Donald Dwight Evans (September 21, 1927 – January 5, 2018) was a Canadian educator, psychotherapist, and spiritual counsellor.
Born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Evans obtained a B.A.
In his early work, his ‘’The Logic of Self-Involvement’’ (1963), Evans finds the meaning of religion within language.
The prominent idea is that both believers and non-believers grieve and rebel against suffering.
To explain this term, Evans gives two fictional atheists--Dostoievsky‘s Ivan Karamazov and Camus‘s Dr. Bernard Rieux--as examples of those whose “compassion is compounded with a sense of outrage and revulsion that nature and men should inflict mental and physical torture on human beings.” Evans also quotes D. M. Mackinnon‘s ‘’Christian Faith and Communist Faith’’ (1953) “the man who revolts, determined somehow to affirm in this most desperate situation that God did not so make the world, is met by the mystery of God’s own revolt against the world He made.” According to Evans, a belief in a God of ‘’’indignant compassion’’’ means a belief in a God who suffers, which is what Bonhoeffer illustrates when—during his incarceration in a Nazi prison—he wrote “Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.” [4] The purpose of philosophical and religious reflection is to help us lead good livesLogic of Self-involvement: A Philosophical Study of Everyday Language with Special Reference to the Christian Use of Language about God as Creator, 1963, SCM Press, In Series edited by Ian Ramsey and John McIntyre