William L. Rowe
Encyclopedia
William Leonard Rowe is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

 who specialises in the philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...

. His work has played a leading role in the "remarkable revival of analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...

 of religion since the 1970s". He is most notable for his formulation of the evidential argument from evil.

Background

According to Rowe, he became an evangelical Christian during his teenage years and planned to become a minister, eventually enrolling at the Detroit Bible Institute for his collegiate education. He later transferred to Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Wayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and...

.

After his graduation from Wayne State, Rowe began his post-graduate education at the Chicago Theological Seminary
Chicago Theological Seminary
The Chicago Theological Seminary is a seminary of the United Church of Christ. It prepares women and men for leadership in the church and society through Master of Divinity , Master of Arts in Religious Studies , Master of Sacred Theology , Doctor of Ministry , and Doctor of Philosophy programs...

 (CTS). He reports that it was at this time he began to take a more critical look at the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, learn about its origins and meet theologians who, unlike himself, did not have a fundamentalist perspective. The result was that his own fundamentalism began to wane.

He received a Master of Divinity
Master of Divinity
In the academic study of theology, the Master of Divinity is the first professional degree of the pastoral profession in North America...

 degree from CTS, and then went on to pursue a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 from the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

. He completed his doctorate in 1962, taught briefly at the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

 and later that year, joined the faculty of Purdue University.

Rowe has described his conversion from Christian fundamentalist to, ultimately, an atheist as a gradual process, resulting from "the lack of experiences and evidence sufficient to sustain my religious life and my religious convictions." He has said that his examination of the origins of the Bible caused him to doubt its being divine in nature, and that he then began to look and pray for signs of the existence of God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....

. "But in the end, I had no more sense of the presence of God than I had before my [evangelical] conversion experience. So, it was the absence of religious experiences of the appropriate kind that . . . left me free to seriously explore the grounds for disbelief," Rowe has said.

Friendly atheism

Rowe introduced the concept of a "friendly atheist" in his classic paper on the argument from evil. A friendly atheist is a person who accepts that some theists are justified in believing in God, even if it is the case that God doesn't exist. This view is criticized by atheist philosopher Michael Martin
Michael Martin (philosopher)
Michael L. Martin is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at Boston University. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1962....

. One consequence of Rowe's philosophical friendliness is his adherence to the principle of charity
Principle of charity
In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity requires interpreting a speaker's statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation...

. He has published in defense of theistic arguments, and is even considered a supporter of the cosmological argument
Cosmological argument
The cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of a First Cause to the universe, and by extension is often used as an argument for the existence of an "unconditioned" or "supreme" being, usually then identified as God...

.

Influential papers

  • “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335–41. Reprinted in The Evidential Argument from Evil. Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996.

  • "The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look." The Evidential Argument from Evil. Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Books

  • The Cosmological Argument. Princeton University Press, 1975. ISBN 0823218856.
  • Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction. Wadsworth Publishing, 1978. ISBN 0495007250.
  • Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality. Cornell University Press, 1991. ISBN 0801425573.
  • Can God Be Free? Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0199204128.

About his work

  • Trakakis, Nick. The God Beyond Belief: In Defence of William Rowe's Evidential Argument from Evil. Springer, 2007. ISBN 978-1-4020-5144-9.
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