In the three major religions of the West, God is understood to be a
being whose goodness, knowledge, and power are such that it is
impossible for any being, including God himself, to have a greater
degree of goodness, knowledge, and power. This book focuses on
God's freedom and praiseworthiness in relation to his perfect
goodness. Given his necessary perfections, if there is a best world
for God to create he would have no choice other than to create it.
For, as Leibniz tells us, 'to do less good than one could is to be
lacking in wisdom or in goodness'. But if God could not do
otherwise than create the best world, he created the world of
necessity, not freely. And, if that is so, it may be argued that we
have no reason to be thankful to God for creating us, since, as
parts of the best possible world, God was simply unable to do
anything other than create us--he created us of necessity, not
freely. Moreover, we are confronted with the difficulty of having
to believe that this world, with its Holocaust, and innumerable
other evils, is the best that an infinitely powerful, infinitely
good being could do in creating a world. Neither of these
conclusions, taken by itself, seems at all plausible. Yet each
conclusion appears to follow from the conception of God now
dominant in the great religions of the West. William Rowe presents
a detailed study of this important problem, both historically in
the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, Thomas Aquinas,
and Jonathan Edwards, and in the contemporary philosophical
literature devoted to the issue. Rowe argues that this problem is
more serious than is commonly thought and may require some
significant revision in contemporary thinking about the nature of
God.
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