Peter van Inwagen

Background

Peter van Inwagen is an American analytic philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, a convert to Christianity from within the analytic mainstream, and the leading practitioner of the defense strategy on evil. His Gifford Lectures, published as The Problem of Evil (2006), introduce "the idea of a story that contains both God and all the evils that actually exist, a story that is put forward not as true but as 'true for all anyone knows'" (van Inwagen 2006, xii, quoted at SEP 'Problem of Evil' §4) — supplemented by a distinction between remote and "real" possibilities (2006, Lecture 4, ibid.).

He is not uniformly a friend of natural theology: his modal-collapse argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason — if every contingent truth has a sufficient reason, the conjunction of all contingent truths can be explained neither contingently nor necessarily, so the PSR is false (van Inwagen 1983: 202–04, at SEP 'Cosmological Argument' §4.4) — is the standard modern objection to Leibnizian arguments.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Evidential Problem of Evil — named among the principal developers alongside Plantinga, Wykstra, and Bergmann. His distinctive contribution against Draper-style Humean arguments is the massive-irregularity hypothesis: the observed distribution of pain "is necessary for great goods associated with higher-level organisms and for avoiding disvaluable worlds that are massively irregular" — a claim that cannot reasonably be ruled improbable given theism (van Inwagen 1991, 1996, at SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §7.2).
• He also extends the free-will defense of The Logical Problem of Evil, and appears in The Leibnizian (Contingency) Cosmological Argument on the critical side, as the PSR's chief modern objector.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: van Inwagen's books are copyright-locked; both wings of his work are reconstructed from the SEP entries 'The Problem of Evil', 'Skeptical Theism', and 'Cosmological Argument' (all in corpus).

Principal critics

• Michael Tooley — presses the key epistemic question against defenses: a story merely "true for all anyone knows" cannot blunt an evidential argument unless some positive probability claim is made for it (SEP 'Problem of Evil' §4).
• Paul Draper — the Humean comparative argument the massive-irregularity hypothesis answers.
• Alexander Pruss — friendly critic on the other front, replying to the anti-PSR argument by distinguishing logically sufficient reasons from sufficient explanation (SEP 'Cosmological Argument' §4.4).

See also

• Alvin Plantinga — originator of the defense-not-theodicy strategy van Inwagen extends.
• Michael Bergmann, Stephen J. Wykstra — the skeptical-theist co-belligerents.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the PSR tradition van Inwagen attacks.