Fwd: NDPR Yujin Nagasawa The Problem of Evil for Atheists

[Doug Mounce]

Here is an apologetics folks on this list might appreciate . . .

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.10.6 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Yujin Nagasawa, The Problem of Evil for Atheists, Oxford University Press, 2024, 272pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198901884.

Reviewed by Andrew Loke, Hong Kong Baptist University

This book is a significant contribution to the discussion on the problem of evil and global philosophy of religion. While the problem of evil for atheists is not new, e.g., Moreland and Craig (2003, 552) had argued that ‘If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering’, in no other book has this problem been explained in such a systematic, well-organized, and clear manner, covering both Western and Eastern religious perspectives. In Chapters 1 and 2, Nagasawa distinguishes different versions of the problem of evil: Deductive Non-Probabilistic Version, Deductive Probabilistic Version, Inductive Version, and Abductive Version. He also distinguishes between the axiological approach, which understands evil in terms of the undesirability of pain, and the deontological approach, which understands evil in terms of the moral status of actions, such as whether one ought to do x or one ought not to do x (20). He notes different versions of theism (including the concept of ‘maximal God’, which affirms that God is the greatest possible being, yet not exactly omnipotent or exactly wholly good, which he considered in his earlier work) and states that the axiological problem of evil poses a challenge not only to traditional theism but also to alternative versions of theism, as well as atheism. The problem concerns ‘the apparent mismatch between our expectation that there is no evil in the actual world and our observation of the reality that there is evil’

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