muhammad javad asghari

The problem of evil is one of the issues that has long been considered by theists and atheists. Atheists have always used evil as evidence against theism, and theists, on the other hand, have made various analyses to justify the existence of different evils in the universe. The theodicy1 of "man's free will and the universe based on Divine Providence" is one of the theodicies expressed by Richard Swinburne, the contemporary philosopher of religion, in justifying the existence of evil in the universe. According to this theodicy, on the one hand, he believes in man's free will, and on the other hand, he considers the world to be ruled based on laws and characteristics that both bring about the effects that human beings choose based on their own free will and enable human beings to predict and control evil by studying nature. Using a descriptive-analytical method, this research first explains this theodicy and then mentions its problems along with the answers that Swinburne himself has offered.

Religious beliefs must be based on knowledge that is logically obtained in a valid way and that also attains certainty in terms of the degree of knowledge. The logical validity and authenticity of the knowledge derived from the accumulative argument, which is being increasingly used in ideological discussions in this period, has not been carefully studied so far, and those who use this argument have assumed its validity and authority. Also, so far, no criteria have been proposed for the expression of a valid and conclusive cumulative argument. Using the analytical method and based on traditional logic, in this research we will first present a description of this argument as a logical conclusive syllogism, and then by determining three conditions, we will prove the premise of syllogism and will show that this argument can result in the minimum knowledge necessary for the benefit of authenticity in religious beliefs i.e. psychological certainty.

From the point of view of some Western philosophers, such as Basil Mitchell, Richard Swinburne, and Caroline Franks Davis, in order to justify the belief in the existence of God, the probability of the proposition “God exists" must be more than 50% of its corresponding evidence-based propositions. From their point of view, the evidence for the existence of God cannot independently increase the probability of gaining correct results to more than 50%, but can only confirm them. Therefore, the existence of God cannot be justified based on each of those arguments. To solve this problem, the mentioned philosophers have proposed the theory of cumulative argument. The logic behind this argument is inductivism and its purpose is to reach a valid belief. Using the analytical-rational method, this paper evaluates and compares the works of some Western philosophers with the principles of Muslim philosophers and finally concludes that from the point of view of most Islamic philosophers, the cumulative argument is not a valid argument for proving the existence of God, but from the point of view of some other Muslim theologians, philosophers, and writers, this argument has a speculative epistemological value in many aspects and, in some cases, is the only way to prove the claim about the existence of God.

The role of perceptive faculties in revelation has been dealt with by Islamic philosophers. They distinguished between rational faculty and that of imagination, expressing important views on the part played by each of these faculties in the process of revealed knowledge. The present article is an attempt to both explain and evaluate these views.