Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil by Brian Davies (review)

473 BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil. By BRIAN DAVIES. New York: Oxford University Press,2011.Pp.192. $30.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-19-9790906 . The usually respectable job in philosophy of defending the goodness of God in the face of evil has fallen on hard times. Atheist philosophers have dismissed the very intelligibility of such a project; theist-friendly philosophers such as D. Z. Phillips, Marilyn McCord Adams, and David Burrell question whether the god defended is the God in whom anyone believes. Brian Davies’s writings on this question, such as his book The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (2006) would place him in this latter group. Davies, like others, draws on the thought of Thomas Aquinas in presenting his alternative to the traditional formulation of the problem of evil. Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil is Davies’s effort to present a systematic and comprehensive account of Thomas’s understanding of God and associated doctrines as they pertain to the question of evil. The body of this book is addressed to readers familiar with the typical philosophical formulation of the problem of evil, but unfamiliar with the foundations and details of Thomas’s own thought. Scholars who work in Thomas’s thought will already be familiar with much of this material, but may be challenged by the conclusions Davies draws. Those already familiar with Davies’s reading of Thomas will further benefit from the substantial comment and dialogue the author incorporates into the endnotes, where he raises important questions worthy of further exploration. Chapter 1 situates the thought of Thomas Aquinas in relation to the contemporary philosophical discussion of the problem of evil. The fact of evil has led some (Hume, Mackie, and Rowe) to reject the existence of God as unlikely or logically impossible; others (Plantinga, Swinburne, and Hick) rise to God’s defense. Rather than proposing to insert Thomas into this debate, Davies instead states, “In a serious sense, however, Aquinas has nothing to say on this topic. I mean that he never offers a stand-alone discussion of what contemporary philosophers have come to call the problem of evil” (6). Thomas is up to something else entirely. Chapter 2 summarizes current understandings of Thomas as a theologian and as a philosopher. Davies affirms that Thomas is primarily a theologian, but defends him as a figure of legitimate interest for philosophers on the question of God in relation to evil. In contrast to contemporary approaches to the “problem BOOK REVIEWS 474 of evil,” Thomas does not reason through an explanation of how a generically benevolent and omnipotent God could be imagined as justly causing or permitting evil. Instead, Thomas employs a coherent metaphysics to explain how Christians who believe in God through faith can understand evil that is suffered and done, and how God redeems them from that evil through Christ as God incarnate. In this respect, Davies shows Thomas’s argument to be philosophically respectable, but unapologetically theological. Chapters 3 and 4 introduce the building blocks that Davies will employ to explain Thomas’s understanding of God and evil. These chapters provide a basic explanation of Thomas’s thought, but situate his teaching in terms best suited to a reader familiar with current philosophical thought. Thus chapter 3 illustrates Thomas’s understanding of essence, substance, accidental form, being, and causation with rather basic examples, but also engages C. J. F. Williams and David Hume as interlocutors. Chapter 4 introduces a basic account of Thomas’s understanding of goodness as perfection and badness as privation, but integrates Peter Geach’s distinction between logically attributive and logically predicative adjectives to clarify how Thomas does not regard good, or evil, as a common property shared by all things so designated. Upon those basic metaphysical building blocks, chapter 5 carefully constructs Thomas’s understanding of God as creator. Creation does revealsomething about God as its cause, but of greater significance for addressing the problem of evil is what Thomas regards as limitations to what humans can understand and say about God. Davies warns about the distortions introduced when God is imagined as just another being operating in the universe as all other...