From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat Oct 09 2004 - 19:53:16 BST
Mark,
> I no doubt have forgotten a lot since then, and I'm sure new analyses
> has been offered since. Who would you recommend for a current view?
Other than the process theologians, and they are more than 25 years old, I
doubt that there is much new. I've recently been reading Leszek
Kolakowski's "Religion", whose first chapter is on the POE. But he is going
over old formulations, and in fact doesn't mention the process folk. I am
reasonably certain that your professor's reply has much more than I know
about it.
I guess what is new is that the picture of God as perfect, omnipotent, and
omnibenevolent is just going out of style, as is the style of argumentation
that seeks to find one rational answer to this and other questions. Not
that one takes pains to provide a different picture, but that one
recognizes this picture as a Platonic ideal, one that doesn't resonate much
with contemporary folk. So you might say that the old response "we just
can't know with our finite minds" is more to the fore, and the emphasis is
more on living with the mystery than attempting to solve it.
David Tracy's "Plurality and Ambiguity" is a not untypical example of
contemporary (well, 1987) theology, though he doesn't discuss the POE as I
recall. But that is sort of the point, that one is more likely to find a
discussion of the POE in a book on philosophy of religion (like
Kolakowski's) or history of theology, than in contemporary theology itself.
Of course, theology as a whole is all over the intellectual and political
place, including conservatives, liberals, existentialists,
deconstructionists, and more.
- Scott
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Oct 10 2004 - 01:13:30 BST