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Book Review: What We Owe to Each other

Orthodox theism, the target of O.'s formulation of the problem of evil, is described as the cognitive core of belief in God. It consists not only of the bare claim that God exists, but a good deal about God's relation to creatures and the purpose of creation. The author is to be commended for his recognition that there is a difference between orthodox theism and belief in God, although his characterization of the relationship between the two is contentious: that the former is implied by the latter, although the converse is not true. It is here that the vulnerabilities of the standard discussion begin to manifest themselves. For orthodox theism, as O. formulates it, is a series of putatively factual claims that have, singularly and in conjunction, definite truth values. This begs all kinds of questions about the reference of God-language and the meaningfulness of dispassionate discussion of religious claims. After granting that some natural evil must be present in any world that can produce beings capable of moral development, much of the discussion revolves around whether a particular type of evil, designated "natural evil inconsistent with God" (11), is present in the world. This in turn requires extended discussion of possible worlds with its attendant problems of their ontological status. One particular difficulty, which O. does not discuss, is the coherence of comparing worlds in which God exists with worlds in which God does not exist. This problem is a consequence of the presuppositions of the standard debate and, since O. accepts those presuppositions, it is perhaps unfair to chastise him for this lack. The book is uncompromising in its demands on the reader. There are at least seven different concepts of natural evil introduced, each with its own acronym. The reader's work would have been considerably simplified had the publisher provided somewhere in the book a list of abbreviations and acronyms, but in the absence of such a list the reader is forced over and over to page back through pages already read to verify that the understanding of a particular usage is correct. But O. has also provided us with a remarkable amount of material in compressed format, something that will well serve readers who want a compact discussion of a dominant strand in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion and are not afraid of some hard work.