Paul Draper. <i>Atheism and the Problem of Evil</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). Pp. 1+182. $100.00 (Hbk) ISBN 9780192847164

Ever since his 1989 article 'Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists', Paul Draper has been making important contributions to the philosophy of religion.Prior to the publication of this book, however, it would have been difficult to construct a general picture of his overall defence of atheism, since his contributions are largely scattered throughout the literature in the form of isolated articles and book chapters.Thankfully, this is no longer the case.As his first book-length defence of atheism (decades in the making), Atheism and the Problem of Evil is a sweeping and punchy presentation of why he thinks God does not exist, all things considered.The central aim of the first chapter is to characterise the main target of the book: 'Core Theism'.Core Theism is the view that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and loving agent who created the cosmos for good reasons.Core Theism is distinct from Classical Theism since it does not build perfect rationality or moral perfection into the characterisation of God, but Draper thinks this is preferable and charitable because Classical Theism significantly lowers the initial probability of the theistic hypothesis.The chapter opens with a discussion of the meaning of 'atheism', 'theism', and 'God'.It then turns to what is the most interesting part of the chapter, a consideration of Perfect Being Theism and ontological arguments.Draper distinguishes between Hard and Soft Perfect Being Theism.The former says a being is perfect just in case it has every absolute perfection.The latter says a being is a perfect just in case it has every absolute perfection it is possible to have.Impossibility arguments attempt to show that a being cannot have all absolute perfections; and so that Hard Perfect Being Theism is false.The Soft Perfect Being Theist can avoid such arguments for, on their view, a perfect being need not have all absolute perfections, only as many as it is possible to have.There have been moves towards Soft Perfect Being Theism in recent years, but Draper offers some persuasive criticisms of this recent project.He also contends that Perfect Being Theists (of either variety) need an ontological argument to be justified in holding their view, but that these all fail.Indeed, he provocatively claims that a consensus regarding all modal ontological arguments -namely, that they all fail -may be soon within our reach.The second chapter considers inconsistency arguments.These are arguments that attempt to show that theism is either (1) internally inconsistent (impossibility arguments) or (2) externally inconsistent (logical arguments).The former claim that either some divine attribute is logically incoherent or that two or more attributes are logically incompatible.The latter claims that some known (or probable) fact about the world entails atheism.