| This dissertation provides a comprehensive examination of the logic of Borden Parker Bowne's response to the problem of good and evil as an integral part of his personalistic theistic idealism. Bowne seeks to show that theories of knowing, of being and causality, and of values must be interrelated in any adequate solution of the problem of good and evil. Accordingly, for Bowne, the question: How we must think about the nature of God's goodness and the explanation of evil? is answered most coherently by considering (1) what experience means when the mind is conceived to be active in knowing; (2) what the order of things is most likely to be if it is known by active mind; and (3) what reality is most likely to be in relation to the mind's cognitive, moral, aesthetic, and religious interests and tendencies.; Hence, this dissertation traces particularly the epistemological, speculative, and ethical grounds upon which Bowne moves from his conception of the world-ground as personal to the world-ground as morally supportive of his religious conception of God as the object of love, trust, and worship. The dissertation evaluates the extent to which Bowne's melioristic solution unties the traditional "intellectual knot" of the problem of good and evil without modifying the religious attributes of the one perfect being.; Bowne, I conclude, shows with good warrant that to know (by reason, faith, will, conscience, emotion, and aspiration) that there is no inherent intractability in the nature of things does undergird the growth of the upper ranges of persons. For the so-called "imperfections" of the physical world can be viewed as instrumental to the upbuilding of persons. However, I suggest, Bowne does not take full advantage of his own interpretation of the "imperfections" of the physical world. Indeed, once we consider the speculative significance of freedom for the activity of living intelligence, we are also led to recognize its reliance in the physical world as a dependable, disinterested system of things. Seen within this larger teleological perspective, "excess evil" (e.g., an earthquake) has no inherent negative significance. In the last analysis, it is this melioristic interpretation that grounds the creative, theoretical, moral, and religious response of persons. |
