my many friends there, I want to acknowledge three people who were extremely supportive in my transition to the University of Alabama in 2015: Gordon Aronoff, Judy Ingerman, and Eric Lozowy. I see the past twenty years of colleagues and friendships as the background for the generation of this project as well as all of those to come. The more immediate background for the movement from project to book has been nothing short of exhilarating. The year before I began writing this manuscript, I became the parent of an incredible individual. Arlo is a wellspring of energy and empathy. Thanks to him, I am continually learning how to reinvent the world. To be more concise, another narrative for this project begins and ends quite simply with Merinda Simmons.

Introduction: Reconsidering Evil Beyond the Discourse of Theism

“Don’t be evil.” Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin adopted this corporate mantra in the early 2000s. They integrated it in the “ten things” the company “knows to be true.” 1 They even directed their employees to bake the mantra into their algorithms. The mantra was dropped in 2015, when Google became Alphabet on the stock exchanges. In that span of time Google had grown from a competitor with Yahoo! to near dominance in their markets. The company early on began to expand its searching (pardon the pun) for innovation and products in a myriad of other sectors. A discource about evil thereby participated in the life and success of that company. Evil is everywhere. And by that, I mean evil is a folk term. Google is a business, not a philosophy department. And the use of this word appears frequently in common speech. Perhaps only alongside “religion” is there another term that is regularly deployed in a variety of mundane circumstances but is also deployed as a taxon in academic discourse. The ubiquity of “religion” is precisely what makes religious studies scholars take pause rather than grant license to move on to other issues. Religious studies scholars have participated in debates going on since the 1960s to the present about whether the term “religion” performs any analytically useful function. There are strong arguments to dispose of religion completely, to which a variety of rebuttals are proposed in the form of defenses of “religion” based on approaches such as studying “lived religions” or social-scientific arguments to study how the term is deployed as a piece of data rather than a scholarly category. No such debates exist among philosophers of religion concerning evil. Discussions involving the term largely take the term for granted and then move on with the real business of debating some other issue. One item 1

2

Introduction

in the background of this book is to suggest that evil may be deployed too glibly among philosophers of religion. Google’s phraseology gives more pause for consideration than the typical formulation of the premise in the problem of evil. Consider the differences between “Don’t be evil” and “There is evil in the world.” One is a desideratum and the other is a declarative statement, to be sure. But consider how the former opens onto a discussion about just what might count as evil, whereas the latter does not offer itself as a point for discussion. Google’s mantra effectively nudges at generating a subject’s identity. How may I be evil? What does it mean for me not to be evil? Who am I? And since Google was starting up in a context where Microsoft was a giant in the market, perhaps the statement constructs an opposition: Don’t be like those other (evil) people. The mantra is not asking its interlocutors to take “evil” for granted. Rather, the better term may be that the mantra interpellates subjects by provoking their consciousness of the possibility of being something they would wish otherwise. The phrase is smart because it seems to suppose that employees respond well to reflexive inquiry. The introspection prompted by the mantra is wide ranging. It sets forth a very strict binary. What could it mean to not be evil? What sorts of beings and doings fall within the ambit of being evil? The issue is about being rather than becoming. The phraseology cuts off the possibility, for employees think they are merely veering, perhaps “just this once,” down a path of becoming evil. Either you are evil or not. Either you are with us or against us. Or, as another recently famous political speech declared: either you are with the Axis of Evil or our Coalition of the Willing. Any action verb gets associated, thereby, with being. Don’t promote, compute, search, watch, act, try, or drink evil. The prompt to reflexivity is unlike stating “Be good.” Being good very well may permit maximizing shareholder returns by any means possible. Considering what it means to not be evil may at least give greater pause before setting out to do that “good.” The philosopher of religion can learn from this example that “evil” does not demarcate a specialized domain of inquiry until greater consideration is given to the term as a taxon than would a corporation or its employees. Questioning the distinction between wrongdoing and evil is not an exclusive point of entry. The term serves its function in everyday speech well. For example, when Felicia Sanders, a survivor of the shooting at Mother Emmanuel Church on June 17, 2015, described the perpetrator at the sentencing trial as “evil, evil, evil as can be.” There are some events in the world that confront everyday comprehension with inscrutability. And while it is possible that philosophers of religion may concur, they are participants in a larger discipline of philosophy which asks for a degree of reflexive examination that goes beyond the ingenuity of Google’s mantra.

Reconsidering Evil

3

Beyond the Problem of Evil proposes that the examination of evil by philosophers of religion may have a wider scope of terms and material for consideration. “Evil” has the potential to function as a useful taxon for inquiry in the way that “religion” functions amid the many qualifications of religious studies scholars. The word works within a specific area of inquiry: the problem of evil. That there already is a dizzying array of articles about the problem of evil is taken as evidence that there is in fact potential to widen the scope of inquiry. However, the literature discusses evil as a problem in ways that carry along with several assumptions in need of reconsideration. As such, this book follows through on a hermeneutic of suspicion that reviews the current discourse on the problem of evil and then proceeds to give examples of how it may be possible to locate and revise some of the concepts and assumptions at work in that discourse. Thomas A. Lewis recently noted this is a peculiar subfield of philosophy which “has not generated a substantial body of work that appreciates, engages with, and contributes to important broader developments in religious studies.” 2 I think that the problem of evil provides a good example of just that. The opening chapters of this book lay out an argument for how the discussions of evil came to form a narrowly focused discourse that itself works to regulate the boundaries of the entire subfield. And so thus this book proposes that widening the scope of the discourse on the problem of evil will serve to extend philosophical engagements with “religion” well beyond theism. Using Jacques Derrida’s texts to pry open the discourse is not an obvious choice. Three reasons present themselves almost immediately. One is that most Anglo-American philosophers feel as though the world would be a better place without Derrida. A second is that doing so requires the resolution of a broader issue involving analytic versus continental philosophy. The final reason is that those familiar with Derrida’s works do not immediately find any direct treatment of something like the problem of evil. The last matter may be quickly addressed here by noting that Derrida’s works do not provide a clear-cut philosophy of religion. The expression “philosophy of religion” does not appear in his published works. It follows that nothing in his writings presents itself recognizably as “the problem of evil.” Insofar as the arguments in Derrida’s texts never appeal to the authority of religious tradition or sacred texts, they retain the aims of philosophy to use examples whose authority and validity do not appeal to a religious tradition. Much of this book is devoted to developing an analysis of how Derrida’s writings frequently discuss evil and suffering. Drawing on this knowledge, the latter half of the book discusses how several of Derrida’s concepts and frameworks helpfully rethink the assumptions up and running among key figures and arguments about the problem of evil. The first two reasons cannot be dismissed so quickly.

4

Introduction

It is entertaining and useful to ask: What we can do is substitute the premises of theism in the classical problem of evil with “Anglo-American analytic philosophy” and substitute evil for “Derrida”? Is there a possible world in which they are compatible? “The basic idea is that a possible world is a way things could have been; it is a state of affairs of some kind.” 3 And further, “To be a possible world, a state of affairs must be very large—so large as to be complete or maximal.” 4 That is, the complement to a given state of affairs must include everything in that world. The concept of “possible worlds” in modal logic provides some entertaining ways of considering whether the conjunction of “Derrida” plus “philosophy of religion” is plausible. Would our actual world be significantly better or worse, compared to one in which “Derrida” did not exist? The phrase “possible worlds” has very particular associations for AngloAmerican philosophers of religion. Alvin Plantinga brought modal logic to bear on thinking about the problem of evil with God, Freedom and Evil (1974). He did so while mounting the now well-known free-will defense, where a world containing significantly free creatures is more valuable, all else being equal, than one with no free creatures at all. Namely, removing significant freedom from a world is an evil that would outweigh the allowance of evils done by through the exercise of significant freedom. There are several historic events that mark a generally skeptical attitude among AngloAmerican philosophers toward the reasonable acceptance that Derrida and the philosophy of religion are compatible. Plantinga may not have known about Derrida during the drafting of his manuscript, but I suspect he would have included Derrida among those “supersophisticates” 5 whose work is irrelevant to doing philosophy of religion. For the segment of time in Plantinga’s life where he wrote his book, his was a possible world free of Derrida. Plantinga’s pithy book proposed arguments that used examples in rather ordinary language and demonstrations with logical operators in order to elaborate a formal argument for the compatibility of evil, freedom, and God. In doing so, Plantinga introduced the concept of “transworld depravity.” 6 Using possible worlds in modal logic, he demonstrated that a necessary being could not actualize a world without evils where human beings have free will to do morally significant actions. Those significantly free beings would necessarily go wrong at least once. Each possible world is a complete, maximal set of worldly affairs that may be considered alongside other possible worlds. Doing so allows for demonstrations of what comes about given adjustments from one world’s set of affairs to the next. For Plantinga, transworld depravity is demonstrated as a necessary feature of any possible world containing humans whose existences are weakly actualized by God. Transworld depravity disappears only in possible worlds where human existence is strongly actualized and thereby lacks free will. If human beings are to have free will,

Reconsidering Evil

5

then there is no possible world that a necessary being might create in which humans do not commit at least one substantial, moral wrong. For those who think that Derrida and the philosophy of religion are not compatible, to ask “Why Derrida?” is to imagine the actualization of a possible world in which a host of agents’ choices do not go wrong with respect to a certain understanding of what counts as “philosophy.” Derrida-possible worlds would be those in which a particular kind of Derrida-depravity is possible. I am not about to argue for transworld-Derrida-depravity, but the thought experiment is useful to ask what the world of philosophy would be like without Derrida. After Plantinga’s book, subsequent work on the problem of evil in AngloAmerican philosophy of religion has always drawn up it. Contrary to most intuitive reasoning about a world without Derrida, few philosophers of religion would care to imagine a possible world in which Plantinga’s work on evil did not come about. In other words, Plantinga’s choice to write that book at the very least weakly actualized further developments in the philosophy of religion. Richard Otte illustrates this point in terms of a human whose choices about suicide affects what is possible: “Consider a possible world Wb in which Adam’s first and only free choice is whether to kill himself.” 7 For Adam to be significantly free with respect to this choice, a possible world must be imaginable in which he does just that. In those possible worlds without Adam, “earlier agents’ bad choices might prevent later agents from even existing, in which case they would not make any wrong choices.” 8 Without Derrida, according to many English-language philosophers, a possible world would exist where subsequent agents would not make wrong choices. And so, while neither strongly nor weakly actualized, this reasoning amounts to wishing for Derrida’s death. None of this is new. Nicholas Royle rightly notes something of a death threat implied in asking “Why Derrida?” 9 Considering the question modally is to ask whether the actual world would be any different, all else being equal, without the life of Jacques Derrida? If Derrida’s work is irrelevant to philosophy, then it would seem that we could do without him. It may even be possible to consider how the world might be a better place without Derrida. Why, if it were not for Derrida’s exchanges with Searle and Habermas, for example, might the world be able to do without the animus that characterizes the divide between analytic and continental philosophy? (More on this to follow, below.) There would have been no “Cambridge letter,” much less the difficulties created for the French government in repatriating the living Derrida from the Czechoslovakian government in 1982. So it may be that a better possible philosophical world is one without Derrida, who many appraise as a latter-day sophist. 10 A softer version of the same death threat is one of relevance, where the question is whether the philosophical world as a state of affairs would do better without further discussion of Derrida’s possible relevance to thinking about

6

Introduction

such topics as the problem of evil. Perhaps Derrida should fade into obscurity in the way that A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) is no longer a key textbook for introductions to philosophy? There are certainly proponents of the analytic-continental divide who would be quite happy to have Derrida’s works fade from the scene. In both of these senses, there is a death knell ringing behind the question “Why Derrida?” The modal way of thinking allows for counterfactual thought experiments that verge upon murder, since we can entertain possible worlds whose maximal contents may be voided of events, phenomena, or persons. Counterfactuals about the existence of a particular philosopher may be posed in several ways. For example, Richard Rorty notes how Heidegger registered the death threat, “Heidegger is vividly aware of a possibility which was eventually actualized in the work of Derrida—that Heidegger would be treated as he himself treated Nietzsche, as one more (the last) rung in a ladder which must be cast away. For an example of this awareness, see his repudiation of the ‘French’ idea that his work is continuous with Hegel’s.” 11 Perhaps the philosopher could be imagined as unnecessary for the historical emergence of an idea. Or, perhaps the philosopher developed an idea up until a certain point, but could be imagined as unnecessary later work in the history of that idea. Or, perhaps the historical absence of that philosopher would have enabled a history or idea to develop more efficiently or fully. And finally, perhaps it is the case that the philosopher and the idea are no longer influential. In all these cases, the context is that of a philosopher’s departure from a possible world. Derrida seems to have been familiar with these sorts of counterfactuals regarding his life and work. In 1999, Derrida was sitting in on a conference at Oxford titled “Arguing with Derrida,” where he recounted a conversation with a life-and-death counterfactual: Back to Oxford, but after 1967. . . . We were discussing “différance” with some students in the gardens of Balliol College. And one of the students asked me (he is now teaching philosophy in the States by the way) “Given what you are saying, why don’t you commit suicide?” That was the question. I don’t remember what the answer was. But here I am, and saying that, in fact, I am very happy with what Adrian is doing, very grateful to Adrian for what he has just been doing. 12

Any one of the three counterfactual scenarios above may have been at play among those privy to the conversation in that vignette. Without immediately explaining différance, it is possible to imagine a world in which “Derrida” committed suicide at some time in the past for a variety of reasons: he had fully developed the idea and nothing further was necessary; or, he had developed the idea to the best of his abilities but was it unnecessary for future developments based on différance; or, by 1999, Derrida was aware that, due

Reconsidering Evil

7

to proposing différance, the world would be a better place, all else being equal, without him. The vignette does not end this way, however. The text recounted above seems to carry the intention that, all else being equal, Derrida understands the actual world’s maximal state of affairs to be better, all else being equal, with his continued existence. Evidence of such counterfactuals is not difficult to find amid the philosophical community when it comes to “Derrida.” The 1992 open letter of objection to Derrida’s honorary doctorate at Cambridge University expressed the opinion that Derrida’s texts should not be acknowledged as influential. In fact, the existence of “Derrida” was likely absent from most of the signatories’ work, since there seems to be no evidence that they had read his work. 13 In other words, they were attempting to strongly actualize a state of affairs in which future agents’ choices would not go wrong with respect to “philosophy.” The signatories wished for a possible world in which, all else being equal, there would be no further possibility of Derrida’s influence or presence in philosophy. Simon Blackburn expressed regret to have not been among the signatories of that letter. His opinion piece in The Times Higher Education Supplement, upon the death of Derrida in the actual world, registered his version of a possible world without Derrida: “I don’t think we should honour an attitude that makes those tasks harder than they already are.” 14 The closing sentence of Blackburn’s piece expresses the counterfactual desideratum for a possible world where lack of attention to Derrida’s texts actualizes a better state of affairs. 15 At another point in time, Derrida himself is not above making wagers about the absence of others. In the exchange with John R. Searle about how to understand the work of John L. Austin’s, Derrida states that he responded with a smile 16 to Searle’s speech act that Austin did not live long enough to develop a general theory of speech himself. 17 Not only did Derrida cite an account of himself responding with a gesture rather than with ordinary language, he posed a problem of determining just what the smile meant. Without knowing the proper context the intention of Derrida’s smile could not be registered. The smile posed similar hypothetical questions about the death of a philosopher that extended to the context of Searle’s words, too. Did Searle intend to regret Austin’s death if the philosophical project unrealized by Austin nevertheless came about? What sort of regret is it if it just so happens that Searle is the philosopher who produced the theory that mitigated the actual fact of Austin’s death? The questions for Derrida include asking whether he smiled with the intention of happiness upon the fact of Austin’s actual death. Or, was Derrida intending to express happiness upon Searle’s actual success in producing a general theory of speech acts? Or, was the smile demonstrating Derrida’s happiness to discover, by way of a smile, the extra-ordinary example by which Searle’s general theory may very well slip upon what Searle intended as a solid philosophical foundation? And if the

8

Introduction

answers to all of the above are “yes,” then Derrida may also smile about having reiterated his overall argument with a smile. Is Derrida practicing some kind of schadenfreude or expressing the thrill of being able to stand Searle on his head? Derrida does not issue any formal claim about a possible world, but his line of argument does imply the possibility of counterfactuals regarding earlier agents’ choices that may have prevented later ideas from existing whereby later agents would not have gone wrong with respect to, in this case, a general theory of speech acts. The most basic answer to “Why Derrida?” is that doing work along the lines of Derrida is to think about those areas in philosophical thinking that are resistant to conceptual precision and logical clarity. There is no disagreement with Blackburn’s contention that this attitude makes the task of philosophy more difficult, precisely in order to consider what philosophical questions need asked and what resources are needed to answer those questions. The point pressed by Plantinga’s free-will defense, however, is that a world containing significantly free creatures is more valuable, all else being equal, than one with no free creatures at all. Namely, removing significant freedom from a world would outweigh the allowance of evils done through the exercise of significant freedom. This book proposes the consideration of Derrida on the problem of evil to be one such choice that enables freedom. The particular lines of questioning taken up in this book may be considered as historicist criticism, which is something the Anglo-American philosophy of religion is not well known for. Historicist critiques will explore and demonstrate the contingency and historicity of the narratives that mobilize and maintain identities. The normative claim on which such critiques run is that there is no complete and total whole of historical causality. 18 That claim runs counter to the modal notion of a possible world, W, as a complete and maximal state of affairs. From the understanding of epistemic limits presumed by a historicist perspective, the complete set W is taken to be unreasonable to accept. The rational acceptance that there is W is resisted by the injunction to historicize further. Turning toward the discourse on the problem of evil, there emerges the opportunity for critiques that open the possibilities for rethinking evil as a problem. Put briefly, this is a way of saying there is more to be done with the problem of evil. The allure and danger of the problem of evil is that it asks philosophers to grapple with matters that present themselves more as ineffable than something encapsulated with “W.” The problem of evil presents a strange situation for philosophers of religion. The problem deals with something quite real—the overwhelming evidence that the world has numerous instances of excruciating suffering—in a manner that abstracts from the world with “evil.” Evil abstracts evidence into a concept that is pitched against metaphysical claims about a necessary being. Almost immediately, the discourse finds itself well outside the circumscribed realm of everyday agreements

Reconsidering Evil

9

about the world. What are the facts of evil that may be agreed upon? Who has laid these out in an exhaustive analysis such that ordinary language is the last word about evil? Can there be a last, ordinary language of evil? Evidently, given the vast amount of literature on the problem of evil, there is no foreseeable end to the stream of ordinary language being deployed in analytical service to the topic. By my reading, it would seem that the pursuit of finer distinctions about evil has not served to do more than to demonstrate the breadth of what may be thought to fit in the category. 19 The use of everyday language and everyday examples, if granted that the intention is not to be trivial or trite about others’ sufferings, should expand the set of what counts as evil so far as to put the category into question. The questions above conjoined with the discussion of Derrida points to another issue addressed by this book. There is a perceived division between two groups. There are Anglo-Americans who often self-identify as analytic philosophers. The other group is easily subdivided into those who identify themselves as Continental philosophers and those who are identified by others as Continental philosophers. The Kantian spirit of Anglo-American philosophy is easy to find in the attempt to distinguish itself from continental philosophy of the wooly sort: epistemic limits must be set in order to rule out inquiries about the world that resist determination. These limits function usefully to enable formal propositional thinking. According to the written records, Derrida is part of the latter group while self-identifying as among the first. At the same Cambridge discussion referred to above, Derrida stated, “When you were defining conceptual philosophy, or analytic philosophy as conceptual philosophy, I thought: well, that’s what I am doing, that’s exactly what I am trying to do. So: I am an analytic philosopher—a conceptual philosopher.” 20 So how might Derrida’s statement be reconciled to the philosophical division with which he self-identifies? How does Derrida’s insistence that impurity is an irreducible structural feature of all locutionary acts 21 as an unavoidable general condition 22 make sense? Toril Moi offers one possibility with the observation that “Derrida’s deconstruction of the tradition is more closely intertwined with the tradition than Wittgenstein’s attempts to get us to give up asking Big Questions.” 23 Moi situates Derrida method alongside Frege’s desire for sharp conceptual boundaries. She sees Derrida making two moves: one move locates and amplifies the sharpness of conceptual boundaries, and the second move then demonstrates the failure of the boundaries. 24 And while Moi’s objective is to lift Wittgenstein out from analytic philosophy, the effect of her analysis situates Derrida amid them. The kind of work done by most Anglo-American philosophers of religion resides within analytic philosophy of the ordinary language sort. The derivation of formal propositions from everyday words for the purposes of analysis using logical methods is what characterizes the work done by those who have

10

Introduction

engaged with texts such as Plantinga’s. Their work treads the fine line between attempting to do metaphysics aligned with everyday talk that avoids the tendency to make the mistakes of both common talk and other methods of speculation through the pursuit of clarity. When it comes to the problem of evil, the metaphor for doing analytic philosophy noted by Crispin Wright 25 is meant to save such reflections from wooly-mindedness. Riding the analytic rails to infinity is a means of intellectual self-defense. Although, doing so leads toward the situation described by Eleanor Stump regarding the problem of evil, where analytic philosophy is “plodding, pedestrian and inadequate to its task.” 26 On this count even Stanley Cavell, who finds that he disagrees with Derrida’s approach to Austin and Searle, 27 agrees with the upshot of Derrida’s overall point about that philosophically substantial topics are overlooked by limiting philosophical inquiry to representational thinking. 28 From a historicist perspective, the rules-as-rails approach detracts from the possibility of reflexive self-awareness about who is riding those rails and over or around what those rails are passing by. Rorty advocates for Derrida’s works on these grounds, where “the result of his reading is not to get at essences but to place texts in contexts.” 29 For example, questions are left unasked about the political operations of decisions about what lies within the boundaries of “ordinary language” and who decides when to work within that language. These are critical questions that show the admonishment of the rail metaphor to be more pastoral than doctrinal. The answer to “Why Derrida?” comes partly from this point, where it is the philosophical ideal and the extraordinary-yet-historical actual that animates Derrida’s texts 30 as well as the problematic that drives the problem of evil. There simply is no problem of evil without the extraordinary, actual history of the world and the historical situation of its philosophers. Derrida’s method is to follow the rules in a rail-like fashion in order to see what happens after taking those rules as far they can go. 31 In this way, Derrida’s texts are works of conceptual philosophy that demonstrate how the “rails” of analytic, ordinary language methods keep philosophers of religion on track. None of this alleviates the fact that there is resistance to proposing Derrida-plus-problem of evil as a reasonable pairing. Derrida’s reputation among Anglo-American philosophers is characterized by engagements that better resemble disputes than discussions. The Searle-Derrida affair is well characterized by Stanley Raffel: “This famous debate has generated more heat than light. Neither seems to have learned anything from the other. Both end up as they began [. . .] Furthermore, while there has been no shortage of commentaries by third parties on the debate, none have managed to change the situation much.” 32 And this book attempts to generate at least a glimmer rather than a tingle, 33 where consulting Derrida’s works on the problem of evil demonstrates how and where it may be useful to go off the rails. 34

Reconsidering Evil

11

When viewed from a historicist perspective, the analytic-continental distinction reveals itself as an exercise in creating borders. The function and structure of the divide serves similar purposes as the discourse on the problem of evil (as will be demonstrated in the first two chapters of this book). The first hint at the workings of myth may be found in Blackburn’s observation about the Cambridge affair, in which there was “a fair amount of spittle.” 35 The term “myth” becomes legitimate upon submitting the distinction to the standards of clarity and rigor characteristic of philosophical inquiry. 36 The distinction does not hold up with categories such as nationality or geographic or historical location. If it did, then there should be numerous examples of specific debates available to build a bottom-up representation of them. 37 What evidence there is consists of the exchange between Derrida and Searle as well as the Rorty-Habermas debate of 1996, 38 where the former takes up the Continental and the latter the Analytic. But none of these philosophers falls strictly into either side of the divide. These facts point to the possibility that the continental-analytic divide is best considered in the scholarly sense of a myth, “with polemical or self-promoting purposes in view and with no very adequate or definite sense of just what they properly referred to.” 39 The mythological work of the distinction is twofold: first, it stands in for reading and interpreting a wider range of philosophical texts than would otherwise be expected; second, the myth masks relations—conceptual, historical, material, or social—that the distinction functions to separate. From this perspective, it does not seem well founded to keep Derrida’s texts away from the problem of evil. Derrida’s aversion to the closure of possibility, such as through rules policing philosophical discourse, leads him to use argumentative strategies that are designed to present closures. These strategies may be generously read as heuristic. They are likely better understood as pedagogically patronizing if not outright pedantic. In any case, one objective of Derrida’s texts that engage with Habermas and Searle is to make a demonstration of how to produce a reading of their texts that is unreadable in return. Where understanding requires adherence to strict and clear rules or some kind of rational consensus, Derrida sees an irresponsible closure to possibility. For example, the first line of Derrida’s response to Searle is meaningless for ordinary language philosophers. 40 That line is intended as a performance of ordinary language that is ostensively unphilosophical. Derrida’s strategy is, however, philosophical. It intends to confront them with communications whose structure and content is specifically designed to present impossibilities of understanding to their rules and rationality within a context that is otherwise recognizable to the rules and rationality. As Raffel notes, “Constative regimes are among the ones Derrida includes within the ‘metaphysics of presence’ which his whole approach is designed to reject.” 41 Derrida is quite rightly, as Searle writes, “saying things that are obviously false.” 42 That, I think, is the inten-

12

Introduction

tion of Derrida’s texts, which lead inquiries along up to a point where the momentum of all the accepted regulations of rules and rationality are propelled exorbitantly beyond their frameworks into unfamiliar spaces. 43 With reference to Derrida’s remark that “an identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements,” 44 I find it is worthwhile to maintain the distinction demarcated by Anglo-American philosophers who self-identify in the analytic tradition. The line marks off a style of philosophy focused on an objective of straightforwardly stating truths versus a style that self-consciously chooses to play a different game that is focused on synthetically contextualizing truths. Knowledge about such a distinction and how it is drawn directly serves projects possessing the latter focus, such as this book, that see questions about the history of practices focused on stating truths. Such a focus does not take for granted that declarative sentences encapsulate the practices of philosophy. Maintaining the line serves the former indirectly, because, aside from the importance of staying focused, there is likely little to be said about maintaining an exclusion of philosophically unnecessary ideas. Analytic philosophy can, and does, happily proceed without those sources. It is only from one “side” that works such as Derrida’s seem like philosophical territory prima facie worth entering. The other side mobilizes the distinction because there may well be enough work to do already. This book proposes openings by which philosophers of religion may move beyond concerning themselves with theism through the lens of one discourse. Following the avoidance of appeals to religious texts by Derrida’s work, this book does not engage in theology. Derrida’s writings have already been mined by theologians and Christian philosophers 45 who, it should be noted, have not chosen to work on the problem of evil. Derrida has deliberately intervened in order to gain some distance from the presumption that his work could be theologically appropriated. For example, the discussion immediately following his oral presentation of Différance in 1968 to the Société Française de Philosophie (Paris) reiterates Derrida’s refusal of theology. 46 When pressed on the issue he insists that différance “blocks every relationship to theology.” 47 The same would go for all words and concepts that supplement the neologism “différance” across Derrida’s texts. 48 Even his contribution to Derrida and Negative Theology 49 focused on the question of how to avoid speaking of theology in order to satisfy the demand that he speak on the topic. 50 He concludes on an emphatic point by demonstrating that Martin Heidegger was as eminent a negative theologian as PseudoDionysius. Derrida’s writings are useful because not only do they resist theological appropriation, but they also resist being pitched into other frameworks that circulate among discourses in the philosophy of religion. John Caputo enjoys recounting that Derrida can rightly be taken for an atheist, all the while

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guiding his meditations with theological thematics. 51 It should be noted, however, that Derrida can be rightly taken no more for an atheist than for a Marxist. Atheism is an important component of the ideology of Marxism, and Derrida is certain that he is not a Marxist. 52 He may appreciate a certain atheist spirit as much as a certain spirit of Marx or of a certain theology. Yet in any of these cases he would search for a “protocol” suitable for reading their discourse. 53 Hugh Rayment-Pickard has written that if Derrida’s work constitutes any sort of theology, it is one of an “impossible God”: Derrida repeatedly undermines any presumption of “God” as “first,” “One,” or “causa sui” with an indeterminate chain of supplementary notions that all point to a general, groundless, and abyssal state of affairs beyond the reach of all human meaning-making artifice. 54 If anything, Derrida’s works deploy “God language” to point out how human social institutions work to claim legitimacy by way of mythical certainties. This demythologizing aspect of his work is more often picked up by biblical interpreters who find Derrida’s themes and methods useful in reading “other testaments” in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. 55 In other words, Derrida’s writings do not easily provide resources for constructive theological projects. I find value in consulting Derrida’s works because they provide resources to generate perspectives on a discourse that is sufficiently foreign and yet contains a host of thematic resonances. The first chapter not only establishes that there is an exclusive discourse on evil, but that the subjectivity of the philosopher of religion is something ignored if not occluded by the structure of that discourse. In the same way that Google may have wanted to spark reflexivity in their employees, I suggest that questions need to be asked about why this is the way philosophers of religion have framed their inquiries into evil. The following chapter amplifies that proposal by delving into how skepticism plays such a key role throughout the discourse on the problem of evil that readers are left thinking the whole thing begs the question. Derrida’s work provides useful inroads to explore why problematics of epistemic certainty lead to loggerheads. The discourse cannot escape the limits of natural language such that the discourse cannot deliver what its participants promise: a knock-down conclusion to an argument that participants present as a zerosum game. In this way, a first look at Derrida’s writings enables this book to consider other options for thinking about what problems are presented by which evils. Most of these options are disregarded by philosophers of religion who currently discuss the problem of evil. The third chapter asks whether there is more to the current version of the problem than making a decision about theism versus atheism. I suggest that the problem of evil is important as a cipher that points to a philosophically problematic history. The problem is not atheism versus theism so much as it is about how to reconcile ideas with actuality, or concepts with events. I consider this possibility in light of essays

14

Introduction

in which Derrida takes up these issues to find no surprise that philosophers of religion see a contradiction in need of reconciliation, but their arguments fail to take reflective steps to consider why one would pose the problem in such a way. What assumptions are being taken for granted? What possibilities open by exploring the possible reasons for those assumptions? Chapters 4 and 5 pursue these questions through Derrida’s discussions of sovereignty and violence. One suggestion is that all participants in the current discourse are thoroughly imbricated in a very specific kind of theology. Another is that the logic of contradiction dominates current debates such that they presume all violence is evil and good entails the absence of violence. In each case, Derrida’s works are mined for insights into how the discourse has become circumscribed by assumptions that are neither explicitly entertained nor criticized. These chapters are thereby meant to demonstrate—through points of contact with Derrida’s writings—how philosophers of religion may reconsider evil. NOTES 1. https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/. 2. Thomas A. Lewis, Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion—and Vice Versa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4. 3. Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 35. 4. Ibid., 35. 5. Ibid., 1. 6. Ibid., 47. 7. Richard Otte, “Transworld Depravity and Unobtainable Worlds,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78, no. 1 (January 2009): 167. 8. Ibid., 171. 9. Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5. 10. Christopher Norris, “Provoking Philosophy: Shakespeare, Johnson, Wittgenstein, Derrida,” Journal of Literary Criticism 12, no. 1–2 (2008): 207. 11. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 97n1. 12. Jacques Derrida, “Et Cetera . . . (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.),” in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicolas Royle (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 381. Abbr.: EtC. 13. See Barry Smith et al., “Derrida Degree: A Question of Honour,” Times (London), Saturday, May 9, 1992. 14. Simon Blackburn, “Derrida May Deserve Some Credit for Trying, but Less for Succeeding,” The Times Higher Education Supplement, November 12, 2004. 15. Without referring to modal logic, Simon Critchley offered a good strongly actualized by the Cambridge letter: “I would like to take this opportunity to register in public my gratitude to these know-nothings for the attention they gave to Derrida because it helped sell lots of copies of my first book—on Derrida and ethics—that also came out in 1992 and paid for a terrific summer vacation. So, thank you.” Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 3rd Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 292. 16. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 94. Abbr.: LI. 17. John Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 205.

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18. The argument is that maximal details about a possible world are frequently missing and only sometimes emergent. Everyday experience supports the reasonability of the historicist’s epistemic intuition that a more complete world is always forthcoming. One such example is the tell-all exposé in the fourth appendix of the third edition in The Ethics of Deconstruction, where Simon Critchley reveals that he set up a secret meeting between Habermas and Derrida in June 2000. The fallout was that Habermas’s hostility to Derrida lessened after starting to read Derrida (Critchley 2014, 292). Prior to this, Habermas was reading claims about Derrida’s work made by other texts, such as Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction. 19. Derrida implied a connection between Europe’s experience with fascism and ultranationalism and the demand that philosophy be done in ordinary language. In the context of his exchange with Searle, he mobilized the rhetoric of justice to serve his immediate ends of winning a dispute: “One shouldn’t complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple word would have gotten round, as you say in English. There you have one of my mottos, one quite appropriate for what I take to be the spirit of the type of ‘enlightenment’ granted our time. [. . . ] No less dangerous for instance in politics are those who wish to purify at all costs” (LI, 119). Derrida wrote these words prior to anyone’s imagining a possible world in which the Eastern Bloc would come to an end and the closing off of the threat that the set W for the actual world would come to an end through mutually assured, nuclear destruction. There was also no consideration of what outcomes would be strongly or weakly actualized by these historic events. While the number of suicides is likely unknown, it is well known that the fall of communism did not produce a peace dividend. The significantly moral choices of free-willed humans strongly actualized massive suffering throughout former Eastern Bloc countries in the form of economic shock treatment and nationalist warfare. Derrida was correct to predict that the political and social scenes in Europe and the Americas would continue to suffer rather remarkably from the enchantment of calls for simple socioeconomic therapies. 20. Jacques Derrida, “Discussion,” Ratio 13, no. 4 (2000): 381–82. 21. LI, 17. 22. Simon Glendinning, “Inheriting ‘Philosophy’: The Cause of Austin and Derrida Revisited,” Ratio 13, no. 4 (2000): 330. 23. Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017), 72. 24. Ibid., 73. 25. Crispin Wright, Rails to Infinity: Essays on Themes from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Reflections (Malden, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 26. Eleanor Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 34. 27. See Stanley Cavell, “What Did Derrida Want of Austin?” in Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, ed. Stanley Cavell (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 42–65. 28. Tyler T. Roberts, Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism after Secularism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 168n45. 29. Richard Rorty, “Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 49, no. 194(4) (December 1995): 447. Much earlier, Rorty noted the ordinary nature of the attention to historicity in Derrida’s texts: “Deconstruction is not a novel procedure made possible by a recent philosophical discovery. Recontextualization in general, and inverting hierarchies in particular, has been going on for a long time” (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 134). 30. Simon Glendinning, “Preface,” Ratio 13, no. 4 (2000): 303. 31. Derrida characterizes his work thuswise: “To transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to reinscribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our work and thereby to produce new configurations. . . . I do not believe in decisive ruptures. . . . Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone” (Jacques Derrida, Positions [Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981], 24. Abbr.: P.

16

Introduction

32. Stanley Raffel, “Understanding Each Other: The Case of the Derrida-Searle Debate,” Human Studies 34 (2011): 278. 33. As Rorty said of Derrida; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 152. 34. There is a genre of philosophy that Norris associates with “continental,” which includes Derrida and Badiou, where the practice of philosophy “not only comes up to the standards set by work in the mainstream analytic tradition but surpasses those standards precisely in so far as it ventures into territory marked firmly off-limits in orthodox analytic terms.” Christopher Norris, “Great Philosophy: Discovery, Invention, and the Uses of Error,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 44, no. 3 (2014): 356. 35. Blackburn, “Derrida May Deserve Some Credit for Trying, but Less for Succeeding.” For the reception-history of Derrida among analytic philosophers, see Christopher Norris, “Of an Apoplectic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” in Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), 222–53. 36. Glendinning, “Inheriting ‘Philosophy’: The Cause of Austin and Derrida Revisited,” 307. 37. Marcelo Dascal, “How Rational Can a Polemic across the Analytic-Continental ‘Divide’ Be?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 9, no. 3 (2001): 314. 38. See Jòzef Nizçznik and John T. Sanders, Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty and Kolakowski (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1996). 39. Norris, “Great Philosophy,” 353. 40. Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, 66. 41. Raffel, “Understanding Each Other,” 285. 42. John Searle, “Reiterating the Differences,” 203. 43. As Raffel notes, it is possible to notice alternative ways of understanding the meaning of utterances and “requires appreciating that one is never the only judge and may not even be the best judge of the meaning of one’s own speeches . . . one need no longer assume that, just because others’ responses reveal that they do not share one’s rules as to what one’s utterances mean, that necessarily demonstrates that their responses are false, meaningless, or even stupid. In many cases, for example, these unexpected responses could help one reflect more profoundly on the possible meaning of one’s own actions” (Raffel, “Understanding Each Other,” 284). 44. LI, 53. 45. Kevin Hart, Trespass of the Sign (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); Brian D. Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Walter Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993); Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). 46. Jacques Derrida, “The Original Discussion of ‘Différance,’” in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 84. Abbr.: ODD. 47. P, 40. 48. See Maurice Boutin, “L’inouï l’indécidable selon Castelli et Derrida: Philosophie de la religion et critique du logocentrisme,” in Philosophie de la religion entre éthique et ontologie, ed. Marco M. Olivetti (Padua: CEDAM 1996), 822, 829. 49. Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Forshay (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 3–70. Abbr.: HAS. 50. HAS, 7, 12. 51. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 25; see C, 155. 52. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 88. Abbr.: SMa. 53. P, 63. 54. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 6. 55. See David Jobling, “Poststructuralism as Exegesis,” Semeia 54 (1991); George Aichele et al., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Yvonne Sher-

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wood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005).

Chapter One

A Problem of Persuasion

OPENING THE PROBLEM OF EVIL As a topic, “evil” is part of the stock and trade for almost all whose teaching involves the philosophy of religion. Any reader with a passing familiarity with philosophy will likely know that “evil” marks out a well-known topical territory that ranges from Socratic dilemmas to earthquakes in eighteenthcentury Spain on past the horrific events of the twentieth century up until present contexts. There is no introduction to the philosophy of religion that neglects to dedicate a section to “the problem of evil.” Likewise, the number of books and articles published on the topic are vast. Between 1960 and 1991, Barry Whitney determined that scholars produced just over 4,237 writings related to the problem of evil. 1 Few other topics falling within the English-language philosophy of religion have obtained this amount of attention. As such this topic forms a discourse that can be studied and criticized. My objective in this chapter is to acknowledge the organizing themes currently used to address the topic in order to later suggest some alternatives or variations for how philosophers of religion may approach the topic of evil. The major figures and topics in the discourse largely emerged within the period overviewed by Whitney’s bibliographic review. The parameters were set by philosophers of religion attacking the acceptability of arguments for the existence of an entity—God—set forth by the premises of theism. Nelson Pike’s “God and Evil: A Reconsideration” set the stage in 1958, 2 where he proposed a revised, concise version of David Hume’s arguments to determine the existence of a logical contradiction between the premises of theism and the premise that there is evil. In 1979 there was a shift in the attack, where William L. Rowe’s “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” 3 concerned a rational, rather than strictly logical, contradiction 19

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Chapter One

between the purported existence of God according to theism and the evidence that there are evils without any utility. A decade later, Paul Draper proposed a significant twist on evidential arguments of the sort offered by Rowe. In his “Pain and Pleasure: A Evidential Problem for Theists,” Draper is less concerned with an outright logical and rational exclusion of theism’s premises; rather, he seeks to establish the stronger probability that theism should be ignored, given the evidence of certain evils. I take these three authors to be primary figures in the development of the English-language philosophy of religion discourse on the problem of evil. Not everyone involved in the discourse necessarily cites these three, but their arguments encapsulate the basic elements of the discourse, and most philosophers of religion will have encountered their work. The other “half” of the discourse involves responses to arguments of the sort proposed by Rowe, Pike, and Draper. These three begin their arguments by taking issue with theism, and the outcome of their interventions is to entrench the discursive parameters for English philosophy of religion within the limits of theism alone. I take their attacks as the novel markers for where to begin seeing the formation of a discourse. Defenses largely accept their attacker’s original premises such that what follows is largely a back and forth on recurring discursive grounds. These circular returns to each other’s premises for the purposes of defeating each other reinforces and sustains particular approaches to evil. In order to explain the problematic elements of this discourse, I will explore the emergence of these three figures and their arguments. The guiding question for this peculiar discourse is whether a case can be made for the existence and attributes of God, organized into what is typically called theism, with regard to the existence of evil. 4 If the claim that God exists is found compatible with the claim that evil—any evil—exists, then theism is taken to be true on this count. My organization of the discourse considers three primary approaches to the problem of evil: logical, evidential, and probabilistic. The initial chapters of this book present a discourse on evil whose animating concepts and structure, along with the commonly held objectives, are at odds with their outcomes. A very particular implementation of the principle of contradiction leads to a series of narrow conditions by which the problem of evil is presented and debated but not persuasively concluded. And while it may be argued that Alvin Plantinga’s 1974 work defeated the logical problem of evil with the free-will defense mentioned in the introduction, there is little that the defense does to obstruct the natural and probabilistic problems of evil. All three of these approaches will be discussed in what follows, as well as the succeeding chapter. My objective will be to review the conditions created by the discourse. What sorts of assumptions must be already up and running in order for any of the three approaches to “work”? Are these assumptions necessary? My response is not that the “problem of evil”

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ever should be “solved.” In fact, this sort of prescription is among the sorts of normative stakes that I wish to suggest as optional for the philosophy-ofreligion game. I propose that if this discourse, as a whole, has a problem of persuasion, then a circle is broken and a different set of questions may be proposed. Such as: “How might philosophers of religion move beyond the search for a knock-down argument in the debate between ‘God’ or ‘not-God’ and begin to think about how discourses among philosophers of religion may productively move ‘beyond theism’ to new arguments about religion and what, according to a global variety of subjectivities and their contexts, goes wrong in light of religion (e.g., evil, suffering, horror, tragedy)?” Recent English-language philosophical discussions of evil are less concerned with the philosophy of the classics, the Enlightenment, or events on the European continent. Instead the discussion revolves around specific questions related to whether or not “evil” justifies “rationality of theistic belief.” 5 Over the last sixty years, a discourse has evolved with increasingly clear borders on the topic of the “problem of evil.” The focus of the problem is derived primarily by focusing upon a particular abstraction of Christian doctrine into the premises of theism. 6 These premises are put into the form of an argument whose validity is tested by questions that may be posed in their general form: Does there exist a contradiction whose resolution requires the exclusion of a premise? Is there an event whose evidence requires the exclusion of a premise? Is it more probable that the actual world’s state of its affairs requires the exclusion of a premise? All three of these questions are “critical” in the narrow sense. They are aimed at a particular set of premises that comprise the basis of theism. If one of these premises is rejected then all the others are correlatively invalidated. The objective here is not critique or criticism. Rather, the point of these arguments is to “cut off” (krinein) the grounds for an argument that would support the existence of an actual entity whose attributes correspond to the premises of theism. My objective in the first two chapters of this book is to propose a critique of this discourse by outlining some major figures whose arguments served to establish and sustain the particular shape of this approach to philosophically considering evil. I do this in order to highlight a problematic with the discourse, based on the following points: (1) the arguments deployed by the major participants share a commitment to a binary, where either atheism or theism exclusively obtains; (2) the binary structuring of the discourse, through repeated performances of its arguments, effectively circumscribes the object of study for philosophers of religion to arguments about theism. None of this is necessarily new in a general sense, but it is worth repeating where considerations of philosophical approaches to evil are concerned.

22

Chapter One

“EVIL” AS A TAXON There are several possible places to begin discussing the assumptions up and running across the voluminous productions of philosophers of religion on the problem of evil. One of those potentially overlooked elements is an issue of definition. What is meant by “evil” when it is brought up for consideration as a problem? What counts as evil is presumed to be similar to what once counted as obscene according to Justice Stewart: “knowing what it is when I see it.” 7 In the context of the contemporary discourse about evil, considerations of what counts as evil is not given the same degree of scrutiny as what evil is supposed to challenge. Nelson Pike’s early intervention in the discourse introduces a fairly wide consideration of what is to be taken as evil: “The name of an undetermined class which includes such facts and events as the suffering and frustration of sentient beings or the facts and events which bring about these torments, such as natural disasters, war, torture, sickness, prosperity of the dishonest, failure of the honest, etc.” 8 As such, “evil” covers a wide semantic field of negative experiences and notions. 9 William R. Rowe’s contribution to the discourse in 1979 introduced the formal notion of a local gratuitous event as an evil sufficient to challenge the validity of theism. Few other contributions to the discourse would go on to question this construal. My interest is not to produce a truer or more defensible conception of evil. The potential for a break through on the problem of evil is not to be found there. The point is to show that, from the outset, a long-standing and ostensibly analytic discourse is formed around at least one concept that is not analytically stable. I find it interesting that, for the most part, the nature and existence of evil(s) is assumed rather than questioned by philosophers of religion. It is one among many points where the circle may be broken. In chapter 5 of this volume, it will be taken up as a further issue that violence is not considered as a key aspect of evil. English-language work on the philosophy of religion is not particularly given to etymological explanations, but doing so may be useful for reflecting on why Pike was compelled to cast the net so widely and how Rowe’s interlocutors have not radically challenged his rather specific instance. The differences between French and English appellations instructively begin suggesting the breadth of the term’s reference. Le mal derives from the Latin malum. “Evil” derives from the old German root ubil, which modern German renders as das Übel. This German term, however, ordinarily correlates to the English “wickedness,” whereas das Böse is the best modern translation for “evil.” Malum arises in English-language usage as a Romance-languagederived prefix that expresses various forms of privation or perversion. “In contrast, no lexical distinction exists in French between the abstract notion of evil and ‘bad’ empirical or phenomenal entities. Instead, the transcendental concept and its phenomenal concretizations, even in the most conventional

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usage, are expressed by one and the same lexical term, mal.” 10 For this reason the French term mal obtains a syntactical ambivalence that is only contextually or perspectivally manifest in English usage. Among the problems with the English term is that “evil” is taken to be prima facie describing a total state of affairs. This draws upon the intuition that evil ought to be abolished, whereas the morally bad remains transformable, reconcilable, and forgivable. Evils, prima facie, are nothing other than evil. Evils are not so trivial as to be forgettable. The intuitive construal of evil does not cohere if evils are not wholly evil. As such evils are irreconcilable and unforgivable. What is important here, however, is that etymologies concern themselves with folk uses of the term. Neither Pike nor Rowe introduces a sustained scholarly or philosophical distinction. Instead, their seminal works trade on uncritically received notions about evil. There is a noteworthy difference in the case of evil with the comparatively sophisticated conceptualization of theism. At a much later juncture in the discourse on the problem of evil, Marilyn McCord-Adams does introduce a sustained discussion of evil. McCord-Adams introduces “horrendous evils”: “evils the participation in (the doing or suffering of) which gives one reason prima facie to doubt whether one’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good on the whole.” 11 As a participant in the discourse, the objective of McCord-Adams was to introduce a level of description about evil that would denote experiences of violation, harm, or affliction such that reasonable doubt about God’s existence arises firstly in the mind of the individual who experiences evil and cannot conceive how such evils could be overcome. However, the designator “horrendous” is perspectival. Victims, the perpetrators, or the witnesses may not necessarily identify a shared experience as evil per se. 12 Indeed McCordAdams’s proposal of “horrendous” trades on folk notions to the degree of being circular: Are evils, if they are so evil, anything but horrendous? And the circularity of “horrendous evils” is further reinforced by the object of existential crisis McCord-Adams proposes that such experiences precipitate: doubt in God’s existence. Along the same lines as McCord-Adams, Eleanor Stump recognizes that logical explanations of evil do not provide any pastoral solace. 13 The works of analytic philosophy are “plodding, pedestrian and inadequate” 14 to the task of providing a reasonably compelling everyday account of God and evil. Plantinga did admit as much in his early work, stating that neither a defense nor a theodicy offers such a function. 15 In response to this Stump takes the narrative route well trodden by postliberal theologians, 16 where stories provide the means of potentially resolving a variety of existential crises about the compatibility of God and evil where the style of analytic philosophy falls short. Stump supplements formal logic of analytic philosophy with biblical stories that explore how suffering is a plausible method for God to find ways

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of union with fully functional adult humans 17 such as Job and Satan. While she draws upon the modal logic of possible worlds mentioned in the introduction, the narrative defense 18 presents stories as segments of possible worlds rather than possible worlds in their entirety. By working within these segments, God allows for suffering in order to intervene at specific moments in a person’s life to administer medicinal suffering. 19 Therefore, if adult humans are able to understand that God seeks union through suffering, then the compatibility of God and evil may be understood as reasonable and acceptable. 20 Unlike McCord-Adams, however, Stump remains within the ambit of biblical narratives, which, while quite terrifying in their own right, do not directly address horrendous evils that are now readily known among the people of modern societies. ASKING FURTHER QUESTIONS I have already suggested that what follows is the wrong kind of question for a philosopher to be asking: Is there an analytic definition, specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for a concept of evil, that does not trade on folk-based knowledge? Instead, a productive avenue of inquiry may be to consider whether the discourse on the problem of evil veers toward a discussion of gratuitous evils, such as Rowe’s fawn dying in a forest fire, in order to avoid the possibility that what counts as evil is, as McCord-Adams suggests, perspectival? Were this the case, then there are considerations about subjectivity and subject position that need to be made that have not been sustained by the discourse. For example, Eve Garrard is only a small step away from McCord-Adams’s notion of horrendous evils when she suggests, “If there is a problem with evil, it must be because of the kind of concept it is, because of the place it occupies in the matrix of our moral understanding of human behavior and character.” 21 Garrard’s proposal is that psychological silencing is the mark of an evil. Evils of this sort would entail an agent who is entirely impervious to the presence of significant reasons against acting thus. The evil is done without any consideration of what might outweigh the act, be it a proximate or ultimate good relating solely to the agent or with respect to the universe’s balance of good and evil. The evil would be completely mute in terms of granting reasons. Such evils, however, would be only the result of a profound cognitive defect in the agent committing the act in question. 22 Her definition makes evil out to be something positively irrational, yet also not foreign to the notion of calculability. Evils are distinguished from wrongs because of their muteness to calculability. Evils would be calculable only analogously by virtue of incommensurability manifested as muteness before calculation. 23 What is interesting is not that Garrard has taken the analysis any

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closer to some putatively true definition of evil. Garrard adds to our consideration of McCord-Adams on the issue of subjectivity. According to whose judgment is the evil in question and its agent mute and foreign to calculation? Whose calculus is at work? Commenting on this aspect of how the problem of evil is posed, Roy Perret insists that “evil” is distinct from ordinary morality and natural evil. Evil as a concept would have to be related to a discourse on characters whose motivation is to do wrong for wrong’s sake. In such cases, the evil character fails to exhibit any morally appropriate attitude toward that wrongdoing. 24 “Evil” functions as a linguistic intensifier of notions about wrongness, badness, and the like. McCord-Adams’s definition of horrendous evils rests upon this foundation as much as Pike’s or Rowe’s suggestions about evil. Linguistically speaking, however, evil as a nominative term for a specific act cannot be sufficiently described by some other nominative. Raymond Gaita questions whether intensification is the correct manner of transition from moral wrong to evil. 25 What, beyond an aesthetic criterion, would establish the conditions for separating an evil from a wrongdoing? How could this be sustained in a consistently coherent manner? A more pertinent issue is whether discussions of evil keep philosophical considerations within the orbit of folk notions rather than within a useful analytic. Evil in ordinary language use might best be the term suited for describing wrongdoing and harm that is beyond the ken of understanding. This would be the grounds where the fawn and horrendous evil might meet, since in both cases the experience of evil may well be that of stunned silence. Evils, if this be the case, are those acts or events in which huge amounts of harm result and there is no conceivable or perceivable gain in it for anyone. Purely gratuitous evils would indeed seem to be perversely inverted utilitarian acts. In this case, the predicates of evils are productions of subjectivity: shock, anger and puzzlement. Something is at work when a subject claims “there is evil,” which I think remains uninvestigated in reflections on the problem of evil among philosophers of religion. The effect of the effort to narrow the exposure of theism to attacks based on the problem of evil has been to actually broaden the scope of what counts as evil. Plantinga’s book does this in the course of illustrating how God’s responsibility to act against evils may be limited due to logical restrictions on knowledge. The desire to use ordinary language and tightly constrained examples leads Plantinga to pose a series of scenarios whereby human actors may or may not be able to save their friends from such outcomes as freezing on a wintry day on a deserted road. 26 Another scenario involves a hiking party encountering helpless strangers stranded on the north face of Grand Teton in the face of a thunderstorm. 27 The point of these accounts is to introduce the dilemma of whether an entity could eliminate a certain evil without eliminating an outweighing good amid a total state of affairs. Further

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examples introduce the situation of avoiding a mildly annoying abrasion 28 and the “morally significant action such as taking a bribe.” 29 One reasonable response, such as McCord-Adams’s, is that these scenarios bear only a passing resemblance to evils that provoke existential questions about whether life is worth living. Those may well be the questions of “supersophisticates,” according to Plantinga. 30 And yet, while these thought experiments are designed to demonstrate the difficulties of deducing formal contradictions that would deny truth to the rationality of theistic belief, their unintended effect is to introduce confusion over what counts as evil. It now includes everything from skinned knees to thunderstorms. Is what counts as an evil the production of an enormous amount of suffering? Amounts and the sort of accounting necessary to establish them are dependent upon practices of categorization and calculation. Empirical approaches are introduced in other spheres of inquiry as a means of differentiating among wrongdoings such as acts of war and excessive acts that cross prescriptive lines such as the Geneva Conventions or the Nuremburg Principles. In a way, such approaches pitch evils as doppelgängers to supererogatory acts. Perhaps such a conception holds evils to be perverse excellences that qualify certain actions as maximally wrong. But this is a long remove from the short descriptions offered by Pike and Rowe. From a certain perspective, their definitions align comparatively better with Hannah Arendt’s description of evil as banal, 31 where the most strange, if not strangely familiar, mixture of ostensibly benign intentions entail outcomes that, once reproduced to a sufficient magnitude, begin to match the quandary-producing power of McCord-Adams’s horrendous evils. Claudia Card does venture to distinguish between evils qua evils and atrocities 32 with an “atrocity paradigm”: an evil would be an intolerable harm produced by culpable wrongdoing, such that there is an agent who foresaw the harm coming to pass. 33 Evils then obtain a relation to the wrong-ness of wrongdoing as well as become defined in such a manner as to exclude natural evils. Card insists that dignity and self-respect are not violated and denigrated in the event of a tsunami, for example; such an event will bring about various registers of fear, anxiety, terror, pain, and suffering, but the trauma of torture, sexual assault, and terrorist attacks are of a wholly other order. Evil-ness builds upon wrong-ness with a higher order of complexity. Card’s argument is that evils must be conceptualized as more complex than wrongdoings, if it is granted that the inscrutability, puzzlement, and disruption of comprehension of thought is due to complexity and not sheer chaos. The complexity of a fawn dying in a forest fire, from this perspective, is insufficient to count as either an evil or an atrocity. According to Claudia Card, agency shifts from morally bad to evil when “it also foreseeably deprives others of basics needed for their lives or deaths to be tolerable or decent.” 34

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These sorts of reflections, which are rarely if ever considered within the discourse on the problem of evil, take evils to be violations: “What we call evil signifies violation [. . .] by calling it ‘violation,’ which is by definition always unnecessary, always internalized, we enunciate the internal relatedness, the intimacy, of the betrayal. [. . .] To violate is to obstruct the becoming of a subject in its otherness, its agency—to subject it without regard for its own genesis.” 35 Evils here are characterized as eliciting subjective perplexity that brings back “the old metaphysical insomnia.” 36 A strictly formal definition that eschews aesthetical judgments cannot be avoided. Evils are presented as material, brutal assaults on subjectivity such that their positivity is not adequately explained by any realism or positivism. The presentation of evils as radically disruptive 37 introduces an interruption of universal claims as “obscenities of understanding” 38 and compels the consideration of evil as an issue for subjectivity. “Does God exist given the fact evil?” is the wrong question. It assumes to have resolved the earlier issues, such as: What counts as evil? Questions concerning subjectivity, then, are completely outside the purview of the first question. From this perspective, a whole range of actions, only limited by the question of whether humiliation can be incorporated into them, become candidates for the repertoire of evils if their symbolic meaning takes on the violation or deprivation of dignity of a subject. Susan Nieman holds, however, that incomprehension must not be the basic quality of evils. “The possibility of an account of evil is the possibility of intelligibility.” 39 If the above descriptions hold actual candidacy as predications or essences of evils, then a certain difficulty arises. This is particularly the case if an evil causes stunned incomprehension. Any legitimate discussion of an evil would not be capable of escaping that affect. The strange condition is that in order for an account of evil to have explanatory power, evils cannot be entirely inscrutable if there is to be some determinable distinction that does not equate an evil as also bad, wicked, wrong, distasteful, or inimical to a given interest. Either there is some essential differentiation of evils or there is no essence to evils. “Evil” needs to be capable of actually doing some sort of explanatory work if it is to be philosophically worthwhile to engage any problem, question, or topic about it. Inquiring into the philosophical utility of the term would seem to be among the first tasks of any discourse that plans to put the term to work. In other words, the usefulness of the term depends upon its capacity to adequately give some account of an agent and agency not already explained by another term.

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WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? As a general method, problem-posing is a means of “calling out” another. Much like open letters in news media, problems are formulated and sent out with the hopes of a response. And while it is unreasonable to presume knowledge of what someone “really means,” it is safe to say that problem-posing is not a neutral or benign activity. Setting out a problem has the potential to stimulate after-effects that mark out a space for exchanges, wherein a sufficient degree of family resemblance among the effects establishes a common idiom. It is people who pose problems through language within contexts that are particular to them. Nothing in and of itself is a problem a priori or sui generis. In order for there to be a problem, there must be someone who sets it into discursive motion. And, in so doing, that act of posing a problem attaches particular significance to things by naming and categorizing them as problematic. “Evil” is one such taxon by which things are named and arranged. If someone claims that evils exist a priori, my next question is to ask, “Who told you this?” For example, William Rowe’s evidential argument is what sets into discursive motion a cute little fawn that gets caught in a forest fire. One taxon or category has the potential to pose a problem by having it set into discursive proximity with another taxon or category. Placing “evil” alongside the premises “theism” has this problem-posing potential. Dewi Z. Phillips once remarked that the problem of evil is “our problematic inheritance.” 40 The first-person plural possessive stated by Phillips locates those who participate in the English-language philosophy of religion. The problem of evil is a formative inheritance because it purports to evaluate religion in general by addressing theism in particular. This is in no small part because “philosophy of religion in the English-speaking world is practiced under conditions that have been shaped by the history of Western philosophy.” 41 There exists no English-language philosophy of religion textbook that does not dedicate a substantial section to this discussion and its key figures. Any statement of a problem will necessarily consider some data, exclude other data, and have restricted considerations for the sake of parsimony. The particular exercise of these conditions about the problem of evil leads to the argument that if “theism” is compatible with “evil,” then religious beliefs related to theism can be assured of their validity. Although such problems posed using “theism” need not concern Christian theological claims, their formulations are specifically concerned with what is entailed by the attributes of the all-perfect entity. And, of course, should a restricted version of belief in God, such as theism, fail to be valid, then the implication is that general and theologically confessional versions of such beliefs must also fail to be rationally acceptable. 42 These are the stakes of this particular

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discourse. Each iteration of the problem poses these stakes in a slightly different way. The logical version Nelson Pike poses a logical problem of evil that consolidates a starting point for the discourse in question. Pike’s argument formalizes the basic dilemma. The first two premises are attributes of a being: absolute goodness and unconditional capacity for action. The third premise is a claim that an evil—or some evils—exist. The problem posed is that of incoherence 43 among the premises. Pike’s claim is that this creates a problem. The predicates of goodness and omnipotence are logically essential to theism. 44 Since the theistic God has no contingent attributes, the existence of evil poses a problem of compossibility: one of the three premises, Pike insists, must be entirely excluded to resolve the proposed incoherence. If one of the two claims about God cannot be conjoined to that about evil, due to some contradiction among them on the order of a logical impossibility, then this entails rejecting the validity of the theistic premises. The logical problem works by tracing out the entailments from essential predicates of theism in order to arrive at a contradiction. “Logic” in this problem is the analytical investigation into the grammar of a given proposition to determine what can and cannot be said. 45 The simplicity of this argument makes it persuasive; it deals with logical necessities rather than contingent—that is, factual and empirical—matters. By working through an issue of logical coherence based on whether the premises in question are able to “stand up to the canons of logic,” 46 philosophers of religion may be persuaded that there is “no valid solution of the problem which does not modify at least one of the constituent propositions in a way which would seriously affect the essential core of the theistic position.” 47 The pertinent member of the canons of logic here is contradiction. Contradictions must be solved by the determination of a disjunction. But this is not a clear-cut deduction of either P or –P. Instead, the key working element that might establish a contradiction to be deployed by the logical problem of evil is an enthymeme: an omnipotent being who is wholly good, must, on account of these two predicates, actively and positively deny the existence of evil. The logical problem of evil presents a wide-ranging version of this enthymeme: any evil establishes a contradiction with the premises of theism. Predatory goodness versus evil I call this the “predatory goodness” enthymeme. Such a powerful and good being should not tolerate any evils. As Pike argues, “By consulting the logic

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(or usage rules) of the terms ‘omniscient,’ ‘all-powerful,’ ‘good person,’ and ‘evil,’ [. . .] an omniscient and all-powerful being could prevent evil and create nothing but good, while a perfectly good person would prevent evil and create nothing but good.” 48 There is a normative claim from folk morality at work here that articulates an expectation: a good person with the power to prevent evils ought to do so. Where evils are the doppelgängers to supererogatory acts, maximally good beings—much like comic superheroes— should entirely dedicate themselves to eradicating all evils. The being described by theism should, according to this line of thinking, exercise predatory goodness. Quite some time after Pike’s 1958 article, J. L. Mackie elaborates further upon the expectation at work in this enthymeme. Mackie claims a logical entailment toward “additional premises, or perhaps some quasi-logical rules connecting the terms ‘good,’ ‘evil,’ and ‘omnipotent,’” 49 all of which he understands to be conjoined into “principles” 50 that ought to be necessary for theism. The point being that if these rules and necessities are logically true, then theism “can be disproved.” 51 The idea of predatory goodness, in sum, is that “a good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely.” 52 It is worth noting that defenses against the logical problem of evil do not challenge these folk expectations. Instead, it is generally accepted that the being described by the attributes of theism always eliminates evil insofar as it can. 53 To my knowledge, no arguments from within the problem of evil discourse under consideration challenge the expectation of predatory goodness. 54 Defensive counterarguments instead choose to carry through nearly all elements of the logical problem in order to suspend its conclusion with a deferral: for all we know, there are morally sufficient reasons for evils. As a result, the basic outline of the logical argument places an expectation of predatory goodness that goes unchallenged. The defenses of deferral are deployed because they interrupt deductive conclusions that would suit the “canons of logic.” 55 By demanding a morally sufficient reason for each evil, defenders of theism construct “an eternal task” 56 of connecting every local evil in a piecemeal fashion to an ultimately global transcendent good. Namely, “it would seem to require something like omniscience on our part before we could lay claim to knowing that there is no greater good connected to the fawn’s suffering.” 57 The outcome of this defense creates far from satisfying philosophical conditions. It neither buttresses theism nor compels atheism to find that morally sufficient reason(s) for evil(s). The logical argument from evil could only establish itself if there were logically deduced evils that lack both logical necessity and sufficient reason. 58 That, however, is not possible. Philosophical logic can establish conditions for what may or may not be stated, but much like mathematics, that mode of inquiry does not have any normative purchase on empirical conditions. 59 As Mackie notes, the logical problem of

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evil “is not a scientific problem that might be solved by further observations, or a practical problem that might be solved by a decision or an action.” 60 Two formative outcomes for philosophers of religion result from the logical problem of evil. One is that the entity described by theism is governed by an obligation to rule out evils. “Goodness” as an attribute carries with it not only the contradiction with “evil,” but also an expectation that the being to which goodness is attributed should predate upon evil to the fullest extent of its potential. The other outcome for the discourse is an expectation of a moral calculus, a morally sufficient reason, to consider what evils might escape predatory goodness. “For the argument from evil to succeed, it must be shown that it is unreasonable to believe that any good is such that it morally justifies the evil which exists.” 61 These outcomes serve to demarcate the borders of the discourse by virtue of the impossibility of their satisfaction. They preserve the potential to pose the problem of evil, but the problem is posed only with respect to the premises of theism. And the success of the attack on theism finds itself limited by its own tools. 62 The evidential version The goalposts for the pseudo-duel of this discourse sustain themselves because of their stark contrast: either theism or not-theism. Each iteration of the discourse reproduces and sustains that disjunction as the gold standard for offering a successful argument. These iterations also repeat the expectation of predatory goodness. The evidential problem of evil retains these thematic boundaries while shifting from a global to local focus; the shift is from evil as a concept logically contradictory to good toward the consideration of a specific kind of localized evil that might upset the premises of theism. The evil posing the evidential problem is a minimal one whose predicates are purposeless, gratuitous, and entirely natural—the diminutive opposite to the ambitious omni-predicates of theism. William L. Rowe’s 1979 article, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” 63 is the paradigmatic evidential problem of evil. Rowe poses the problem of a fawn, which may have canonical status in the problem of evil discourse. 64 Rowe explains a plausible scenario where, after several days of suffering, a fawn dies of burns inflicted by a forest fire that was ignited by lightning. He surmises that “[a]n omnipotent, omniscient being could have easily prevented the fawn from being horribly burned, or, given the burning, could have spared the fawn the intense suffering by quickly ending its life.” 65 If this scenario has happened at least once in the world, then there is evidence of an evil, which serves no higher good or purpose, which could have been ruled out by the being described by theism. 66 And while the evidence in this argument rests upon single fallibility 67—whereby were evidence were to arise to the contrary, the inference against God’s

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existence would be abandoned—Rowe has shaped the problem of evil discourse in such a way that he would continue to restate and “fine-tune” the problem. 68 The evidential problem of evil establishes a discourse of agreement about the general empirical facts of the world, where some evils come to pass that do not prevent any humanly known global or local goods from coming to pass. While this version of the problem is meant to remove the deferral invoked by defenses against the logical problem of evil, the routine patterns of the discourse are further reinforced. The lines of proposed inference reiterate predatory goodness and affirm the baseline status of theism for philosophers of religion. Humans ought to be capable of knowing the intense animal suffering occurring in their world. They should be able to understand what goods do exist and to imagine what goods might come about from what exists. They are thereby capable of making judgments as to what an omnipotent being can and cannot do; including the capacity to reasonably expect what a wholly good being could do with respect to good and evil. 69 By hinging itself upon inference to such plausibility, Rowe’s argument obtains epistemic persuasiveness. Rowe seeks to affirm that goodness is predatory while doing away with the plausibility of evils as justified by moral sufficiency. If such a fawn’s demise never happened, then a more quantitatively and qualitatively good world would obtain, and a good omnipotent thing should completely eliminate such basic evils. However, Rowe’s argument does not consider the plausibility of not knowing anything deductively certain about the fawn. Evils, in Rowe’s argument, are occasional, contingent, and finite. Each instance of evil is not epistemically accessible. The difficulty, as Susan Niemen puts it, is the following: “Data are what you have when you have scientific procedures based on causal analyses and inductive evidence. None of this is present for events that happen only once. There everything rests upon speculation.” 70 When pressed about “which exact fawn,” there is no specific answer. The defense against the evidential problem of evil continues the discursive pattern of rejoinders to the logical problem of evil. Stephen Wykstra’s skeptical defense 71 affirms all the basic premises and movements of Rowe’s argument, only to undermine its epistemological certainty: for all we know, there might actually be a justificatory explanation for every evil that comes to pass. Wykstra’s strategy not merely repeats but amplifies the good-eliminates-evil binary of predatory goodness. The argument may also be summarized as: for all we know, we may expect that a powerful and good entity will ultimately rule out all evil. By relativizing the self-evidence of Rowe’s evidential claims, Wykstra attenuates the rhetorical force of the attack but does not entirely refute the problem posed by Rowe. The conclusion of a single fallibility argument teeters provisionally on the possibility of further evi-

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dence, which Wykstra amplifies with a principle of “CORNEA”: the Condition Of Reasonable Epistemic Access. 72 This contends that there is an inordinately strong requirement for the appearance of divine determination of the world’s affairs towards empirically observable events that qualify as goods. The purpose for seemingly inscrutable suffering is reasonably limited, given human epistemological conditions. Thus claims about evils in the world are true observations, but any judgment upon the balance of good and evil in the world must be suspended, pending a further possible observation of outweighing goods in the future. The probabilistic version The most recent development in the discourse on the problem of evil appeared not long after Rowe’s evidential argument from evil. Bruce Reichenbach introduced what he called the “inductive argument from evil” 73 because he found Rowe missing a knock-down argument: “Merely presenting instances of pointless suffering will not establish that there are instances of evil which God could have prevented such that no overriding good would have been negatively affected by their prevention.” 74 Lacking a sound means to decisively invalidate theism vis-à-vis evils, evidential arguments can at least provide inductive reasons to deny the probability that theism is improbable. Reichenbach introduced Baye’s theorem of probability, which determines the odds between contemporaneous probabilities in ratios of likelihood 75 to establish what a reasonable person should be expected to believe. Affirming the expectation of predatory goodness, he states, “We rely on good people to remove, prevent or alleviate the natural evils which we encounter and which they are capable of affecting [. . .] how much more can one expect that there would be less natural evil in the presence of a perfectly good and omnipotent personal deity than if the natural laws were simply allowed to run their course with respect to the furniture of the world.” 76 Paul Draper refines reformed Reichenbach’s work into what may be called the probabilistic problem of evil. 77 The objective is to circumvent the defensive deferrals against the logical and evidential versions. Draper asks “whether or not any serious hypothesis that is logically inconsistent with theism explains some significant set of facts about evil or about good and evil much better than theism does.” 78 From an “indifferent” stance, given theism and atheism as two options of a wager, toward which option is it most likely reasonable to abandon that neutrality? As such, the probabilistic problem of evil shifts the criteria for “victory” in the discourse: “In general, the more specific and hence riskier an existential claim like theism is, the less probable that claim is intrinsically but the more probable its denial is intrinsically. This is why we assume both in science and in everyday reasoning that

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existential claims, especially specific ones, require stronger evidence to be justified than their denials do.” 79 Draper’s probabilistic argument asks for what defenders against the problem of evil are not in the position to offer; 80 namely, that the already grant “omni”-type premises of theism buttress themselves with even stronger wagers that obtain even higher probabilities of belief. Draper’s strategy presents a bind by asking defenders of theism to further amplify the expectation of predatory goodness. The existing borders of the discourse are correlatively reinforced by raising the stakes of the “evil game” in this manner, because the putatively indifferent hypothesis is formulated explicitly with regard to theism. Draper’s approach thereby serves to limit questions from arising within the discourse, such as how or why in the first place only certain options obtain consideration for the analysis of their probability. Indeed, this question is absent from the discourse on the problem of evil. Draper does briefly consider what options are eligible “relative to our epistemic situation,” 81 but without substantive elaboration in order to highlight that potential to expand the range of possible considerations by those participating in the discourse. 82 Presumably this applies to any hypothesis with which theism’s premises must compete for probability. According to Draper’s shaping of the discussion, however, to analyze the discrete processes and operations of judgment is unnecessary: “The crucial point is that, as long as one makes the correct abstraction, the background knowledge that should affect the crucial probabilities will affect them, and the background knowledge that should not affect them won’t. There is no need to list all of our beliefs or all of the propositions we know, subtract some, and then conditionalize on the ones that are left. That would be a truly hopeless procedure.” 83 CORRECTING THE ABSTRACTIONS At this stage in the development of the discourse, the boundaries for what is admitted and granted for consideration is in its third round of reiteration and reinforcement. The point being made by Draper, against the logical and epistemological deferrals of various defenses, is that there are limits to what considerations should be made when considering options for philosophical reflections on evil. The correct abstractions that “we” should make are being quite accurately represented here by Draper on behalf of the other participants in the discourse. The correct abstractions are the ones that engage the premises of theism with an eye toward presuming that good logically contradicts evil, and therefore good should predatorily rule out evil. The scope of the discourse, what “we” consider, is not all background knowledge or beliefs. What would be hopeless for Draper is the rather simple task of considering all the viable options for approaching evil within the orbit of theism.

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Substantially far more hopeless, then, would be the task of philosophically approaching evil in such a way that would critically question the presumptions of what are the correct abstractions, background knowledge, crucial probabilities, as well as the propositions and beliefs possibly known by other “we”s. In this way, the current state of the discourse on the problem of evil purports to facilitate the exercise of judgment toward a determinate decision, but the fundamental data and basic assumptions at work in the discourse, however, are not scrutinized. Draper does reflect upon the possibility that the available antecedent probabilities may indeed vary: “from person to person and from time to time, since different persons can be in different epistemic situations at the same time and the same person can be in different epistemic situations at different times.” 84 But I think it reasonable to expect that Draper is not asking anyone to consider the epistemological variations outside the borders of the current discourse on the problem of evil. Were it the case, then a host of background data and epistemological starting points would be considered beyond the choosing between theism versus atheism. While one must always start somewhere, all three paradigmatic iterations of the problems of evil—the logical, evidential, and probabilistic—introduce and sustain a rather restricted set of considerations for philosophers of religion who wish to approach the topic of evil. The borderlines of this discourse are reinforced by the defenses’ counterarguments to each version of the problem of evil. David O’Connor correctly surmises that the nature of the discourse is, “less a duel than a mime, for the weapons yielded on each side are incapable of inflicting any wounds.” 85 Despite voluminous publications and a status quo of détente, participants in this discourse share the expectation that one side or the other must ultimately be correct, and that goodness is necessarily predatory. WHITHER THE PROBLEM OF EVIL? Perhaps the participants in this discourse cannot be faulted for this state of affairs. The discovery and resolution of any apparent contradiction is, according to most philosophers, a fundamental element of undertaking studies in the discipline and the canons of logic are something taken to provide conditions for their practice. If a philosophical approach cannot resolve a contradiction, then its mission has likely failed. For the problem of evil, however, the possibility of contradiction is not a logical a priori condition of theism or any religion for that matter. The problem is posed to people in specific contexts by linguistically putting concepts or categories into relations with one another. In the case of this specific discourse, the problem requires the formulation of a third element, an enthymeme, which brings into

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relief a putative contradiction between good and evil. To my knowledge the participants in the discourse depicted in this chapter never question the basic folk belief of predatory goodness behind neither the enthymeme that animates the problem of evil nor the good-versus-evil binary that structures their arguments. As it stands, these are the basic elements of the so-called correct abstractions and background knowledge needed to participate in the discourse in order to pose a problem of evil. The same elements prevent the discourse from ever arriving at a decisive conclusion. After surveying the participants and arguments in the discourse on the problem of evil, an outcome foreign to their considerations can be stated by asking about the effect of this discourse. The formalizations and abstractions done in order to pose a clear-cut contradiction, where goodness is predatory upon evil, cumulatively work to exclude wider critical questions about the scope for doing philosophy of religion. Each paradigmatic iteration of the problem effectively reinforces the borders of the discourse, and thereby deflects the potential for philosophers of religion to consider a wider assortment of data when approaching the topic of evil. This intractability is due to the logic and strategies employed by the so-called “sides” in the discourse: the grounds for the debate have been systematically narrowed, while the explanatory and probative power of each opponent has become increasingly idiosyncratic. 86 To philosophically approach evil as a face-off between religion and reason, where the grounds of debate are between theism and atheism, sets out an expectation that to practice the philosophy of religion is to engage in a battle over the conceptual usurpation of religion via theism. As a result, this subfield of philosophy has neither questioned its basic assumptions nor substantively engaged in alternative investigations on the topic of evil. “The possibility of an account of evil is the possibility of intelligibility.” 87 If the philosophy of religion cannot produce a persuasive account for the problem of evil, its intelligibility might be in jeopardy. Rather than finding a persuasive and decisive conclusion to “the problem” as it stands is to propose an opportunity for an opening toward more productive thinking about other approaches to doing the philosophy of religion on the topic of evil. The proposal developed by the following chapters is to start thinking about the subjects who pose “the problem of evil.” While some may view this line of inquiry as a hopeless procedure, my hope is that it will open new lines of inquiry into a topic in the philosophy of religion that avoids the accusation of Henri Duméry: “The quarrel continues based on old ideas and dated methods.” 88

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NOTES 1. Barry Whitney, Theodicy: An Annotated Bibliography on the Problem of Evil, 1960–1991, 2nd Edition (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University, 1998). 2. Nelson Pike, “God and Evil: A Reconsideration,” Ethics 68, no. 2 (January 1958): 116–24. 3. W. L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335–41. 4. Philip L. Quinn, “Philosophy of Religion,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 607–11. 5. Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 3. 6. Neither Jewish nor Muslim figures nor the resources of their religions have a significant presence in the discourse. An analytic response would remark that, strictly speaking, the figures and resources of religions along with their diversity is unnecessary for working out the form, structure, and solutions to this specific problem. 7. U.S. Supreme Court, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 1964. 8. Pike, “God and Evil,” 119. 9. Petruschka Schaafsma, Reconsidering Evil (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 3. 10. Maria L. Assad, “Language, Nonlinearity, and the Problem of Evil,” Configurations 8 (2000): 273. 11. Marilyn McCord-Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 211. 12. McCord-Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 218n20. 13. Eleanor Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 181. 14. Ibid., 34. 15. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 28, 64. 16. Representative examples of this approach are Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon’s Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989), as well as George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1984). 17. Eleanor Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 4. 18. Ibid.,14. 19. Ibid., 399. 20. Ibid., 375. 21. Eve Garrard, “Evil as an Explanatory Concept,” The Monist 85, no. 2 (2002): 323. 22. Ibid., 331. 23. Hillel Steiner, “Calibrating Evil,” The Monist 85, no. 2 (2002): 185. 24. Roy W. Perret, “Evil and Human Nature,” The Monist 85, no. 2 (2002): 304. 25. Raymond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 74. 26. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 18. 27. Ibid., 20. 28. Ibid., 23. 29. Ibid., 46. 30. Ibid., 1. 31. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1963), 150. 32. Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9. 33. Ibid., 4. 34. Ibid., 102. 35. Catharine Keller, “The Mystery of the Insoluble Evil: Violence and Evil in Marjori Suchoki,” in World without End: Christian Eschatology from a Process Perspective, ed. Joseph A. Bracken (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 49.

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36. William Desmond, “Evil and Dialectic,” in New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 179. 37. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 7. 38. Idelbar Avelar, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 46. 39. Susan Neiman, “Theodicy in Jerusalem,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steve E. Aschheim (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 86. 40. Dewi Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 5. 41. Phillip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, eds., A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (New York: Blackwell Publ. Ltd, 1997), 1–2. 42. Bill Martin, Humanism and Its Aftermath (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1995), 341. 43. The logical argument from evil is only a pseudo-problem because, as Terence Penelhum notes, “[t]heists do not see fewer evils in the world than atheists; they see more. It is a necessary truth that they see more. [. . .] Only if this [the atheists’ acceptance of the theological concept of ‘sin’ as a valid means of discussing evil] is accepted can the problem of evil be represented as a logical problem” (“Divine Goodness and the Problem of Evil,” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams and Marilyn McCord-Adams [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990], 70). 44. Nelson Pike, God and Timelessness (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1970), 21. 45. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, 7. 46. Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), xii. 47. J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams and Marilyn McCord-Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36–37. 48. Pike, “God and Evil,” 116. 49. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” 26. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 25. 52. Ibid., 26. 53. A. M. Weisberger, Suffering Belief (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 24. 54. For example, William P. Alston discusses, via meta-ethics, God’s moral obligation within divine command theory. See “Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists,” in Michael D. Beaty, Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 303–26. 55. Robert Pargetter, “Evil and Evidence against the Existence of God,” Mind, New Series 85, no. 338 (April 1976): 242. 56. McCord-Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 17. 57. W. L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams and Marilyn McCord-Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 130. 58. Michael Martin, “Is Evil Evidence Against the Existence of God?” Mind 87 (1978): 429. 59. “First, even if he [the atheist] can refute n possible reasons for saying that God has a morally sufficient reason, there still may be an n + 1th reason, which hasn’t been refuted. Secondly, and more generally, the anti-theist is committed to the view that the statement, ‘an omnipotent and omniscient being cannot have a morally sufficient reason’ is a logical truth. However, the only evidence he can bring to bear against the statement is factual and inductive” (William E. McMahon, “The Problem of Evil and the Possibility of a Better World,” Journal of Value Inquiry 3 [Summer 1969]: 84). 60. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” 25. 61. Weisberger, Suffering Belief, 28. 62. Paul Ricoeur, while not a participant in this discourse, nicely summarizes the issue: “the fact that a finite understanding will be unable to reach the evidence for this guaranteeing calculation, only being able to gather together the few signs for the excess of perfections over

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imperfections in the balance of good and evil” (Paul Ricoeur, “Evil, A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” trans. D. Pellauer, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53, no. 4 [1984]: 641). 63. W. L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335–41. 64. For example, in his 2003 Gifford lecture, Peter van Inwagen refers to “Rowe’s fawn” (The Problem of Evil [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 9). 65. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” 337. 66. Ibid. 67. Single fallibility is the hypothesis that, since human knowledge of the external world bases its reasons upon propositions whose certainty stands contingently upon experience of the world, that knowledge is the product of inference rather than deductive entailment. The truth of knowledge then rests upon confirmation of a proposition which renders the proposition probable. So long as the proposition is not overridden by a more probable proposition, it does not yet fail as knowledge. Single fallibility leads to reasoning by what Charles Sanders Pierce named “abduction,” “where we find some very curious circumstance, which would be explained by the supposition that it was a case of a certain general rule, and thereupon adopt that supposition” (Douglas N. Walton, Relevance in Argumentation [Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 2004], 4). 68. W. L. Rowe, “Skeptical Theism: A Response to Bergmann,” in The Improbability of God, eds. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 312. 69. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” 336. 70. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 158. 71. Stephen J. Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of Appearance,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 73–93. 72. Stephen J. Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments form Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance,’” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams and Marilyn McCord-Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 138–60. 73. Bruce R. Reichenbach, “The Inductive Argument from Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 3 (July 1980): 221–27. 74. Ibid., 227. 75. Informally stated, Bayes’s theorem is that: “if an experience is indirect evidence for h and neither h nor the denial of h is antecedently certain, then that experience makes h more probable, all things considered, than it would otherwise be. The greater the ratio of the antecedent probability of the experience occurring given h to the antecedent probability of the experience occurring given the denial of h, the stronger the evidence” (Paul Draper, “God and Perceptual Evidence,” Philosophy of Religion 32 [1992]: 151). 76. Ibid., 223. 77. Paul Draper, “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists,” Noûs 23 (1989): 331–50. 78. Paul Draper, “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 13. 79. Paul Draper, “More Pain and Pleasure: A Reply to Otte,” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, ed. Peter van Inwagen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 47. 80. Peter van Inwagen, “The Problem of Evil, Air and Silence,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 155. 81. Draper, “Pain and Pleasure,” 190n18. 82. Ibid., 181. 83. Draper, “More Pain and Pleasure,” 54. 84. Draper, “Pain and Pleasure,” 14. 85. David O’Connor, “On the Problem of Evil’s Not Being What It Seems,” The Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 149 (1987): 441. 86. David O’Connor, “On the Problem of Evil’s Still Not Being What It Seems,” The Philosophical Quarterly 40, no. 158 (1990): 73.

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87. Neiman, “Theodicy in Jerusalem,” 86. 88. Henri Duméry 1978, 586–87, quoted in Maurice Boutin, “Effacing the Divine: Kai Nielsen’s Philosophical Achievements,” ARC 33 (2005): 516.

Chapter Two

A Discourse on Evil within the Limits of Theism Alone

A CERTAIN GAME ABOUT EVIL One way of framing how discourse proceeds in the philosophy of religion is that its participants are concerned to find means of establishing or discrediting the epistemic certainty of religious claims. Talking about the problem of evil is one among many demonstrations of how to proceed. The previous chapter already discussed an issue of epistemic certainty with regard to the status of “evil,” for most of the contributions to the discourse do not spend much effort on considering or reconsidering evil. Rather, this is taken by many to be one of the certainties with which the discussion of the problem might proceed. There is evil. Right there in the actual world. This chapter will explore aspects of how that claim is most often taken to be certain. Whether a God with the attributes of theism exists in light of the certainty of evil is presumed by most participants in the discourse as the epistemically uncertain item up for debate. Very few arguments are sustained where the inverse is the case. Manicheanism and such is taken as long put to rest. This chapter, too, does not see to push any arguments in that direction. Instead, the objective is to keep thinking about the discourse in terms of what sorts of openings are presented for rethinking the up-and-running assumptions that animate what philosophers of religion talk about when they talk about evil. Talk about evil as a problem has involved some effort to define what positions are available to occupy. Typically, the varieties of theism are the positions taken to be in need of defense, while varieties of atheism are proposed as locations from which attacks emerge. Prevalent among nearly all participants is the assumption that epistemic certainty is the value by means of which success or failure of defense and attack are determined. Epistemic 41

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certainty is the coin of the realm. One common strategy to garnering certainty for a position is to orchestrate a denial of certainty for other positions. Likewise, preventing other positions from amassing certainty is one of the best modes of defense. It is as if there is a zero-sum game being played in which a denial of certainty to others results in a correlatively direct deposit to one’s own position. No arguments explicitly make this claim, but this chapter presents one way of seeing just such a claim at work in the discourse. Something interesting to investigate then emerges from asking about the cumulative effect of arranging “the problem of evil game” in that way. This chapter considers this question as another opening whereby philosophers of religion might reconsider the prevailing assumptions and commitments at work in the discourse on evil up to now. Taking a step back from the numerous presentations of failures in epistemic certainty attributed to the positions named and occupied in the discourse may establish a sense that the entire discourse begs the question. AN ENGLISH LANGUAGE GAME As noted in the previous chapter, this book conceives of a discourse on the problem of evil within the philosophy of religion that works through the logical, evidential, and probabilistic approaches. In each case, the challenge put to the argument from evil against theism is that of demonstrating the irreconcilability that the claims of theism obtain epistemic certainty with one element of the actual world. The difficulty in laying theism to rest, however, is that defenses of theism themselves deploy arguments against the epistemological certainty of their detractors, too. This chapter suggests that this state of affairs creates an opportunity to pause and consider how the discourse may be participating in a shared condition that solicits all its participants. If the philosophy of religion’s discourse on the problem of evil enunciates what amounts to “less a duel than a mime,” 1 then a discussion on the work of philosophy might elucidate why this is the case. That is to say, there is a problematic that besets the discourse on the problem of evil that may usefully explain the limits of that discourse as well as indicate options for venturing beyond those limits. One key condition by which this particular discourse attempts to cultivate certainty is a project that is shared among nearly all its participants: English is the language in which the disputations take place and certain terms in that language are agreed upon to help stake out the available positions. Any other language could be chosen for the discourse, but the discourse happens to take place largely in English. The conditions about to be discussed would nevertheless obtain. Namely, the philosophy of religion is practiced by borrowing

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and using a language whose terms and conditions are not owned by the discourse. The terms used in disputes such as the problem of evil trade partly in folk terms and partly in taxons constructed specifically for doing the work of the discourse. “Evil” is one of the folk terms, whereas “theism” is a taxon that is, for the most part, quite strictly delimited. As a result of trading in borrowed terms, the discourse can never be formalized outright. As Jacques Derrida rightly asked, “Within a so-called natural language, so one that cannot be totally formalized, where is the frontier between ordinary usage and philosophical usage?” 2 Philosophers find themselves with little other options than to begin with borrowed language. Recourse to a purely philosophical idiom is not possible. Even the adoption of mathematical or symbolic sets is not a live option for doing philosophy of religion so long as the problems or issues taken up are putatively relevant to informal actualities such as the practices or beliefs of humans understood to be outsiders who do not themselves participate in the discourse at hand. Philosophical concepts demand sentences and texts that are not the exclusive possession of philosophers. This inescapability of situation, context, and singularity is a key element that compels any aspiration for epistemological certainty to be eluded by the conditions for obtaining a sound conclusion. The complicity and scandal of being unable not to avoid language entails, necessarily, the deferral of any knock-down argument that would close, forever, a discussion about religion and evil. This problematic situation is a chance to consider the idioms of the discourse in question. The struggle with inhabiting the medium of language is not something extensively dwelt upon by English-language philosophers of religion. The issue is instructively elucidated by Derrida’s attempts to bring attention to the conflict between the notion of universality ascribed to philosophical concepts versus their instantiation in ordinary, borrowed languages. To participate in a philosophical discourse may be a struggle to reconcile metaphysical claims with actualities because the practice uses language metaphorically. The discourse must “inhabit the metaphor in ruins, to dress oneself in tradition’s shreds and the devil’s patches—all this means, perhaps, that there is no philosophical logos which must not first let itself be expatriated into the structure Inside-Outside.” 3 The work of locating claims of interest and then transforming their language into philosophical claims is a work of translation that forms conditions of ineluctable uncertainty. While commentary, explanation, and paraphrase is not translation per se, these are the sorts of strategies that approximate potential meanings that are in no way equivocal. The translation of religious claims into logical statements is not pure translation. This could be an excuse for the overestimation of certain capabilities espoused by philosophers of religion, but it is by no means an alibi for a defense. The resistance of the religious idioms to translations goes at least two ways: it affects the unicity of any religion’s dogmatics, teachings, truth

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claims, or other idealizations as much as it affects the capacity for philosophical argumentation to finally and conclusively demonstrate, for instance, the incredulity of religious claims. POSITIONS There is nothing wrong with working to stake out as clearly as possible the available positions for participating in a debate. The performances of defining and inhabiting those positions are simply to participate in the construction of borders for a discourse. Over the last fifty years, a clear and distinct problematic has emerged, on the grounds of which certain distinctions can be introduced in order to locate the voices in the discourse. Within the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil has been construed as a debate between theism and atheism. For each of these terms, there are distinctions regarding questions on whose behalf the term may speak. Theism has been delineated as standard, orthodox, expanded, and restricted. The latter term denotes the voice of a strictly philosophical rendering of theism that does not take note of the broader doctrinal, confessional, or religiously variable contexts. Restricted theism, then, does not necessarily defend even Christian theological claims; it is specifically concerned with what is entailed by the attributes of the all-perfect God, and it does not include any claim that is not entailed by it. The contents of restricted theism are that there is an all-powerful, allknowing, perfectly good being. The other variants would presumably take into account varying swathes of Christian doctrine and theology. The most formalized of the four, restricted theism, nevertheless grounds the possible admissibility of the others. Should restricted theism fail to be valid, so much so do the others. 4 Arguments that take up the problem of evil as a problem for theism are thereby varieties of atheism: unfriendly, indifferent, and friendly atheisms. 5 All three characterize positions for arguments against the validity of claims that God, as defined by theism, does not exist. The first position adamantly and polemically advances its argument against the existence of God. The second is not concerned to make such bold claims, but merely holds out the option for atheism. The third articulates a position that grants the possibility of sound arguments establishing the existence of God. Some nuance could be added to these positions with the distinction between positive and negative atheism. Unfriendly atheism is also positive atheism “in the sense of disbelief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, completely free, disembodied being.” 6 This indicates no belief in god or gods. Negative atheism takes on the unfriendly atheist position with the addition of arguments that refrain from negating the possibility of there being any god or gods. Many of the arguments from evil are restrictive in scope and do not take up the larger task of

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establishing positive atheism. Michael Martin 7 offers a further distinction of “broad” and “narrow” relevant to his construction of arguments from evil on behalf of negative atheism. The narrow sense of negative atheism argues against the existence of a personal god who is actively interested in the world’s affairs. The broad sense of negative atheism believes in the absence of gods actively interested in the world’s affairs. Thus the narrow positive atheism of most analytic arguments from evil understandably does not prove that God, if there is God, does not exist; it does prove that a particular concept of God fails to be valid. WHAT COMES BEFORE A PROBLEM? For most participants, the above positions set out in advance the conditions for the problem of evil. Derrida’s reflections on the structure and function of problems in Western thought is useful to consider how it is possible for the discourse to bump up against limits that derive from the comportment of its participants. For example, most participants in the discourse assume several basic elements and presuppositions explored in the previous chapter about evil, God, God’s predicates, a burden of proof, and the enthymeme producing that burden. All these are typically taken as set forth in advance as “the problem.” Whatever amounts to a problem is something which, Derrida’s works usefully remind us, is typically taken to be that which is before the subject who is thinking. 8 A problem is pro-posed. It is thought to be there, somewhere, placed before thought as an object of study. In one meditation on problems, Derrida explores some avenues for thinking about problems via the term’s Latin backbround: “problema is a shield, an armor, a rampart as much as it is a task for the inquiry to come.” 9 Etymologically speaking problems are objects (L. ob-jecta) thrown before thinking subjects. The philosophical tradition follows from the Greek understanding of problema as something put forward: proballein is to propose by way of combining pro, “forward,” and ballein, “to throw.” In the vocabulary of warfare, it should also be noted that blema was the wound in a human body pierced by a thrown spear. This wound follows from the result of something being thrown. But blema also signifies the missile itself, a javelin, a lance, a kidney-ripping spike, or a chest-splitting spear. In the military parlance of Latin the blema is both the wound and the weapon. And so a problem can be wielded not only as an apotropaic shield to protect against another. 10 A problem can wound. Problems are offensive weapons for thought. The problem of evil is a good example of something wielded by the positions of atheism against theisms. Furthermore, it may be imaginable that certain subjects who take up atheism

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as a position may shield themselves against theism vis-à-vis the problem of evil. Considering the “pro” of the problem may point reflection toward thinking about what comes before the wound. Asking about priority is to ask not only what comes before the blema and whence or where anything may arrive but also the composition and status of whomever goes there. The French language is able to say something here, since the language provides two ways of considering what is before. Avant implies temporality in the sense that there is something earlier; in that case, the problem is a wounding of thought that has already come about and to which thought must attend. The problem is something that a priori wounds the subject. Devant implies a sense of spatiality in which there is some distance involved. The problem is something sui generis that is ready at hand for subjects to wield. In any case, it is the language user whose interests position the possibility of a problem. Nothing happens without a subject working to pose a problem before itself or another. There is not so much an ethics of problem-posing. There is nothing wrong per se with posing problems for oneself or others. There is a politics of problem-posing. The practice is most often deployed in order to compel responses from others. Therefore no “problem” is neutral or benign. By means of the structure and force of problem-posing, philosophers mean to put some other under a philosophical horizon, elicit philosophical language in a certain philosophical idiom from the other, and ultimately, if the other can be rendered reasonably coherent, non-contradictory, and sound, be capable of philosophically remarking upon how that other can be successfully encompassed within a philosophical circle of understanding and explanation. At such point, the other is no longer other because epistemological certainty has been reconciled. That other no longer poses the problem nor needs that problem be posed to the other. It will no longer be necessary to make the other the object of a problem. Who or what is before the problem of evil? Does this depend upon whomever finds themselves compelled to respond to the problem? The particular philosophical idiomatics by which the problem is posed is the actual language of the discourse. Posing the problem in that particular discourse involves delineating available positions regarding theism and atheism in the language of philosophy qua metaphysics. As far as it is typically performed, the problem of evil is not a benign element introduced in order to enable the use of any idiom other than those introduced by its interlocutors. Under these circumstances other languages or even other philosophical idioms likely seem incoherent and unreasonable to the participants in the discourse. Likewise, strangers to the discourse would suffer none of the wounds presupposed by the wielding of this particular problem.

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In this way a consideration of Derrida’s reflections on problems challenges the presumption that philosophical discourses are capable of going “straight through the frame on their way to what is supposed to be the center of their work.” 11 Unless, that is, there is a reconsideration of who—rather than what—is at the center of the work in a discourse. The problem of evil discourse currently does not think the possibility that the center is comprised of the subjectivities who are wielding the problem. David Wills reads Derrida to think this question as the “problem of lemming”: “language and meaning are forever in the business of contextualization, which also means they are forever in the business of framing, framing an abyss; in the business of lemming.” 12 Far from putting others into question, the very possibility of posing dilemmas also puts the would-be problemposer into question. If so, then Wills’s next words pose a problem of their own: “That framing or bridging is what permits something to make sense rather than operate as the free-floating drift of signification; but the very same, and necessary, law of the abyss that opens the play of meaning makes ascribing limits to it ultimately impossible.” 13 Following Wills further, the point is to consider who is at work with the problem of evil. The available positions listed by Rowe form part of the largely unquestioned frame for the problem. A problem is often framed by dilemma. The components of dilemmas are thought to set the framework for problems. Indeed, dilemmas are constituted by the pairing of two lemmata. The problem of evil nicely illustrates this point, where the framing is done by theism and evil. The Latin term lemma may well be involved in the etymology of “problem,” and thinking about this may serve some use, too. In philosophy, a lemma is a premise. It is something proposed as granted in the course of developing an argument. In that context, a lemma is given as something acceptable and accepted for the purposes of the argument and more widely as something credible. At one point in the history of Western thought, a lemma was originally the formalization of a religious statement. This statement was not necessarily a philosophical claim, as it could be a series of phrases, or even paragraphs, over which the lemma hovered as a title or subtitle. For example, many versions of the Christian Bible have lemmata interspersing their passages. The lemma is a guide to the reader that can expedite either the act of locating a specific passage or the act of surmising the meaning of the passage. In any case, the lemma is originally deployed in the Christian religious context as a pedagogico-hermeneutic commentarial technology. It presents a reductio that can operate as a formalized indicator of a phrase, statement, passage, or series. Lemmata sometimes functioned as credos by which Christians could also confess their faith. In this sense, lemmata stand ambivalently in the place of something else, and it is the subject who asks lemmas to do that work.

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Chapter Two The word lemma (pl. lemmata), which in the fifteenth century referred to the proposition drawn from a classical source or holy writ that was quoted and served as a heading for the commentary that followed it, now means both an assumed, and therefore accessory, proposition on the basis of which an argument will proceed, and a similar proposition given as a title. It is thus something fundamental to the argument that occupies an accessory or marginal position, albeit with the prominence of a title or headword; something like a frame that provides a basis for conceptual or aesthetic structure while appear to remain more or less exterior to it. 14

Classical philosophers, following the usage of the Church Fathers, employed lemmas in that titular capacity. Lemmas would appear at the beginning of a chapter or at the head of a work. In this way, works would be granted their author’s name, an annotation of the contents, perhaps a comment about the circumstance of the text’s production such as at the behest of a monarch or to mark an event, as well as the intended person or audience to whom the text is addressed. A text without a lemma is anepigraphos, and lemmas also provided the primary means for pseudepigraphy. 15Lemmas were distinguished from the primary text by means of characters differentiated by font and color. The lemma functioned as a headword and sometimes as a gloss on a passage. In this way, lemmas provided a kind of signature, gloss, context, and postage whereby subjects identified themselves. 16 That lemmas have an epigraphic function is the point worth noting. As it pertains to reconsidering the problem of evil, the discussion of problems and lemmas helps direct focus toward the subjects who wish to put the discourse to work. IS ONLY ONE EVIL MOMENT SUFFICIENT? William L. Rowe’s evidential argument, mentioned above, puts forward what might be the best of all possible atheist arguments from evil, but only goes so far as to set forth an unfriendly, narrow negative atheism. The argument is meant exclusively for a God of the sort defined by theism. The argument proposes the certainty of evils as something that disqualifies and invalidates the certainty of theism. Rowe’s evidential argument from evil reframes the construal of the problem of evil in terms of what kind of reasoning most sufficiently obtains a judgment on the compossibility of God and evils. The matter at hand is whether theism or atheism is more adequate, given the actual world. However, what the argument is no longer capable of discounting outright is that there might be some relation between the metaphysical and the empirical. Rowe’s proposal is for thought experiments about gratuitous evils that ought to be capable of comparing how the world would be either if God did or did not exist, given the actual world. The reframed construal proposes that this comparison can be concluded on the strength of

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evidence proffered for the support of each option. Whichever option has the best argument is the one that can produce the most compelling evidence. Rowe derives the strength of his argument from its humble epistemological claims: it should be possible for humans to know of the intense human and animal suffering occurring in the daily world. In the case of his argument, interlocutors are asked to consider the likelihood that somewhere, at least once in the existence of the world, a fawn has died in a forest fire. Humans are capable of understanding what goods do exist and of imagining what goods might come to exist. It should also be feasible for humans to make reasonable judgments as to what an omnipotent being can and cannot do. Finally, it should be reasonable to expect that humans can judge what a wholly good being would seek to accomplish with respect to good and evil in the universe. 17 Rowe’s argument importantly also makes another humble epistemological claim about human knowledge and its expectations of omniscience. Namely, “it would seem to require something like omniscience on our part before we could lay claim to knowing that there is no greater good connected to the fawn’s suffering.” 18 It is not imaginable that the world would be deprived of any global or local goodness, were the fawn’s condition to be somehow either alleviated or prevented. Therefore, either God exists as a moral agent with such attributes and capacities, or it is to be inferred that God does not exist. Rowe’s argument is thought to obtain its strength on the basis of evidence that there is an evil that lacks morally sufficient reason. All the same, the evidence itself plays a very limited role within the overall functioning of the argument. Rowe’s argument is a direct, yet inductive, argument from evil. 19 The evidence is circumstantial, as every wholly gratuitous evil inflicted upon a body, such that there is wounding and pain, is a singularity. The experience of the fawn is not transcendently available to anyone else’s understanding. Rowe’s argument and those who engage it, such as Stephen Wykstra, 20 do not infer the plausibility of not knowing anything for certain about the fawn. Evil, such as Rowe treats it, cannot be exemplary. The instantiations of purely gratuitous evil are occasional, contingent, and finite. The plausibility of his argument largely rests upon the plausibility that the fawn’s experience can be known and qualified as evil. The operative claim is that facts of particular suffering and evils can be known with certainty. These certainties are not logically necessary truths. If they are facts, each arises in its own singularity. 21 Rowe’s argument is therefore left only supposing the widely held knowledge of instances of wholly gratuitous evils. Each evil itself is not universally known or universally accessible. As such, Rowe’s evidential argument is limited to giving narrow, negative atheist grounds to invalidate theism as a positive claim. Rowe self-consciously accesses and arranges his argument according to the inferential limits of evidence in order to reset the stage for arguing

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against the credibility of theism. The starting point is no longer a setting friendly to theism where the logical coherence of God’s attributes are first presented as ostensibly aligned with general claims of metaphysics. That said, the friendly beginning with evidential claims already gives priority to that which resists metaphysical conceptualization—that is, actual—finite circumstances of a singular instance that is an evil. The problem with this argument, as Susan Neiman puts it, is the following: “Data are what you have when you have scientific procedures based on causal analyses and inductive evidence. None of this is present for events that happen only once. There everything rests upon speculation.” 22 The premise of posing the fawn dying in the forest is that just one evil is enough to overturn claims about the ultimate goodness and capability of the God posed by theism. And so, Rowe’s argument withholds from explaining or exploring anything about the amount and distributions of evils in the actual world. Rowe also depends upon the reader’s agreement that the pointless suffering of an animal counts as evil so as to cut short rebuttals that trade on the moral claims that evils may be justified if they serve to establish a greater good. THE MOMENT OF DECISION The objective with presenting something that happens only once is to close down the possibility of reopening the argument. The defenses offered as rejoinders to Rowe do attempt to push back against what Rowe thinks is reasonable to conclude: that in any world in which at least one event goes wrong, insofar as no future event redeems it with a higher good, then the God of theism cannot be saved. The difficulty with Rowe’s argument, as already discussed in chapter 1, is that it rests upon making a decision rather than deductively forcing a closure. The decision on the case for or against theism given evils is just that, a decision. And that decision is not legislated across subjects throughout time and space. Instead, the decision Rowe wishes others to make is just as gratuitous as the death of the fawn. The conclusion lacks necessity. The philosopher can enunciate and reason through the eligible options. But at some point, as was found with William L. Rowe for example, there is no more speaking for “us.” At that point, Rowe himself decides “I believe.” 23 Here Rowe comes up against a limit of rhetoric and argumentation. It becomes clear that one structure operative in the discourse is decision. A binary is organized from which few participants attempt to extricate themselves. The field of operations is narrowed to a decision for one of two positions established by the discourse to be mutually exclusive: either for positive theism or for positive atheism. The structure of decision, however, does not operate under any compulsion or necessity for one or the other. In

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the structure of this context epistemological certainty leaves off when the decision begins. THE UNCERTAINTY OF DECISIONS This is not to say that there were no decisions prior to points in the discourse such as Rowe’s conclusion to believe. Numerous decisions are already up and running long before then. Considering these decisions does bring about the possibility of thinking of what comes before the problem of evil. For example, the introduction of certain available positions—some of which are to be beset by problems and dilemmas—foregrounds the possibility of deciding for atheism or theism. The decision for or against the formalizations of theism or atheism are often preceded by decisions for restricted or unrestricted, positive or negative, friendly or unfriendly and narrow or broad. All of these are part of the work participating subjects do in order to animate the discourse. These are the idioms of a particular philosophical discourse. There is nothing wrong with idioms. Instead, the useful thing is to understand that “restricted theism” is already putting in motion a very particular work of abstraction that functions as a lemma whose title is meant to designate a particular set of items to be translated. Restricted theism is a particular distillation of other ostensibly unrestricted theisms. Participants in the discourse either assume or trust that this is the case: that there are unrestricted theisms to be translated into this idiom that represents them. Derrida, whose work demonstrates the attempt to repeatedly work across and through languages, declared that a translation is “an always possible but always imperfect compromise between two idioms.” 24 The formalizing and abstractive shift from an unrestricted toward a restricted discourse is a shift from one idiom to the next. Elsewhere Derrida describes these unavoidable movements as the scandal and the chance of philosophy. 25 The scandal of philosophy is the inability of a philosophical discourse to adequately speak the other’s language 26 so as to proceed as if it were the case. In that case, however, then there is always some remainder or remnant that is yet to be translated. 27 The formalization of abstraction is always a partial success that sets in place, before every enunciation of a concept, the problem of that insurmountable economy. As was already noted above, Derrida suggests that discourses must “inhabit the metaphor in ruins, to dress oneself in tradition’s shreds and the devil’s patches—all this means, perhaps, that there is no philosophical logos which must not first let itself be expatriated into the structure Inside-Outside.” 28 It is for this reason that meaning is a possibility, not a necessity. And that possibility depends upon the subject’s decision to make use of that possibility. Acts of language take place, but no act of language necessarily causes

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there to be meaning as its effect. An act of language does say “yes” to meaning, “yes” to making space, and “yes” to the possibility of reply. However, all these affirmations by no means dictate what follows. At most, an act of language can promise meaning. “This sentence is false” can stand as a promise of meaning. Derrida makes a similar point in reflecting upon one of the more neglected unpublished fragments that was signed by Nietzsche: “I have forgotten my umbrella.” 29 What could this mean? Most certainly it is an act of language that, as reiterated in this citation, cannot but make space and affirm the possibility of meaning and reply. “There is no infallible way of knowing the occasion of this sample or what it could have been later grafted onto. We never will know for sure what Nietzsche wanted to say or do when he noted these words, nor even that he actually wanted anything.” 30 While few philosophers would take either “This sentence is false” or “I have forgotten my umbrella” as statements of truth, not all philosophers would make “truth” into a condition for philosophically valid language. With regard to the Nietzsche fragment, it is at once for nothing and precisely not for nothing that Derrida goes on to explain in depth the possible ramifications of “I have forgotten my umbrella.” The lines of inquiry on this topic in Derrida’s works are not focused on an analytic discourse such as the problem of evil. Derrida was working with conceptions of representation in the works of Hegel, where Hegel’s texts were read by Derrida as proposing several points where the reader is asked to make the decision to follow next steps where no clear path is apparent. The problem Derrida saw in Hegel was that, “The essence of representation is not a representation, is not representable, there is no representation of representation.” 31 This approach to understanding representation follows Plotinus’s basic argument that the essence of “the One” is not unity but multiplicity, 32 except that Derrida’s objective is to demonstrate that multiplicity is the necessary condition for making claims about unity. Representations abstract through language, and there is no language that is anterior and exterior to representation that would be capable of representing representation. This would overcome Frege’s paradox that a term cannot refer to something, and, at the same time, refer to the fact that it refers to it, 33 as well as Wittgenstein’s thesis that one cannot express through language what expresses itself in language; over this, there must be a passage in silence. 34 It would also overcome the demonstrations of Cantorian set theory that the postulation of a super-set is an indeterminately deferred event. 35 Instead, the conditions of possibility for each formalization deployed in a philosophical argument demonstrate commitments to numerous prior decisions. The upshot of drawing attention to the uncertainty built into philosophical argumentation is to show how decisions are at work that, were they to be dwelt upon, might introduce an experience of anxiety about whether and how arguments could be proffered as conclusive. In particular, the situation is

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perhaps most acutely demonstrable in arguments about the compossibility of one formalization—theism—with another—evil. Reading Derrida’s works across that discourse helpfully discovers means of considering all the decisions at play in posing a problem of evil. The objective is not only to speculate, but in later chapters explore, what openings in a seemingly staid discourse are possible by making a frank admission, such as the following one enunciated by Derrida: And if you were to bide your time awhile here in these pages, you would discover that I cannot dominate the situation, or translate it, or describe it. I cannot report what is going on in it, or narrate it or depict it, or pronounce or limit it, or offer it up to be read or formalized without remainder. I would always have to renew, reproduce, and reintroduce into the formalizing economy of my tale—overloaded each time with some supplement—the very indecision which I was trying to reduce. 36

That is, the philosopher’s work may not be to effect an absolute displacement of substance from one idiom to another; rather, it may be that the philosopher’s accomplishment consists of the demonstration of an affinity that exhibits its possibility between two or more forms. Following Derrida’s suggestions, there are remainders in the movement from one idiom to the next that mark the salvation of philosophical abstraction in the course of their failures. First, if there is always some-to-be-translated, then the resulting untranslatability entails that more is to be done. Some kind of work remains because the conclusion remains in deferral. Second, given this remaining meaning, any act of language engenders a fundamental trust that there is meaning on the behalf of all idioms. In other words, participation in a discourse is a decision affirming a positive belief that not only are these the terms to be used but that there is more to be done with those terms. WHAT REMAINS TO BE THOUGHT At the moment where William Rowe decides that he is in the position to decide, he declares a belief in positive atheism as the most certain outcome of the considerations available given the discourse on the problem of evil. He’s not wrong. He’s not right. He does believe. This is one of those moments where a subject has registered what Derrida calls solicitation. The work of solicitation is finding points at which the whole of a structure or discourse is understood to move 37 such that the structure of a concept or discourse shudders and shakes all of its own accord. A discourse such as the problem of evil, whose participating subjects set out to find an epistemically certain conclusion, find themselves having to enunciate belief, and may be understood to ground itself only by forgetting the myriad decisions that must be

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made in order to mitigate a plurality of uncertainties. One example of this work is that of setting out and settling into subject positions such as theist and atheist. Philosophers of religion have not yet solicited their discourse on the problem of evil by thinking about what problems set themselves up in advance of being able to enunciate something like “there is a problem of evil for theism.” What remains to be thought: the very thing that resists thought. It resists in advance, it gets out ahead. The rest gets there ahead of thought; it remains in advance of what is called thought. For we do not know what thought is. We do not know what this word means before or outside of this resistance. This can only be determined from, in the wake of, what resists and remains thus to be thought. Thought remains to be thought. 38

NOTES 1. David O’Connor, “On the Problem of Evil’s Not Being What It Seems,” The Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 149 (1987): 441. 2. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 77. Abbr.: PaM. 3. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 112. Abbr.: WD. 4. Bill Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelpia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), 341. 5. William L. Rowe, “Response to Wykstra,” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams and Marilyn McCord-Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 161–62. 6. Martin, Atheism, 334. 7. Ibid., 465. 8. Jacques Derrida, On the Name (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 10. Abbr.: ON. 9. SMa, 163. 10. “For problematization is certainly the only consistent organization of a question, its grammar and semantics, but also a first apotropaic measure to protect oneself against the starkest question, both the most inflexible and the barest, the question of the other when it puts me in question at the moment it is addressed to me” (PaM, 85). 11. David Wills, Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 26. 12. Ibid., 32. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. Wolfram Hörander, “Lemma,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan (Oxford University Press, 1991). 16. The epigraphic function obtains in the discourse of linguistics, too. A lemma is a heading for a set, such as the the use of infinitive form of a verb to not only show that infinitive form, but to also represent the whole set of various conjugations possible for that verb. The lemma is the least-marked form of a verb. The lemma identifies a starting point for whatever work follows under its name. A glance at a language-learning text, such as Louis Bescherelle’s L’Art du conjuger, is an example of this. The lemma, in this context, is meant to function as a simple form capable of gesturing toward a set of substantially more complex possibilities. Here the norm is that the infinitive is a more reliable means for representing verbs in the French, German, and English language rather than the subjunctive, for example. In this context, so too the function of the lemma is grounded in its ambivalence.

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17. William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 336. 18. Ibid., 337. 19. Martin, Atheism, 336. 20. Stephen J. Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of Appearance,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 73–93. 21. Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), xiv. 22. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 158. 23. W. L. Rowe, “Evil and Theodicy,” in The Improbability of God, eds. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 297. 24. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5. Abbr.: FLa. 25. Jacques Derrida, “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis),” in Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, ed. Barry Stocker (New York: Routledge, 2007), 305. Abbr.: OTNH. 26. WD, 89. 27. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 188. Abbr.: TBa. 28. WD, 112. 29. Fredrich Nietszche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Fragment 12, 175; in Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 159n18. Abbr.: S. 30. S, 123. 31. Jacques Derrida, “Psyché: Inventions of the Other,” in Reading de Man Reading, eds. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 111. Abbr.: PIO. 32. See Maurice Boutin, “L’Un dispersif: Examen d’une requête récente,” in Neoplatonismo e religione, ed. Marco M. Olivetti (Padua: CEDAM, 1983), 253–79. 33. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999b), 213. 34. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge, 2002), 89. 35. William Lane Craig, “Theistic Critiques of Atheism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 77. 36. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2. Abbr.: TrP. 37. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 1998), 133n38. Abbr.: MOP. 38. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed, Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xxxii–xxxiii. Abbr.: WAl.

Chapter Three

Orthodoxy and Others

TAKING HISTORY SERIOUSLY The problem of evil usefully represents a theme running across much of modern Western thought: how to understand the relationship between ideality and actuality. The God of theism occupies the former and evil represents the evidence that constitutes the latter pole. Leibniz began sketching out this version of the theme with Theodicy, to be followed by Pierre Bayle and David Hume. The topic itself was not picked up by Kant or Hegel, who nevertheless struggled with the theme in order to propose their understandings. Instead, the problem of evil is picked up and formalized by Englishlanguage philosophers of religion. For example, while Leibniz did discuss possible worlds, only the English-language philosophers of religion bring modal logic to the discussion of whether or not the propositions of God according to theism may be squared off with propositions about facts, construed and developed to varying degrees, about evils taking place in an actual world. The previous chapters have already explored the development of this discourse as well as introduced some proposals drawn from the work of Jacques Derrida. The current chapter will further develop this trajectory while also reflecting upon the relationship between philosophers of religion with the field of religious studies. The objective of doing so is to justify introducing sources of theory and method that are not conventionally or traditionally associated with doing philosophy of religion. Using Derrida’s work as a conceptual and methodological resource for doing new work in the philosophy of religion is quite simply and humbly one possible avenue among many candidates for revitalizing what is currently a very narrow philosophical range of inquiry on religion. 57

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Derrida may not be the first figure coming to mind when thinking about philosophers who explicitly take up the theme of attending to the relation between the ideal and the actual. Many likely take Derrida’s writings to reside entirely within esoteric and obtuse realms of literary flourishes of idiomatic jargon rather than taking up the task of sussing out something as simple as whether a particular set of concepts, like theism, may be compossible with the actualities of this world and its furniture. Some brief forays into recent work done on the problem of evil, however, quickly demonstrate that there is a discourse composed of literature and figures whose modes of conduct, literary style, and range of idioms coheres internally as a set. But some investment is required to enter into that discourse. Not everyone is born conversant in contemporary, English-language philosophy of religion. From outsider’s perspectives, working out and explaining to others an approach to this discourse does not lend itself to simple claims, concepts, and frameworks. Thus it should be no surprise that members of that discourse may well claim that work done by outsiders such as Derrida is not only difficult, but that their relevance is not obvious. That something is strange or foreign does not warrant outright rejection, however. Were that the case, Bayesian probability analysis should not have been introduced as a means of thinking about possible worlds in which the God of theism exists alongside at least one instance of actuality taken to be evil. The philosophical consideration of how to reconcile ideas and their concepts with actual instances of events happening in the world is taken up across the entire oeuvre of Derrida’s writings in a variety of manners. If the problem of evil does take up this theme, then there may be unexplored openings onto avenues of inquiry just as useful as probability calculations. While his work has been taken up by a wide range of academic fields, from the perspective of philosophy and its subfields, Derrida’s writings are best situated within two areas of inquiry. One is that of phenomenology in the lineage of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, who worked on and around Kant’s problematic of the seeming separation of the noumenal and phenomenal. Their analytics proposed conditions of possibility for thinking subjects to understand how their existence is embedded in the world. The other is that of politics in the lineage of figures such as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, among others, who sought to understand how the events around and across the twentieth-century world could be conceptually comprehended. These quick explanations clearly do not encompass the discrete natures of each field; rather these portrayals are meant to connect with the theme at hand: the relation of the ideal and the actual. Current discourse on the problem of evil poses the latter as a problem for the former. And this is one way of portraying phenomenological and political philosophizing. The validity of the concepts and frameworks is challenged by the existential data. Derrida’s writings repeatedly take up this theme. The early publications ex-

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plicitly take up phenomenological problems while working out political issues in the background of the same. One example taken up in this chapter is Derrida’s essay “Sign, Structure and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (SSP), presented at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. 1 The essay may be read as a critique of Heidegger, but also as a reflection on the problem of politically understanding a world whose events marked the waning of European colonial powers. The opening sentence of SSP is a proposal whose language takes up both phenomenology and politics within a wider contestation of structuralism. “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-structuralist-thought to reduce or suspect.” 2 “Event” is presented by this statement as a nominative proposal of a taxon whereby a history of a concept is to be analyzed. That taxon is designated as a “loaded word,” too, that functions throughout the essay to carry ideas into a discourse that had been either excluded or not previously considered. And so what is the “event”? One event is the essay SSP itself. The essay was written and delivered at a certain point in time. The ideas proposed and discussed are themselves an event. That event is the introduction of “event” as a conceptualization of the singularity of a center, which is not only presupposed by structuralist approaches in anthropology and metaphysics but also resists the purported function of structuralism: to be able to map out singular phenomena according to conceptual frameworks that themselves transcend the specificities of the contexts to which they are applied. Other events may be read as loaded into SSP that parallels the reliance of structuralist approaches on an exception to their own rules for their possibility. In particular, the unraveling of French colonialism in the wars of Algeria and Vietnam provide sets of actualities that demonstrated how political power structures are vulnerable to events that displace their supposed centers, which can and often do disappear quite suddenly. SSP is one example of how Derrida’s writings take up actualities in order to interrogate ideas. Reading SSP in this manner is useful to draw lines connected to understanding the problem of evil as but one instance where philosophers grapple with the relation between the ideal and the real. The essay argues that “the history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.” 3 The point being that an event may be understood to have taken place whenever Western philosophers have introduced their works. “God” and “evil,” from this perspective, are then among the taxa that form the syntax and lexicon of the history of metaphysics, 4 and that the situation of these concepts can take place within contexts that show them not to be transcendent essences but rather formations of ideas by which some particular philosophers have opted to do metaphysics. SSP, like so many of Derrida’s works, contains the suggestion that philosophical works not only

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may be historicized but that they are ineluctably always and already participants in some history of meanings. 5 Of course, there is a stark difference between the deployments of actualities as evils in the discourse on the problem of evil versus the use of “event” in Derrida’s essay. The proposals in SSP are to present the concept of event and thinking about events in service of historicizing philosophical discourses. As was shown in the previous chapter, the works residing within the discourse on the problem of evil do not offer any historicizing analyses of the concepts put to work in the problem. In this way, the problematic set out by SSP is shared by structuralism and most other philosophical discourses such as those operating in the field of the philosophy of religion. History, in this sense, is a problem that can be put to the discourse on the problem of evil. It is a problem often avoided or resisted because reflection on the historical location of philosophy does not necessarily work to the advantage of that line of thought. Deferral or outright diffidence to history may result from a presumption that a demonstration of embeddedness among events renders argumentation less powerful. Perhaps an idea, once shown to be situated among peculiar or particular events, runs the risk of being shown up as a relic of a bygone time or era. However, precisely by not historicizing does the same effect come about. The express avoidance of making connections or references to events or dates and times is likely done in order to give the impression or effect that whatever is discussed therein must be timeless truth, were that it not for publication dates! Most work by English-language philosophers of religion, like that of most philosophy, does not attempt to historically situate itself, as did Leibniz, by clearly stating that the problem of evil is prompted by an event. Instead, the typical presentation involves natural evils of fawns in forests or gratuitous evils in possible worlds precisely in order to abstract away from actualities. Perhaps the decisions by writers in the discourse to avoid locating their work among events in history are because events are external to truth. Since it is impossible to quiz authors on their intentions, the issue can only be proposed and the question cannot be asked with the expectation of certain replies. For example, were the early authors in the discourse on the problem of evil troubled by the Vietnam War or the possibility of mutually assured destruction? Is there to be found a demonstrative interest in the events of devastation precipitated by so-called natural evils such as earthquakes or forest fires? Or, do many authors writing about the problem of evil see their works as analogous justifications of Cold War politics, global-capitalist economics, or projects of statecraft, where certain even, might be categorized as evils offset by other events categorized as greater goods? And, is “evil” discussed mostly as a concept without close association to historical events because of factors such as the race, gender, and nationality of the majority of philosophers of religion? (white, male Americans born largely since the 1940s). Would the

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discourse take a different shape and content were the majority of its authors people of color from America, Africa, or South Asia? No determinate and easily defensible answers can be offered for these questions. The largely analytic style that is orthodox to the discourse, perhaps foreign to many other philosophers, 6 is one that typically evades historical situations and historicizing of concepts. Most contributions to the discourse do not interrogate whether or how subjectivity may matter for thinking about evil in the context of religion. The problem of evil is structured to include at least a basic assumption about actual events in the world that challenge the coherence and validity of claims about a particular metaphysical framework. Philosophical work that takes historical events as touchstones for analysis, particularly those where history seems to have gone wrong, might be useful for rethinking and revising how a problem about evils might be posed. Derrida’s works repeatedly situate themselves, and these remarks may be read as invitations to think about the ideas and concepts explained and explored as invitations to read history across the text. There are several examples: a 1968 essay given in New York, “The Ends of Man,” whose opening line, “every philosophical colloquium necessarily has a political significance” 7 explores under what conditions philosophers might discuss the Vietnam War and human reality; a book-length meditation on the legacy of Marx whose preface remarks on the text’s composition near the close of the Cold War by meditating on apartheid as a cipher for “so many other kinds of violence going on in the world.” 8 On several other occasions, Derrida’s texts offer up discussions of events that regularly involve examples of violence and trauma as part of an argument for historicizing philosophy. Since the representation of events is perspectival, however, historicizing philosophical discourses clearly introduces vulnerabilities into argumentation that might otherwise be avoided. To leave “evil”—and “religion”—as a euphemism for actual events opens onto vulnerabilities of perspective, and therefore questions about subjectivity, that may be mobilized to rethink what might operate as a “problem” as well as for who. As already stated, there is some distance from Derrida’s works insofar as participants in the discourse on the problem of evil avoid historically situating the concepts at work and the historical context of any actual events. While theism stands in the discussions as a fairly determinate framework with rather unambiguous propositions, the previous chapter showed ways in which evil is left without interrogation and can thereby be seen to stand as a cipher for all manner of possible actualities. One possible outcome is that the argument against theism on the grounds of evil gains the rhetorical force of an indeterminate number of events depending upon the subject who is imagining what may qualify as evil from among the furniture and events. Granted the line of argumentation in the discourse does narrow evil down to

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the possibility of one gratuitous evil, but that is nevertheless a placeholder for what is left to the imagination. The point to be drawn is not about the variability of whatever may stand in for evil. The more important matter is to understand that whatever stands in for evil as an actuality or event will depend on the historical context of that subject. The reading of SSP offered above is not an in-depth analysis of the essay but an attempt to demonstrate some useful points of contact for reconsidering the discourse on the problem of evil. The discussion about historicizing philosophy leads to reflecting upon the historical position of the philosophizing subject. This sort of philosophical work is something not typically discussed or revisited in the discourse on the problem of evil, too. SSP may be read as a discussion about what assumptions are up and running about the construction of the Western philosophical subject. The essay poses “the problem of empiricism” 9: no philosophical system or structure can demonstrably comprehend all empirical data in their totality because at least one condition for doing philosophy, the necessity of employing a language, is finite. One demonstration of the generate finitude of language is in the reliance upon the movement of supplementation for signifiers, where chance and discontinuity are indispensable. 10 Knowing this makes sense of the claim that “the history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.” 11 “Evil” works in the discourse in question because it is a metaphor. Further development of the concept in the discourse with the evidential and probabilistic approaches, as described in chapter 1 and chapter 2, narrow rather than broaden the content of “evil” precisely in order that it function metonymically. Doing so puts an even greater burden on issues related to subjectivity. Who is expected by whom to imagine what is actually evil? Using SSP to reflect on subjectivity involves the essay’s discussion of how philosophical arguments are structured relative to a center, a subject, who is not fixed. The subject is not a fixed locus but a governing function 12 that reaches throughout the structure by virtue of proposing it through language such that others may themselves take on that function. The transmission of ideas through philosophical frameworks is this process of substitution where one may take up another’s structure. Of course, the possibility of transmission and adoption of structures means there is never a single code, language game, context, or situation that could fix a single structure. Instead, subjects establish their structures within a historical context. The paradox is that the subject is both within a structure and outside it, 13 which is a contradictory state of affairs that is typically resisted by naming a center, point of presence, or fixed origin: “the origin or end, arché or telos.” 14 Doing so is not wrong per se. Instead, the point lifted for the purposes of this chapter is that scholars should make every effort to historicize their analyses rather than construe it in a historically dislocated style. If the center is able to shift from

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one governing function—that is, subject—to another, then it is possible and perhaps advisable for subjects to pay attention to and articulate those shifts. The point is to always do just that: clarify further the historical location of what governs a given intellectual structure. In other words, to take the problematics attendant to the theme of relating the ideal and the actual as far as possible by paying close attention to the historical aspect of the work in question. RECONSIDERING THE SUBJECT(S) OF EVIL While the current discourse in English-language philosophy of religion about the problem of evil is the topical focus of this book, the task of historicizing discourses outlined above is not limited to that specific discourse. The problem of evil is one place to begin rethinking the philosophy of religion from the bottom up, as it were. There are already several arguments being proffered for changes in the objects of study in the philosophy of religion. The point of this chapter is to suggest that an opening move reconsiders the subjects at the center of any such reorganization of the subfield as a whole. Rather than thinking through the objects of study “out there,” some navelgazing “in here” may be worthwhile to consider the modes of subjectivity by which topics and categories are projected to be worthwhile studying as philosophy of religion. As Morny Joy observes, “Philosophy of religion has thus far been reluctant to undertake any committed self-questioning, or dialogue [with race, gender, class, ethnicity, indigeneity and non-Christian identities].” 15 One way of discussing this move is to historicize discourses among philosophers of religion, such that the construction of the participating subjects is no longer assumed but rather is a topic in itself. And so the problem of evil is only one among a plurality of possible avenues of inquiry into what assumptions are at work when certain spaces are taken to be locations where philosophy of religion takes place. And so, some brief historical reflections are useful to situate the wider subfield. Will Wainright notes that philosophy of religion did not emerge sui generis out from the mists of time: “The expression ‘philosophy of religion’ did not come into general use until the nineteenth century, when it was employed to refer to the articulation and criticism of humanity’s religious consciousness and its cultural expressions in thought, language, feeling, and practice. [. . .] The most salient feature of this sort of philosophy of religion is its attempts to establish truths about God or the Absolute on the basis of unaided reason.” 16 Philosophy of religion may be said to have begun as a response to historical circumstances of religious diversity and philosophical pluralism from the perspective of European intellectuals. 17 In other words, the philosophy of religion proceeds “within a Euro-centered imaging of the world whose

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cognitive claims are derived from the historical experiences of European (modernist) cultures.” 18 European intellectuals needed to figure out what to make of their work in light of what was being brought to their attention from the newly expanding colonial holdings via mass-printed materials. Tomoku Masuzawa’s narrative about the emergence of Religionswissenschaft remarks on how early European scholars such as Cornelis Petrus Teile framed their inquiries on religion into a “two-ply legacy” 19 that separated the history of religion (morphology) from philosophy of religion (ontology). The outcome of this historical event is that, as Masuzawa notes elsewhere, the discourses working in the philosophy of religion “spiritualizes what are material practices and turns them into expressions of something timeless and suprahistorical, which is to say, it depoliticizes them.” 20 And this is why English-language philosophy of religion takes the shape that it does. Chad Meister helpfully summarizes the situation with his threefold apology for the contents of an introduction to the subfield: the history of the field shapes introductions to the philosophy of religion; the early authors were European and the majority of recent work is Anglo-American. Both nearly exclusively focus their attention upon monotheistic arguments. 21 A quick glance at the historical situation of the philosophy of religion quickly leads to awareness that here is a set of discourses with contents that are communicated and reinforced by a fairly particular history of ideas and processes of argumentation. Approaching the history of the field in this way is helpful, because the dominant language about “transcendence” and “theism” may then be recognized as “culturally and historically specific concept[s].” 22 The coherence of theism—so aptly put by Richard Swinburne—provides not only the problematic for arguments about evil but may also be said to currently provide the setting of the entire field. 23 The field is unsurprisingly focused on a culturally and historically specific content. Cultivating an awareness that theism is a construction that depends upon sociopolitical, cultural, and ritual factors 24 helpfully demonstrates how it is quite possibly a hasty generalization to leave up and running the assumption that the alternative positions for argumentation must be atheism and unbelief. 25 Theism is heuristically useful because it involves a nicely restricted set of propositions and correlates that can be tested with basic philosophical tools, but adopting the conceptual framework of theism as a governing organization for the entire field is troublesome insofar as doing so uncritically frames the potential objects of study for the philosophy of religion. What resources are there to think through reframing the field if, as is always possible, the center moves? The potential for shifts in the subjectivity forming the sensibilities of the field has always been possible. Following the argumentation of SSP, one avenue for reflecting on such an event may be to ask by what conditions subjects find it possible to consider the objects of their studies. While this is not a practice typically integrated into discourse

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on the problem of evil or other discourses among English-language—particularly analytic—philosophers of religion, the proposals that follow are simply offered as useful means to reconsider not only the framework of a nowclassic problem as well as the subjects who place themselves as its center. By doing so, it is possible to displace or replace governing assumptions in service of revitalizing both the framework and its subjects. HISTORICIZING SUBJECTIVITY Another essay from Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” 26 (WM), may offer some of these useful avenues. The essay’s touchstone seems to be an essay from Nietzche that “truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions,” 27 from which follows a wholesale historicizing claim about philosophy: “What is metaphysics? A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos—that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason.” 28 WM is an essay that deploys an enumerated and thus formalized argument to, again, pose the problem of the relation of the physical and the metaphysical, or, ideality and reality. The essay focuses on the productions of abstraction and representation precede the rationality that is supposed to do the work of the thinking subject. In other words, prior to criticizing whatever might be produced by a certain subject there is the task of thinking about the conditions of that subject. The notion that thought, and rational thought in particular, is a matter of consciously willed representation supplants the reason it claims for itself. The capacity to lift intelligible concepts into a restricted realm for proprietary work is a selfinflicted ruse. “For if consciousness is informed by a process of representation, then one will only select for representation that which contributes to a judgment that will continue such representation.” 29 In the case at hand, chapter 1 demonstrated how the discourse on the problem of evil is doing so. The overall framework of that discourse is animated by the binary of theismatheism, but at the center are the subjects who take turns animating a discourse that always returns to the concerns of that binary. These subjects’ rationality supposedly actualizes itself on the basis of concepts, a flow of many concepts that are then put into action for the purposes of further conceptualization. The “white mythology,” then, is an ideology of conceptualization that presupposes the capacity to produce concepts spontaneously by abstraction and representation with a desire to erase any history that would situate these processes. The mythology is what enables the forgetting or obfuscation of history. The avoidance of history, from this argument, is a product of a subjective desire to act as though ideas are somehow located

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outside subjectivity. And much like SSP, the point is to direct thought toward the structurality of what it is proposing to govern, such that the work of historicizing is not simply naming a date and place of a thought as a literal event, but to also demonstrate a reflexive awareness of how ideas are projected beyond the subject as an event. WM and SSP, as well as most of Derrida’s other works, do not propose a way out of this situation. There is no meta-position from which to escape historicizing subjectivity. The response to the situation is more history rather in philosophy. WM states, “Let us rather attempt to recognize the conditions which make it in principle impossible to carry out such a project. In its barest and most abstract form the problem would be the following: that metaphor remains in all its essential features a classical element of philosophy, a metaphysical concept.” 30 In a related essay Derrida explores the possibility that thought can get outside or beyond the subject: “The essence of representation is not a representation, is not representable, there is no representation of representation.” 31 And so there is no capability to actualize a project that avoids white mythology, as such a project would require a language that is anterior and exterior to representation. And there simply is no language capable of representing representation. Thus Frege’s paradox: a term cannot refer to something, and, at the same time, refer to the fact that it refers to it; 32 and Wittgenstein’s thesis: one cannot express through language what expresses itself in language; over this, there must be a passage in silence; 33 or, the demonstration of Cantorian set theory that the postulation of a super-set is an indeterminately deferred event. 34 If WM and these other sources are correct, then the inescapable conditions of embeddedness in history leaves two general options: to pretend that history does not exist, or to situate the productions of the subject in history. These are not the horns of a dilemma for reconsidering the problem of evil, because the former seems less attractive in terms of a paradoxical commitment to excising actuality from a discourse whose entire problematic turns on pressing the exigencies of actuality against the metaphor of theism. The latter option is no less susceptible to the logic of that paradox, since the white mythology is inescapable for philosophy. There can never be enough historicizing to encompass the totality of any subject’s context. That is no reason to give up or abstain from historicizing philosophy. Instead, WM argues that philosophy is the field of inquiry gifted with the privilege of this awareness and its consequences. Philosophical subjects cannot get outside their subjectivity, but at least they may demonstrate knowledge about it, “to recognize both what governs its transformations and at the same time the limits of its flexibility.” 35 To do so would be to reorient philosophical inquiry to include considerations of relation between the ideal and the actual. In other words: to include history in thinking.

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THE PROBLEM OF DUPLICITY Including history in thinking is not to eschew abstraction and representation. The injunction toward historicizing a discourse such as the problem of evil requires reconsidering the framework of the discourse and its orientation. Derrida’s writings are offered to provide useful inroads to this challenge. The remainder of this chapter will apply a general claim about language toward “religion” as an example of how that claim works in discourses among philosophers of religion. There are several ways this general claim is phrased in Derrida’s writings. One way of stating the claim is that common language is ineluctably structured by duplicity. Inasmuch that philosophers of religion study language they take to be religious, they find themselves in the milieu of common language. Insofar that philosophers of religion communicate their work to others they, too, find each other’s work in the milieu of common language. From this, then, it would do well for philosophers of religion to take account of how every aspect of their work is riven with duplicity. The claim about duplicity, as will be explained below, does not establish the horns of a dilemma or poles suspending a middle way such that philosophers of religion are caught between throwing up their hands in futility or facing the impossible task of developing a purely formal analytic that avoids contamination by any and all things “common.” The usefulness of Derrida’s claim is to establish a framework in the sense of a circumspect orientation toward the subject position “philosopher of religion,” the work done from those positions, the tools they use, and the objects they choose to study. The wager of this book is that in doing so, it is possible to change the subject and to consider problems of evil beyond theism. Duplicity is a theme whose structure is deployed throughout Derrida’s oeuvre for a variety of purposes. 36 Generally speaking, however, Derrida’s writings may be read as considerations of how there is an unavoidable duplicity that undermines metaphysical claims to unity, wholeness, oneness, and the like. This reading sees Derrida’s works posing this problem in order to lead the reader toward an argument for duplicity as an aporetic alternative to unicity. The best example for the purposes of this chapter, if not the entire book, is from the essay on “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” which presents the problem of duplicity as a formal analytic linked specifically to evil: Calculability: question, apparently arithmetic, of two or rather of n + One. [. . .] Why should there always have to be more than one source? There would not have to be two sources of religion. There would be faith and religion, faith or religion, because there are at least two. Because there are, for the best and for the worst, division and iterability of the source. This supplement introduces the incalculable at the heart of the calculable. [. . .] But the more than one plus d’un > is at once more than two. There is no alliance of two, unless it is to

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The paragraph—setting aside its discussion of evil for a later chapter—takes an argument about the structure of language developed in earlier work 38 and applies it more generally to thinking about religion. The example at the basis of that argument is the ineluctable duplicity of the French phrase plus d’un. The phrase obtains quite literally opposite meanings depending upon its context. That is, depending upon whether the language user is aware that the meaning changes radically if the “s” is enunciated (more than one) as opposed to if the “s” is left silent (no more than one). The phrase performs functions of inclusion or exclusion that, depending upon the context of actual use in historical circumstances, are not compossible with each other. Although the point is demonstrated in a unique phrase, its upshot may be generally applied to language and carried forward into thinking about historicizing philosophy. Whatever work language does, it is inseparable from its circumstances. The premise and conclusion of the argument is that language depends upon the structural possibility of representation in iterability. Insofar as language is the medium of thought and language works via re-presentation there is the requirement of the “re-”: that there is always more than one. There is always the possibility of division of any proposed unity simply because there may always be changes in the situation of the proposal amid actual history. This is why one reason for the existence of usage dictionaries. They would be rather unnecessary were it not for the “madness” of iterability. On these grounds, philosophical work on religion that sets aside or refuses to consider history, that is duplicity, is proposed here as irresponsible not only because “religion” may be named as the category for a set which exemplarily performs this structural condition of iterability. Using the phrase plus d’un as an example is to insist that there is always ambivalence about “one” that may be understood as a structure of language that imposes a law of logic on thinking: if there is one there must also be more than that one. Indeed, this is the same logic at work in the evidential and probabilistic arguments from evil. If there is but one gratuitous evil in any possible world, then it is unavoidable that there may also be more than one evil. It is just that in the quotation above, the possibility of more than one is an ambivalent condition. There is always more than one not only for the worst but also for the best. Worst and best are qualifiers that depend upon historical conditions so far as the subjects using such evaluations are concerned. On this reading of Derrida’s uniquely French example, there is presented an argument for an indefinite succession of “more than ones,” which

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forms the dimension of sub specie aeternitatis in Derrida’s work. If there is one, then there will always be another. Most analytic philosophers will find most extensions of these claims to be madness. But the point here is to move toward reconsidering the discourse on the problem of evil from a position not foreign to the structure of the problem as it currently stands. The dilemma posed by the classic problem of evil is the presumed contradiction of metaphysical claims with claims about the actual world. The evidential version presses the issue that makes the logical version find itself defeated. In other words, later versions of the problem of evil press the issue of the two kinds of madness referred to in the quotation above. One is the madness of attempting to resist, if not overcome, the general structural condition for the postulation of any one thing, because the determination of something in ordinary language will only be recognizable, that is, representable, by way of such duplicity. On these grounds, representation in discourse tacitly includes a commitment to the possibility of something otherwise. The other madness is that, confronted with the possibility of being otherwise, a discourse cannot ultimately authorize the choice of one rather than another representation. Only a strictly logical argument for the coherence of theism can avoid this madness. But the discourse as it currently stands also resists the madness of committing to the structural actualities of the possible worlds that are repeatedly submitted as evidence for the probability of atheism. CONSIDERING CONJUNCTION RATHER THAN CONTRADICTION What about the English language? Is there another way of approaching the theme of duplicity that is not uniquely embedded in a common language in which most of the discourse about the problem of evil takes place? One approach for doing so in the English language may be to give attention to the work done by “and” to sustain oppositions without presupposing separation or synthesis. While “and” is not a real term, much less a concept, it is perhaps by virtue of this that “and” possesses a peculiar conceptual capacity in that it signifies the structure of duplicity. The possibility of any genesis or origin requires “and.” The point does not go unnoticed in Derrida’s work, however. “And in the beginning, there is the and,” 39 is what Derrida writes elsewhere, going on to write that “Without the ‘meaning’ of some ‘and,’ nothing would happen, neither linking nor break, neither consequence nor consecution, neither conjunction nor disjunction, neither connection, nor opposition, nor strategic alliance, nor juxtaposition, nor being-with, being-without, being-together, being-save, not-being, etc.” 40 As such, a reflection on “and” points toward the need for duplicity in the possibility of thinking any particular actuality. There must always be some “and,” some conditions of combina-

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tion, in order to represent concepts. So “and” may be postulated as the condition that opens the possibility of thinking the relations among beings as well as among series or sets of “and”s that allow the conventional philosophical orders to be thought, and thereby also rethought. To think about the implications of “and” is to consider the work of terminology as a matter of combining more than one rather than as a matter of separation, purification, or exclusion. If the usefulness or meaning of a term is only understandable by virtue of its being with other terms, then whatever enhances the combinatory powers of the language will also enhance whatever possibilities are available for discovering how that term is used. This combinatory augmentation is not an increase in powers that would synthesize or produce unities. Instead, the attendant work would be to think through examples by and upon which duplicity is required to generate meaning. Rather than synthesis into higher unities, the work of analysis would be to remark and highlight how combinations of terms work in discourses vis-à-vis the simple grammatical operators available in language. In other words, the work would be that of making the argument based on plus d’un more explicit. Going further: “And” is without limit. The work of duplicity as the work of pairing is indefinite. If one is always re-presentable and thereby more than one, then one may always be paired with more others. In other works, Derrida writings usefully highlight how this is the case for other common linguistic operators such as “i.e.” 41 and the hyphen. 42 There is no restriction upon what they might combine, to the point where their power is capable of overcoming great semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic distances. Without this duplicitous work there can be no thinking of conjunctions that make possible paradoxes and problems. Duplicity is what puts claims then into proximity with each other as well as what resists the completion of dialectical circles. “And” signifies the opposition without dialectical resolution that precedes the approximation of any two lemmata. 43 On the one hand, its power to facilitate proximity is unhindered, but this comes to pass without any necessity or force requiring an equally indefinite sustain of that togetherness. The conjunctive work of duplicity is not synthetic. Were it otherwise, not only would there be no usage dictionaries, there would be no dilemmas (see chapter 2). The proximity of any two lemmata is brought about by the compossibility of “and” even though “and” indicates a distinction and a difference, too. The argument being proposed here on the basis of Derrida’s work, then, is one answer to the question asked earlier in the chapter: What resources are there to think through reframing the field if, as is always possible, the center moves? The proposal is to press a call to historicize the discourse on the problem of evil by way of thinking about duplicity. Stated otherwise: to think about conjunction. Whatever is conjoined by “and” is bound contingently.

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Seemingly infinite semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic distances are bridged without terminating the participating terms. The problem of evil is one example of this madness that philosophers of religion have the opportunity to confront. The lines of questioning may shift under reconsideration toward how religious claims are afforded and affronted by the unavoidability of duplicity. As such, “and” is a term that does not gesture toward a law of contradiction, but a law of conjunction. A shift toward historicizing the discourse would then be to think less about contradiction and pursue more speculations about how these conjunctions arrange and present themselves. Furthermore, the same line of inquiry could be pressed back upon the participating philosophers of religion. Another example of duplicity is the conjunctures afforded by number. Number accounts for multiplicity, but the difference effected by number is irreducible: two is not three. S must not be P for the very possibility of numbering. Or, a number is unable to not be itself. This is the power of number that itself resists pure and simple quantification. However, based on the same law, the number is not identical with the numbered. Furthermore, there is no pure experience of any number. Enumeration is a matter of translation. There is always some-to-be-enumerated, and so the “law” of plus d’un also obtains for numbers. There is duplicity in counting, however. On the one hand, the practice of numbering effects distance. Seeming unities, such as space, are divided into singularities for the production of time. Furthermore, and particularly in the case of time, the differences thus introduced are heterogeneous one to the other. The division of space into time performs the bringing-about of heterogeneity where there once was no such necessity. Then again, there never was unity as such in the cumulative set of what timing makes heterogeneous, since delimiting such a unity would require some conjunctive practice, such as a counting or hyphenation, of that unity with some other. The only necessity is that of plus d’un. A determination of unity introduces the nonsimple heterogeneity that makes counting possible into space; with the implication that there cannot be a primeval unity, since any “-eval” entails interval and interval entails the heterogeneity of the “inter.” On the other, counting can bring about a unity, wherein the cumulative “intra” is established by the borders, margins, or limits of an enumerable set. For example, between 0 and 1 is unity. But both 0 and 1 are the borders of the non-finite. Counting is not infinite. Counting is non-finite. Counting effects the incalculable; but the fact of incalculability only means that calculation can always continue. With each count, what is counted enters finitude. That is how counting produces “finity.” The fact of counting discounts any “in-” that would negate the nature of counting. Derrida notes Husserl’s point that counting is always possible. 44 The numbers in any enumeration are not simply numeral, numeric, or linear.

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Numbers in enumeration also function as “and”s. Numbering has a capacity to conjoin heterogeneous things and words despite their heterogeneity and despite the seeming sameness of number. The sound of the rain outside, the lamp shining on my desk, and the name “God” can be counted together as a set. Their number is three. Rain, desk lamp, and God makes three. By this means even “nothing” and “space” can be counted. By virtue of counting things in the course of an enumeration, those things are included with each other in a manner that is completely unnecessary by way of affording some minimal homogeneity established by their differences. Enumeration thereby introduces a very basic ontology. The capability of counting, number, or enumeration is unrestricted. Numbering, the practice of enumeration, is not limited in what it can do. For example, number does not necessitate that what is numbered be of the same genus, genre, or order. Enumeration is just as easily a modality of association as it can work to create an order of the same. Counting, or enumeration, therefore effects both unities, singularities, “finities,” and accounting; but it precludes heterogeneity. In other words, enumeration effects work, which takes place among, and thereby affects, the counted. As such, enumeration effects the conjunction without the neutrality of “and.” Just like “and,” enumeration can put singularities into proximity with one another. Enumeration does not necessitate entailment, unity, genre, or sameness. Likewise, alphabetization is a practice of enumeration. This is one among the formal points being made in the paragraph from “Faith and Knowledge” above. These two may be paired together. They may be counted as two sides of one problem. Compossibility is not a function of logic’s law of contradiction, but rather a function of its own logic, which is prior to the possibility of stating any such exclusionary principle. EVIL BEYOND WHITE MYTHOLOGY There are two points that follow. One is that the instantiations of such practices facilitate presence in general in the order of representation. Enumeration and alphabetization is representation. The other is that such practices also bring to pass a very general structure of otherness. Any two terms can be brought together in language. The affective capability of this practice upon those terms is incalculable as a function of the incalculability of the possible permutations. Bordering upon the margins set by one practice extends the non-limited possibility of other sets or of counting more or by counting otherwise. Two terms, even if they are proposed as heterogenous, cannot resist the power of “and” to effect their proximity. The upshot for the purposes of this chapter is to then adopt the earlier quotation of Nietzsche in order to begin philosophical investigations into illusions that ask, “Why this

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particular duplicity?” And: “Why, given my history, am I interested in this duplicity?” In this way, it is necessary to reconsider the neutrality of the “and.” Nothing is conjoined without an interest at work whose history could be explored and explained. Further to the points lifted from the discussion of SSP, an inquiry into the problem of evil is unnecessarily limited when pursued as a white mythology. No conjuncture is innocent with respect to the representation it effects, since it also introduces not only the possibility of that conjunction having been otherwise, but also prophesies a future of conjunctions that is not programmable. On the reading above, at least one of Derrida’s essays is read as working on the grounds of what that essay calls “discursive machines.” 45 Whether it is plus d’un or “and,” these are noted as deployments of technical devices in language whose outcomes are productions that make recognizable the conjunctions for a given concept. The operations made possible by these discursive machines are given attention to as basic to the formation of concepts in thinking. The discussion of “limits of reason alone” in that essay is meant to draw attention to the kind of effort Kant was making to delimit religion and reason. By virtue of placing them in proximity to each other, however, the essay suggests that reason is never alone, neither in its critical purity (der reinen Vernunft) nor within the limits of its nakedness (der blossen Vernunft). Reason is always with another and cannot escape this law if thinking is not to do without its terms. “Religion” is proposed as but one example of the “discursive machine” 46 that puts terms into close proximity in order to effect distinctions of on the one hand and the utterly other. 47 Conjunctive machines such as religion use language to bridge distances among concepts precisely because of a resistance to homogeneity. The representational machinery of religion is not only a technical device, since the events thereby provoked produce the fabulations which some philosophers may wish to call “lies” and others call illusions. There is absolutely nothing surprising, then, that there is a problematic compossibility between claims about God and evil. Explanations of this can most certainly remark an interesting starting point. But what is the interest in doing so? Why the interest in this particular duplicity? In the chapters that follow, Derrida’s work will continue to be accessed as but one possible avenue of speculating on problems of evil in ways that demonstrate this particular interest in history. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

See WD, 278–94. WD, 278. WD, 282. WD, 280. WD, 279.

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6. See the discussion of analytic and continental philosophy in the introduction. 7. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 111. Abbr.: MP. 8. SMa, xv. 9. WD, 288. 10. WD, 289–91. 11. WD, 279. 12. WD, 280. 13. WD, 279. 14. WD, 279. 15. Morny Joy, “Philosophy and Religion,” in New Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 198. 16. William J. Wainwright, The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. 17. Phillip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, eds., A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (New York: Blackwell Publ. Ltd, 1997), 1–2. 18. Purushottama Bilimoria, “What Is the ‘Subaltern’ of the Comparative Philosophy of Religion?” Philosophy East and West 53, no. 3 (2003): 346. 19. Tomoko Masuzawa, “Regarding Origin: Beginnings, Foundations, and the Bicameral Formation of the Study of Religion,” in Writing Religion: The Case of the Critical Study of Religion, ed. Steven W. Ramey (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2015), 138. 20. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20. 21. Chad Meister, Introducing Philosophy of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2009), 7–8. 22. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 111. 23. The exception was Keith Yandell’s “contemporary introduction,” which rigorously takes up a wider analysis across the entire text (Keith Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction [New York: Routledge, 1999]). Arvind Sharma’s series over the last thirty years has been the most impressive attempt to bring a global perspective to the philosophy of religion (Arvind Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion: A Sikh Perspective [New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2007]; A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion [Dordrecht: Springer, 2006]; A Jaina Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion [New Delhi: Motilal Bnarasidass, 2001]; The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta: A Comparative Study of Religion and Reason (Hermeneutics) [University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995]; The Philosophy of Religion: A Buddhist Perspective [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995]; A Hindu Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion [Basingstoke: PalgraveMacMillan, 1990]). 24. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies, 25. 25. Bryan Rennie, “After His Strange Starting: Method, Theory and the Philosophy of Religion(s),” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 131. 26. Jacques Derrida and F. C. T. Moore, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History, Vol. 6, no. 1 (Autumn, 1974): 5–74. 27. Derrida and Moore, “White Mythology,” 64. 28. Ibid., 11. 29. Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money (London: SCM Press, 2007), 53. 30. Derrida and Moore, “White Mythology,” 18. 31. PIO, 111. 32. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999b), 213. 33. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge, 2002), 89. 34. William Lane Craig, “Theistic Critiques of Atheism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 77. 35. Derrida and Moore, “White Mythology,” 29.

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36. According to David Wills, this duplicity is the “first principle tout court” in Derrida’s works (David Wills, Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], 28. 37. FK, Sections 50 and 51, p. 65. 38. E.g., MdM, 15; SMa, 13; and EtC, 282–305. 39. EtC, 282. 40. EtC, 299. 41. LOB, 75. 42. MOP, 11. 43. “It will be figured, figurable. It will have the figure of an opposition and will always let itself be parasited by it” (MdM, 137). 44. EtC, 284. 45. FK, 34. 46. FK, 34. 47. FK, 36.

Chapter Four

Subjectivity, Sovereignty, and Law

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND POLITICS The well-worn and familiar form and content of discourse about the problem of evil involve challenges to the compossibility of theism with the known states of affairs in the world. More specifically, the discourse overwhelmingly concerns the plausibility that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good divine being—typically referred to as “God”—given that the experience of the world includes evil. Evil is typically construed as an actual event that somehow involves a morally excessive element of violence, pain, and suffering. As already discussed in the previous chapter, the construal of the form and content that construct the “problem” at hand are animated by several assumptions that are up and running in the background. The current chapter explores what may well be a key assumption at work in the discourse. Namely, the challenge to theism is a political challenge. The attributes of theism are those of a governor who is all-powerful, absolutely just, and is justified vis-à-vis whatever events and circumstances come to pass within the realm. Attacks on theism via the problem of evil assume this is the case, too, since they insist that this sovereign must carry total responsibility for whatever comes to pass in the realm given this ruler’s absolute power and knowledge. Another way of wording the enthymeme of predatory goodness explored in a previous chapter is that the justice of God’s rule must be entirely just. If there is injustice in the realm for which an absolute sovereign must be responsible, then there is either no such being or the claim to rule is unjustified. The problem of evil is a problem of sovereignty. The notion of God as a sovereign is not foreign to the confessional discourses of monotheistic religions. And certainly, the theological works of most all Christian denominations include some references to God as a very 77

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powerful, knowledgeable, and wholly good ruler. The evidence about the early Christians in their gospels points to the developmental stages of this conception of their God as a means of displacing the claims to sovereignty of their rulers at the time. And so claims to the absolute sovereignty of God are unremarkable in Christian theological discourses. Although the discourse on the problem of evil is somewhat removed from Christian theology there is little doubt that the problem of evil would not take the form and content that it has were it not for these influences. Plato’s dialogue of Socrates and Euthyphro, for example, is doing something very different from what is at work in the problem of evil. It is at this point where the arguments against God on the grounds of evil seem to have their assumptions line up with those of theism. The so-called atheist arguments largely grant theism’s claim about God as absolute sovereign in order to construct the trilemma. The notion of God as a sovereign is not necessarily foreign to the discourse on the problem of evil. Stepping back to ask questions about the concept of sovereignty is a useful means of revisiting one assumption running in the discourse on the problem of evil. Indeed, if the concept of absolute sovereignty is not compatible with the practical affairs of any possible world, then the entire debate may be thought to beg the question. On the face of it, this chapter will seem to present a knock-down argument against theism. The upshot will be that absolute sovereignty cannot be actualized in the world. Any form of sovereignty must have relations with other entities in order to actualize itself. And the conditions of relationality will be found to face an ineluctable requirement that compromises any possibility of absolute sovereignty. The subjectivity of any sovereign is as divided as any other subject with whom it relates. Nearly all participants in the discourse have this assumption challenged, however, thus raising the curious question of what interest have participants in the contemporary discourse on the problem of evil in leaving assumptions about sovereignty untouched. As with every chapter in this book, Derrida’s writings will be enlisted in the cause of tugging at this thread that so often weaves together the problem of evil. Other authors have already found a version of atheism at work in Derrida’s writings. John Caputo enjoys recounting that Derrida can rightly be taken for an atheist, all the while guiding his meditations with theological thematics. 1 If there is a protocol for atheism to be located in his writings, it takes neither the form nor content of “atheism” as a position outlined in writings on the problem of evil, much less the typical construal of atheism in the English-language philosophy of religion more broadly. Derrida’s works do not yield much in terms of refuting arguments for theism or rejecting confessional theology. If anything, Derrida’s earliest works offer an “atheism” that is a critique setting forth several problematics, rather than a refutation or reversal, of Western metaphysics. The arguments and confessions in

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question are those that privilege concepts and assumptions that require a selfcontained, individuated metaphysical subjectivity. In Of Grammatology, an important footnote contextualizes the early orientation of Derrida’s writings toward this central debate position for the problem of evil: “Here I do not mean those ‘theological prejudices’ which, at an identifiable time and place, inflected or repressed the theory of the written sign. [. . .] These prejudices are nothing but the most clearsighted and best circumscribed, historically determined manifestation of a constitutive and permanent presupposition essential to the history of the West, therefore to metaphysics in its entirety, even when it professes to be atheist.” 2 Another way to characterize the approach in Derrida’s writings is to take a point from his 2003 interview with Giovanna Borradori about the philosophical and practical effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Derrida situated his reflections thus, “A ‘philosopher’ [. . .] would be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation.” 3 In one way or another all of Derrida’s works contain problematics that locate problematic theological inheritances in the Western metaphysical tradition. The consideration of sovereignty sets forth just one problematic among several that calls into question the kinds of subjectivity that allow for metaphysics-as-usual. Hugh RaymentPickard has written that Derrida’s writings repeatedly undermine not only presumptions about “God” but widen the scope of that critique to include all arguments that require assumptions of a determinable ground that is primordial, First, causa sui. 4 “God language” in Derrida’s work may be thought of as a heuristic device directing attention toward the problematics arising from claims to legitimacy by way of foundations. This demythologizing aspect of his work is more often picked up by biblical interpreters who find Derrida’s themes and methods useful in reading “other testaments” in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. 5 In other words, Derrida’s writings do not easily provide resources for constructive theological projects of any sort. In this chapter, the theological project in question is the sovereignty: How does the concept work? To what conditions is its actualization subject? What general problems are faced by any appeal to sovereignty? A claim underpinning this chapter is that sovereignty is an onto-theological concept whenever and wherever it is found. One place where it is found is among other onto-theological concepts. The problem of evil currently occupies itself with the preeminently onto-theological conceptual framework of theism, and a further claim is that sovereignty is always at play in every conceptual framework that involves theism. The point of this chapter is to draw on Derrida’s discussions of sovereignty, substantiate these claims to the point where it is possible to state that theism is another term for sovereignty. That may not be terribly controversial. It may admittedly be more of a stretch

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to argue that the defense of theism is a defense of the aspiration to practically actualize absolute sovereignty, but that is a foundational element to the chapter. Another place to find the concept of sovereignty is in political philosophy, and another objective for this chapter is to show how Derrida’s writings usefully bring considerations of politics and the political to bear upon the problem of evil. Derrida’s final 2004 lecture, published as Rogues, was as much a political meditation as Of Grammatology or his 1992 essay “Force of Law: On the Mystical Foundations of Authority.” In Rogues: “In speaking of an ontotheology of sovereignty, I am referring here, under the name of God, this One and Only God, to the determination of a sovereign, and thus indivisible, omnipotence.” 6 The problem of evil, which also concerns God and omnipotence, may thereby provide a useful heuristic device for exploring topics linked to the discussion of sovereignty in several examples of Derrida’s writings: relations, responsibility, law, and violence. A DISCOURSE ON SOVEREIGNTY The current discourse on the problem of evil as it currently stands is animated by the problems of sovereignty. Sovereignty is among the enthymemes unfurling from the proposition that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good entity. Ideally, good governance would include these sorts of qualities. And many rulers in history have likely appealed to these qualities as a justification of their reign. The concept of sovereignty may be considered an attribute that encompasses the qualities attributed by theism to God. A sovereign God is one who is not compromised by anything or anyone else. Sovereignty nicely describes the preservation of absolute power and knowledge, and it may even be useful for describing absolute goodness. A sovereign whose acts and edicts are good is not likely to be compromised by evil. Indeed, sovereign goodness may be thought to not only resist all evils but to also be a source of legislation whose governance ensures that all evils are not only prosecuted but also resolved into the order of the realm. A God whose status does not succumb to attacks based upon the problem of evil is undoubtedly a sovereign. If sovereignty is a useful concept in which the attributes of theism may find themselves embedded, then it is not a stretch to consider how theism and the problem of evil are not strictly metaphysical issues but quite clearly have political valences. A discourse that concerns itself with relations among entities within a realm is one that concerns itself with political issues. The problem of evil is among these, and the introduction of political problematics is a useful way to recast the terms and concepts at work in that discourse. The discussion here meets Derrida’s works halfway, since the problem of evil as it is conventionally construed is something that is not directly taken

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up amid their terms, concepts, and approaches. However, reconsidering the problem of evil from the perspective of politics meets up with Derrida’s writings where the terms, concepts, and approaches are focused on demonstrating how theological concerns are just barely under the surface of Western political thought. “The fundamental concepts that often permit us to isolate or pretend to isolate the political [. . .] remain religious or in any case theologico-political.” 7 Derrida’s works on conceptions of the political and specific politics regularly tug at the theological threads that are deployed by Western discourses. And so the point of connection between the problem of evil and Derrida’s writings is at a midpoint of sorts, where the former may be understood as a discourse ostensibly dealing with metaphysics with ties to putatively political concepts and the latter is a set of works that mounts a critique of Western politics by way of demonstrating how it is riven with theological, and thus metaphysical, assumptions, concepts, and commitments. From the perspective of the latter above every discourse, even those of metaphysics, are political in the sense that they are always and already contextualized by relations and their particularities in some sort of domain. Politics is unavoidable: This is inevitable; one cannot do anything, least of all speak, without determining (in a manner that is not only theoretical, but practical and performative) a context. [. . .] Once this generality and this a priori structure have been recognized, the question can be raised, not whether a politics is implied (it always is), but which politics is implied in such a practice of contextualization. This you can then go on to analyze, but you cannot suspect it, much less denounce it except on the basis of another contextual determination every bit as political. In short, I do not believe that any neutrality is possible in this area. 8

The domain in question for the problem of evil is the entirety of the world and its furniture. The relations in question are not only those of the beings who live in that world. The problematic currently gives a central place to the question of whether that domain includes a being with the attributes of theism. The outworkings of the various attacks and defenses in the discourse are inevitably concerned with articulating the relationships and their arrangements in that realm. Do they afford the possibility that the God of theism exists? Under what sorts of arrangements of relations allow for the God of theism to be compossible with that world and its furniture? These issues are much more clearly about politics than a debate between Derrida and John Searle as to whether much more strictly delimited inquiries of analytic philosophy have a political dimension. Were the problem of evil to be reconsidered in such a manner as to not include discussions of theism, a political dimension would obtain for any discussion. So long as “evil” refers in some

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way to events and relationships in a possible or actual world, the discussion obtains a political element. One important aside to make before discussing the concept of sovereignty is to make a critical note about useful metaphysical distinction between “politics” and “the political.” The political denotes the general conditions that enable specific contents to take shape. The political is a term useful for thinking about what makes possible for the various forms and content of politics such as structures, networks, actors, offices, and the like. The political usefully disambiguates the difference between thinking about the general conditions that make possible political entities and their relations versus politics, which encapsulates the set of considerations about the structuring of already existing relations and their relevant entities. The distinction is useful for two reasons. One is that the political is clearly friendlier to admitting metaphysical thinking into political considerations. Regarding the problem of evil, the discussion of possible worlds in which theism and evil coexist makes sense may include a discussion about what sorts of general conditions obtain for possible worlds. Politics interacts with the problem of evil on a different level, where it is more a discussion of what relations can be expected of a theistic God, as is typically the case, with other entities and events taken to be evil. The distinction is also useful because it addresses a popular criticism of metaphysical thinking. Namely, that metaphysics does not deal with the so-called real world. That “real-world criticism” claims that at least one aspect of philosophy is irrelevant to the contemporary world. Discussing the political is then irrelevant word-doodling. A rejoinder is that restricting reflection to politics alone truncates the ability to make analytical moves that, while never promising to remove all imbrications for thought to some Archimedean position, allows for thinking that resists accepting the world’s affairs as is. Holding thought about the political alongside reflection on politics usefully suspends the teleology and theology of the latter. Both the hardened cynic and naïve optimist may claim this is the only possible world, but this distinction understands both as Panglossian. Thus the distinction allows for greater interaction between the discourse on the problem of evil and considerations typically reserved for those of ostensibly more “real” scenarios. The repeated use of this distinction in several of Derrida’s works illustrates a third usefulness for the distinction: “The fundamental concepts that often permit us to isolate or pretend to isolate the political—restricting ourselves to this particular circumscription—remain religious or in any case theologico-political.” 9 Going back to figures such as St. Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr would demonstrate that Western political thought is not able to cleanly dissociate reflections on politics from metaphysics. The persistence of these connections reveals another point of contact with the discourse on the problem of evil, where “politics” denotes another discourse just as keenly

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interested in the goings-on of the actual world as much as any evidential argument from evil against the claims of theism. To discuss possible worlds is as much to engage in metaphysics as politics, and there is no compelling reason why the insights from one should not be applied to the other. A fitting example in Derrida’s writings is an essay on Nelson Mandela, “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration,” which sets forth a proposition for what seemed impossible at the height of apartheid South Africa. The essay outlines Mandela’s clear understanding of what threatened his nation-state and its laws. Within the borders of that state there were repeated attempts to enforce an absolutist scenario of a sovereign state. Total compliance was the teleology of politics within those borders. The South African government clearly understood that threats to its version of justice always lay in the future both within and beyond the borders of that state, however. The objective of the apartheid state was to actualize sovereignty by removing obstacles to how justice was legislated. The ideal scenario for apartheid was to realize politics wherein the relations of the entire population would be perfectly stable under absolute control. The state considered such a scenario the most just possible. In this way, apartheid South Africa sought the realization of a perfectly just possible world. However, due to the necessity of relationality of entities within and beyond its borders, the South African government repeatedly experienced difficulty realizing its politics. Derrida’s essay explained that other, more general conditions were influencing the form and content of relationality within South Africa, such that the apartheid state was imminently haunted by the possibility that the telos of its laws would unravel. Mandela functioned as one such cipher of that possibility, where his twenty-seven years in prison haunted apartheid with something that threatened to unhinge South African sovereignty. Were it not so there would be no need to imprison Mandela, whose mere existence demonstrated that any particular conception of justice is governed by a “specular paradox” that threatens every actual law with divisible justice. “There is no law without a mirror,” and the logic of that mirror is that a “‘properly reversible structure’ is constitutive of all laws.” 10 Any particular instantiation of justice in any possible world, be it apartheid or some outworking of theism, is always mirrored by general conditions of relation otherwise called the political. In what follows, this will show to be most acutely the case for any and all claims to sovereignty. MODERN SOVEREIGNTY Sovereignty is a key element of politics that underwent alterations at the advent of modernity in Western Europe. There the conception of sovereignty and the sovereign were reformed in order to bring an end to particular kinds

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evils such as warring and intense social unrest. The emergent politics of sovereignty then developed into forms that combined with the emergence of scientific technology to facilitate new cruelties and sorrows. Modern sovereignty moved toward the exercise of proprietary control within definite borders. 11 The conception of sovereignty shifted from the transcendent matter of an entity’s attribute to an immanent matter of proprietary control within a domain of constant exchange. The capacity to exercise propriety obtains by keeping the jurisdiction mobilized, rather than by merely claiming ownership. Thus, sovereignty today is conceptualized not as the right to expose the lives of subjects to death, but as the combination of executive and legislative powers by which a plurality can be subjected to more constant and immanent forms of management over subjects’ bodies. That is, modern sovereign politics has an aspiration to the degree of power and knowledge commensurate to the degree of responsibility attributed to the God of theism in the problem of evil. And while “the agency that decrees the absolute punishment [. . .] must logically be in a position to determine absolute responsibility,” 12 sovereign state politics willingly affords itself the liberties of the former while seeking to mitigate the latter. The ground rules for the problem of evil present no such escape from responsibility. Several alibis are attempted to except the God of theism from absolute responsibility for the entirety of the world’s affairs. Classifications that divide evils into moral and natural kinds are hoped to excuse the postulate of an all-knowing and powerful entity, but doing so displaces the basic problem rather than presents an invulnerable solution. The conceptual axiomatics of sovereignty are those of propriety and dominion. Problems of contradiction arise in the practical instantiation of those axioms, where each axiom demands indivisibility and domain. Dominion requires borders, within which there is an indivisible domain under sovereign control. The ideal instantiation of sovereignty asks that the domain is unaffected by whatever is beyond those borders. Borders must also somehow stand within that domain, since the sovereign itself is indivisibly unaffected by whatever takes place within that domain. In order to be actualized, the practical conditions for relationality within that domain and the exclusionary demand for indivisibility within that domain make for the paradox of sovereignty. And so, in the example above, if apartheid South Africa were to fully actualize the teleology of sovereignty, that state would have been able to exercise unmitigated responsibility over its domain. The aspiration to regulate relationality reveals the particular way in which the conception of sovereignty construes the administration of justice and laws. From the perspective of sovereign rule, these are only partly historical claims. The actualization of sovereign relations requires making each legislation an absolute beginning in the name of procuring authority over whatever follows thenceforth from its inauguration. Another way of stating this is that

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the historical actualization of sovereignty is temporally half-open. Sovereignty demands that its actualization be taken as the arkhein protéron from whence all other recognizable presents are synchronically organized. Every claim to sovereignty wishes to suppose its own Anno Domini. Sovereignty is conceived of as necessarily diachronically transcendent and synchronically immanent. POLITICS OF SOVEREIGNTY AND LAW Modern sovereignty is administrative. Its priority is the calculation and administration of a jurisdiction whose teleology is universalized. The perfect sovereign ought to be capable of mobilizing all things, since all things are subject to its administration. The modern version of administrative sovereignty begins with texts such as Hobbes’s Leviathan, which argues for the imposition of an absolute sovereign to order the entirety of human affairs and the furniture of their world as the imaginary brutish state of affairs that would come about were the constraints of social norms removed. 13 In the tenth and eleventh chapters of Hobbes’s Leviathan, an anthropology is elaborated wherein human are machine-like entities who are informed by and respond to stimulus-relations. On these grounds the thirteenth chapter introduces the absolute sovereign as the administrator sufficiently capable of directing these machines. Hobbes’s proposals are the grounds upon which modern sovereignty would be discovered by Foucault. As Hardt and Negri note, Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty provides the first political and metaphysical solution to the crisis of modernity, 14 where social worlds were legislated rather than postulated by mythologies of transcendent origins. According to Michel Foucault, sovereignty is derived from the right of the father, patris potestas, as “the right to take life or let live.” 15 The right to take life has been translated into two rights of the sovereign. Foucault quotes Samuel von Pufendorf in order to articulate the classical theorizing of sovereignty. 16 The sovereign’s right to defense comes about by exposing the lives of its children and slaves to risk. Foucault notes how this is not equivalent to directly causing their death, although their exposure to risk is asymmetric to the sovereign’s privilege to continue living. The sovereign could legitimately require that his subjects war on his behalf. If a subject transgresses the sovereign’s laws, then by the same right as can the subject’s right to life be revoked as the ultimate rejoinder. Patris potestas was then subtractive, where the sovereign’s capability was a right of seizure. “Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.” 17 The important point is what the capacity of the sovereign did not include; namely, any generative capacity. Under the classical theory of sovereignty,

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taking life or letting live does not entail any capacity to give life or make live. Foucault meant for his genealogy to set into relief the new form of modern sovereignty—managerial sovereignty—which departs from patris potestas toward power as a function of administration. The modern sovereign is described by Foucault as a new juridical being. The asymmetry of patris potestas is displaced by a more radical asymmetry whose effect is to render all subject’s relations to an order of sameness. 18 Any conception of sovereignty carries with it assumptions about the functioning of laws. Normally, the law and its laws have a sovereign status within the country of their origin. The teleology of a legal framework is that it should provide “the law of the land.” To ask whether it is possible to reinscribe sovereignty may be a direct flirtation with anarchy. Hobbes’s thought experiment about the suspension of the absolute monarch argues that the resulting state of affairs would be that of conatus essendi. Each individual would be the enemy of every other: “To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power [or currency, in this case], there is no law: where no law, no injustice.” 19 The law and its laws are necessary limitations on human proclivities that only obtain their legitimacy if taken as emanating from a source of absolute power over the relations within the realm. The instantiation of laws are concerned with the attempt to determine relations by means of drawing boundaries. In her analysis of the etymology of law as nomos, Hannah Arendt finds that the work of law is indeed to create limits. Lévinas is correct that laws build and maintain the walls that generally structure relations within a given polis. The purpose of laws are to lend stability to these relations by virtue of clearly marked distinctions. Nomos takes its meaning from the dividing hedges or walls within the outer walls of the polis, deriving from nemein, “which means to distribute, to possess (what has been distributed), and to dwell.” 20 Lex gathers up nomos within a more formal set of relations in order to establish relations where there is no immediate physical connection among the singularities of a society. Laws can be thought of as attempts to create restricted places as distinct from the possibility for places in the general domain of space. The concepts sovereignty and law work together in order to make possible particular laws whose function is to economize space in the creation of places and the regulation of relations within and among those places. These two concepts may be understood as working together in contexts ranging from patrum potestas through to the modern forms of bio-power. The laws of modern, contemporary sovereignties serve to regulate, that is economize, the living activities of societies via the enactment and performance of laws. A problem in any of these situations, however, is none of these particular laws

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are absolutely necessary. The conditions making each law possible are those of possibility rather than necessity. Sovereignty entails the capacity to enact a law, enforce a law, and also to arrest the process of a law or dismiss a law. Peter Fenves notes that this capacity, in Kant’s Prussia of the eighteenth century, was that of the Machtspruch, the “sovereign sentence,” that is, “The ‘saying’ (Spruch) in which ‘power’ (Macht) expresses itself without recourse or reference to the process and procedures of the ‘legal order’ (das Recht).” 21 In Prussian law, Machtspruch was thought to move toward justice that is free of legal procedure and process, an apparently unjust or delayed juridical outcome that may be resolved by a pronouncement of the Machtspruch sort. By such a means a sovereign could enact justice where it was due. Friedrich Wilhelm I was thus capable of rejecting any legal decision he deemed unjust. Machtsprüche can overrule Rechtsprüche, despite the latter’s grounding in the former. The fatum and fiat of sovereignty creates the conditions of truth in this politicojuridical context. Laws are particular instantiations of the possibility for laws. In Derrida’s essay on Mandela and South Africa, the contradiction at the essence of any law’s legislation is brought into view by considering what makes a law possible: “Its intentional content, its meaning requires that in its immediacy it must extend beyond the historical, national, geographical, linguistic, and cultural limits of its phenomenal origin. Everything should begin by uprooting. The limits would then appear to be empirical contingencies.” 22 Each law must misrepresent this condition, however, since each law is to be performed as though it were universal. At the very least, each law is universal within the space it creates, and ideally, the law should appear as though it could not have been otherwise. And all of this is despite the inability of any particular law to legislate its own conditions of possibility. The jurisdiction of a law is to be understood and applied as universal at its first moment of instantiation. Put otherwise, the authority and legitimacy of a law that is beyond question involves the denial of its conditions, including that of time, so that the particular law appears to be sovereign. Laws imply universality within their jurisdiction as well as purport or feign to have jurisdiction for their subjects beyond sovereign borders. The contradiction only obtains from taking a view from the perspective of the political, since no law has any of this prior to its declaration. The above paragraph explains a double bind within faced by the requirement that sovereigns legislate. If there are conditions governing the manner by which laws come into existence, they are conditions of the political rather than politics. And the conditions of the political highlight circumstances that relativize the nature of any actual politics and its laws. Unlike politics, considerations of the political draw attention to legitimacy, authority, and propriety for a specific law in terms of the conditions for its origins. Toward the

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particularities of politics, legislation must appear as completely deracinated from the possibility of being otherwise. Establishing and maintaining a law’s jurisdiction is thereby a work of abstraction required of everyone involved in the place set forth by that law. Indeed, while the law establishes the place of its jurisdiction, it must be respected as though it applied throughout that space as if without question. The bind is highlighted by taking note that in the moment of a law’s taking place, of becoming a law in effect, is also the moment of its taking leave of all particularities of place. The law applies everywhere. Every law practices this paradoxical act of disappearing in its appearance in the name of authority and legitimacy. Force is necessary for the establishment and sustained “life” of laws. And this introduces yet another consideration about the political that reveals some of the practical exigencies of any given politics. Laws, as Michel Foucault observes, cannot help but be armed somehow. 23 Laws without some kind of teeth can barely create any place, much less sustain it. The living-on of any law depends on its capacity to enforce its legality. As a result, any law that is somehow lawful requires some form of exertion and management of force. Violence is a condition for the possibility of laws. On these grounds, then, is a question about violence. Is the possibility of violence a necessary condition for any law? Is it a condition for the conception of law itself? The answer seems to be that, on the argument that the jurisdiction of every law appear in a sovereign form demands recognition of its legitimacy and authority without question. That condition constitutes a moment of violence not agreed to by any prior legality or justice. Each law performs itself as if it were sui generis and mystically without precedent. A law cannot recognize that its origins are extra-legal without putting into question its legitimacy. By the same turn, however, each law is confronted by the abyss of its own conditions of legitimacy. To question the justice of a particular law is to confront it with the alltoo-finite and fragile conditions by which it came into being. The pairing of force and law is paradoxical in the sense that if any law were absolutely justified, then no violence would be necessary in order to establish or sustain that law. Nothing would undermine the legitimacy or jurisdiction of that law. Richard Beardsworth observes that, “No law can be general enough not to be violent, not to engender exceptions or instances of counter-violence which, as the precipitate of the disjuncture between the universal law and its particular application or reality, are appropriately thought of as ‘singular.’ The undecidable relation between the general and the singular translates in other terms the iterability of the law.” 24 A law that relies on force to conserve itself cannot be considered universally just, but a law that needs no force is no law. Stated otherwise, the closer any law comes to being absolutely and universally just the less visible the law since it requires less enforcement. Conversely, the less just the law the more force it requires to maintain itself. An absolute law would be invisible. A law that

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itself is visible in its operations remains conspicuous, and as a result, it requires further coups de force in order to sustain itself. If the violence of the law’s origin does not render it invisible, then further law-sustaining violence will be necessary, and as such, its visibility will be too great. Derrida’s essay on South Africa, discussed above, makes the point that “Mandela” was one among many ciphers for just this reason. The twenty-seven years of forcing this man into jail were twenty-seven years of political visibility for apartheid laws. 25 Any actual sovereignty requires a jurisdiction in which the legislation is enforced, and that deployment of force will always reveal not only the borders of that jurisdiction but also the limits of the sovereign’s legitimacy. Without these conditions, as will be argued further below, there is no sovereignty. THEOLOGICAL PHANTOMS The concept of sovereignty is picked up by several of Derrida’s recognized later works through engagements with the thought of Carl Schmitt. 26 Interestingly relevant to making the connection with the problem of evil, Schmitt’s reflections on modern politics rest upon the following claim: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” 27 And so the halfway meeting point between the problem of evil and Derrida is one that is facilitated by Schmitt. Schmitt’s work on political theology takes into account the last 400 years of European history as a reaction to the turmoil of the sixteenth century. What some took to be the widening of a secular political order whose teleology would be a rational society, Schmitt took to be a minimally productive appeal to another set of values that were hoped to be “higher.” Schmitt argued that the state cannot sufficiently define the political; the political is that which makes the state and its politics possible. The modern state and its reliance upon sovereignty is not the outcome of rational necessity, but simply one possible outcome of the political. For Schmitt, the rise of the state flows from a pure potentiality that resides amid the socius. The political, then, is that potentiality at work in human decisions that organizes some plurality of subjects as the supplementary energy that can either threaten or strengthen determinate forms of politics. That space, in his framework, is energized by enmity. It is necessary that politics retain some form of enmity with actual others in order to remain energized by the political. 28 Schmitt’s reasoning is that an actual political entity presupposes relationality; that is, the existence of another political entity. That is: an enemy. “War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it never-

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theless must remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.” 29 Schmitt intended for his friend-enemy to function in politics as does good-evil in moral philosophy. 30 His critique of modern political thought is that the universalization of the political subject excludes the consideration of the “energy” of the political created by the friend-enemy distinction. The instructive outcome of his analysis is that the political nature of the subject as individual includes an aspiration to sovereignty whose actualization must be denied if the subject is to retain its energy. Derrida notes this as important: the actualization of subjectivity lacks propriety without others; it is that lack which makes others necessary. Derrida’s paraphrase of Schmitt’s insistence on the enemy is transposed into the grounds for one of the most powerful phrases in Enlightenment metaphysics: “Without an enemy, I go mad, I can no longer think, I become powerless to think myself, to pronounce ‘cogito, ergo sum.’ For that I must have an evil genius, a spiritus malignus, a deceitful spirit.” 31 The capacity for any subject’s subjectivity— its energy—depends upon others. The possibility of subjectivity—of which sovereignty is one form of subjectivity—necessarily requires the experience of its impossibility: the experience of the other. When Derrida’s works explore the concept of sovereignty, each sustains an argument that the concept of sovereignty carries an ineluctible practical paradox: the sovereign must be transcendent of all conditions and yet produce effects within finitude. The requirement of transcendence is what Derrida describes as a “theological phantasm” that has helped produce the most traumatic and cruel events of today. 32 Sovereignty, if there is any, would be pure and unaffected by history; a pure concept, sovereignty would be life in its pure state, 33 “it is necessary to deconstruct sovereignty, more precisely, the phantasm—thus a certain fable and a certain ‘as if’—of the political onto-theology of sovereignty. But without simply losing the horizon of its unity, sovereignty divides two or three times. Its concept has been constantly displacing itself throughout history.” 34 By following Derrida’s works through some of the analyses leading up to these claims it can then be understood how the problem of evil is but one more example that instructively points to the necessity of those displacements. PROBLEMS OF JUSTICE The complications of the codependency between force and law confront any claim to sovereignty, and these are among the issues with which Derrida grapples in his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” 35 Derrida’s essay opens a discussion of the political in this essay in terms of the conditions of possibility for laws and laws themselves. To ask whether force is prior to law pursues a line of inquiry about authority and

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legitimacy that is not aimed at uncovering a contraction. Instead, for any one that would claim the capacity to set forth laws, such as a sovereign or sovereignty. Derrida bases his essay partly on Pascal’s observation in his Pensées: “Justice without strength is powerless. Strength without justice is tyrannical. Justice without strength is a contradiction because there are always wicked people. Strength without justice is an indictment. So justice and strength must be joined, and for that, what is just must be made strong, or what is strong, just.” 36 As Pascal notes, whatever force is deployed in the name of that law cannot be extricated from the law itself. That is, if there is no law without enforceability, then no law can be disentangled from force. “There are, to be sure, laws that are not enforced, but there is no law without enforceability and no applicability or enforceability of the law without force, whether this force be direct or indirect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive—even hermeneutic—coercive or regulative, and so forth.” 37 Derrida’s innovative observation is that rational reflection must challenge the law precisely on the issue of its nexus with force. The irrationality at hand is that a law must de facto perjure itself through an appeal to force—and thereby enact violence—in order to possess de jure capabilities in order to obtain jurisdiction and legitimacy. A law may establish a jurisdiction by naming a specific act of violence as outlawed, but the possibility of such justice requires at least some in the course of enacting that law. No law is a law without the possibility of violence. This condition does not grant licentious caprice to any and all violence. Instead, the condition of violence also requires that a just law limit violence. The more a law requires violence to sustain the economy force in its jurisdiction then the more that law risks losing its place as unjust and unlawful. From this perspective, the most just laws appear as nearly unnecessary. Their violence is more in their declaration than in their performance. And this is a qualification that may most usefully distinguish the more just from the less just, since there is no absolutely just law. The qualification of the lesser violence produces the conditions for a positive feedback loop, however. 38 The requirement for the force of law always introduces an opening to violence. Even a law against violence must be violently opposed to violence. There is a self-reflective bind imposed by law-giving that is similar to an issue posed by Derrida’s essay on “Force and Signification,” 39 which argues that structuralist methodology is unable to determine the most basic question: Is structure contemporaneous or prior to the actualities which are studied? A structuralist analysis cannot answer this question because there is no way to maintain a scholarly integrity of any commitment to structure while also making an exit from structures to analyze them from without. Derrida argues that analytical structures are the artifice of human analyses, whose conditions

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rest upon decisions about differences enunciated in acts of language that both reveal and occlude those very conditions. “The relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized.” 40 There is, too, a reproductive bind imposed by the enforcement of law. Laws cannot use absolute force to accomplish total conformity. Absolute force, on these grounds, leaves no opening for any further jurisdiction. The results of this conclusion are twofold. On the one hand, force involves differences and relationships between discrete entities. Force of law does not require only two entities, but rather a plurality where there is always a third. Without a plural context the application of force in such a delimited jurisdiction would accomplish its total justification. The law would not only lose the possibility of its justification but also its force, since there would be no more possibility of its application. The nature of that plurality arrives in terms of differences such as time and number, where the time of a law, force, enforcement, and having been enforced are not equivocal. If law is inextricable from force then the possibility of law requires the necessity of an incalculable number of finite moments by which a law survives from one to the next to the next. As such, violence belongs to any law and is not simply an accident external to law. Democratic governance is one means of attempting to gain clarity on these decisions and their limits. No law is natural in the sense that every law must be enunciated and applied. Put otherwise, the nature of any law is that it must have conditions. The functioning of democracies usefully put this point into relief, where the legitimacy of a law and its force originates from a plurality of singular sources, all of whom are neither in unequivocal agreement with each other nor with all instantiations of themselves. The paradox of democratic foundation is that a democracy’s constituency comes into being as a sovereign entity through its members’ sovereign consent to some form of heteronomous closure that, as a closure, undermines each individual’s sovereignty. 41 When democracy foregrounds the conditions of politics, constatives are repeatedly overrun by performatives precisely in the attempt to preserve the former. Sustaining a democracy requires repetitions of such closures of itself. A democracy’s constituency is not a democracy prior to its event of constitution, nor does it remain so after any such event. Any democratic law, likewise, is subject to these conditions of opening and closure. No law is ever under continual evaluation and assent by a democratic jurisdiction. Were it so, the law would be unnecessary and unenforceable. Once the democratic decision has been formed, its sovereign voice lacks any capacity to revisit that decision. It is simultaneously the creation and annulment of political consent. 42

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A PROBLEM OF LEGITIMACY FOR ALL SOVEREIGNS The above consideration of sovereignty along with law and force begins to form the context of a situation in which no actual politics is able to avoid. Any political actor who takes on the position of sovereign is necessarily involved in declaring and enforcing laws. Assuming sovereignty and legislating both involve implications in contradictions and paradoxes that can be said to constitute the problem of sovereignty. The problem has logical and practical valences that interact with each other. The sovereign declaration of laws takes place only by virtue of the sovereign assuming it to be outside the law. The position of the sovereign is “outlawed,” as it were. And the legislation and the jurisdiction of any practical actualization of sovereignty entails the application of force. The problem of sovereignty is that the outlaw must do violence. These are logical and practical requirements whose ineluctability has not been taken up as a challenge to the assumptions up and running in the discourse on the problem of evil. Theism postulates a sovereign, and the problem of evil may be seen to work as a reminder that no claim to power comes without responsibility. The attacks on theism from this position, however, would find it useful and instructive to discover that the problems they pose are unavoidable. Where there is law there is no justice, taken as a condition of unity and goodness. Instead, if these are the conditions of politics, then “justice”—and perhaps “goodness”—must take on different conceptions. Derrida’s final lecture, Rogues, explores a key contradiction entailed by what is being named here the problem of sovereignty. “As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state. Abuse is the law of use; it is the law itself, the ‘logic’ of a sovereignty that can reign only by not sharing. More precisely, since it never succeeds in doing this except in a critical, precarious, and unstable fashion, sovereignty can only tend, for a limited time, to reign without sharing. It can only tend toward imperial hegemony.” 43 There are two components to legitimacy in the force of law in an office or entity. One is the ability to enforce laws, and the other is the capacity to alter the legal order. Sovereign legislative acts that establish the current legal order are beyond the current legal order precisely because they are borne of the capacity to alter the legal order. Possessing the force of law, the sovereign decrees the law by virtue of being exempt from the law and judicial procedure. If a sovereign is not “above the law,” there is no sovereignty. If a failed sovereign cannot utter sovereign sentences, then an actual sovereign must be outside its laws. Every sovereign declaration must have this basic element of arbitrary tyranny relative to the law and order it establishes. And every sovereign is thereby an outlaw. An issue of legitimacy is co-extensive with the outlaw nature of the sovereign. The problem of legitimacy of laws is because laws must be en-

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acted. There is no enactment of law without fiat. The condition is binary. Either there is an act of legislation or there is not. And while the moment of enacting legislation is a performance that makes this transition, such procedures only introduce buffers and or masks of the requirement for fiat. As noted earlier with Arendt’s analysis of law, laws only obtain within the borders of a place. The coming into existence of jurisdiction is by fiat, too. Laws do not obtain in general, undifferentiated space. All laws must be enunciated and followed somewhere by someone. According to Michel de Montaigne’s De la Physionomie, legitimacy is a concept employed to found the truth of justice, but it is per se a fiction or fabulation: “It is said that even our laws are legitimate fictions upon which the truth of their justice is based.” 44 This argument is modern in the sense that it abandons the possibility of natural law. Where classical natural law obtains, there is no reason to consider the fictive requirement of inaugurating law. When the world is already legislated then there is no problem of legitimacy, in which case there too is no legislator-sovereign with any possibility of responsibility for the world and its affairs. In the lecture on Rogues, Derrida construes the core conception of sovereignty as the capacity to exist, and thereby act, without giving reasons. 45 The sovereign is one who can refuse relationality. Obeisance to the principle of sufficient reason is just not something a truly sovereign being must be concerned with. The exception from relationality is foundational to the concept of sovereignty. Derrida writes, “A pure sovereignty is indivisible, or it is not at all.” 46 Hegemony is central to the politics of sovereignty, for if there is sharing of reasons or territory with others there is a compromise that undoes a central assumption of the politics. The lack of relationality is not only external, but also internal. As was explained in the above, sovereignty relates tenuously to law because the former requires holding the capacity to determine laws and is thereby above the laws. To this end, sovereignty is only sovereign in its the capacity to act in exception to those very laws. Giorgio Agamben calls this the paradox of sovereignty. 47 Carl Schmitt identifies it as the state of exception. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” 48 The paradox is that the actualization of sovereignty is a performance in perjury. The sovereign is simultaneously and contemporaneously inside and outside the juridical order. The sovereign authorizes the order, but as such does so from outside that order. Indeed, the sovereign must be capable of suspending that order. The required potentiality to suspend order and laws places the sovereign outside the law. Indeed, sovereignty is its own alibi against any law. To be alius ibi literally means to be in some other place; providing an alibi defends one before an allegation of the law. In other words, an alibi removes one from the position of having to be before the law. Sovereignty, in terms chosen by Derrida, establishes itself as a theological phantasm: “the

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phantasm—thus a certain fable and a certain ‘as if’—of the political ontotheology of sovereignty.” 49 There is an attendant problem of violence that follows upon the above. Violence is required in order to institute law in the break from a previously non-legislated state of affairs. 50 This is the upshot of Derrida’s essay on “Force of Law”: at bottom and at their inaugural moments, authority, foundation, and position of law do not rest upon anything other than themselves, and as such “they are themselves a violence without ground.” 51 The language of “without ground” is an appeal to “mystical foundations”—which is distinct from any sort of theological appeal to mysticism—because in the moment law interrupts all that precedes it. These foundations are neither sui generis nor a priori. Something did precede them, and they are conditioned by what preceded them. However, the authority of law that is sovereign requires the succession of all precedents. The law of laws is that any law’s foundation must be an-arché-ic. Whence the mystical irrationality of law: “The operation that amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying a law (droit), making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no previous law with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate.” 52 There is an element of sui generis but only as pretense. An authoritative law inaugurates a demand for a metaphysic to construct legitimacy via the denial that the law is bounded by prior laws. And it is on these grounds that Derrida’s essay makes the claim that the origin of laws are historical. They are acts of fiat but certainly not de novo, sui generis, or ex nihilo. Every law is legitimated by means of sovereign fictions that defer questions of legitimacy and violence. To state the claim more boldly: sovereign legislations are unable to acknowledge the conditions that make them possible. Sovereignty and the act of legislation require politics that mask the political. 53 At this point attention may be drawn to the discourse on the problem of evil, which does not currently question the presumption of sovereignty working in the background of theism. If the God of theism is to be an actual entity with those particular attributes as well as a responsibility for all that comes to pass in the world, then this entity is the ideal sovereign. The trilemma, however, poses a problematic that is secondary to those that follow from thinking about the actualization of sovereignty. The expectation of “predatory goodness,” as is discussed earlier in this book, is also based on the expectation that the God in question carries responsibility for the world as would an absolute sovereign. Given the opportunity to unfurl the prior problematics of sovereignty, before even questioning the possible contradictions of an absolutely knowledgeable, good, and powerful being with evil, it would seem that the assumptions of the premises have been given too much credit. In the latter half of this chapter, the problem of sovereignty will be unpacked

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with closer reference to Derrida’s works in order to present an alternative conception of justice. RECONSIDERING JUSTICE Derrida’s thesis in “Force of Law” is that the possibility of justice depends not on the compossibility of justice and law, but on the successful maintenance of their incompatibility. It would be reassuring if justice and law functioned in such a regulated manner so as to permit mastery. Were it so, the sovereign decisions could be made without threatening the very order established by those decisions. There would be no need of a state of exception. And it would be possible to have an actual absolute sovereign who would not be practically and logically required to exist beyond and outside the law. Given that the enactment of any law and its jurisdiction entails moments of fabulous trust in a diachronic and synchronic perjury, Derrida’s essay argues that “Law is not justice.” 54 A dissection of the connection between justice and law raises the consideration of the political as distinct from politics. Justice is proposed as something of the political. Justice is considered as a term that points toward the conditions that make possible the actualization of specific politics and their laws. Sovereignty, as a form and content of politics, would then be subject to justice as, “the sensitivity to a kind of essential disproportion that must inscribe excess and inadequation in itself” and denounces “the good conscience that dogmatically stops before any inherited determination of justice.” 55 Derrida’s essay presents justice is more a desideratum than an actual experience. Justice “is always an interpretative force.” 56 The discussion of justice then always opens onto realizations of the insufficiency or inadequacy of politics and laws. Justice in this sense is what the cipher “Mandela” points to in Derrida’s essay on apartheid, as the specular mirror that reflects the inadequacy of an actual state of affairs in the possibility of being otherwise better: “One cannot speak directly about justice, thematize or objectivize justice, say ‘this is just’ and even less ‘I am just,’ without immediately betraying justice.” 57 Claims about justice do not possess absolute justification because while actual relations may be “just” with recourse to particular politics and laws of a jurisdiction, these are outcomes of conditions of the political. Derrida offers several meditations on common and received notions of justice in order to argue for its conceptualization as a disjointed rather than stable state of affairs. 58 There is no dike that stabilizes justice. The point is not to argue for a best of all possible worlds. Quite the contrary, Derrida’s writings on justice may be read to locate justice in the possibility of better worlds. The argument is that considerations of justice are reflections on

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actual relations among others. These could be more just. There is always the need for a more just state of affairs. “As soon as justice implies a relation to another, it supposes an interruption, a dis-joining, a disjunction or being-outof-joint, which is not negative.” 59 The logic at work here is slightly different from objections to Anselm’s argument for God as the greatest of all possible beings. Recognizing actual states of being as greatest is a non-finite task, as Guanilo of Monmartiers did suggest. The proposal concerning justice is to reconceive the concept in terms of a not-yet realized practical desideratum. Justice is the recognition that where any possible world entails relations among others, that world is always and already not-yet just. Attention to the injustice inherent in all relations is the recognition of justice. On more than one occasion Derrida’s work proposes this argument by critically citing Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the Anaximander Fragment (1975). The point being to argue that “justice” is essentially a matter of divisibility: “Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation to the other suppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a disjuncture or an anachrony, some UnFug, some ‘out of joint’ dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or render justice to the other as other? A doing that would not amount only to action and a rendering that would not come down just to restitution.” 60 In other words, Derrida postulates that injustice is the condition of justice. The greatest injustice, the words possible scenario, would be a possible world in which there was absolutely no injustice or evil. Such a realm would be indivisible and thereby absolutely sovereign. However, it would also be a world in which nothing actually happens. Possible worlds are practically actualized with divisibility and disjunction. In other words, a possible world must have injustice in order for there to be justice. Neither dike nor adikia is privileged, because the opposition is not sufficiently stable. “It seems to me on the contrary [to Heidegger] that at the heart of justice, of the experience of the just, an infinite disjunction demands its right, and the respect of an irreducible dissociation: no justice without interruption, without divorce, without a dislocated relation to the infinite alterity of the other, without a harsh experience of what remains forever out of joint.” 61 Not all laws are unjust, but it is always inadequate to claim that justice has been accomplished. Justice, as Derrida’s essay construes the concept, always remains something more than whatever is readily at hand in the assessment of any state of affairs. 62 From this, several points about the relationship of law and justice can be noted. First, laws are never perfectly just even though justice needs laws in order to be articulated and enforced. Since justice is necessarily divisible, no law itself can exhaust the scope of justice. For this reason, laws always fall short of justification. On these grounds

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Derrida claims: “One may even find in this the political chance of all historical progress.” 63 Second, it can then be asserted that there is always a better possible articulation of justice that can become an actual alternative. Something like the best possible world is ruled out if justice is always excessive of any current order. “Otherwise justice risks being reduced once again to juridical moral rules, norms, or representations, with an inevitable totalizing horizon.” 64 As Paul Patton notes, Derrida “wants to provide reasons for thinking that criticism of the present is not only possible but desirable, but in a way that does not rely on some implicit teleological or utopian vision of the future.” 65 Instead, as noted in the example of apartheid South Africa, any particular conception of justice is governed by a “specular paradox” that threatens every actual law with the essential divisibility of justice. Any particular instantiation of justice in any possible world, be it apartheid or some outworking of theism, is always mirrored by general conditions of relation otherwise called the political. Every time that something comes to pass or turns out well, every time that we placidly apply a good rule to a particular case, to a correctly subsumed example, according to a determinant judgment, we can be sure that law (droit) may find itself accounted for, but certainly not justice. Law (droit) is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule. 66

The implications for thinking about the problem of evil is that considerations related to theodicy must pay attention to the possibility that the notions of justice up and running are rules of particular politics rather than an investigation of the political and its conditions. Taking up Derrida’s construal of justice shuts down all theodicies that presume a rule-bound world in which all states of affairs may be calculably resolved into a coherent whole. The zero-sum game presumed by the majority of participants in the discourse on the problem of evil is questionable if not alone for the reason that doing so prevents broader conversations about justice. Indeed, so many highly determined assumptions about what justice and justification may entail are admitted without question by nearly all the participants that it would do well to hold all of it up in suspicion. ACTUALIZING SOVEREIGNTY The arguments above are that the very instant of actualizing sovereignty is when the concept is ruled out of the question, and more briefly, that justice is

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a possibility that resides in the political and is always found wanting in politics. Politics, as the organization of actual beings within a realm or the world, is the particular outworking of the possibility of the political. The political establishes the circumstances within which sovereign politics might be conceptually imagined and practically engaged. And sovereignty is always and already compromised in any actual world of relationships among entities. One of the compromises is that any laws enacted may be just vis-àvis the internal validity of the laws of a jurisdiction, but the instantiation of those laws will require a perjury that always exposes them as lacking justice. And so the meaning of the following sentence shifts: the sovereign is the one who can make the exception, that is, to decide without condition. A sovereign, if there is one, excepts itself in the same instant. The concept of sovereignty demands that it cannot be anything other than a contradiction. Aspersions must be cast upon any claim for the absolute goodness of any sovereign, let alone any arrangement of politics in the world. The above arguments have sought to press the practical limits of claims to sovereignty against the logic of the concept and vice versa. Considering absolute sovereignty does, for an instant, afford absolute idiosyncrasy for the ontological structure of the sovereign so long as such mastery entails absolute loneliness in a world where nothing happens. And that world would be one in which it is impossible to ask questions about justice. The absolute sovereign would be the purest of idiots. Elsewhere, in terms of the larger overall objective of his work, Derrida calls the “predeconstructive subject”: “One could put the subject in its subjectivity on stage, submit it to the stage as the idiot itself (the innocent, the proper, the virgin, the originary, the native, the naïve, the great beginning: just as great, as erect, and as autonomous as, submissive, etc.).” 67 The existence of such an idiot is beyond intelligibility. The absolute idiot-sovereign would not know of others, and others would not know anything about this perfect idiot in whose world nothing happens in accordance with its being absolutely just. The implications of the argument clears away one of the central issues in the problem of evil. No claims about any actual entity in any possible state of affairs may be said to be absolutely just. And justice reconsidered according to the above obtains in any possible world whose jurisdictions are not absolutely just. And a world in which there is no undecided future is the worst possible world because there is no relationality in such a scenario. Derrida does actually consider this as a scenario in which a God may exist: “In speaking of an ontotheology of sovereignty, I am referring here, under the name of God, this One and Only God, to the determination of a sovereign, and thus indivisible, omnipotence. For wherever the name of God would allow us to think something else, for example a vulnerable nonsovereignty, one that suffers and is divisible, one that is mortal even, capable of contradicting itself or of repenting (a thought that is neither impossible nor

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without example), it would be a completely different story, perhaps even the story of a god who deconstructs himself in his ipseity.” 68 In such a case, however, the entire discourse about the problem of evil would need to be revised. The issue would not be about pressing issues whose assumptions are already suspect, but rethinking a discourse beyond theism. A reconsidered problem of evil would pay attention to those theological prejudices with which Derrida’s earlier works concern themselves and that he would take up later in a critique of the concept of sovereignty as “the heritage of a barely secularized theology.” 69 And so it is important that claims concerning theism are already undone by the unworkable nature of their unstated logical and practical assumptions about sovereignty—and thereby law and violence. So much so that the problematics surrounding philosophical talk about evil needs substantive reconsideration if these assumptions have been up and running without question across thousands of pages. NOTES 1. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 25; see Jacques Derrida, “Circonfession,” in Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155. Abbr.: C. 2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 323n3. Abbr.: OG. 3. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 106. Abbr.: ARSS. 4. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 6. 5. See David Jobling, ed., “Poststructuralism as Exegesis,” Semeia 54 (1991); George Aichele et al., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005). 6. Jacques Derrida, Rogues (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 157. Abbr.: R. 7. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 25. Abbr.: AoR. 8. LI, 136. 9. FK, 25. 10. Jacques Derrida, “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration,” in Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, ed. Barry Stocker (New York: Routledge, 1987; 2007), 331. Abbr.: LoRe. 11. Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money (London: SCM Press, 2007), 41. 12. Alphonso Lingis, “The God of Evil,” in Evil Spirits: Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity, eds. Gary Banham and Charlie Blake (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 45. 13. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 21. 14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 84. 15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 136.

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16. Ibid., 135. 17. Ibid., 136. 18. Ibid., 135. 19. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. John Plamantz (London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1962), 145. 20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 64n62. 21. Peter Fenves, Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (New York: Routledge, 2003), 33. 22. LoRe, 337. 23. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 144. 24. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1996), 25. 25. LoRe, 334. 26. FL (1992); Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997). Abbr.: PoF; FK (1998); R (2004). 27. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 36. 28. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1976), 53. 29. Ibid., 33. 30. Ibid., 26. 31. PoF, 175–76. 32. WAl, 244. 33. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter, 2002): 391. Abbr.: AnIA. 34. WAl, xix. 35. FLa; AoR, 228–98. 36. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), §125, 34. 37. AoR, 233. 38. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, 23. 39. WD, 3–30. 40. WD, 6. 41. Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 26. 42. Schmitt, Political Theology, 25. 43. R, 102. 44. Quoted in Bram Ieven, “Legitimacy and Violence: On the Relation between Law and Justice According to Rawls and Derrida,” in Evil, Law and the State, ed. John T. Parry (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 199. 45. R, 100. 46. R, 101. 47. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 15. 48. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 49. WAl, xix. 50. Ieven, “Legitimacy and Violence,” 199. 51. FLa, 14. 52. FLa, 13. 53. Derrida’s essay “Without Alibi” links up with this line of argument to make a claim about the demand for faith made by such politics. Sovereign legislation establishes legitimacy by fiat and thereby requires acts of faith from those who fall under its jurisdiction. Those actors must give assent to the legitimacy of the sovereign, the laws and the force applied in service of those laws. “To link in a certain way faith to knowledge, faith in knowledge, is to articulate movements that could be called performative with constative, descriptive, or theoretical movements. A profession of faith, a commitment, a promise, an assumed responsibility, all that calls not upon discourses of knowledge but upon performative discourses that produce the event of

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which they speak” (WAl, 209). In Derrida’s thought this would be the “return to religion,” which is neither secular nor religious. 54. AoR, 244. 55. AoR, 248. 56. FLa, 13. 57. FLa, 10. 58. N, 230. 59. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 230. Abbr.: N. 60. SMa, 27–28. 61. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow. . . ., trans. J. Fort (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 81. Abbr.: FWT. 62. FLa, 27. 63. AoR, 242. 64. SMa, 28. 65. Paul Patton, “Derrida’s Engagement with Political Philosophy,” in Histories of Postmodernism, eds. Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 158. 66. FLa, 16. 67. ON, 260. 68. R, 157–58. 69. WAl, 207.

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EVERY WORLD HAS EVIL By the close of this chapter, a weak bridge will have been constructed between Derrida’s arguments about the necessity of violence and Plantinga’s free-will defense based on transworld depravity. Where Derrida argues against Lévinas that a non-violent world is not possible, Plantinga argues that, although “a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can,” 1 the absolute elimination of evils is not possible. The difference between the two is that Derrida’s argument neither requires the existence of a necessary being nor concerns itself with preserving the free will of humans as a result of defending the existence of a necessary being. The outcome of Derrida’s line of argument is to present a robust account of the actual world that has all the features of Plantinga’s worlds without logically requiring theism. Using the modal logic of possible worlds and counterfactuals presented in the introduction, Plantinga’s argument gives a model for a possible state of affairs, such that were it actual, the set of claims pertaining to it were consistent with the observable world, then all members of that set would be true. These claims about a possible world may include reasons explaining the existence of evil as well as those pertaining to theism. Such is the content of theodicies and their defenses, each of whose contents include the attempt to plausibly present a possible state of affairs wherein claims about God and evils may not be found in formal contradiction with each other. Noting the argument in Leibniz’s Theodicy, Plantinga cites the notion that “every world has its book” 2 that contains propositions, “not sentences,” 3 which correspond to a possible world. While sentences in such books express propositions, they may well be used to express other propositions, too. 4 Were any possible world actual, according to this line of argument, then that pos103

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sible world would have its respective book that completely, or maximally, reduplicates every feature of every other possible world. The propositions in each book may both exist, but only one of them obtains as true in the book of the actual world. Based on the discussion of propositions alone, Plantinga is thereby able to validly argue that every possible world contains the proposition that a necessary being exists. In other words, any argument against the rationality of theism has undone itself at the very moment it grants logical possibility to any propositions that include a “necessary being.” Plantinga eventually offers the morally significant action of taking a bribe 5 to find that “every world God can actualize is such that if Curley is significantly free in it, he takes at least one wrong action.” 6 And this is what Plantinga names as transworld depravity, which he formally outlines as a condition suffered by every person in the case of any possible world being actual. “A person goes wrong with respect to an action if he either wrongfully performs it or wrongfully fails to perform.” 7 The range of sentences from which propositions about moral significance may be drawn is broad, since it includes possible sentences that Plantinga categorizes as morally significant evils such as taking bribes, breaking promises, and Watergate. 8 What makes these actions not only wrong but in fact evil is implicitly left to the reader. Plantinga does not set about offering any extended considerations about what amounts to evil. Rather, his objective is to demonstrate how it is not in the powers of a necessary being to create a possible world in which there are significantly free agents that do no moral evil. In support of his argument, Plantinga admits that “there doesn’t seem to be any way to measure moral evil,” and that it is “not obvious at all” whether any mixture of good to evil could somehow be optimized compared to other possible worlds. 9 In other words, the sentences about which propositions are to be formulated do not themselves contain the potential to measure evils much less derive a logically valid series of claims about differential management of evils. These lines of inquiry are simply irrelevant for the free-will defense. Formal philosophical work cannot answer questions such as “Why these evils?” with finality. The introduction of scenarios about hiking, breakfast and bribery only amplifies the gulf between Plantinga’s analysis and Dostoevsky’s famous sentences that Plantinga finds “painfully graphic” 10 or the “brutish” 11 comments of an American soldier about the My Lai massacre. In retrospect, Plantinga wrote, “The whole point of introducing [transworld depravity] was to show how it could be that it wasn’t within God’s power to actualize a world containing free creatures who always do what is right.” 12 And to this day, his work stands as having defeated the logical problem of evil. What is worth noting is that Plantinga found that weaker propositions would do just as well: “What’s required, for the proposition that it wasn't within God’s power to actualize a perfect world, is just that all the perfect worlds are among the unobtainable worlds.” 13 What eventually emerges in

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this chapter is Derrida’s affirmation that the unobtainability of perfect worlds has little to do with either the existence of God or free-willed beings. RETURNING TO THE EVIDENCE A young mammal can become a symbol of evil that gives rise to thought. 14 “Rowe’s fawn” 15 is among the most popular ciphers for gratuitous evil. It is a “famous example” 16 that first appeared almost forty years ago in William L. Rowe’s essay on some varieties of atheism 17 and regularly appears throughout the syllabi and textbooks of most introductions to the philosophy of religion. Rowe’s argument narrates the demise of the fawn as an example of what he would later call “horrendous evil” 18 in order to offer a premise that anyone may observe the general empirical facts related to the goings-on of the world. Rowe’s argument is a direct, yet inductive, argument from evil. 19 Evils take place in the world that would in no way have prevented any humanly known global or local goods from coming to pass. As noted in a previous chapter, Rowe’s argument sustains the quasi-logical proposition of predatory goodness already at work in the logical version of the problem of evil: “A good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely.” 20 Also unchallenged, and therefore most likely up and running in Rowe’s argument, are assumptions about sovereignty in any actual world. Namely, a God of the sort described by theism should exercise sovereign power to arrange the jurisdiction of the world to exclude evils. Rowe’s argument is thought to obtain its strength on the basis of plausible evidence that there is an evil that lacks morally sufficient reason. The specific event of the evidence itself plays a very limited role within the overall functioning of the argument. The evidence is circumstantial, as every wholly gratuitous evil inflicted upon a body, such that there is wounding and pain, is a singularity. The experience of the fawn is not transcendent. The violence the animal undergoes must be imagined by Rowe’s interlocutors as intensely subjective. Nevertheless Rowe’s argument and those who engage it, such as Stephen Wykstra, 21 do not infer the plausibility of not knowing anything for certain about the fawn. Thus the phenomenality of evil such as Rowe presents it cannot be exemplary. The instantiations of purely gratuitous evil are occasional, contingent, and finite. Some strange argumentative circumstances thereby follow. Rowe’s evidential argument from evil aims to conclude that the actuality evils can be known with a high degree of certainty. However, the singularity and facticity of one or more actual evils must ultimately be dealt with in the abstract. These certainties are not logically necessary truths. And if an event such as the horrendous suffering of a fawn comes to pass, that fact only arises in its singularity. 22 The plausibility of his argu-

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ment largely rests upon the assumption that the fawn’s experience can be known as evil. In order to strengthen of his argument, Rowe later introduced another narrative that he adopted from a newspaper citation in Bruce Russell’s essay “Defenseless,” 23 which Rowe summarized as: “A little girl in Flint, Michigan, who was severely beaten, raped, and then strangled early on New Year’s Day of 1986.” 24 In the course of his argument, Rowe abbreviates the story of the fawn as E1 and this newspaper account as E2. Rowe then argues that these narratives are examples of pointless, horrendous evils that are “just as bad” 25 as other plausible examples. Yet another set of assumptions at work in the discourse on the problem are those that presume “evil” is a self-evident category of events that are “bad.” And whatever is bad always somehow involves violence and violation. The tautological exercise of defining evils reveals that, whatever the problem is, the problem of evil is mostly in the eye of the beholder. And in the case of the discourse considered in this book, the problem of evil is currently beholden not only to assumptions tied to theism but also to largely uninvestigated avenues for alternate conceptions of evil. Outside the philosophy of religion, as noted in chapter 1, there are other voices suggesting reconsiderations of the plausible problematic involved with evil and violence. The chapter that follows turns to Derrida’s writings once again in order to explore the topic of violence in the converse direction assumed by major figures in the discourse such as Rowe, who chose to add E2 to his argument roughly thirty years after introducing E1, the famous fawn. As already noted, Derrida’s work does not directly engage any of this discourse. Instead, the work of these chapters is to show how his writings usefully reveal assumptions and points of entry to reconsider the problem of evil beyond theism. Derrida mobilized the terminology of violence early on in his career and continued to discuss it throughout his oeuvre. In what follows, selected elements of those discussions will be presented in order to step back from the fawn, as it were, toward a consideration of gratuitous violence that is far more empirical than Rowe’s fabulation of a fawn. Doing so is helpful to reflect on how most if not all participants in the current discourse assume evils are tautologically horrendous forms of violence and violation. What if considerations about evil and related problems take a more discrete approach? In this chapter, violence will be reconsidered by taking the notion of gratuitous evil in another direction. RECONSIDERING VIOLENCE Violence as such is no more a thing or definable phenomenon than evil. Both terms speak volumes about the discourse that is using them to categorize and

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contain. That there is no thing in itself that is violent need not pose the sort of problematic that is hastily solved by determining that violence is not a useful category. It does make sense to claim that there is violence or that an event or act is violent, and then to reflect on how doing so enlists some sort of framework whose concepts combine the phenomenal and the noumenal. The point, then, is not to determine the species or genus of violence once and for all. It may be treated as a variable. In the context of thinking about the problem of evil, for example, this may mean specifying a particular conceptualization of violence to consider just what is the “problem.” Where none of Derrida’s writings directly address the topic of evil, not only does his early work take up the topic of violence but the discussion of the term continues throughout his oeuvre. Much of this is due to an abiding concern with political discourse. And the previous chapter already mentioned violence in the discussion of sovereignty and law. One of Derrida’s early works is a critical appraisal of a colleague, Emmanuel Lévinas, whose works aim at criticizing the legacy of Western metaphysics in general and the directions taken by Martin Heidegger specifically. Where Lévinas argued against all violence, Derrida countered that violence is unavoidable, and so the matter is to do the least violence. While it would be over two decades when Derrida developed the conception of justice explored in the previous chapter, his early work on violence already points in that direction: he argues that a concern for less violence should always be a reflexive and immanent critique of any state of affairs, but that the desire is not to do away with all violence. Such a state of affairs would be evidence of the worst violence rather than the fulfillment or culmination of non-violence. Derrida’s essay on “Violence and Metaphysics” sets forth this point in the course criticizing Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity, wherein a “problem of violence” is posed against the general structure of Western metaphysics. Lévinas defines violence as “interrupting the continuity of a being.” 26 and argues that the logic of ontology in metaphysics inevitably does violence, according to Lévinas, interrupting all unique identities in order to assemble them into an objective order of sameness. The problem of violence is the postulation of a contradiction between the totalizing aim of metaphysics to absorb the multiplicity of beings 27 versus the experience of others in their singularity. The enthymeme in this problem is that totality should be prevented from absorbing singularity. Infinity is proposed in Lévinas’s analytic of “the face” in order to oppose the totalizing teleology of metaphysics with a “subject insoluble into objectivity, and to which exteriority would be opposed.” 28 The face, proposed as primordial to ontology, would practice a nonviolent speech that should be amplified to the interrupting, totalizing tendencies of metaphysics. “Speech refuses vision, because the speaker does not deliver images of himself only, but is personally present in his speech, absolutely exterior to every image he would leave. In language, exteriority is

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exercised, deployed, brought about.” 29 Lévinas thinks that violence should be avoided altogether by eschewing language (same, objective) for the speech of the face (uniquely present). The critique in Derrida’s essay is that Lévinas’s alternative repeats the problematic at work in the problem of violence: “By radicalizing the theme of the infinite exteriority of the other, Lévinas thereby assures the aim which has more or less secretly animated all the philosophical gestures which have been called empiricisms in the history of philosophy.” 30 Derrida writes in “Violence and Metaphysics” that, “A speech produced without the least violence would determine nothing.” 31 For him, Lévinas overlooks an “irreducible zone of factuality, an original, transcendental violence, previous to every ethical choice, even supposed by ethical nonviolence.” 32 Violence is the very possibility of any act of language, 33 because contradiction is the very condition for the differences that allow for the empirics and phenomena of others. Derrida argues that Lévinas’s argument for avoiding all violence shares the same dogmatism of non-contradiction with the metaphysics he criticizes. The alternative, the essay can be read to claim, is that whereas violence is inevitable there should operate an injunction for lesser violence. While the discourse on the problem of evil rarely sustains any sort of conceptual deliberation on what constitutes violence, the assumptions running therein are quite different from the debate on violence between Derrida and Lévinas. Their analysis of violence is at a more discrete and granular level than forest fires that burn fawns to death. Their debate concerns violence as an unavoidable constituent of the general structures of possibility. Derrida’s claim is that without the differences that involve, at the very least, the ineluctable violence of basic contradiction with each other as discrete entities, there is nothing more than a totalizing silence. And while not disagreeing with Lévinas that plurality is a structural condition for existence, Derrida follows on with violence as a basic requirement for the possibility of plurality. And that some violence unavoidably opens the possibility of more violence. The death of the fawn depends upon these conditions. Where the preservation of difference and differentiation is the preservation of the future, Derrida’s argument with Lévinas is to preserve such violence and potential for greater violence. The engagement of Lévinas’s work involves of only part of a concern with violence in Derrida’s early work. In addition to “Violence and Metaphysics,” there is his treatment of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques in Of Grammatology. Common among these works is Derrida’s insistence that physical violence is a mundane construal of a structural condition. Derrida’s texts engage these authors to insist that violence that some may choose to associate with “evil” is that of transgressing a tribal taboo by revealing an enemy’s proper name to an outsider, the oppressions of totalitarian govern-

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ance, the social disruptions of general strikes, or enforcement of the law by police action. Beyond all of these physically instantiated forms is a phenomenality of violence that requires critical attention. CATEGORIZING VIOLENCE Of Grammatology discussed an originary violence that opens onto other possibilities for violence. The text presents the analysis of an originary violence that is a condition rather than an option. Derrida postulates a violence that is unavoidable if anything is to take place called “arché-violence,” from whence comes “what is commonly called evil, war, indiscretion, rape; which consists of revealing by effraction the so-called proper-name, the originary violence which has severed the proper form its property and its self-sameness.” 34 The discussion in Of Grammatology delineates other forms of violence that concern figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lévinas, and, later, Walter Benjamin. Physical manifestations of violence share in the violence of arché-violence, as their practice does involve thinking the unique within some system or structure. 35 Arché-violence has to do with physical assault as much as the violations of relation and the discursivity of language acts. To think this is all there is to violence is naïve. The mastery of presence is physically accomplished by violence, but also by what Derrida designates as the second violence. This is the violence that, in order to master presence, conceals the fact of arché-violence, which itself is the very loss of mastery over presence. This is the second violence that is practiced by metaphysics, to which Lévi-Strauss pays no attention where Lévinas does. The second violence of metaphysics is the bold-faced fictional postulation of grounds and foundations, such as the laws discussed in the previous chapter, where in fact arché-violence has ensured that there is no such state of affairs. The second violence papers over the yawning hiatus that opens with the “obliteration of the proper is the originary violence itself.” 36 Second violence claims that it actually begins as though sui generis something determinate. This second violence is accomplished by language, “which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying,” 37 as though the inscriptions and classifications were incorrigibly actual and intrinsically sound of themselves. The violence is required to accomplish the delusion, which is also unwittingly paralytic, of sovereign mastery over the phenomenality of the world. Derrida elsewhere notes this is the blind spot of metaphysics. Second violence accomplishes the conviction that there is masterable presence, “around which can be organized the representation of meaning, that it is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity—here we would have to say an expenditure and a negativity without reserve—that they can no longer

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be determined as negativity in a process or a system.” 38 That is, the accomplishment of the second violence is the occlusion of arché-violence, setting in place the presumption for mastery that will justify the instantiations of a third violence. Arché-violence is, then, the loss of any possibility for unity or totality that founds the desire for what is lost. It is the loss of the possibility for noncontradiction. If there was, in some beginning, the loss of the proper itself in the very moment of recognition, this is irretrievable and irrecoverable. No reduction or suspension can return to a time T that would be a pure moment without violence. Or, at the very least, such a return would be a return to undifferentiated silence that would effectively obliterate the possibility of regaining any sort of original stasis. To accept that there is the obliteration of the proper as the condition of difference and recognition is to forego the possibility of there being absolutely no violence. It also entails a commitment to forgo attempts to master reality. The essay discussed in the previous chapter, “Force of Law,” is also a reflection on Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, which can be read to introduce a typological distinction into the discussion of violence in “Violence and Metaphysics” and Of Grammatology. The essay considers the logic of Benjamin’s distinction between divine and mythical violence to correlatively propose founding violence and conserving violence. The term “divine violence” is used not because it comes from God, but rather because it dissolves the linkage between its violence and the relations of the economy brought about. 39 Founding violence institutes and positions the existence of the law; conserving violence maintains, confirms, and ensures the law. With this correlation, Derrida’s essay argues that the term “law” does not only mean the juridical order, but representation of nomos in general by language. If arché-violence is the obliteration of unity, then the instantiations of orders and their continued claims to order will entail secondary and tertiary violence to be actualized in the world. The profound logic of this essay [Benjamin’s] puts to work an interpretation of language—of the origin and experience of language—according to which evil, that is to say lethal power, comes to language by way of, precisely, representation (the theme of this colloquium), that is to say, by that dimension of language that is re-presentative, mediating, thus technological, utilitarian, semiotic, informational—all powers that uproot language and cause it to decline, to fall far from, or outside of, its originary destination. This destination was appellation, nomination, the gift or the call of presence in the name. 40

The conditions of differentiation upon which rest the possibility of language depends upon something like “arché-violence.” Another word for these conditions would be “arché-writing.” This is not the original writing of a pure language, such as Benjamin refers to in The Task of the Translator, 41

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which would provide the ultimate foundation of all languages. The presumption behind that sort of originary writing or language is the possibility of pure translation and the end of the babble of Babel/Bavel. Derrida’s proposal about arché-language and its corresponding violence is “the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying. [. . .] To think the unique within the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of arché-writing: arché-violence.” 42 The upshot of these claims about arché-writing is that claims to orderliness, ontology, law, logic, arché, or foundation are instances of the second violence. The first saying of such a claim is the founding moment wherein that law takes place and is suspended. “This moment always takes place and never takes place in a presence.” 43 The first act of language that enunciates the law of an order takes place within an aporetic structure in which every subject is caught in advance. It is the act of originary violence. Benjamin’s mystical violence, according to Derrida, “is in fact the only one that allows us to conceive the homogeneity of law or right and violence, violence as the exercise of droit and droit as the exercise of violence. Violence is not exterior to the order of droit. It threatens it from within.” 44 In connection with the arguments of the previous chapter, the phenomenality of mystical violence is “divine” because it appears as sovereign. The claim is theological. It postulates itself in its originary announcement as the foundation, the taking-place of order, horizon, and economy. But this violence does not owe itself to a more primordial economy that also declares and delimits itself. It is violence because the declaration requires the occlusion and effacement of the indistinction between itself and the notion of foundation. Derrida carries over Benjamin’s claims about the effacing nature of divine violence, which situates it at “the limit,” since its work is to establish an economy where there was no such limitation. One outcome of this distinction intended by Benjamin is also followed by Derrida: if violence is what allows for the recognition, then whatever order it establishes is also ineluctably violent. The general economy of differences and relations organized under the horizon, or gathered into the space, of some order is necessarily violent. An actual order cannot but come to pass violently precisely because it cannot make an enduring or absolute claim for itself. Insofar as any state of actual affairs has an inception, it is not independent from violence, but rather it is intimately bound up with violence. Any order and its economy necessarily find its originary event to be lacking vis-àvis that order’s economy. This violence is inaugural, because an economy is not yet in place at the instant of its becoming economic, and it cannot comprehend itself. 45 The upshot is that a critique of violence such as Benjamin’s does not entail the disposal of violence toward a state of affairs without violence. A state of absolute non-violence is described in the essay: “These moments, supposing we can isolate them, are terrifying moments.” 46 In other

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words, Derrida continues to present arguments aimed at lesser violence rather than non-violence. The impossibility of any order or economy to comprehend itself in a full or complete manner is neither nihilistic, phyrrically skeptical, or fundamentally negative. Instead, this analysis ties into an understanding of language as a matter of iterability and affirmation. The possibility of an order’s inauguration does take place by violence, but the irreducible necessity and lack entailed by this is also the necessity of continued possibilities of freedom. There is no final order, and therefore no final book. The aim of the analysis is exorbitant: within the taking-place of any order there can only be “more,” and the ungrounded ground of every order is one among the many grounds for affirming this exorbitance. There are always more propositions because no economy can close itself off; there isn’t any “outside of the text,” as it were. LÉVINAS AND THE LEAST VIOLENCE Perhaps there is a difference between non-violence and no violence. Might non-violence be a disposition toward the least violence? Benjamin’s distinction between inaugural and conserving violence, then, is not avoided by such non-violence. Neither, also, is Derrida’s threefold distinction between archéviolence, second violence, and tertiary violence. Non-violence may avoid tertiary violence, but since it is established according to some order of meaning and significance, it avoids neither arché-violence nor second violence. The former is the very possibility of outlining the disposition, and the latter is entailed because even non-violence proposes some economy of meaning for signification. Nevertheless, the conservation of that economy requires some violence from whence follow all the self-threatening possibilities of exorbitant trajectories. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas proposes an articulation of thinking that does without violence and would avoid violence. Among the opening statements is the memorable claim and its urgency: “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.” 47 Lévinas opens the initial discussion of war and its permanent possibility, which obtains by way of the pejoratively characterized “black light” of Western phenomenological assumptions about intelligibility. He describes the violence of this black light by which self-same entities apprehend their others as objects. “Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.” 48 Neither Descartes’s cogito nor Heidegger’s Dasein avoids this violence, which dupes thought into starting with ontology, which anchors beings in identity, mobi-

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lized by false absolutes that set beings over and against each other under a horizon that they take to be neutral and thereby objective. Peace, in this state of affairs, is only negative: the cessation of outright hostility. For Lévinas, thinking starts with the ethics of relation based on the analysis of a being’s capability for consciousness of infinity. This is the alternative to the violent morality of ontology that begins with totality and ends in totality, thereby sacrificing the unique singularity of all beings and enabling the ambivalent moralities that destroy each other remorselessly under a neutral horizon. While Lévinas does not articulate this, the intention of his alternative would be something like positive peace, not merely the cessation of hostilities, but the establishment of just conditions that would forego such resorts. 49 According to Lévinas, so long as thinking begins with ontology, negative peace will obtain and war will remain constitutive of the horizon. Lévinas’s evaluation is not unlike that of Thomas Hobbes’s political economy in Leviathan, which assumes “a model of society which permits and requires the continual invasion of every man by every other.” 50 By virtue of beginning with ontology, the black light of Western phenomenal comprehension casts warfare—in advance—among all over the capabilities of human beings. For Lévinas, “Violence is the interrupting of the continuity of a being.” 51 “The negator and the negated are posited together, form a system, that is, a totality.” 52 So long as a being takes its existence to be prior to that of any other and relates to others from this position of sovereignty, its relations to others is war waged on the orders of the sensible and the intelligible, as well as by the physical, linguistic, and other empirical orders. Lévinas proposes that this is entirely avoidable. In short, according to the argument of Totality and Infinity, it is possible to do without violence. Violence is unacceptable to Lévinas, since for him it entails the subjective assertion of the cogito or Dasein over and against the contents of reality, among which are other (human) beings. The evil of violence, for Lévinas, is the reduction of the other to the same, the reduction of the other to oneself. 53 Lévinas’s immediate concern in Totality and Infinity is with what Derrida would call secondary violence, or, Benjamin’s inaugural violence: a forced entry of form into and upon the world that then affirms itself by conserving, tertiary violence. Alternatively, Lévinas proposes “a non-allergic relation with alterity.” 54 Where the Western philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Plotinus considers separation to be a condition to be overcome, 55 Lévinas proposes the phenomenology of the face, which confronts the desire for self-same totality with infinity. “This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’ The infinite paralyses power by its infinite resistance to murder, which, firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other, in the total nudity of his defenceless eyes, in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcen-

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dent.” 56 For Lévinas, thinking that attends to the infinity of the face obtains with no violence. This would be not only non-violent, the least violence; this would be where no violence obtains. Participants in the discourse on the problem of evil, particularly those who wish to pose the problem against theism, do not stray far from Lévinas’s ambitious vision in their construal of a world ruled by a wholly good, omnipotent sovereign. The world would be one in which there is no violence; only absolute unity. No holocausts, those of fawns and other young mammals or otherwise, would take place in such a world. Nor would any E2s, that horrific event abstracted in Rowe’s argument, ever come to pass. A world without violence is something like what is assumed to obtain by evidential arguments from evil against the likelihood of the God of theism. Of course, there is no concern in the discourse like that of Lévinas. Participants discussing the problem of evil do not pose a problem of violence to the metaphysics at work in the constructions of theism, much less in the assumptions that animate constructions of their arguments and counter-arguments. The reduction of others in their singularity to the same is not raised primarily because the fundamental assumption that animates the discourse’s construal of the problem of evil is an aberrance to contradiction. Be it the enthymeme of the trilemma or the predatory conception of goodness—discussed in the first chapter—there is the concern to remove the contradiction of goodness to evil. Furthermore, the assumption of sovereignty granted to God by both theism and its detractors carries with it the insistence that there should be nothing contrary to the jurisdiction of an all-powerful ruler. In this, the discourse does not stray far from Lévinas’s characterization of the black light of metaphysics. Therefore, the back and forth between works by Lévinas and Derrida usefully explores a background dialogue about assumptions at play but never considered in the discourse on the problem of evil. Derrida’s works pose a further-reaching problem of evil to Totality and Infinity. And while the discourse on the problem of evil cannot be held accountable for all that Derrida’s writings demonstrate in their critique of Totality and Infinity, there is an instructive point to be taken about the lack of such a focused examination of whatever violence may be assumed to be complicit in any example of whatever is categorized as evil. The appeal to the infinite capability of the face returns squarely within the violence of metaphysics. Discussions of fawns and other such events as problem-posing evils work on assumptions that proceed in an almost Panglossian naïveté visà-vis the possibility of offering an analysis of violence. Thus the analytic of the face may offer varying grounds or assumptions that propose the elimination of physical—third—violence, without avoiding participation in the— first and second—violence of inauguration and conservation. 57 Derrida’s argument is that Lévinas cannot do without arché-violence, since his proposal must at the very least come to pass by taking place via acts of language.

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Lévinas’s cautious thinking, precisely refusing to locate or place alterity in an effort to entirely eschew violence, commits him to effacing the other with infinity. The discourse on the problem of evil rarely pauses to consider the problem of violence posed by Lévinas or how Derrida takes the problematic further. Derrida’s engagement with Totality and Infinity usefully demonstrates the violence in Western metaphysics and makes room for considering a position arguing for the least violence rather than an absolute cessation of violence. The position articulated in Derrida’s works is that the worst violence is the absolute annihilation of relation and difference. The worst violence is the absolute lack of violence. As with the discourse on the problem of evil, the risk of the worst in Lévinas is not that of a structuralist totalitarianism. It is a temptation to economize excess into a totality of the absolutely other. 58 LEAST VIOLENCE In reflecting on his work, Derrida proposed that philosophers proceed with the least violence: “I am not sure that violence is an evil, and I would prefer to oppose various sorts of violence to one another rather than opposing violence to non-violence.” 59 Derrida’s thought usefully explores how violence is a scandal philosophers can neither escape nor finally justify; rather, violence is something to be mitigated without elimination. The objective for this chapter is to offer a reading of Derrida’s works in order to propose one example of how the problem of evil might be reconsidered by thinking about violence. Another takeaway from the discussion above is to reconsider how participants in the discourse conduct themselves and offer their arguments. A meditation on practicing the least violence can be located across Derrida’s oeuvre. Opting for the lesser violence may entail close reading, scrutinizing assumptions, and exploring the possibilities opened by submitting alternatives or substitutions into existing discourses and their frameworks. Drucilla Cornell 60 and John P. McCormick 61 have already recognized this in their own projects. In the case of this book, the objective is to move beyond the fixation with theism—an easily recognizable cipher for infinity—in the discourse on the problem of evil. Derrida’s works present a useful alternative because of their attention to radically empirical analyses of violence 62 as well as the example of sovereignty in the previous chapter. What is argued in “Violence and Metaphysics” is that “language can only indefinitely tend toward justice by acknowledging and practicing violence.” 63 The general state of affairs for doing philosophy includes several forms and layers of violence, some of which are avoidable, and others not. Third violence, as described above, is something to aim at avoiding. The discourse on the problem of evil is at the very least implicitly concerned with the issue of

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avoiding the third violence while ignoring how first and second violence present relevant points for reconsidering the problem of evil. OPENINGS FROM VIOLENCE From the perspective of the discussion above, there are basic forms of violence that are both absolutely gratuitous and unavoidable in any possible world in which relationships amid discrete entities obtain. The basic violence is elemental for opening the aleatory variations possible for relationality. Derrida’s proposals explicitly do not apply to worlds frozen in absolute stasis. In the background of these claims are assumptions about the workings of differences, such as the supplement as well as the repetition and affirmation entailed by iterability, as empirical evidence of the aleatory whose possibilities are inconceivable to reason insofar as they are not functions of a program or rules. 64 Events such as E1 and E2 are possible by virtue of the gratuitous violence where possibility is subjugated to actuality. Is this violation of possibility in the name of making events possible so-called horrendous violence? Whatever one calls horrendous violence cannot take place without it. Derrida’s writings provide a clear line connecting the varieties of violence with each other. No entity, not even a God, can avoid participation in this network of violence. Some, but not all, violence is inevitable. While the current discourse on the problem of evil does not consider this approach to argumentation and analysis, there are resonances in the history of Western philosophy that would make for points of entry. The unavoidable violence in differential relations of force is what Derrida identifies in the analyses of Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau: “The passage from one structure to the other [. . .] that of society for example—cannot be explained by any structural analysis: an external, irrational, catastrophic factum must burst in. Chance is not part of the system.” 65 If structural analytics cannot determine this, then the philosopher must turn toward other means of reflecting upon how the change comes to pass. In line with Nietzsche, Derrida holds that such reflection is ambivalent, although the history of Western thought has associated the aleatory with evil as a privation of presence: Negativity, the origin of evil, of society, of articulation, comes from without. Presence is surprised by what threatens it. On the other hand it is imperative that this exteriority of evil be nothing or nearly nothing. The little push, the “slight movement” produces a revolution out of nothing. [. . .] A nearly nonexistent force is a nearly infinite force when it is strictly alien to the system it sets going. The system offers no resistance; for antagonistic forces play only within a globe. The slight push is almighty because it shifts the globe in the void. The origin of evil or of history is thus nothing or nearly nothing. 66

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The formulation of the logical problem of evil has the potential to touch upon this line of thought, but there is no current argument in the discourse. Following Benjamin’s distinction, the intervention of chance can bring about unforeseen configurations of forces and the differences sufficient to be inaugural and divine in its violence. The opening onto violence does not obtain as an unlocked configuration of presence standing already reserved within present states of affairs. It is not possible for the conventional concern for contradiction, upon which metaphysics typically opposes presence and absence, positive and negative, to think something aleatory like the basic violence whereby events come to pass. There is little reason for arguments about evil not to tap into these potential avenues for arguing about evil. Perhaps the best way to put the implication from this line of thinking about violence is that the possibilities for reconsidering evil are open. NOTES 1. Alvin Plantinga, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 17. 2. Ibid., 36. 3. Ibid., 38. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 46. 6. Ibid., 47. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 30. 9. Ibid., 55. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. Alvin Plantinga, “Transworld Depravity, Transworld Sanctity, and Uncooperative Essences,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78, no. 1 (January 2009): 182. 13. Ibid. 14. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), 19. 15. Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9. 16. David O’Connor, God and Inscrutable Evil: In Defense of Theism and Atheism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 190. 17. William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335–41. 18. William L. Rowe, “Skeptical Theism: A Response to Bergmann,” in The Improbability of God, eds. Michael Martin & Ricki Monnier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 312. 19. Michael M. Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelpia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), 336. 20. J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams & Marilyn McCord Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 26. 21. Stephen J. Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of Appearance,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 73–93. 22. Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), xiv. 23. Bruce Russell, “Defenseless,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 193–205.

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24. William L. Rowe, “Evil and Theodicy,” in The Improbability of God, eds. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 262. 25. William L. Rowe, “The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look,” in The Improbability of God, eds. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 297. 26. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 27. Ibid., 222. 28. Ibid., 290. 29. Ibid., 296. 30. WD, 151. 31. WD, 147. 32. WD, 125. 33. WD, 125. 34. OG, 112. 35. OG, 112. 36. OG, 110. 37. OG, 112. 38. WD, 259. 39. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 65. 40. AoR, 259. 41. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), 257. 42. OG, 112. 43. FLa, 36. 44. FLa, 34. 45. Geoffrey Bennington, “Derrida and Politics,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 204. 46. FLa, 35. 47. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 21. 48. Ibid., 42. 49. Birgit Brock-Utne, “A Feminist Critique of the Concept of Peace,” in The Web of Violence: From Interpersonal to Global, eds. Jennifer Turpin and Lester R. Kurtz (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 151. 50. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 42. 51. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 21. 52. Ibid., 41. 53. Roger Burggraeve, “Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Lévinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility,” Journal of Social Philosophy 30, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 35. 54. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 47. 55. Ibid., 102. 56. Ibid., 199. 57. OG, 139–40. 58. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69. 59. Jacques Derrida, “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 90. Abbr.: TfS. 60. Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit, 70. 61. John P. McCormick, “Derrida on Law; Or, Poststructuralism Gets Serious,” Political Theory 29, no. 3 (June 2001): 401. 62. See WD, 151–52. 63. WD, 117. 64. OG, 259. 65. OG, 258.

Violence and Responsibility 66. OG, 257.

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Currently, the contemporary English-language philosophy of religion is a specialized subfield within the discipline of philosophy. The objective of this book is to consider whether one discourse within that subfield may find avenues of inquiry that would productively expand its scope of inquiry. What I hope for is a general widening of scope for the philosophy of religion. Such a fundamental transformation of the field is a grand ambition that runs in the background of this book. A far more humble project is carried on by showing that there are several unexamined assumptions at work in the discourse on the problem of evil. Each of the chapters demonstrate in their own way how I think the current state of the discourse on evil is unable to revitalize its rather staid condition without “outside help.” The impulse to focus solely on theism hearkens back to the continental beginnings of Religionswissenschaft, which originally consisted of the history of religion, comparative religion, and philosophy of religion. 1 As William Wainwright explains, The expression “philosophy of religion” did not come into general use until the nineteenth century, when it was employed to refer to the articulation and criticism of humanity’s religious consciousness and its cultural expressions in thought, language, feeling, and practice. [. . .] The most salient feature of this sort of philosophy of religion is its attempts to establish truths about God or the Absolute on the basis of unaided reason. 2

News about the early Orientalist discoveries of Asian religions partly inspired Kant’s critique of religion at the limits of reason, and such news definitely provided substance for Hegel’s proposal on Spirit in his lectures on the philosophy of religion. David Hume, alternatively, only needed variety of belief among Christians to construe “religion” as something not worthy of 121

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granting belief in The Natural History of Religion. Today’s philosophers of religion—their descendants—typically treat the variety and diversity of religious data as a contradiction of belief, and therefore nearly universally construe the potential scope of inquiry as a “problem” in need of a singular solution, such as the essentialist notion of “ultimate reality.” A set is created from a cursory overview of some distilled propositions about ultimate reality that are assumed to represent “religion.” 3 The principle of noncontradiction is then applied with the correlative demand that a unified truth must obtain within the set. The reductive abstractions by which that set was created help to rule out considerations beyond theism, not to mention critical reflection on the epistemological presumptions about how the propositions were arrived at and the ontological presumptions on the existence of something called “religion,” or, the methodological presumptions about “religion” as a taxon philosophically defensible as a second-order philosophical term. Whatever the solution to the “problem” of religious diversity, these legitimate concerns do not arise in mainstream philosophy of religion. Instead, a well-worn route is followed toward theism. The transformation needed for English-language philosophy of religion is of a Copernican scale. The entire constellation of topics and problems in the discourse focus on classical theism and its variants, and this focus unnecessarily restricts the scope of inquiry in philosophy of religion generally. The fixation on theism may be demonstrated by examining English-language journals that contain contemporary scholarship on the philosophy of religion. The discourse that emerges from these journals has a theism-centric orientation, too. A 1995 review article on the contents of the International Journal of Philosophy of Religion since its first issue in 1970 found that the contents remained fixed upon topics related to theism. 4 The experiment could likely be reproduced with similar results in journals such as Faith and Philosophy. 5 These examples demonstrate there is a significant amount of caretaking and trusteeship occurring within the discourse of philosophy of religion as concerns the general well-being of a certain understanding of “religion.” Religion in the discourse of the philosophy of religion, for various reasons to be examined here, is taken to be almost exclusively about belief in a supernatural being supposed by classical theism or one of its variants (open theism, process thought, etc.). The definition traces its lineage to E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (1871) and David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion (1771). There is a dogmatic slumber at hand when an essentialist understanding of “religion” finds nearly exclusive currency among philosophers of religion. Their findings lack credibility outside the discourse in other human sciences (e.g., anthropology, sociology, political science, religious studies). The discourse has been working as the trustee of this understanding, which ultimately serves to undermine the potential to demonstrate that the

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field has sufficient scope to include considerations of anything other than theism. The work done on the problem of evil demonstrates this state of affairs in spades. Recent English-language philosophical discussions of evil are less concerned with the philosophy of the classics, the Enlightenment, or events on the European continent. Instead the discussion revolves around specific questions related to whether or not “evil” justifies theistic belief. Over the last sixty years, a discourse has evolved with increasingly clear borders for the “problem of evil.” The focus of the problem is derived primarily by rendering a particular abstraction of Christian doctrine into the premises of theism. These premises are put into the form of an argument whose validity is tested by questions that may be posed in their general form: Does there exist a contradiction whose resolution requires the exclusion of a premise? Is there an event whose evidence requires the exclusion of a premise? Is it more probable that the actual world’s state of affairs requires the exclusion of a premise? All three of these questions are “critical” in the narrow sense. They are aimed at a particular set of premises that comprise the basis of theism. If one of these premises is rejected then all the others are correlatively invalidated. The objective here is not critique or criticism. Rather, the point of these arguments is to “cut off” (krinein) the grounds for an argument that would support the existence of an actual entity whose attributes correspond to the premises of theism. My objective in the first two chapters of this book was to propose a critique of this discourse by outlining some major figures whose arguments served to establish and sustain the particular shape of this approach to philosophically considering evil. I did this in order to highlight a problematic with the discourse, based on the following points: (1) the arguments deployed by the major participants share a commitment to a binary, where either atheism or theism exclusively obtains; and (2) the binary structuring of the discourse, through repeated performances of its arguments, effectively circumscribes the object of study for philosophers of religion to arguments about theism. None of this was necessarily new in a general sense, but it is worth repeating where considerations of philosophical approaches to evil are concerned. I think the situation for the discourse on the problem of evil is somewhat like Michael Behe’s familiar mousetrap analogy. Something irreducibly complex is “composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function” such that “the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” 6 When a scholarly discourse takes on the nature of an irreducibly complex system, it has either achieved a high degree of elegant refinement or it has been lost to irrelevance by a Kuhnian paradigm shift. The state of current philosophy of religion might have created an irreducibly complex mousetrap system by restricting the understanding of

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“religion” to belief in a supernatural being supposed by classical theism and its variants. Remove “theism” from the discourse on the problem of evil and it is handily demonstrated that the analytic power of the discourse possesses this fundamental vulnerability. Perhaps the discourse overwhelmingly focuses on “religion” as the belief in classical theism or its variants in the same way that the specialization of quantum mechanics studies matter and energy microscopically, since functions of matter at that level are completely different from macroscopic objects studied within the discipline of physics. On the grounds of that objection, the specialized inquiry into topics related to theism and its variants might be due to a category distinction. In such a case, however, this subfield of philosophy ought to be more aptly named “philosophy of theism and its variants.” Philosophy of mind does not study only one sort of mind and its variants, nor does the philosophy of law study one kind of law and its variants, nor does the philosophy of art study only one sort of art and its variants. Were the discourse in the philosophy of law almost singularly focused on feudalism or its variants, it would also introduce a mousetrap of its own. For example, therein, we might note that a legitimate question would ask: Why not include Asian feudalism and perhaps democracy? The chapters in this book propose some means by which one discourse may consider how the assumptions therein effectively “mousetrap” philosophical reflections about evil. The objective of this book was to chart out one possible way beyond theism by asking the question: How may earlier arguments from the Englishlanguage philosophy of religion be examined to provide grounds for going beyond theism? Viable openings for inquiry appear, I think, upon questioning the certainty by which the discourse on the problem of evil takes for granted assumptions at work in its arguments. In his essay “Religion, Religious, Religions,” the religious studies scholar J. Z. Smith notes how, in The Natural History of Religion, Hume defines “religion” as “the belief of invisible, intelligent power.” 7 Even given the problematically narrow construal of “religion,” Smith finds a lesson to arise from Hume’s argument: if Hume is right about “religion,” then it can be neither universal nor natural. Smith rightly realizes that belief in an invisible, intelligent power is too easily altered by the accidents of history, geography, society, culture, and so on. Hume himself notes how such beliefs vary not only from nation to nation, but also from one person to the next. Outside the discourse of philosophy of religion, there is a host of scholarly evidence that these degrees of variance continue to proliferate even today. 8 Along with Hume, Smith suggests that scholars conclude “[t]here may well be a primary and valid human experience that gives rise to the secondary religious interpretation, but the truth of the experience is no guarantee of the validity of the interpretation.” 9 The point here is that reconsidering the problem of evil entails realizing that what counts as a “problem” and “evil” is never readily apparent. Philosophers of

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religion ought to recognize that the terminology is always theirs to define. 10 The discourse on the problem of evil has retained a largely unexamined framework and “border controls” 11 for too long. Resistance to these proposals might argue that the limitations of the discourse are the result of happenstance. This is simply what philosophers talk about when they talk about evil. It is a discourse, after all. Such responses are “best of all possible worlds”–type theodicies. Namely, this discourse happens to be the only discourse, and so it must be the best one. Such reasoning, as in the case of many theodicies, results from the prior commitments of whoever espouses the “best of all possible X” position. Surely, though, the limited scope of the field should be determined by critical scholarship and not merely curatorial trusteeship. By considering what may be unthought, the discourse may be productively explored for constructive avenues beyond theism. Such work remains a philosophical task. The chapters in this book are driven by a proposal that the discourse on the problem of evil has the potential to include a wider range of problematics than are currently up for discussion. David O’Connor’s conclusion regarding the discourse on the problem of evil is that there is no such thing as the problem of evil; what does exist “is less a duel than a mime, for the weapons yielded on each side are incapable of inflicting any wounds.” 12 The first two chapters of the book show that there is no knock-down conclusion to the debate between the two solitary argumentative poles of theism versus atheism. As was argued in the second chapter, the role of this “problem”—at least within the Anglo-American philosophy of religion—is formative. It is often deployed in order to set the stage for how to derive claims from religious sources, as well as how to evaluate those claims. Among the many avenues of inquiry available, several writings of Jacques Derrida are explored in later chapters to present options to pursue unexamined assumptions that unnecessarily close off those potential avenues for discussion. These chapters further reconsider the form and potential content of those avenues, but they most certainly neither suggest that Derrida’s works are the only worthwhile problematics nor set forth a clearly delimited program for the discourse. The objective at hand is to humbly offer a useful example of how evil may be reconsidered. “Evil” needs to be capable of actually doing some sort of explanatory work if it is to be philosophically worthwhile to engage any problem, question, or topic about it. This book suggests that “Does God exist given the fact of evil?” is a misguiding question that assumes to have resolved the earlier issues, such as: What counts as evil? Questions concerning subjectivity, then, are completely outside the purview of the first question. Michael Martin presents the arguments from evil cumulatively as a last line of attack by atheism against religion in general. The arguments from evil will defeat theism in the event that demonstrations of contradictions among God’s attrib-

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utes, inconsistencies in the concept of God, or a critique of the teleological argument does not successfully displace theism from the realm of rationally plausible beliefs. 13 Martin grounds this unfriendly negative atheist position on an indirect inductive argument from evil. Namely that if a theory has not proven convincing in the past despite alterations and only allows for further slight alterations and no substantive reconsideration, then that theory is in all likelihood one that ought to be abandoned. 14 On the other hand, the possibility of reconsidering what may be the problem of evil does not seem to be compelling issue for defenders of theism. For example, Peter van Inwagen proposes an equally indirect inductive defense of “a story that, according to the teller, may or may not be true, but which, the teller maintains, has some desirable feature that does not entail truth—perhaps (depending on the context) logical consistency or epistemic probability (truth-for-all-anyoneknows)” 15 by which he seems to satisfy Martin’s demand. On the grounds of this defense, evils may not necessarily be the sort of problem for non-theists as they are for theists. That is, the arguments from evil might pose a problem that is more significant for atheologians and atheist philosophers, who decide, as did J. L. Mackie, theism is positively irrational. 16 Taking a step back from such presentations of failures in epistemic certainty attributed to the positions named and occupied in the discourse may establish a sense that the entire discourse begs the question. The fundamental data and basic assumptions at work in the discourse are in need of reconsideration. The point of drawing attention to the uncertainty built into philosophical argumentation is to show how the working assumptions may introduce new issues for philosophers of religion. In particular, the situation is perhaps most acutely demonstrable in arguments about the compossibility of one formalization (theism) with another (evil). Reading Derrida’s works across that discourse helpfully discovers means of considering all the decisions at play in posing a problem of evil. The objective is not only to speculate, but to explore what openings are possible by reading outside the current borders of the discourse. The previous chapters have pursued that line of thinking: the current discourse on the problem of evil does not likely pose all the sorts of problems about evil that others may find significant. The irresolvable mime sustained within the current discourse demonstrates the potential for reconsidering evil. In fact, one of the major defenders of theism makes just such an observation about the difficulty facing the current poles of the debate: “Sadly, every known argument for a substantivist philosophical position is a failure—by the most literal (by the most possibility-of-success-friendly) possible criterion of success and failure.” 17 The arguments and counterarguments from evil via theism will fail for the same reason that every other substantive philosophical argument fails. The troubling piece is not that such failures take place, but that the same parameters and frameworks are repeatedly deployed

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toward the same ends. This entire book is based on a suspicion that these repetitions are avoidable. The exploration of Derrida’s work in the preceding chapters acts on that suspicion. The tack chosen by the arguments from evil is to favor so-called natural evils such as Rowe’s fawn or the mere notion of a dysteleological event. The logical argument from evil poses a contradiction between theism and evils on the grounds of first setting aside the primordiality of God relative to the existence of the world itself. “When the existence of God is accepted prior to any rational consideration of the status of evil in the world, the traditional problem of evil is reduced to a noncrucial perplexity of relatively minor importance.” 18 If God is the absolute genetic origin of the world then evils are already gratuitous. In the logical version of the argument this gratuity is itself the problem on the grounds that a maximally excellent being ought not to effect a universe with any such ateleological “gaps.” As noted in chapter 5, the direction of the discourse is thereby charted toward a singular focus on theism by way of a shadowy and unquestioned notion of gratuitous evil. As far as concepts or universals are concerned, God has been up for questioning, but evils have not. The significance let on by the argument from evil is such that even one dysteleological gratuity is capable of discrediting, if not destroying, a metaphysical framework. Gratuity as the tipping-point criterion for failure might not threaten theism exclusively. This “perfect evil” allows for a relatively simple and weak argument to unsettle a more robust framework of arguments. The mere possibility of such gratuity can solicit any metaphysical framework whose orientation is toward criteria of unicity and completeness. Somehow, evils resist the unicity and totality of metaphysical frameworks. Somehow, evils pose problems. The later, evidence-based arguments from evil gloss over what the logical problem of evil alludes to by its name: the problem strikes at the rational disposition toward order. The structure of the various arguments from evil actually place evils as that which is prior. At least one evil is granted without question, and thereby poses a problem to theism. Such evils wound and throw human beings and their reasoning into question. Evils are whatever remains to be thought. Evils are construed, even as natural evils, as the very things that resist order. As Derrida notes, that which resists does so in advance. If the resistance were not primordial in this manner, there would be no problem. He insists that only that which resists and remains to be thought is the proper starting place for thought. 19 If evils are indeed gratuitous, their gratuity is in part a matter of their antecedence to the attempt at ordering the world. Gratuitous evils have already come about. Rowe’s supposition actually demands this. Only if evils wound logic are they problems. The evidential argument of evil assumes that the probability of at least one localized event upsets a set of global claims. The matter of formulating

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just what the so-called “natural evil” is taken to be are custom-made for posing a problem against theism, but not for sustained consideration of why they are problematic in the first place. Arguments from evil, if the notion of gratuitous evil is to be sustained, need to give a deeper consideration to the possibility and extent of gratuity. For metaphysics, the most natural evil actually entails some “almost nothing” that affects conditions and finitude without being affected itself. An actually profound evil, more profound than what happens to Rowe’s fawn in a forest, would be one that visits perplexity upon both philosophy and religion as well as forces thinking to confront its limits. Derrida’s analyses confront all metaphysics with the fact that such thinking is grounded upon properly reversible structures rather than absolutes. 20 This is not a call for nihilist skepticism, but it demonstrates that a desire for roots and destiny that can be terrifying in its implications. 21 Here is why evils visit perplexity upon thought. Evils, if that is what they are, must be negotiated within history. Only through language can this take place. The problem of evil sets this situation into bold relief, because its dilemma is the confrontation of a maximally excellent metaphysical claim with mere immanence. The mirror-effect of the problem of evil is less that transcendent claims are not reflected in the affairs of the world, but that immanence and contingency are already reflected within any claims that mobilize assumptions about transcendence. Anglo-American philosophers of religion in particular have not given attention to such elaborations about evil. If “physical suffering has probably changed little over the centuries” and the victims of evil do not suffer something that is “culturally constructed,” 22 then why is this the case? The difficulty is that “evil” covers a wide semantic field of experiences and notions. In the general determinations of language, the construal of evil does not cohere unless evils are are somehow “evil.” “If there is a problem with evil, it must be because of the kind of concept it is.” 23 And if evil is more complex than mere wrongdoing, then the discourse must reflect on what it means for philosophical inquiry to admit such inscrutability, puzzlement, and disruption of comprehension. Approaching the field in this way is helpful, because the dominant language about “transcendence” and “theism” may then be recognized as “culturally and historically specific concept[s].” 24 A discourse such as the problem of evil, whose participating subjects set out to find an epistemically certain conclusion and find themselves having to enunciate belief, may be understood to ground itself only by forgetting the myriad decisions that must be made in order to mitigate a plurality of uncertainties. One example of this work is that of setting out and settling into subject positions such as theist and atheist. The coherence of theism—so aptly put by Richard Swinburne— provides not only the problematic for arguments about evil but may also be said to currently provide the setting of the entire field. 25 The discourse on the problem of evil is focused on a culturally and historically specific content.

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The chapters of this book demonstrate points of contact with Derrida’s works in order to show how philosophers of religion might solicit their discourse on the problem of evil and consider what assumptions are set up in advance of being able to claim that there is a problem of evil. NOTES 1. Tomoka Masuzawa, “Origin,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, eds. Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon (New York: Cassell, 2000), 215. 2. William J. Wainwright, The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. 3. “Insofar as philosophy of religion assumes that what is essential is creeds like those compiled by Jaroslav Pelikan, or theology, then they misunderstand what religion is. When they do this, philosophers disembody and deracinate religious beliefs from the practices, communities, and institutions that make up lived religion” (Kevin Schilbrack, “New Directions for Philosophy of Religion: Four Proposals,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41, no. 1 [2012]: 49). 4. Robert Cummings Neville, “Religions, Philosophies, and Philosophy of Religion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 (1995): 168. 5. Published book series also demonstrate the existence of the mousetrap. Continuum’s Key Thinkers series includes a volume on philosophy of religion. This book’s chapters deal exclusively with the conception of theism. The introduction does not seem to offer any critical apology for this situation, instead an aspiration to a non-existent widespread applicability of the entries is implied: “Several of the historical religions of the world—think of Judaism, for example, or Christianity—are purported cases of revealed religion” (Jeffrey J. Jordan, ed., Philosophy of Religion: The Key Thinkers [New York: Bloomsbury, 2010], 4). Series editor Jonathan L. Kvanvig introduces each of the three new Oxford University Press volumes on philosophy of religion by stating that “[t]he time is thus ripe for a non-sectarian and nonpartisan series” (Jonathan L. Kvanvig, “Introduction,” in Oxford Studies in Philsoophy of Religion, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan L. Kvanvig [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], vii). Kvanvig’s words ring true in relative comparison with the Press’s other series on Philosophical Theology; but in 34 entries, only Tomis Kapitan’s essay on “Evaluating Religion” deals with a topic without reference to theism (Tomis Kapitan, “Evaluating Religion,” in Oxford Studies in Philsoophy of Religion, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan L. Kvanvig [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 80–104). 6. Michael J. Behe, “Intelligent Design as an Alternative Explanation for the Existence of Biomolecular Machines,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs (December 1, 1998): 567. 7. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 273. 8. See Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Oxford Handbook to Global Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 9. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” 274. 10. Ibid., 281–82. 11. See Richard King, “Philosophy of Religion as Border Control: Globalization and the Decolonization of the ‘Love of Wisdom’ (Philosophia),” in Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion, eds. Andrew B. Irvine and Purushottama Bilimoria (New York: Springer, 2009), 35–53. 12. David O’Connor, “On the Problem of Evil’s Not Being What It Seems,” The Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 149 (1987): 441. 13. Michael M. Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelpia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), 334. 14. Ibid., 360. 15. Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7. 16. J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams and Marilyn McCord-Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 25.

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17. van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil, 160n5. 18. Nelson Pike, “Hume on Evil,” in The Problem of Evil, eds. Robert Merrihew Adams and Marilyn McCord-Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 52. 19. WAl, xxxii–xxxiii. 20. LoRe, 331. 21. MdM, 243. 22. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Basic Books, 2003), xiv. 23. Eve Garrard, “Evil as an Explanatory Concept,” The Monist 85, no. 2 (2002): 323. 24. Timothy Fitzgerald, “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category, ” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9, no. 2 (1997): 104. 25. The exception was Keith Yandell’s “contemporary introduction,” which rigorously takes up a wider analysis across the entire text (Keith Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction [New York: Routledge, 1999]). Arvind Sharma’s series over the last thirty years has been the most impressive attempt to bring a global perspective to the philosophy of religion (Arvind Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion: A Sikh Perspective [New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2007]; A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion [Dordrecht: Springer, 2006]; A Jaina Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion [New Delhi: Motilal Bnarasidass, 2001]; The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta: A Comparative Study of Religion and Reason (Hermeneutics) [University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995]; The Philosophy of Religion: A Buddhist Perspective [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995]; A Hindu Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion [Basingstoke: PalgraveMacMillan, 1990]).

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Index

actuality, 57, 69 Agamben, Giorgio, 94 Alphabet, 1 Althusser, Louis, 58 analytic philosophy, 9–10, 12, 22, 23, 24, 37n6, 44, 60, 64, 69, 81, 91; AngloAmerican, 4, 9, 12; vs. continental philosophy, 3, 5, 9, 11, 16n34 Anaximander Fragment, 96 arché-violence. See violence arché-writing, 110–111 Arendt, Hannah, 26, 86, 93 Anselm, 96 atheism, 12, 13, 21, 30, 33, 35, 36, 38n59, 41, 44, 48–49, 50, 51, 65, 69, 77, 78, 105, 123, 125; negative, 44, 48, 49, 125; positive, 44, 50, 53; vs. theism, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 65, 123, 125, 128 Austin, John L., 7 Axis of Evil, 2 Ayers, A. J., 5 Baye’s theorem of probability, 33, 39n75, 58 Bayle, Pierre, 57 Beardsworth, Richard, 88 Behe, Michael, 123 Benjamin, Walter, 109, 110–111, 112, 113, 117 Blackburn, Simon, 7, 8, 11 Borradori, Giovanna, 78

Brin, Sergey, 1 Cambridge University, 7 Cantorian set theory, 52, 66 Caputo, John, 12, 78 Card, Claudia, 26 Cavell, Stanley, 9 Christianity, 12, 21 Coalition of the Willing, 2 cogito, 112–113 continental philosophy, 9, 16n34, 121; vs. analytic. See analytic philosophy contradiction, 13, 20–21, 25, 29, 31, 34, 35–36, 69–70, 72, 84, 87, 91, 93, 95, 98, 103, 107–108, 114, 117, 122–123, 125, 127 Cornell, Drucilla, 115 Critchley, Simon, 14n15, 15n18 Critique of Violence, 110 Culler, Jonathan, 15n18 Dasein, 112–113 De la Physionomie, 93 de Montaigne, Michel, 93 decisions, 10, 13, 30, 50–53, 53, 60, 89, 92, 96, 98 democracy, 92 Derrida, Jacques, 3–13, 57–58, 67, 89, 125, 126, 127, 128; as analytic or continental philosopher, 9, 16n35; as atheist, 12, 78; as conceptual philosopher, 9, 10; as 145

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Index

latter-day sophist, 5; as seen by AngloAmerican philosophers, 3, 4, 10; characterization of own work, 15n31; conceptions of the political, 79, 80–81, 82; death, 5–7; The Ends of Men, 61; “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at Limits of Reason Alone,” 67–68, 72; “Force and Signification,” 91; “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’” 79, 90, 95, 96, 110; honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, 7, 11, 14n15; indecision, 52–53; language, 42–43, 51, 66–67, 69, 71, 73, 78, 110–111, 115; “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration,” 83, 87, 88, 96; method, 9, 10; objective of work, 99; Of Grammatology, 78–79, 108, 109, 110; on analytical structures, 91; on duplicity, 67, 70, 71; on enemies, 89; on Hegel’s work, 52; on justice, 96–98; on perfect worlds, 104; on representation of thought, 66; on resistance, 127; on sovereignty, 13, 90, 91, 94–95, 99; on violence, 13, 103, 106, 107–109, 110–111, 112, 113–116; reception by analytic philosophers, 16n35; reflection on structure and function of problems, 45–46, 47; Rogues, 79, 93, 94; “Sign, Structure and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 58–60, 62, 64, 65–66, 73; “Violence and Metaphysics,” 107–108, 108, 110, 115; “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” 65–66; Without Alibi, 101n53 Descartes, René, 112 différance, 6, 12 dominion, 81, 83–84 Draper, Paul, 19–20, 33–34, 34–35 Duméry, Henri, 36 duplicity, 67–72, 72; in counting and numbers, 71–72 Eastern Bloc, 15n19 English language, 22–23, 69–70 enthymeme, 29–30, 35, 45, 77, 80, 107, 114

enumeration, 71–72, 72 Euthyphro, 77 evil, 1–3, 8; analytic discourse on, 22, 23, 24; approaches to, 20, 21; argument from, 105–106, 117; as a folk term, 1, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 42; as a taxon, 1, 2–3, 22, 28, 42; assumptions about, 41; avoidance of, 1; in Anglo-American philosophy, 5, 28, 128; definition of, 22–23, 24–25, 25–27, 62, 77, 106, 125, 127, 128; discourse on, 19–21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31–32, 34, 35, 35–36, 37n6, 38n62, 41, 42–45, 47, 53, 60, 63, 65, 69, 70, 77, 78, 82, 95, 106, 108, 114–115, 115, 116, 121, 123, 125, 127–128; elimination of, 103; existence of, 1, 20, 22, 29, 41, 49, 68, 73, 103, 126–127; gratuitous evil, 24, 25, 48, 49, 60, 61, 68, 105, 106, 127; judgment of, 32; language about, 2, 8, 22–23, 25, 27, 28, 35, 42–43, 110, 128; localized, 22, 30, 31, 34; natural, 25, 26, 33, 60, 127; observation of, 32; organizing themes, 19; origin, 109, 116; the problem of, 2, 3, 8, 9–11, 12, 13, 19, 20–21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 30–31, 31–32, 32, 33–34, 34, 35–36, 38n43, 38n59, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 57, 60, 61, 67, 69, 70, 73, 77–78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 89, 93, 98, 99, 106, 114, 115, 117, 122–123, 124, 125; subjectivity about, 20, 24, 25, 27, 47, 60, 125; violence, 13, 22, 77, 113, 114, 117 Faith and Philosophy, 122 fascism, 15n19 Fenves, Peter, 87 Foucault, Michel, 58, 85, 88 Fredrich Wilhelm I, 87 free will, 4, 15n19, 103, 104 free-will defense, 4, 8, 20, 103, 104 freedom, 4, 8, 112 Frege, Gottlob, 9, 52, 66 Gaita, Raymond, 25 Garrard, Eve, 24 Geneva Conventions, 26 God and Evil: A Reconsideration, 19 God, Freedom and Evil, 4

Index goodness, 2, 13, 24, 25, 29, 29–30, 31, 31–32, 33, 34, 35, 49, 80, 93, 98, 103, 104; absolute, 29, 80, 98; predatory, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 77, 95, 105, 114 Google, 1–2, 13 Guanilo of Monmartiers, 96 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 11, 15n18 Hardt, Michael, 85 Hebrew scriptures, 12, 78 Hegel, G. W. F., 6, 52, 57, 121 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 12, 58, 96–97, 107, 112 historical causality, 8 historicity, 8, 10, 11, 15n18, 15n29, 59–64, 65–67, 68, 70 Hobbes, Thomas, 85, 86, 113 Hume, David, 19, 57, 121–122, 124 Husserl, Edmund, 58, 71 ideality, 10, 57, 58, 59, 62, 65 infinity, 107, 113, 114, 115 International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 122 Job, 23 Joy, Morny, 63 justice, 15n19, 32, 49, 77, 80, 83, 86, 88, 90–91, 93, 96–97, 98–99; legitimacy of, 93; problems of, 90–91; relation to law, 96, 97–98 Kant, Immanuel, 57, 58, 73, 87, 121 language, 22, 28, 29, 42–43, 46, 47, 51–52, 59, 67, 68, 69–70, 72–73, 107, 112, 121, 124, 128; acts of, 51, 53, 91, 108, 109, 111, 114; god, 12, 78; related to evil, 2, 8, 22–23, 25, 27, 28, 35, 42–43, 110, 128; related to violence, 107–108, 109, 110–111, 112, 115; ordinary, 4, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 13, 15n19, 25, 42–43, 67, 69 Language, Truth and Logic, 5 law, 73, 83, 85–88, 93, 95, 97–98; enforcement, 88, 91, 92, 93, 108, 111; legitimacy of, 86, 87–88, 92, 93, 95, 101n53; philosophy of, 123; relation to

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justice, 96, 97–98; relation to violence, 88, 91, 92, 93, 95, 110, 114 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 57, 60 lemmata, 47–48, 54n16, 70 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 108, 109, 116 Leviathan, 85, 113 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 86, 103, 107–108, 109, 112–115 Lewis, Thomas A., 3 Machtspruch, 87 Mackie, J. L., 30, 125 Mandela, Nelson, 83, 88 Manicheanism, 41 Martin, Michael, 44, 125 Marxism, 12, 61 Masuzawa, Tomoku, 63 McCord-Adams, Marilyn, 23, 24–25, 25–26 McCormick, John P., 115 Meister, Chad, 63 metaphysics, 9, 11, 46, 49, 59, 62, 65, 78, 80–81, 82, 85, 127; violence within, 107–108, 109, 114–115, 117 Microsoft, 2 Moi, Toril, 9 Mother Emmanuel Church, 2 myth, 11 The Natural History of Religion, 121–122, 124 Negri, Antonio, 85 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 82 Nieman, Susan, 27, 32, 49 Nietzsche, Fredrich, 6, 51, 65, 72, 116 Nuremburg Principles, 26 O’Connor, David, 125 ontology, 71, 107, 112–113, 121 Otte, Richard, 5 Page, Larry, 1 Pain and Pleasure: A Evidential Problem for Theists, 19 Parmenides, 113 Pascal, Blaise, 91 Patton, Paul, 97 Pensées, 91 Perret, Roy, 25

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Index

Phillips, Dewi Z., 28 philosophy, Anglo-American, 3–4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 63, 65, 125, 128 philosophy of religion, 2–4, 5, 12, 19, 20, 22, 41, 57–58, 63–64, 73, 121–122, 123, 125–126, 129n3, 129n5; approach to evil, 36, 42, 44, 60, 63, 64, 106; English language, 5, 8, 19–20, 21, 22–23, 28, 42–43, 54n16, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 78, 121, 122–123, 124, 125; global perspective, 74n23 Pike, Nelson, 19–20, 22–23, 25, 26, 29, 29–30; definition of evil, 22–23, 29 Plantinga, Alvin, 4, 5, 8, 9, 20, 23, 25, 103 Plato, 77 Plontinus, 52, 113 politics, 58–59, 80–83, 85, 87, 89; value of the enemy in, 89; vs. the political, 82, 95, 98 possible world, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 15n19, 103; as a complete and maximal state of affairs, 4, 8, 15n18; concept of, 4; premise, 21 Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 122 The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism, 19 problems, structure and function of, 45–47 propriety, 83–84, 87, 89 Raffel, Stanley, 10, 11 Rayment-Pickard, Hugh, 12, 78 Rechtsprüche, 87 Reichenbach, Bruce, 33 religion: as a term, 1; definition of, 122, 124; lived, 1, 129n3. See also philosophy of religion Religion, Religious, Religions, 124 Religionswissenschaft, 63, 121 Rorty, Richard, 6, 10, 11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 116 Rowe, William L., 19–20, 22–23, 25, 26, 28, 31–32, 33, 47, 48–51, 53, 105–106; concept of evil, 22, 105–106; fawn, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 49, 49–50, 60, 105–106, 108, 114, 116, 127 Royle, Nicholas, 5 Russell, Bruce, 106

Sanders, Felicia, 2 Satan, 23 Schmitt, Carl, 89, 94 Searle, John R., 5, 10–11, 81 single fallibility, 31, 32, 39n67 Smith, J. Z., 124 Socrates, 77 South Africa, 83, 84, 87, 88, 97 sovereignty, 13, 77–99, 105, 113, 114; actualization of, 78, 79, 84, 89, 93, 94, 95, 98; concept of, 82, 83, 90; laws within, 83, 85–88, 90–92, 93, 95, 96–97, 101n53; legitimacy of, 93, 101n53; managerial, 85; problems of, 80, 93, 95; relationality in, 78, 83, 84, 86, 89, 94, 96, 98, 99, 113; source of, 85; subjectivity of, 78, 89; violence, 77, 88, 91, 92, 93, 95, 99, 107, 111 St. Augustine, 82 Stewart, Potter, 22 structuralism, 59, 60, 91, 108, 115, 116 Stump, Eleanor, 9, 23 suicide, 5, 6, 15n19 suffering, 23 Swinburne, Richard, 64, 128 The Task of the Translator, 110 theism, 3, 12, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 42, 115, 121–122, 123–124, 125, 129n5; argument against, 61, 77, 78; as a construction, 64; credibility of, 49; coexistence with evil, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30–31, 33–34, 34, 35, 52, 53, 58, 77, 82, 105, 106, 123, 125–127; debate with atheism, 13, 21, 30, 33, 35, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51, 65, 77, 123, 125; delineations of, 44; existence of God within, 41, 44, 50, 57, 58, 81, 83, 93, 95, 105, 114, 125, 127; language about, 64, 128; positive, 50; premises of, 4, 19–21, 29, 31, 34, 77, 79–80, 83, 97, 99, 123, 125; relation to possible worlds, 103; restricted, 28, 44, 51; varieties of, 41 Theodicy, 103 Tiele, Cornelis Petrus, 63 Totality and Infinity, 107, 112, 113, 114–115 transworld depravity, 4

Index Tristes tropiques, 108 Tylor, E. B., 122 ultra-nationalism, 15n18 van Inwagen, Peter, 125 Vietnam, 58, 60–61 violence, 13, 79, 91, 95, 103–117; absence of, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113–114, 115; arché-, 109–110, 110, 112, 114; avoidance of, 107, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116; definition of, 106, 108, 112–113; divine, 110, 111; inevitability of, 116; least, 115; necessity of, 103, 107, 108; origins of, 109, 110, 111; problem of, 107; relation to evil, 22, 61, 77; relation

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to law, 88–89, 91, 92, 93, 95; second, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115; tertiary, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115; worst, 67, 107, 115 von Pufendorf, Samuel, 85 Wainright, Will, 63, 121 white mythology, 65–66, 72–73 Whitney, Barry, 19 Wills, David, 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 52, 66 Wright, Crispin, 9 wrongdoing, 2 Wykstra, Stephen, 32, 49, 105 Yahoo!, 1

About the Author

Nathan R. B. Loewen is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he teaches on religion in modern thought and religion in South Asian culture. He also develops and supports pedagogical initiatives as the faculty technology liaison for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His research is focused on globalizing discourses within the philosophy of religion and analyzing the intersection of religious studies and development studies. He is a member of the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion seminar and editor of a research series on religion and international development.

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