Anti-theodicy

This chapter aims to examine the anti-theodicy view as it has been developed in two publications that bear some affinities with previous proposals, while marking out a distinctive and challenging position of their own. The notion of anti-theodicy is liable to confuse and mislead on a number of fronts. It may be supposed that the rejection of theodicy enshrined in anti-theodicy is no different from the typical atheological rebuttals of theodicy, for example, the writings of J. L. Mackie and H. J. McCloskey. Sympathetic treatments of anti-theodicy are also to be found outside of Jewish thought, especially in much recent Christian theology and in so-called Continental or European philosophy. By contrast, the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy has spawned relatively few discussions of anti-theodicy. Where Gleeson's anti-theodicy is motivated by Ivan Karamazov's challenge, Burrell's rejection of theodicy draws upon a much earlier and even better-known challenge: that of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures.