Dialogue on Good, Evil, and the Existence of God

by John R. Perry

Book Overview

John Perry--author of the acclaimed Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Hackett Publishing Co., 1978)--revisits Gretchen Weirob in this lively and absorbing dialogue on good, evil, and the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087220460X
• ISBN13: 9780872204607
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Good introduction to serious philosophical ideas

I am a philosophy professor, and I am very grateful to John Perry for his dialogues. They are an excellent way to get introduced to different philosophical views. They are also very useful teaching tools. The reader who wants more can get to the texts that the discussion is based on (Augustine, Leibniz, Russell, etc.). Perry's dialogues are witty, accessible and easy to read. No technical jargon. For those who do not have the time or the motivation to read Leibniz' Theodicy but who want to think for themselves, this text is highly recommended.

Friendly Introduction

This is a dialogue between a skeptical philosopher and her friends about the problem of evil and the existence of God. The philosopher feels sick, and refuses her friend's prayer until he can explain how a good God could allow for her illness and other greater evils. Evil is supposed to count against the existence of God, and the theist is supposed to show that it does not, e.g. by showing how a good God might allow for evils. In this dialogue various explanations of how God might allow for evils are presented, including the free will and afterlife theodicies. The skeptical philosopher eventually accepts her friend's prayer. In my opinion, the problem of evil is not an insurmountable problem for religious belief; however, I doubt that the theodicies developed here alone plausibly answer the strongest forms of the problem. The book is friendly and engaging, and should be accessible to those unfamiliar with the problem of evil. The problem and the theodicies are introduced clearly and carefully. The book also includes a very brief list of further readings. To be sure, the problems of evil and possible replies are not addressed comprehensively; the dialogue is less than 70 pages in length. Nevertheless, it is a nice introduction to the problem, and the paperback edition is not expensive, at least at the time of writing this review.

Informative and easy

Possibly the easiest introduction to the problem of evil. John Perry discusses the problem in a dialogue format that is all at once engaging, humorous and informative. I strongly suggest this book as an introduction to reasoning, the problem of evil, and/or the philosophy of religion.