Ada Agada

Clashing traditional theistic and limited God perspectives in African conceptions of God and the problem of evil have emerged in the fledgling field of African philosophy of religion. While the theistic perspective asserts that Africans conceive God in the Christian sense of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity, the limited God perspective rejects this claim. This project critically examines the premises of the two perspectives. It probes the African literature in traditional religion and philosophy to determine whether there are autochthonous African conceptions of God that attribute omnipotence and omniscience to the deity. The work seeks to determine the degree of compatibility of the amount of suffering in the world with the existence of the limited African God. Adopting the method of philosophical argumentation, the work demonstrates that the reality of evil and God’s limitedness indicate a tragic dimension of the world that only human moral agency can mitigate.