Evil as Human Experience and its Potential in the Philosophy of Religion
Keywords:
Conceito de mal. Teoria da privação. Problema do mal. Experiência humana.Abstract
The article discusses the concept of evil in view of exploring, in a future work, its employing potential in the philosophy of religion. In this previous reflection on the idea of evil here proposed, the text begins with an illustrative list of examples and suggests a typology that classifies those cases in the standard categories of ‘moral’ and ‘natural’. Next, it analyses three theories aimed at explaining why the evils classified that way are bad in the end: the privation theory, of evil as a reality in itself and the deflationist theory. The following step is proposing and defending a theory of evil as human experience, in order to explore its explanatory potential in the debates about the concept of religion, the relation between religion and other human activities, and about the possibility of understanding evil as occasion for religious experience, instead of just an argument against the existence of God.
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