The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God

D.Z. Phillips examines the philosophical tensions surrounding evil and divine existence through a distinctive approach that challenges mainstream analytic philosophy of religion. Rather than defending or attacking theistic belief through traditional argumentation, Phillips develops a grammatical investigation of religious language that reveals fundamental misconceptions in how philosophers typically frame the problem of evil.

The work critiques both theistic defenses and atheistic attacks as sharing flawed assumptions about the nature of religious belief. Phillips argues that standard formulations of the problem of evil treat God as an empirical hypothesis subject to evidential assessment, thereby misunderstanding the grammar of religious discourse. He contends that believers do not typically hold their faith as a theory explaining worldly phenomena, but rather as a framework through which life's experiences, including suffering, acquire meaning.

Phillips engages particularly with theodicies that attempt to justify God's ways by explaining evil's purpose or necessity. He demonstrates how such explanations often distort religious understanding by reducing mystery to intellectual puzzles requiring solutions. The work systematically exposes how both believers and skeptics frequently operate with an impoverished conception of religious language that treats statements about God as quasi-scientific claims about a supernatural entity.

The monograph's significance lies in its methodological innovation within analytic philosophy of religion. By applying Wittgensteinian insights about language games to theological discourse, Phillips shifts focus from whether God exists given evil's reality to what religious believers mean when speaking of God amidst suffering. This grammatical approach reveals that many philosophical debates about evil rest on category mistakes that misconstrue the logic of religious belief.

Phillips advances his argument through careful conceptual analysis of actual religious practices and expressions, contrasting lived faith with philosophical reconstructions. He shows how believers' responses to suffering often embody forms of understanding irreducible to theoretical explanation or justification. The work thus contributes to philosophy of religion by questioning the field's dominant evidentialist paradigm and proposing an alternative approach that takes seriously the distinctive character of religious discourse. This perspective has proven influential in subsequent discussions about methodology in philosophy of religion, inspiring both followers who develop his grammatical approach and critics who defend more traditional analytical methods.