Critical Evaluation Of The Theodical Arguments Advanced By...

In this dissertation, I engage with the problem of natural theodicy through careful comparative evaluation of the theodical arguments advanced by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Catherine Keller, Arthur Peacocke, and Robert Russell in the context of their dialogue with modern physics and biology. In so doing, I critically investigate how the main interlocutors reconstruct the problem of natural evil, its relation to moral evil, God’s creative and redemptive immanence in the midst of the world, and the eschatological new creation, within the matrix of their approaches to dialogue between natural science and theology. The four interlocutors claim for a mutual interaction between theology and science, namely consonantist approaches under the framework of epistemological monism, as opposed to â€Å"scientism,† or metaphysical naturalism , â€Å"scientific imperialism,† â€Å"ecclesiastical authoritarianism,† â€Å"creation science,† and â€Å"the two-language approach.† For these theologians, consonance between science and religion can take place in the context of the contemporary scientific view of the universe as an open and ontologically indeterminate web of chance and law-like regularities. This open-ended cosmology centers upon five important areas: (a) the contemporary Big Bang-quantum cosmology, (b) quantum physics (c) the second law of theromodynamics, (d) chaos theory, (e) Darwinian evolutionary cosmology, (f) non-reducible epistemological monism. These elements of the