Authored by: Thrasymachus.

Preliminaries

Beatrice:          What do you think the problem of evil can accomplish? Can it argue someone out of their faith?

Adam:             I think so. People do lose their faith, and evil is a common reason why. It isn’t always argued or reasoned: I don’t think people are carefully constructing inductive arguments when they ask why God let their child die. Evil might subvert or damage one’s relationship with god: you might hate god, or believe that he hates you. This doesn’t make sense if God exists as advertised by religion: he hasn’t (and can’t) do anything to warrant hatred, and loves us all.

But whether there is a good argument matters. If evil doesn’t really suggest Atheism[1], then those who renounce God in the face of evil are making a tragic error. But if it does, perhaps we should make a more sober conclusion: instead of a malicious or uncaring god, perhaps there isn’t one at all. Perhaps we live unsupervised by a caring creator, and so evil is wholly expected: the world was never made to make life good for us.

Beatrice:          What do you mean by ‘good argument’? That any reasonable person aware of it must accept its conclusion? That it would be decisive for an ‘ideal’ agnostic?[2]

Adam:             Neither. I can’t think of any argument that would persuade everyone who is reasonable. And although an ideal agnostic standard is closer to the mark, I don’t think it is very helpful here – unlike some more arcane fields of philosophy, I think everyone has prior commitments and intuitions about God.

So I’d want something like the following: A good argument is one that can change a rational person’s degree of belief. A reasonable person, after considering the premises and the inferences of the argument being offered, adjusts their confidence in the conclusion.

Invalid arguments are never good. But probably unsound arguments might be. Even if a given premise of an argument is believed to be probably false, it might still undermine great confidence in the opposite of its conclusion. If you were certain of X, but only pretty sure that Y, then being presented a valid argument that X iff Y, then perhaps you shouldn’t be certain of X, but only pretty sure, like you are of Y.

Beatrice:          Perhaps, but you might do the opposite. On realizing X iff Y, and that you are certain of X, why not conclude that, in fact, you should be certain of Y too? That might be reasonable – yet it would mean this isn’t a good argument: they’re still certain of X. Yet in principle any argument can be ‘turned around’ and played in reverse to deny the premises used in a ‘Moorean shift’. So are there no good arguments?

Adam:                         There are perhaps two degrees of belief at work here: you’re actual likelihood assessment, and your confidence in that likelihood assessment. I may believe something is as likely as not because of long and bitter enquiry, or through simple ignorance – and it would take a lot more argumentative might to shift the former P ~ 0.5 than the latter.

So you might need a suite of arguments: if I thought, when showing X iff Y to get someone to be uncertain of X instead of certain of Y there was a risk they’d reinforce their priors, I might want need other arguments to close off this option – separate reasons why you shouldn’t be certain of Y.

Beatrice:          Similar difficulties apply when trying to provide these reasons for why Y shouldn’t be considered certain – perhaps I might be inclined to reverse that argument too. That doesn’t seem an unrealistic prospect for real arguments like the Argument from Evil: it touches on lots of side concerns about ethics, free will, divine foreknowledge, and so on. All of these have a plethora of different positions – all held, I imagine, by pretty reasonable people. These in turn may draw their credence from still more beliefs, and so on. To get someone to accept the Argument from Evil might require you to transform their entire web of beliefs from the locus of one argument.

Adam:                         I don’t quite agree. You are right that I am faced with lots of different webs of belief to negotiate, but I don’t need to offer arguments for every single remotely relevant belief. I might argue that a given belief doesn’t matter either way; the argument still works whether it is Z or not-Z. Or I might offer parallel arguments, one for if Z, and one for if not-Z (or for all the alternative reasonable positions if it isn’t yes or no) for the conclusion I am after.

That’s hard, but no one wants the problem of evil to be successful with some prior beliefs, but not with others; they want it to be shown that evil is good evidence or not regardless of the variation in prior beliefs sensible people may have. I think some issues cannot be side-stepped (for example, the issue of free-will) but many can.

Beatrice:          Fine. But even if an argument has persuasive power, that needn’t change someone’s mine. Even if evil does provide evidence against God, other concerns might give stronger evidence in favour.

Even if we can see that God probably doesn’t exist, then that isn’t necessarily important. I don’t think many people believe in God through evidentialist grounds – it means more than that. Likewise, I don’t think probability assignments have all that much to do with the religious form of life. Even if I thought God was unlikely, I might believe in him out of the hope he was there.[3]

Adam:             I agree with you. Even if evil does constitute evidence against God it may still be the cumulative case for Theism over Atheism is decisive. When considering multiple arguments, the picture I’ve given above becomes even more complicated. But evil is a better place to start than most: it is a common reason why people don’t believe, and ‘hits you in the gut’ a way more metaphysical concerns with natural a/theology lack.

I also agree to your second point: one needn’t believe that God probably exists to have faith in him – so for these people, God’s probability is moot. Yet I think it can inform doxastic attitudes: if you think that a world without God isn’t that bad, then you might consider having faith in God similar to hoping that you’ll receive a fortune: you might, if asked, accept that it would be good, but this won’t motivate the sort of committed hope which could resemble a ‘living faith’.

Beatrice:          Life might be wonderful for you, but what about everyone else? If God doesn’t exist, then many people – often those who form ‘case studies’ of the problem of evil – have lives that are horrendous. Whatever goods in their lives are not only outweighed but defeated by the evils they suffered.[4] So perhaps hope for them should motivate faith.

Adam:                         Pace universalism, Theists don’t hope for this either – many that live awful lives will lose out post-mortem too.[5] Perhaps whatever account they offer is still better than likely oblivion, but it doesn’t seem very hopeful to me.

Why not a universalist? Because I think it is too remote a possibility to be worth hoping for. Like me magically becoming rich, it is something that I would like, and something that is for all we know possible, but it seems a waste of time to bother entertaining hope that it will happen. So too a universalist God, if the argument from evil works as well as I think it does.

Beatrice:          Fine. So what is the argument?

Evil:

Adam:             Consider:

1)    If God exists, there are no examples of pointless evil.

2)    There are cases of pointless evil.

3)    God does not exist.[6]

‘Pointless’ means without justification. A gratuitous evil is not one that is necessary, in whatever sense, for an outweighing good.[7]

This is the core of the problem of evil. It’s surely a valid argument. I think it is basically sound as well. We don’t know for certain that there are pointless evils, but it’s pretty damn likely given the lots of apparently pointless evils that some are pointless.

Beatrice:          I know most of the criticism hinges on (2), or the evidential premise, but I have doubts about the theological premise as well. I think there may be cases where God would permit a particular case of evil, not because it itself locally permits a greater good, but that permission of that evil might be globally necessary, in whatever sense. Perhaps God must permit a certain number of horrendously evil events to occur such that we realize our fallen nature, but there are no particular events specified.[8]

This is similar to other principles that might ‘tie god’s hands’. Perhaps God cannot stop a young child being raped and murdered because he must maintain a world of moral choices, or perhaps he must allow her to drown because he cannot allow massive irregularities of the laws of nature. This gives a Theist a lot of latitude: defences, along these lines, can be vague.

Adam:             I agree with this sort of vagueness, but there still must be global justification, even if local explanations are lacking. But I wouldn’t agree with the hypothesis that there is no minimum: even if no explanation can be demanded for why this child as opposed to that, but one can be for how many children in total. Perhaps to some extent this is out of his hands, but he must pick the best strategy to minimize this global evil.[9]

I agree such concerns are useful in local evil. A valid defence to a particular charge isn’t why that child suffered, but that some children needed to – and if so, then why not that one? I am happy to argue against candidates of such defences, should the need arise.

Given how we’ve alluded to case studies and suffering children, here’s an example from recent news – if I’ve mistaken some the details, I hope you’ll agree that evils like this can and do occur.

The Puttick family was, by all accounts, an idyllic one. Neil and Kazumi were devoted to each other and their newborn son, Sam. One friend of the family said: “if you could bottle up a perfect marriage, theirs would be it.”

They were involved in a car accident in 2005. Kazumi’s legs and pelvis were broken. Sam’s spine was severed at the neck – he would have died were it not for two doctors who stopped to help. On being rushed to hospital, the parents were told that Sam’s injuries were catastrophic. Neil was defiant:

“… I believe in my heart the doctors are wrong and he will win. I believe God is with us and Sam will walk, talk and breathe again.

He was a miracle when he came to us, it was a miracle when he survived the crash and it will be a miracle when he recovers. These things do happen and they will happen to Sam.”

Sam survived, and flourished. Both Neil and Kazumi quit their jobs to devote their time to looking after Sam and raising the money necessary for his care. The wider community helped out too with sponsored events. They also sent pictures of themselves from all over the world holding cards with ‘Hi Sam!’, which Sam enjoyed immensely. Given all of this, perhaps the evil of Sam’s injury was outweighed (or even defeated) by all of these goods.

Sadly, that isn’t the end of the story. At the age of five Sam fell ill with meningitis, and it became clear there was no hope of survival. Neil and Kazumi took Sam home, and he died soon afterwards. His parents put Sam’s body in a rucksack, and filled another one with his toys. They carried both of these to the cliffs at Beachy head. Beachy head is a suicide hot-spot: a Chaplaincy has been set up there solely to try and prevent suicides. Yet neither they nor any passers-by saw Neil and Kazumi. They threw themselves to their deaths.

The point of this story is not to give other another ‘theodicial nasty’, but rather to point out the usual sub-categorizations (‘natural evil’, ‘moral evil’) aren’t always clear, and aren’t always useful. It also brings into stark relief some of the harder problems with the usual theodicies

Beatrice:          This is horrific. But what are these ‘harder problems’ why couldn’t one try and offer accounts for the natural and moral evil involved in events like these?

Adam:                          Take moral evil. The usual discussions of moral evil involve what I call deliberate moral evil: someone explicitly intends to harm someone else. An example would be van Inwagen’s example of “The Mutilation”, the true story of a woman who was raped, beaten, and both arms severed at the elbow, or Rowe’s case of “Sue”, where a young child was raped and killed.[10] Examples like these are picked to provide the ‘toughest case’ a free will defence needs to answer – if it works for them, perhaps it can work elsewhere.

Yet I think ‘Radical evils’ – to use Arendt’s phrase – aren’t the hardest ones for Theists to account for – such profound deliberate evils fit well with a Theistic account of mankind’s nature.[11] The hardest ones are cases where the choices leading to the moral evil are far less significant than the evil itself. Suppose that a Doctor – if only he knew that Sam Puttick had meningitis – could have stopped the infection before it got out of control. Or that perhaps, if he were an incredibly good Doctor he would have made the diagnosis in time, but as he was only a good Doctor he did not. There seem lots of instances where God could have gently guided people’s morally-irrelevant decisions towards the good. God might have to allow evil things to happen when people will the wrong, but why allow evil things to happen when people will the good?[12]

Beatrice:          This ties into global concerns I suggested earlier. Perhaps there are certain ‘freedom’ thresholds that God needs to keep in order to preserve a moral world, a Vale of soul-making, or something like this?

Adam:             But these ‘choices’ have no moral bearing – so why should God protect them? Surely God would want to facilitate good acts wherever possible by this ‘guidance’.

Beatrice:          Who says he doesn’t? Such ‘commonplace miracles’ are mentioned often in the lives of believers.

Adam:                         Perhaps, but what about these instances of ‘missed providence?’ What thresholds need to be observed for these morally irrelevant choices: why can’t God offer a guiding hand all the time?

Beatrice:          What about a threshold of mystery? Maybe if God did guide us too much we’d begin to wonder at all these little coincidences, why providence always favoured us.

Adam:             We seem to be going in a circle – you said a minute ago that God really did guide us so much that some of us (albeit believers) twig that he’s at work in these ‘commonplace miracles’. Besides, Theism – at least the Theism of world religions – entails commitment to the idea that God does get intervene drastically: consider the lives of Jesus or Muhammad. If he’s willing to do that, what plausible excuse does he have to do something far more subtle?

Of course, all of these leads to the problem of hiddenness – that, actually, God being mysterious and apart is exactly what we shouldn’t expect on Theism.[13] To appeal to it as a solution to evil seems to be avoiding one monster by throwing oneself down the throat of another.

This concern ramifies elsewhere: after all, the precipitating cause of the Puttick tragedy was a natural evil – meningitis. Now, I suspect you will offer some defence of natural evil on the need for having a regular order of the natural world.

Beatrice:          Partly. I also find it strange when Atheists are so confident in suggesting adjustments to the laws of nature – that we all be unable to be bodily harmed, say – as definite improvements. I have little idea what the world would be like under radically different natural laws, if you’ll excuse the term.

Adam:             It is better to focus on fairly minor changes to natural laws, especially those where we can easily imagine what the world would be like, for example a world without HIV or Polio. If we imagine an ‘evil landscape’ or phase-space, it may well be that far away from our location on this evil landscapes that there are minima lower than ours – but it’s hard for us to assess worlds so far from our own. However, if I only want to show our world has some pointless evil, then showing a local minimum nearby would be sufficient.

But the Puttick’s point to another problem: that the world doesn’t need to be actually regular. It just needs to appear regular. So it seems clear God could have simply prevented Sam Puttick from getting ill whilst still keeping up appearances of regularity and order. It isn’t like people would wonder “isn’t it strange Sam didn’t die of meningitis when he was five? That’s terribly irregular.”

Beatrice:          Two concerns. One: why not say that genuinely regular worlds are better than apparently regular worlds, in a similar way to genuinely living is better than plugging yourself into an experience machine? Two: What about the argument that there wouldn’t be a minimum to suffering, because if God stopped this instance of suffering, he should have stopped that one too, then another, and then we end up removing all the evil which was serving a purpose in the first place?

Adam:                         I think your first argument will struggle. The Theistic god regularly breaks the natural order, so you need a plausible account to justify these to avoid allegations of special pleading. I also don’t see the strength of the analogy with the experience machine: we don’t hook ourselves up because we want genuine experiences, but I don’t see the appeal of living in a world with genuinely regular laws over one with apparently regular laws. After all, for all I know, the laws aren’t regular anyway.

For the second concern, consider the world has so much evil to achieve a certain threshold. Surely we can rearrange this: so the meningitis that got Sam could have affected someone who would survive. You may then say your argument applies just as well to this: because if we rearranged this evil, why not that evil and end up with an evil being rationally arranged. Yet this isn’t true – there would be a global reason why he couldn’t eliminate all evils. We can know that your threshold concern doesn’t apply – simply because we realize that we would be none the wiser about God’s intervention in Sam’s case than if he didn’t. So we know by inspection we aren’t at the minimum threshold.

Beatrice:          Is it really as simple as that? The minimum threshold must be vague – we can’t lie ‘on the limit’, because that itself could be taken to show God’s action in the world.

Adam:                         I think you might be confusing me unnecessarily. If we grant God requires some mystery in his action in the world as justification for great natural evils. I think Sam’s case is sufficient to knock that over – if it never happened, we wouldn’t lose any of this mystery. It’s an open question how many such evils God could remove without violating this global concern, but it’s pretty clear there’s at least one.

There is a general worry here too. If you expand this idea of mystery too far – that God must make it appear that he doesn’t exist, then you might end up with a position like “God exists, but he makes the world looks like he doesn’t”. If you do, why shouldn’t someone turn around and say “Then I reject this idea in the same stroke as I do external world scepticism”?

Beatrice:          No, I see the problem. I think you are right about explanations for evil being much harder than I might hope. There are two worries: one is that the concerns a Theist offers simply don’t ‘cut it’. A theist might not agree, but I confess I am tempted to agree with Ivan Karamazov when he says free will concerns are never enough to justify the suffering of an innocent child.[14]

The second problem, which we’ve talked about, is instrumental. Even if free will, or soul making or similar are valid concerns, God seems to have done a cack-handed job of realizing them – that we can see that someone interested in free will, or soul making, or whatever, could do it better. I see that you are right in that looking at evils together, how evils can engender or amplify each other presents difficulties for the Theist.

Adam:             The usual dialectical moves in the problem of evil involve the Atheologian cutting out whole classes of evil to side-step potential theodicies. So you avoid moral evil to dodge the free will defence, and you usually end up with instances of animal suffering as the toughest problem for Theists to provide explanations for.

This approach is, to my mind, misguided: it concedes far too much ground, and ignores all the interactions which, to my mind, make evil so difficult. The cases of the Putticks, I think, is so awful precisely because of how it happened despite the moral virtues of all involved (worse, perhaps it happened because of these moral virtues: perhaps, if Sam and Kazumi were not such utterly devoted parents, they might still be alive today).

This discussion kicked-off because I wanted to justify premise (2) in my argument: that there are pointless evils. Given the formidable difficulties I’ve pointed out by trying to show it likely there are ‘points’ to the evils we observe. I think it is fair to say (2) is probably (or almost certainly) true. Given (1), or something in the neighbourhood or (1) is also true, would you be willing adjust your likelihood of god downwards?

Beatrice:           Evil already ‘adjusts it downwards’, in whatever sense. However, what you’ve said about scepticism reminded me of something. I think I might have let you go too far in your argument. I think we should be a bit more sceptical.

Appearance

Beatrice:          I think there might be another way to think about evil. We have both been groping around some of the difficulties and trying to work out how it falls together. I don’t think we are in any position at all to figure out the problem of evil. It might look like some evil is unjustified, but that is only in the same way that a patch of grass seems not to have insects on when we view it from a skyscraper. We do not satisfy the Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access (CORNEA for short).

Wykstra put it something like this:[15]

“For X to say ‘it appears that P’, it must be reasonable for them to believe, if it were not-P, it would appear otherwise.’

In a similar way, Evil’s might appear pointless, but on further reflection we should see that we are in the skyscraper case. If so, then the rest of the discussion on evil doesn’t matter: instead of getting God’s acquittal, we’ve found out our verdict is unsafe.

Adam:             It’s hard to see, if we should doubt the appearance of pointless evil, what else we should doubt as well. How about this:

M)        Suppose you were able to stop Neil and Kazumi Puttick committing suicide. If God exists, then it’s likely that he sees great goods beyond our ken. Thus, although it might appear that stopping these people committing suicide is good, in fact we aren’t in a position of epistemic access to say this.

Yet this is strange.[16]

Beatrice:          Why should I be committed to something like this? I only need to be sceptical about how god must interact with the moral world.

Adam:             What would distinguish this from simply appealing to your reasons for Theism (whatever they may be) to rebut the argument from evil: “Sure, it appears that there are instances of pointless suffering, but I think different rules apply to God.”

And I think, if not this, you are committed to different rules. If the world is so morally obscure such that only God can fathom out the right thing to do. Yet in our day-to-day lives he ensures we can trust our faculties for the bulk of our decision making. That seems pretty ad-hoc to me.

Beatrice:          What’s the problem? Why not say that – but for the grace of God – we have no hope of understanding our moral world. This isn’t (at least for me) an ad hoc adjustment. It fits in quite nicely with the noetic effects of sin.

Adam:                         Sure, but these seem extensions to the Theistic hypothesis, and although they purchase immunity from disconfirming evidence, but at the risk of making the conjunction of (Theism & Extension) implausible – it becomes ‘top heavy’.[17] This worry I think applies if you make further moves: for example, why can’t, if there’s evil which God must permit for reasons beyond our ken, could God not give us some sense of assurance that it is all for the best? You might say ‘Why not apply CORNEA to this, too?’ but I think people are at liberty to think that God permits evils for reasons beyond our ken, and in a bulk of theses cases must, also for reasons beyond our ken not assure of that he is permitting these evils for reasons beyond our ken seems, to me, flatly ridiculous. It doesn’t get off the ground as an explanatory hypothesis, and I can only urge you to think the same.

I think we can argue that moral obscurity is implausible by its own merits. The argument in favour relies on a comparative judgement – God, if he exists, would possess intellectual and moral capacity vastly in excess of our own. Yet this isn’t enough to get to the conclusion, which is that we aren’t in a position to trust moral appearances.

Analogies offered by William Alston for sceptical theism can be co-opted to make this point clearer.[18] He points to examples like chess grandmasters to laymen, physics professors to students, or parents to children suggest instances where the former can’t explain their reasons to the latter (‘Why did you move the pawn there?’ ‘How did you derive that?’ ‘Why can’t we eat?’) yet their beliefs or behaviours being wholly reasonable. So here’s the problem – focus on the chess example:

Even if a layperson can’t dissect out optimal play or a complicated mid-game scenario, he might be able to do something simple like assess whether black is in checkmate. He might be able to work out less categorical circumstances: if white has got a pawn and black all his pieces, then they’d be surely reasonable to think ‘black is winning’. Now, a grandmaster can be more confident that ‘black is winning’, and perhaps supply many more reasons why black is in fact winning, but that still doesn’t mean our layperson isn’t in a position of epistemic access. We don’t show that by pointing to people who have far better access than us. We show the situation at hand is inaccessible.

Why believe that for day-to-day ethical scenarios? Given most conceptions of normative ethics, we are able to morally assess states of affairs somewhat competently. Moreover, these theories tend to be axiologically complete – we don’t hold open the door for other things being good besides what we specify, so qualities of ‘goods beyond our ken’ seem implausible. Instances of ‘goods beyond our ken’ with qualities we already know are plausible, but, on the bulk of normative theory, this isn’t so common as to make appearances untrustworthy. It might be harder to assess things like justification, greater goods and other concerns in the problem of evil, but it still remains surely accessible.

Of course, some moral questions might really be inaccessible – but the problem of evil looks at cases where it seems clear that something is pointlessly evil. Of course, it might be that all the apparent evils we observe aren’t evil at all. But I never claimed to be infallible. Besides, given there are lots of apparently gratuitous evils, it seems a pretty safe bet that at least some of these are gratuitous. CORNEA needs to convince us that the appearances of pointlessness give no reason to think it is pointless because we aren’t in a position of epistemic access. But we’ve seen believing that we have access (even if God’s is far better) is highly plausible. So CORNEA collapses – not because of wider conceptually difficulties, but because it simply doesn’t apply to the circumstances. We aren’t ‘on a skyscraper’ regarding pointless evil. We’re in the thick of it.

Beatrice:          Then perhaps theodicy has a role after all: to try and ‘muddy the waters’ of what appears to be. If one can be convinced that the appearances aren’t as clear as one thinks – that it is more like dissecting a complicated midgame than seeing if you’re in check, then assumedly sceptical Theism is back in the game.

Adam:                         Yes, if. Concerns of soul-making or free will or regularity do ‘muddy the waters’. Yet it needs to be made entirely opaque for a sceptical defence to work. Perhaps we do see through a glass darkly, but the image is clear enough to me.

REFERENCES:

Adams, Marilyn M. (2006). Christ and Horrors, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Adams, Robert M. (1972) “Must God Create the Best?” Philosophical review, 81(3): 317-332

Alston, William P. (1996) “Some (Temporarily) Final thoughts on the Evidential Argument from Evil,” In Howard-Snyder (ed.) The Evidential Problem of Evil. Bloomington. Indiana University Press.

Almeida, Michael J and Oppy, G. (2003) “Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments from Evil,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81: 496–516.

Chrisholm, Roderick M. (1968) “The Defeat of Good and Evil,”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 42: 21–38

Draper, Paul. (1989). “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists,” Noûs, 23: 331-350

Hasker, W. (2008). The Triumph of God over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering, Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Howard-Snyder, Frances. (1994) “How an Unsurpassable Being Can Create a Surpassable world.” Faith and Philosophy 11: 260-268

Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Moser, Paul K. (2001) Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, New York: Cambridge University Press

van Inwagen, Peter (2006) The Problem of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press

van Inwagen, Peter (1991) The Problem of Evil, The Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence. Philosophical perspectives, 5: 135-165.

Murray, Michael J. (1993) “Coercion and the Hiddenness of God,”

Pojman, Louis P. (1991) “Faith, Doubt and Hope” in Contemporary Classics in Philosophy of Religion, eds. Ann Loades and Loyal Rue, Open Court pp. 183-207

Rowe, William L. (1979). “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 16: 335-41

Rowe, William L. (1984) “Evil and the Theistic Hypothesis: A response to Wykstra” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 16: 95-100

Rowe, William L. (1996). “The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look,” in Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, 262-85.

Rowe, William L. (2006). “Friendly Atheism, Skeptical Theism, and the Problem of Evil,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 59: 79-92

Russell, Bruce and Wykstra, Stephen J. (1988) “The ‘Inductive’ Argument from Evil: A Dialogue” Philosophical Topics, 16(2): 133-160

Schellenberg, John R. (2005) “The hiddenness argument revisisted,” [two essays] Religious studies, 41:201-215 and 287-303.

Schellenberg, John R. (1993) Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Weilenberg, Erik J (forthcoming) “Skeptical Theism and Divine Lies” Religious Studies

Wykstra, Stephen J. (1984). “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of `Appearances’.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 16

Wykstra, Stephen J. (2009). “CORNEA (1984 – 2009) In Memoriam?” Presentation at the 18th Baylor Philosophy of Religion Conference. Available online at:

Wykstra, Stephen J. (2007): “Cornea, Carnap, and Current Closure Befuddlement” in Faith and Philosophy 24:1 88.

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[1] “Atheism”, here, will always refer to the explicit affirmation that there is exists no omnipotent, morally perfect being.

[2] See van Inwagen (2006) Ch. 2 for an example of this criterion of ‘philosophical success’

[3] Pascal’s wager is a common argument, but here rational self-interest is not being appealed to, but rather “if God does not exist, life might not be splendid”. See Pojman (1991)

[4] ‘Defeat’ is being used in a manner after Chrisholm (1968). Evils and Goods can be outweighed by greater goods or evils. They are only defeated if that evil or good is a necessary part of the greater whole that is good or evil.

[5] This concern can explicitly motivate commitment to universalism. See (M. Adams 1999) p229-230

“Traditional doctrines of hell go beyond failure to hatred and cruelty by imagining a God Who not only acquiesces in creaturely rebellion and dysfunction but either directly organizes or intentionally “outsources” a concentration camp (of which Auschwitz and Soviet gulags are pale imitations) to make sure some creatures’ lives are permanently deprived of positive meaning.”

[6] Formations of the ‘evidential problem of evil’ are on these lines, although they might be expressed in probabilistic or Bayesian idiom (see Draper (1989)). Here, I use Rowe’s formulation, expressed first in Rowe (1979)

[7] The concept of ‘gratuitous evil’ is difficult, but will not be discussed here.

[8] van Inwagen (2006, 1991) and Hasker (2008) are two who employ this approach.

[9] Two problems: Robert Adam’s has suggested that God is ‘within is rights’ not to minimize evil (R. Adams 1972). It is also commonly urged that God cannot minimize evil, because there simply is no minimum: God is not able to do it in a similar way that he can’t tell us the last integer (See Howard-Snyder and Howard Snyder (1994)). I urge that even though God could add goods to a world without end, there is a limit to pointless evils – none. Thus (at least on this point) it is fair to demand god minimize evil.

[10] See Rowe (1979) and van Inwagen (2006) respectively.

[11] One might hope that evils like the mutilation or Sue’s murder are natural evils because those who committed them weren’t sane. Sadly, even if those evils really were done by madmen, it seems likely that at least some evils as horrific as them were done by people who were ‘in their right mind’.

[12] This point is developed, in part, from a fleeting mention in Russell and Wykstra (1988)

[13] For snapshots of the evolving discussion on the ‘Problem of divine hiddeness’, See Schellenberg (2005, 1993), Murray (1993), and Howard-Snyder and Moser (2001)

[14] See Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov, Ch. 5.

[15] After Wykstra (1984). Much like the original argument (which it was a response to) it can also be phrased in probabilistic idiom. Rowe (2006) and Wykstra (2009) give the two sides of this developing conversation.

[16] These reductios are a common response to sceptical Theism (of which Wykstra’s work is one branch). Besides arguing that it entails moral scepticism (Oppy and Almeida (2003)), it’s also been suggested that it leads to violations of epistemic closure (Wykstra 2007) and that Theists should not trust God’s revelation (Weilenberg forthcoming)

[17] This is the main objection Rowe deploys against sceptical Theism: that the ‘extension’ of moral obscurity isn’t plausible ‘by its own lights’, even if it purchases immunity from disconfirmation by apparent evil. See Rowe (1984)

[18] See Alston (1996)