We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Find out more

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $115.50

Format:
Hardback
208 pp.
156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199237272

Publication date:
August 2008

Imprint: OUP UK


Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering

Michael Murray

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.

Readership : Advanced students and scholars of philosophy of religion and theology

1. Problems Of and Explanations for Evil
2. Neo-Cartesianism
3. Animal Suffering and the Fall
4. Nobility, Flourishing, and Immortality: Animal Pain and Animal Well-Being
5. Natural Evil, Nomic Regularity, and Animal Suffering
6. Chaos, Order, and Evolution
7. Combining CD's

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

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.

There are no related titles available at this time.

Special Features

  • Gets to grips with an emotive challenge to religious belief
  • An issue of increasing importance which is rarely discussed in popular or scholarly works
  • A clearly structured study packed with original arguments