SMPT Conference. UVU. March 25-27

The schedule for this years conference for the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology is now up. You can read it here.

I will be speaking two weeks from today on Thursday at 2:30. Here is a quick abstract for my presentation that I wrote up yesterday.

The problem of evil has almost always been seen as a challenge for God's existence. Philosophers of religion, in turn, have taken the problem as a call to defend God's existence, and have sought to provide an argument by which both God and evil could co-exist. In this paper, I argue that the response to the problem of evil is misplaced. For both the believer and the unbeliever, the true challenge is not in the question of God's existence in light of this evil, but in the devaluation and of the human individual who experiences and/or witnesses evil. Attempts to philosophically challenge the problem of evil by defending evil's existence and analogizing God as the great chess-master who maneuvers through evil, exacerbate the problem by turning the individual who suffers into a valueless sacrificial pawn for God's ultimate win. Instead, I argue, the proper response to the problem of evil is not a defense of God through the justification of evil, but rather a justification of the individual through the confrontation of evil. The Atonement, especially as understood by liberation theology, is the paradigm of God's own response to the problem of evil.

If you are in the area, you should come check it out. It won't just knock off everyone's socks; it'll knock off their feet.