This book presents a novel approach to one of the most formidable challenges to theistic belief: the problem of evil. Integrating insights from contemporary moral philosophy and religious thought, it develops a comprehensive framework for understanding how suffering serves as a necessary condition.
This book presents a novel approach to one of the most formidable challenges to theistic belief: the problem of evil. Integrating insights from contemporary moral philosophy and religious thought, it develops a comprehensive framework for understanding how suffering serves as a necessary condition for exemplar transformation in both humans and non-human animals.
The book’s central aim is to demonstrate—through what the author terms the Exemplarist Theodicy—that God allows suffering because it is essential to a four-stage exemplarist transformative process that culminates in the formation of exemplars who ground morality and spread goodness throughout the world through their exemplary lives.
By systematically analysing this process, the author constructs a unified framework showing how suffering functions not as a design flaw but as a structural feature of a world ordered toward exemplarity and creative flourishing. Engaging with both classical theodicies and anti-theodicy positions, the author offers a fresh articulation that addresses both human and animal suffering. Drawing on recent philosophical resources—including robust normative realism, natural law theory, cognitive ethology, and exemplarist moral theory—he formulates a cohesive response that applies to logical, evidential, and hiddenness formulations of the problem of evil.
The Exemplarist Theodicy: A Philosophical Response to the Problem of Evil is essential reading for scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of religion, theology, and ethics.
Introduction Part 1: Theoretical Foundation and Formulation of Theodicy
1. The Metaphysical Foundation and Normative Framework for the Exemplarist
Theodicy
2. The Cognitive Capabilities and Moral Status of Animals
3. The
Exemplarist Theodicy (i): Human Suffering
4. The Exemplarist Theodicy (ii):
Animal Suffering Part 2: Application of Theodicy to Problems of Evil and
Divine Hiddenness
5. The Logical Problem of Evil
6. The Evidential Problem of
Evil
7. The Problem of Divine Hiddenness Conclusion
Joshua R. Sijuwade is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. His general research interests fall into the areas of philosophy of religion, analytic theology and metaphysics. He is the author of Analytic Theism: A Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2024), The Rational Ontological Argument: Modality, Ontology and God (Bloomsbury, 2025), and A Rational Faith: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Richard Swinburne (James Clarke & Co, 2025).
