Skeptical Theism

Skeptical Theism Daniel Speak (Loyola Marymount University) (For T&T Clark Volume) Here is a natural thought: if there is a God roughly like the one envisioned by traditional theists (a maximally powerful and benevolent creator and sustainer of the universe, let’s say), then there is bound to be a wide epistemic gulf between human beings and this God. On the assumption that God exists, that is, we should expect the ordinary cognitive limitations of human beings to impose deep constraints upon what these human beings could come to understand about God and divine purposes in the created order. Further, this natural thought seems to be underwritten not by unwarranted overreach but rather by an attractive form of intellectual humility. Skeptical theism is a philosophically defensive posture that seeks to leverage this natural thought into a forceful response to particular versions of the argument from evil for atheism. Put tersely, the strategy is to show that such atheistic arguments fail to mind the cognitive gap when they insist on a confident judgment regarding the absence of reasons for divine permission of some evils. Thus, the skeptical theist is not skeptical about theism but instead about the ability of human beings to understand and appreciate the full panoply of reasons that God may have for allowing the horrors that our world clearly contains. Given its popularity among many contemporary philosophers of religion confronting the problem of evil, and given some vocal opposition to its popularity among others, the skeptical theistic strategy deserves particular attention in this volume. The central purpose of this entry, then, is to contextualize the defensive posture and explain its content and appeal. We will conclude, all too briefly, by recognizing some of the most important challenges facing the skeptical theistic position. Skeptical Theism in Context Doubt about the human ability fully (or even substantially) to grasp the intentions and machinations of God have a long and venerable tradition, with echoes of the prophet Isaiah reverberating through religious intellectual history: “’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways,’ declares the LORD. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” Isaiah 55:8-9 (NIV). Whether in God’s confrontation of Job from the whirlwind, in the impulse toward the via negativa of medieval theology (and beyond), in the broader skeptical elements of early modern thought, or in ordinary religious piety, it has not been difficult to uncover an intellectual respect for the vast difference between human beings and God— a vast difference taken to have profound epistemic implications. For treatment of some of this intellectual history, especially with regard to its import for skeptical theism, see Justin McBrayer, “Skeptical Theism: An Historical View,” in The History of Evil, Volume 6, Evil From the Mid-20th Century to Today, eds. Jerome Gellman, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro (New York: Routledge Press, 2018), 45-58. Presumably, it is also no accident that our sensitivity to these implications has been commonly piqued by our experience with various forms of innocent suffering. As a contemporary argumentative strategy, however, skeptical theism has sought to put these putative implications to work in a rather specific context—a context with which we need to familiarize ourselves before we are able to understand and appreciate the strategy itself. About 40 years ago, as logical versions of the argument from evil for atheism were being confronted by powerful objections, evidential versions of the argument from evil began to take root among analytic philosophers of religion. For appreciation of the logical problem of evil and the objections to it that ultimately provoked the development of evidential versions, see Chapter of 2 of Daniel Speak, The Problem of Evil (Malden: Polity Press, 2014). The central thought was this: even if the general existence of suboptimality cannot be shown to be strictly inconsistent with the existence of God, the kinds or amounts or distributions of suboptimality can nevertheless be shown to be strong evidence that God does not exist. William Rowe’s seminal article “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” can reasonably be taken to be the headwaters of the flow, from the later part of the last century up to the present day, of new efforts to demonstrate that the existence of evil in certain of its concrete forms counts against the existence of God even if it is does not render theism formally incoherent. William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 no. 4 (1979): 335. Though this influential essay introduced Rowe’s central strategy, it was redeveloped and redeployed in many others, giving us, in point of fact, a family of evidential arguments rather than a single canonical account. Still, given the strong family resemblances among them, it won’t do too much harm to our contextualization of the skeptical theistic response to treat Rowe’s contribution to the contemporary debate as single line of reasoning. Rowe’s argument is based on the supposed existence of what have come to be known as “gratuitous evils.” What makes an occurrence a gratuitous evil is, roughly, that it is an instance of intense suffering that makes no essential contribution to a greater good or to the obstruction of a worse evil. Put another way, the gratuitousness of an evil is a matter of its serving no necessary purpose that could function as a moral justification for its divine permission. If an evil is gratuitous, then, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being lacks a morally justifying reason for allowing it to occur. With this account in place, it is not hard to feel the force of the evidential argument from gratuitous evils which runs as follows: If God exists, there are no gratuitous evils. There are gratuitous evils Therefore, probably there is no such being as God. Why only “probably” in this conclusion about God’s existence? Because the support for premise 2, as we will soon see, is inductive. Thus, the conclusion will have to be probabilistic. The first premise is intuitively compelling. While a maximally good and powerful being might have to allow some evils, it is plausible that such a being would do so only with sufficient moral justification. If there is a sufficient moral justification for permitting a particular instance of evil, then it is, by definition, not a gratuitous one. Thus, we can be confident that there will be no gratuitous evils in a world overseen by God. Here it is worth marking that most critics of Rowe’s argument have accepted this theological premise, saving their complaints (as does the Skeptical Theist) for the second, empirical premise. Of course, not all critics of Rowe’s argument have accepted the theological premise. Peter van Inwagen, for example, has objected to it. See his The Problem of Evil (New York, Oxford University Press, 2006), especially pp. 98-112. Rowe motivates this second crucial premise by way of appeal to specific concrete cases. The two cases that have come to be nearly canonical are these: E1: A fawn is trapped in a forest fire, started by a random lightning strike. It is badly burned but is not immediately killed. Instead, the fawn lies in excruciating pain on the forest floor for a number of days until it finally succumbs to the trauma of its wounds. E2: A five-year-old girl in Flint, Michigan is brutally beaten, raped, and strangled to death by her mother’s boyfriend on New Year’s Day, 1986. E1 is an imaginative construction but E2 is based on an actual newspaper account. Rowe emphasizes that we have every reason to believe that cases like these are ubiquitous. How E1 and E2 are supposed to support Rowe’s claim that there are, indeed, gratuitous evils is crucial to our context for the Skeptical Theistic reply. This is because Rowe uses these concrete cases to support a kind of inductive strategy to get to the second premise of his argument. Notice that Rowe has carefully selected these cases in large part because of how extraordinarily implausible it would be to appeal to standard modes of theodicy to justify God’s permission of them. A free will theodicy, for example, seems to be a non-starter, both because the fawn’s situation doesn’t seem to involve any serious free will and because the boyfriend’s free will won’t strike us as nearly valuable enough to allow his horrendous actions. Similarly, a soul-making theodicy will seem to fall desperately flat because we are at a loss to see how this could be relevant to the fawn’s situation in E1 and because, again, whatever possibilities for soul-making that might exist in E2 simply do not seem weighty enough to justify the permission of the young girl’s suffering. Given these points, Rowe enjoins us to consider the following kind of inductive reasoning. When we think as hard as we can about what could justify God in permitting E1 and E2, we come up empty. We can’t come up with any good reasons that God could have for allowing these events to occur (again, holding fixed omnipotence and omnibenevolence). Further, from the fact that, try as we might, we can’t come up with any even prima facie and minimally plausible reasons for God to permit these horrors—and here’s the crucial step— we should inductively infer that that there probably are no such reasons. That is, Rowe urges us to make the following inference: From (A) We are unable to identify any morally justifying reasons for God’s permission of E1 and E2 Infer (B) There probably are no morally justifying reasons for God’s permission of E1 and E2. For ease of reference, we can call this inferential move from (A) to (B) Rowe’s Inference. And it should now be clear how Rowe comes to the second premise of his argument. After all, (B) is equivalent to this premise— since, if there are no morally justifying reasons for the permission of E1 and E2, then these evils are gratuitous in the relevant sense. Thus, the force of the second premise of Rowe’s argument turns essentially on whether Rowe’s Inference is a good one. And here we have reached the base soil of skeptical theism; because, at this ground level, what the skeptical theist is principally skeptical about is the legitimacy of Rowe’s Inference. Memorably, Stephen Wykstra has characterized Rowe’s crucial move as a form of “noseeum” reasoning, since the idea is that with such inferences we conclude that particular items are not present in virtue of the fact they have not been perceived. Wykstra tells us that this terminology comes from its use among U.S. Midwesterners to identify “tiny flies which, while having a painful bite, are so small you ‘no see um.’” See Stephen Wykstra, “Rowe’s Noseeum Arguments from Evil,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 126-150. We do not see them; therefore, they probably are not there. Further, we should be clear that there are, indeed, good noseeum inferences—cases in which it is perfectly legitimate to infer that something is not present from its not presenting itself to an observer. For example, we will have no serious complaint about a professor’s judgment that, in virtue of seeing no full-sized horse in her classroom, there is no full-sized horse in her classroom. Similarly, it seems quite reasonable to conclude that I have no further move to make in a game of tic-tac-toe on the basis of my seeing no further move that I can make. However, it is also clear that there are many cases of objectionable noseeum reasoning. The fact that the professor sees no germs in her classroom does not give her any reason to conclude that there are no germs. And the fact that I (a mere novice) do not see the strategic advantage a chess master has achieved by sacrificing her queen gives me no good reason to conclude that there is no such advantage. According to the skeptical theistic response to Rowe-style evidential arguments, then, the crucial question is whether Rowe’s Inference is a good bit of noseeum reasoning or a bad one. It is probably fairly clear why the skeptical theist is inclined to judge it to be a case of bad noseeum reasoning. When such reasoning is legitimate, as in the cases of the horse in the classroom and the move in tic-tac-toe, we are confident that the observer has what it takes, in the context, to succeed in identifying such things as horses and available moves in a simple game. That is, we confidently judge that the following is true of the observer: if the unseen object had been present, then it is very likely that the observer would have seen it. Or, to put it negatively, we judge it to be false that, had the object been present, appearances would have remained the same. When we move to the germs or chess move case, however, the parallel judgments do not seem at all reasonable. That is, we do not think that, had there in fact been germs in the classroom, the professor would very likely have seen them. And, given my chess limitations, it is very tempting to suspect that if the chess master did, in fact, have excellent strategic reasons for sacrificing her queen, things would look the same to me as they do in the case where there is no strategic advantage. In these cases, we do not think that the observers have what it takes to be properly discerning regarding the objects in question. To this point, the skeptical maneuver has been expressed as something of a negative impulse toward epistemic humility in this domain—an impulse that drives the skeptical theist to resist Rowe’s Inference. But we can do better than this, since skeptical theists have, in fact, attempted to specify their central claims and defend them in various ways worthy of note. The skeptical theist is not, after all, simply rejecting a particular claim but offering a positive thesis (or collection of theses) that she endorses. There have been a number of efforts to characterize this collection of theses but we can make a decent start by identifying the Skeptical Theist’s Claim To be clear, this purports to be the skeptical theist’s distinctively skeptical claim. Of course, the skeptical theist is also a theist and, therefore, also endorses the claim that God exists. thusly: STC: It is reasonable to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs that we know to be connected to evil events (like E1 and E2) are representative of the values of the states of affairs actually connected to these events. This formulation owes debts both to Mike Bergmann, “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, eds. Thomas Flint and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 374-399 and to Perry Hendricks, “Skeptical Theism Proved,” The Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6, No. 2 (2019): 264-74. If one has good grounds for accepting STC, one will also have good grounds for being suspicious of Rowe’s Inference. Justifying Skeptical Theism Do we have good reason to adopt skeptical theism? In particular, do we have good reason to accept the principle, STC, that we have characterized as the central distinctive claim of the skeptical theist? Strategies of justification here have been diverse. In fact, we have already had occasion to see the outlines of a couple of them in the context of our initial presentation. 2.1 Analogies, Limitations, Principles As our chess master example illustrates, appeals to analogy have played a crucial role in justifying Skeptical Theism. The parent analogy has been most common; but cases of special expertise are almost nearly as common. The idea here is clear enough. Every parent has had the experience of having to subject a child to a treatment or discipline the justification of which is beyond the capacity of the child fully (or even partially) to understand. Similarly, each of us has come to see, in some domain or other, that a scientific expert or strategic gaming genius or the like can have reasons for her actions that are beyond our local purview at a given time. To the degree, then, that—in relation to God—human beings are taken to be like young children in relation to a mature parent or like mere novices in relation to an expert, the central skeptical claim will get some traction. In a similar spirit, many skeptical theists have appealed directly to intuitions about human cognitive limitations. For a widely-repeated list of the kinds of limitations mentioned here, see William Alston, “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991), 29-67. In some cases, the focus here has been upon the boundaries of perspective, as in the case of the germs in the classroom. Human capacities may not be up to the task because the domain is too vast for them. In others, the focus is upon the complexities facing any human agent trying to make the kinds of judgments that Rowe-style reasoning requires us to make. In more pointed cases, philosophers have attempted to animate the skepticism by emphasizing specific potential limitations regarding, for example, our ability to make reliable modal judgments of the cosmic variety required by Rowe’s argument (for example, that it was possible for God to make a world that contained creatures like us but that did not also contain a long and bloody history of Darwinian predation) or about our ability to make reliable value judgments about the comparative value of possible worlds very different from the actual world (for example, that a world containing stable natural laws and the suffering ours contains is better than a world with less suffering and massive irregularities among the laws). The modal and moral skepticism glossed here is borrowed from Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil. Perhaps the most influential defenses of skeptical theism—defenses that also invoke a number of the considerations above— have attempted to show that doubt about Rowe’s inference is supported by some independently plausible epistemic principle. Stephen Wykstra, for example, has been defending some or another version of his CORNEA principle (Condition Of ReasoNable Epistemic Access) for more than three decades. Stephen Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance,’” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984), 73-93. According to this principle, roughly put, a person is entitled to infer that “there is no x” from the fact that she sees no x only if it is reasonable for this person to believe the following: if there had been an x present, then she would probably have seen it. Once this principle is accepted, the skeptical theist then insists that the necessary condition has not been met in the context of evidential argument. That is, she argues that there is no particular reason to be confident that, had there been a good reason for God to permit E1 and E2, we would probably have recognized it. Michael Bergmann has defended another kind of epistemic principle in defense of the skeptical theistic strategy. Michael Bergmann, “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil.” Like CORNEA, it seeks to identify a necessary condition for a good inductive inference of the kind Rowe’s argument requires. According to Bergmann, legitimate inductive inferences of this kind depend upon justified confidence that our inductive sample is representative. That is, we can properly infer that there are no values (whether pursuit-worthy goods or avoidance-worthy evils) that justify God in permitting E1 and E2 from our inability to ascertain any such values only if we are rightly confident that the values accessible to us are representative of the values there are. With this principle in place, the skeptical theist insists, once again, that this necessary condition has not been met in the context of the evidential argument. That is, she argues that there is no particular reason to suppose that the values that are accessible to human beings are representative of the values there actually are. 2.2 An Argument Despite the decades of important work on the skeptical theistic strategy of response to the evidential problem of evil, including the interventions we have just enunciated, no formal argument for the central skeptical thesis (STC) had been offered—that is, until quite recently. Perry Hendricks has developed a positive argument for STC that is worthy of our attention. Perry Hendricks, “Skeptical Theism Proved.” This argument, which Hendricks calls “the Preclusion Argument” depends on three principles that we can gloss like this: I have taken some liberties with the formulations of these principles both for ease of expression and to connect the conclusion specifically to my formulation of STC. Connection: If S knows nothing significant about a state of affairs, then the value of the state of affairs is inscrutable to S. Event: For any event E, it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs about which S knows nothing significant. Preclusion: If it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs the value of which are inscrutable to S, then it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs S knows to be connected to E are representative of the values of the states of affairs that are actually connected to E. With these principles in place, the first premise of Hendricks’ argument follows from Connection and Event taken together: (1’) For any event E, it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs the value of which are inscrutable to S (from Connection and Event). The second premise is the Preclusion claim: (2’) If it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs the value of which are inscrutable to S, then it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs S knows to be connected to E are representative of the values of the states of affairs that are actually connected to E (Preclusion). This gives us the conclusion: (3’) It is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs S knows to be connected to E are representative of the values of the states of affairs that are actually connected to E (from (1’) and (2’)). And now it should be clear that this conclusion, applied specifically to Rowe’s E1 and E2 for us, just is our core skeptical thesis: STC: It is reasonable to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs that we know to be connected to evil events (like E1 and E2) are representative of the values of the states of affairs actually connected to these events. Thus, Hendricks has either usefully gone beyond the intuitions and analogies that have been animating theistic attraction to STC or has regimented them in a way that appears to add force to the central skeptical claim. The Preclusion Argument, together with one or another of the epistemic principles developed by Wyskstra and Bergmann, contributes to a fairly tight defense of the rejection of Rowe’s Inference. From this point of view, resistance to the evidential argument from gratuitous evils can look to be quite reasonable. Dissatisfaction with Skeptical Theism A number of objections have been raised to skeptical theism, nevertheless— too many, indeed, to do much more than canvas their basic outlines. 3.1 Skeptical Expansion One unifying theme among many of the concerns is what we might call “skeptical expansion.” Many opponents of skeptical theism have suggested that the skepticism cannot be kept within the narrow limits the theist will insist upon. For example, some have argued that the skeptical theist’s skepticism will open the door for a quite broad and radical form of doubt about our knowledge of the external world on the order of Cartesian Skepticism Bruce Russell, “Defenseless,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 193-206 and Justin McBrayer, “CORNEA and Inductive Evidence.” Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2009): 77.— or, in a similar spirit, at least of doubt regarding much of our ordinary knowledge. Ian Wilks, “Skeptical Theism and Empirical Unfalsifiability,” Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2009): 64. Less expansively, but still with considerable breadth, others have argued that the skepticism will infect the forms of reasoning that have traditionally supported theism. In other words, they claim that principled doubt about the crucial premise of Rowe’s argument will have to extend to doubt about the premises of cosmological and fine-tuning arguments that purport to provide support for the claim that God exists. Or perhaps such doubts will have to extend to central claims of religious life— for example, that God wants what is best for one, that God can be trusted, etc. Ian Wilks, “The Structure of the Contemporary Debate on the Problem of Evil,” Religious Studies 40, no. 3 (2004): 307. Stephen Maitzen, “The Moral Skepticism Objection to Skeptical Theism,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, eds Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 444-457. Such doubts, as critics have pointed out, could seriously threaten the integrity of religious life. Perhaps the most common and forceful worries about skeptical expansion, however, concern the domain of morality. At the level of theory, some have insisted that a consistent application of the skeptical principle would involve unlimited openness to the possibility that any evil event can be counterbalanced by a greater good; and a commitment to such openness would amount to a commitment to consequentialism in our moral theory. This would surely be an unhappy result for the vast majority of theists who are characteristically (though by no means universally) averse to consequentialism. More pointedly, at the level of moral practice, the opponents of skeptical theism have argued that a form of moral stultification will be generated by commitment to the skeptical theistic outlook. For any supposedly morally worthy act (whether, say, telling the truth or saving a drowning child or helping a friend move) the very same considerations that undergird doubt about the gratuitousness of evils will also support doubt about whether the act is, in point of fact, a morally worthy one. Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy, “Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments from Evil,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 4 (2003), 496. Daniel Howard-Snyder, “Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism,” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, vol 2, ed. Jonathan Kvanvig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1-35. William Hasker, “All Too Skeptical Theism,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 68, no. 1 (2010), 15-29. In short, what such critics allege is that the moral life requires us to have confidence, at one point or another, in the legitimacy of noseeum inferences precisely like the ones that the skeptical theist insists on challenging. Proponents of skeptical theism have developed rich and detailed responses to these concerns at the heart of which are various efforts to demonstrate that any untoward skeptical expansion could not be the result of the limited epistemic humility enshrined in resistance to Rowe’s Inference. Michael Bergmann, “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil,” 2009. Daniel Howard-Snyder, “Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism,” 2010. Michael Rea, “Skeptical Theism and the ‘Too-Much-Skepticism’ Objection,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, eds. Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 482-506. 3.2 Restricting the Reach If worries about skeptical expansion are aimed at undermining the case against Rowe’s Inference, another family of responses proceeds by granting the legitimacy of resistance to the crucial noseeum inference. Proponents of this brand of response insist, nevertheless, that the evidential argument for atheism can succeed. Consider, for central example, the commonsense atheist. What the commonsense atheist claims is that her confidence in the empirical premise of the evidential argument (the premise asserting that there are gratuitous evils) is grounded not in the problematic inductive inference but rather in a direct recognition of the gratuitousness of evils like E1 and E2. That is, he claims that we can see directly—by immediate commonsense—that there can be no good reason for God to permit either the fawn’s suffering or the suffering of the little girl in Flint, Michigan. To the degree that this reasoning is forceful, skeptical theistic humility will simply be by-passed, demonstrating that a commitment to STC does not undermine Rowe-style evidential arguments. The temptation to be in doubt about the purported seemings of the commonsense atheist may be strong. For development of such doubts, see Perry Hendricks, “How to be a Skeptical Theist and a Commonsense Epistemologist,” Faith and Philosophy 35, no. 3 (2018), 345-355. In part, this is likely because the seemings in question have a kind of abstraction or attenuation to them. What the commonsense atheist claims is not just that the perceived events appear to have a certain singular property—like a particular color or truth-value or moral valence. What he claims to observe directly in the relevant event is the property of being such that a morally perfect and omnipotent creator and sustainer of the universe could not possibly have a good reason to permit it. Doubt about such observability may be reasonable. In any case, it appears to be an open question just how much leverage commonsense atheism can get against Skeptical Theism. Continuing with concerns regarding the reach of the skeptical theistic strategy, the abductive atheist insists that evidential arguments from evil need not rely on a noseeum inference even if an inference is involved. As Paul Draper has emphasized in a series of important papers, a powerful evidential argument can be grounded in a form of inference to the best explanation that at least purports to bypass the strategy of leveraging STC. With a tip of his cap to Hume, Draper develops the strategy of comparing the explanatory power of theism with an alternative and incompatible thesis, which he calls “the hypothesis of indifference.” According to this hypothesis, the structure of the world with respect to the effects of pain and suffering is not due to any intentional actions of non-human persons. What needs explaining, according to Draper, is not just the amount and kind of pain and suffering the world contains, but also how it appears to be distributed—namely, more or less willy-nilly. It is not as if suffering serves only to help organisms flourish biologically; nor does it befall only those who are morally bad. Indeed, how organisms (including human persons) suffer seems to bear no interesting probability relationship to moral qualities at all. In short, then, what needs explaining is that suffering and pain do not seems to be distributed in such a way as always to contribute either to biological or moral well-being. Further, Draper claims, on theism we would expect suffering to be distributed so as to contribute in one of these two ways. By contrast, there would be no particular reason to expect this distribution on the hypothesis of indifference. Put slightly more formally, Draper claims that the probability of this distribution of pain and suffering is lower on theism than it is on the hypothesis of indifference. If this is right, then the distribution is evidence against theism. This abductive version of the argument purports to reach the same evidential conclusion as Rowe’s inductive argument (that the world’s evil is evidence against theism) but without the controversial noseeum move. One line of reply to this abductive species of the evidential argument involves seeking to identify some surreptitious way in which, appearances notwithstanding, it depends upon the kind of illicit inference that STC is tailor made to undermine. For a reply, see section 6.1 of Trent Dougherty, “Skeptical Theism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skeptical-theism/. Another is to argue that while the distribution is evidence against simple theism, it is not evidence against a more subtle form theism that predicts our observations of pain and suffering just as well as the hypothesis of indifference. The dispute here is complex, involving extremely delicate evaluation of the nature of evidence and confirmation. For some of the delicacy, see the essays by Timothy Perrine and Stephen Wykstra (“Skeptical Theism, Abductive Atheology, and Theory Versioning”), Paul Draper (“Meet the New Skeptical Theism, Same as the Old Skeptical Theism”) and Lara Buchak (“Learning Not to be Naïve: A Comment on the Exchange between Perrine/Wykstra and Draper”) all in Skeptical Theism: New Essays, eds. Trent Dougherty and Justin McBrayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Mathew Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs, “Evil and Evidence,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7 (2016), 1-31. Reductio Ad Absurdum A final (for our purposes) species of concern with skeptical theism has to do with its implications across possible worlds. As Rowe himself, among others, has pointed out, the claim that a commitment to something like STC undermines the force of the inductive argument from evil appears to entail that almost no amount or kind of evil could ever count as evidence against theism. Consider, for example, a world in which sentient beings come into existence for only 20 minutes, during which they experience only excruciating pain (say, as for a woman during un-anesthetized breach child-birth), and after which they simply pass out of existence. Many will be powerfully inclined to conclude that, if such a world were actual, the suffering in it would be very good evidence that there is no God. What the critic of Skeptical Theism can point out here, however, is that the skeptical strategy should be just as effective here as in the actual world. That is, given STC, it seems we should consider it inscrutable whether God could have a good reason to allow the grotesque and (nearly) transparently pointless evils in this world. Thus, to the degree that one is tempted to conclude that the evils of the purely painful world would be evidence against the existence of God, one also has reason to be suspicious of Skeptical Theism. Though the Skeptical Theist could, of course, bite the bullet here and simply accept that even the suffering of the purely painful world is no evidence against theism, another route of response would be to re-consider what Dougherty has usefully characterized as the Skeptical Theist’s “No Weight Thesis,” according to which evil makes no contribution at all to the disconfirmation of theism. Trent Dougherty, “Skeptical Theism” (section 1.2). Since there are unpleasant consequences for both of these responses, this reductio ad absurdum argument against skeptical theism continues to have force. Conclusions The intellectual humility enshrined in the philosophical dispositions of the skeptical theist is not without its attractions. Given the traditional concept of God, the existence of an apparently relevant epistemic chasm between the human and the divine is all but inevitable. The central question facing both proponents and opponents of skeptical theism is whether this inevitable chasm can be put to good use in defending the rationality of theistic belief in the face of evidential arguments from evil. For fruitful conversations about the issues addressed in this chapter, I thank Tom Crisp and Gregg Ten Elshof. Further thanks are due to Manuel Vargas for comments on an earlier draft. For Further Reading Almeida, Mike and Oppy, Graham. “Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments from Evil.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 4 (2003): 496-516. Alston, William. “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition.” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 29-67. Benton, Matthew, Hawthorne, John, and Isaacs, Yoaav. “Evil and Evidence.” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7 (2016): 1-31. Bergmann, Michael. “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, edited by Thomas Flint and Michael Rea, 374-399. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Buchak, Lara. “Learning Not to be Naïve: A Comment on the Exchange between Perrine/Wykstra and Draper.” In Skeptical Theism: New Essays, edited by Trent Dougherty and Justin McBrayer, 178-190. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Dougherty, Trent. “Skeptical Theism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skeptical-theism/. Draper, Paul. “Meet the New Skeptical Theism, Same as the Old Skeptical Theism.” In Skeptical Theism: New Essays, edited by Trent Dougherty and Justin McBrayer, 164-177. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hasker, William. “All Too Skeptical Theism.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 68, no. 1 (2010): 15-29. Hendricks, Perry. “How to be a Skeptical Theist and a Commonsense Epistemologist.” Faith and Philosophy 35, no. 3 (2018): 345-355. Hendricks, Perry. “Skeptical Theism Proved.” The Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6, No. 2 (2019): 264-74. Howard-Snyder, Daniel. “Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism.” In Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, vol 2, edited by Jonathan Kvanvig, 1-35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Maitzen, Stephen. “The Moral Skepticism Objection to Skeptical Theism.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, edited by Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder, 444-457. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. McBrayer, Justin. “CORNEA and Inductive Evidence.” Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2009): 77-86. McBrayer, Justin. “Skeptical Theism: An Historical View,” in The History of Evil, Volume 6, Evil From the Mid-20th Century to Today, eds. Jerome Gellman, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro, 45-58. New York: Routledge Press, 2018. Perrine, Timothy and Wykstra, Stephen. “Skeptical Theism, Abductive Atheology, and Theory Versioning.” In Skeptical Theism: New Essays, edited by Trent Dougherty and Justin McBrayer, 142-163. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Rea, Michael. “Skeptical Theism and the ‘Too-Much-Skepticism’ Objection.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, edited by Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder, 482-506. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Rowe, William. “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 no. 4 (1979): 335-341. 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