James P. Sterba

Using yet untapped resources from moral and political philosophy, this book seeks to answer the question of whether an all good God who is presumed to be all powerful is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. It is widely held by theists and atheists alike that it may be logically impossible for an all good, all powerful God to create a world with moral agents like ourselves that does not also have at least some moral evil in it. James P. Sterba focuses on the further question of whether God is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. The negative answer he provides marks a new stage in the age-old debate about God's existence.

I begin with an account of what is deserved in human ethics, an ethics that assumes without argument that only humans, or rational agents, count morally. I then take up the question of whether nonhuman living beings are also deserving and answer it in the affirmative. Having established that all individual living beings, as well as ecosystems, are deserving, I go on to establish what it is that they deserve and then compare the requirements of global justice when only humans are taken into account with the requirements of global justice when all living beings are taken into account.

Charles Darwin questions whether conflicts between species palpably captured by the conflict between Ichneumonidae and the caterpillars on which they prey could be compatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. He also questioned whether the suffering of millions of lower animals throughout our almost endless prehistory could be compatible with an all-good, all-powerful God. In this paper, I show that these two problems of natural evil that Darwin raised in his work can be resolved so as to present no objection to theism once it is recognized what the moral principles are that should govern our relationship to the natural world and analogously should govern God’s relationship to the natural world.