There’s a growing sense among philosophers of religion that Humean arguments from evil are some of the most formidable arguments against theism, and skeptical theism fails to undermine those arguments because they fail to make the inferences skeptical theists criticize. In line with this trend, Wes Morriston has recently formulated a Humean argument from evil, and his chief defense of it is that skeptical theism is irrelevant to it. Here I argue that skeptical theism is relevant to Humean arguments. To (...) do this, I reveal the common structure of skeptical theism’s critiques. Seeing the common structure reveals why some versions of skeptical theism are irrelevant to Humean arguments from evil. It also points the way forward to formulating a relevant version. By combining skeptical theism with a plausible principle concerning reasonable belief, I formulate a version of skeptical theism that undermines Morriston’s argument that is also immune from his objections. (shrink)

“Parent analogy” is one of the important arguments that was suggested by Stephen Wykstra, one of the prominent philosopher of Skeptical Theism. By formulating this argument, Wykstra shows that like infant who doesn’t understand reasons of her parent who permit suffering for her, Human being also cannot understand reasons of God who permits suffering. According to this we cannot infer from not seeing the reasons of God to there is no reason for God. Therefore, evidential argument from evil fails. Bruce (...) Russell, William Rowe and Trent Dougherty challenge “parent analogy”. They offer “loving parent analogy” instead. “Loving parent” never leave their child alone in suffering or at least they make clear that there is reason. In their view, if theism is true, it`s expecting that this world be a transparent one and we can understand God`s reasons. In this article we show that parent analogy confront limitations which shows that it can be used neither for Skeptical Theism nor against it. But we show that there are other ways to justify cognitive limitations of human being. For example Alston instead of appeal to parent analogy, offer other analogies and enumerate at least six limitations for human beings. Accordingly, we can say that the claim of cognitive limitation form the view of Skeptical Theism is justified. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a family of responses to arguments from evil. One important member of that family is Stephen Wykstra’s CORNEA-based criticism of William Rowe’s arguments from evil. A cornerstone of Wykstra’s approach is his CORNEA principle. However, a number of authors have criticized CORNEA on various grounds, including that it has odd results, it cannot do the work it was meant to, and it problematically conflicts with the so-called common sense epistemology. In this paper, I explicate and defend a (...) CORNEA principle. After sketching a brief argument for it, I show how it can be acquitted of these recent charges. (shrink)

Skeptical theism, broadly construed, is an attempt to leverage our limited cognitive powers, in some specified sense, against “evidential” and “explanatory” arguments from evil. Since there are different versions of these kinds of arguments, there are correspondingly different versions of skeptical theism. In this paper, I briefly explain three versions of these arguments from evil (two from William Rowe and one from Paul Draper) and the three versions of skeptical theism tailor-made to block them (from Stephen Wykstra, Michael Bergmann, and (...) Peter van Inwagen). (shrink)

Skeptical theism, broadly construed, is an attempt to leverage our limited cognitive powers, in some specified sense, against “evidential” and “explanatory” arguments from evil. Since there are different versions of these kinds of arguments, there are correspondingly different versions of skeptical theism. In this paper, I consider four challenges to three central versions of skeptical theism: (a) the problem of generalized skepticism, (b) the problem of moral skepticism, (c) the problem of unqualified modal skepticism, and (d) the challenge from Bayesian (...) epistemology. (shrink)