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[The previous chapter argued that drawing an analogy between God and human parents actively undermined the claims of Swinburne and others about the in-principle relevance to God’s existence of blemishes in the world such as the slightest toothache. It also argued that if God created the world from a love akin to human parental love, then he cannot be a God of the sort we find in theodicy, who would not refrain from creating the world with horrors (at least) as terrible as those of the actual world so long as they are outweighed by greater goods, but who would resile from creation on account of evil outweighing good by the margin of the slightest toothache. In this chapter I argue that the parental love image of God points us towards still more radical ideas. If the argument of Chapter 1 were the last word on the topic of God and evil, God might very well be dead. In this chapter I argue that the parental love image of God offers the believer a possible response both to standard atheology and to Karamazov’s challenge: a response in the form of an appeal to love. The response does not ultimately succeed so long as we retain an anthropomorphic conception of God as an immaterial agent, a being who performs loving acts. It does succeed once we amend the analogy between God and human parents to acknowledge that while human parental love is indeed akin to divine love, this is not because both are instances of an agent performing loving acts.]
Published: Nov 21, 2015
Keywords: Moral Judgement; Moral Responsibility; Ideal Observer; Moral Requirement; Moral Matter
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