Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering

by Michael Murray

Overview

While the problem of evil remains a perennial challenge to theistic belief, little attention has been paid to the special problem of animal pain and suffering. This absence is especially conspicuous in our Darwinian era when theists are forced to confront the fact that animal pain and suffering has gone on for at least tens of millions of years, through billions of animal generations. Evil of this sort might not be especially problematic if the standard of explanations for evil employed by theists could be applied in this instance as well. But there is the central problem: all or most of the explanations for evil cited by theists seem impotent to explain the reality of animal pain and suffering through evolutionary history. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw addresses the evil of animal pain and suffering directly, scrutinizing explanations that have been offered for such evil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191608070
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	06/19/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Michael Murray is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor in the Humanities and Philosophy at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA). He received his BA at Franklin and Marshall College, and his MA and PhD at the University of Notre Dame. He has held fellowships from the Institute for Research in the Humanities (Madison, Wisconsin), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion.

Table of Contents

1. Problems Of and Explanations for Evil2. Neo-Cartesianism3. Animal Suffering and the Fall4. Nobility, Flourishing, and Immortality: Animal Pain and Animal Well-Being5. Natural Evil, Nomic Regularity, and Animal Suffering6. Chaos, Order, and Evolution7. Combining CD's

Editorial Reviews

"carefully argued, historically grounded, and insightful work." —American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

From the Publisher