Abstract:
Skeptical theism is a type of reply to arguments from evil against God’s existence. The skeptical theist declines to accept a premise of some such argument, professing ignorance, for example, about whether God is justified in permitting certain evils or about the conditional probability that the world contains as much evil as it does, or evils of a particular sort, on the hypothesis that God exists. Skeptical theists are thus not supposed to be skeptical about theism; rather, they are theists who are skeptical about something else. But that raises the question of exactly what else. In particular, does skepticism with respect to some claims about God and evil lead to a more pervasive skepticism? More precisely, is skeptical theism committed to additional skepticism about God? Is skeptical theism committed to global skepticism, including skepticism about ordinary, commonplace beliefs? Or is skeptical theism at the very least committed to a broader skepticism about matters of morality? This paper takes up these questions.
Machine summary:
The skeptical theist declines to accept a premise of some such argument, professing ignorance, for example, about whether God is justified in permitting certain evils or about the conditional probability that the world contains as much evil as it does, or evils of a particular sort, on the hypothesis that God exists.
Human beings are simply not in a position to be able to tell whether some instance of suffering could have been prevented by an omniscient, omnipotent being without thereby losing a greater good or permitting an 4 equally bad or worse evil.
1 The skeptical theist will, of course, continue to demur; claiming that our inability to discern what connections to possible goods and evils the fawn’s suffering has, prevents it from being reasonable for us to believe that the connections that would justify God in permitting it are absent.
1. The skeptical theist does not claim that the likelihood that the suffering of the fawn is connected to the promotion of a greater good or the prevention of a greater evil in a way that permits it is very low, and similarly for any of the additional examples of intense suffering.
I think it is possible, contrary to what Hasker claims, to be skeptical about whether there are any instances of intense suffering that God could have prevented without losing a greater good (or permitting an equally bad or worse evil) without having to be skeptical about all moral reasoning.