A Theodicy

Albert Taylor Bledsoe — West Point graduate, professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia, and later Assistant Secretary of War to the Confederate States — published A Theodicy in 1853 as a sustained American Protestant answer to the problem of evil.

Bledsoe holds that the existence of natural and moral evil is fully compatible with the existence of a holy, omnipotent, and benevolent God — and that the standard objections to this compatibility (Manichaean, necessitarian, determinist, depravity-based) all rest on confusions that can be cleared by careful philosophical and biblical reasoning. The argument is conducted in long dialogue with Leibniz, Jonathan Edwards, the Westminster Confession, John Stuart Mill, and the rising tide of mid-nineteenth-century philosophical naturalism.

This edition reproduces the standard public-domain text in full. A short editor's preface places the book in its biographical and intellectual context.