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  1. Evil and Evidence.Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7:1-31.
    The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...)
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  • (1 other version)Rowe's evidential arguments from evil.Graham Oppy - 2013 - In Justin P. Mcbrayer (ed.), A Companion to the Problem of Evil. Wiley. pp. 49-66.
    This chapter discusses the two most prominent recent evidential arguments from evil, due, respectively, to William Rowe and Paul Draper. I argue that neither of these evidential arguments from evil is successful, i.e. such that it ought to persuade anyone who believes in God to give up that belief. In my view, theists can rationally maintain that each of these evidential arguments from evil contains at least one false premise.
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  • Skeptical Theism, Moral Skepticism, and Divine Commands.Brian Ribeiro & Scott Aikin - 2013 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2):77-96.
    Over the last twenty-five years skeptical theism has become one of the leading contemporary responses to the atheological argument from evil. However, more recently, some critics of skeptical theism have argued that the skeptical theists are in fact unwittingly committed to a malignant form of moral skepticism. Several skeptical theists have responded to this critique by appealing to divine commands as a bulwark against the alleged threat of moral skepticism. In this paper we argue that the skeptical theists’ appeal to (...)
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  • Skeptical Theism, Abductive Atheology, and Theory Versioning.Timothy Perrine & Stephen J. Wykstra - 2014 - In Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford University Press.
    What we call “the evidential argument from evil” is not one argument but a family of them, originating (perhaps) in the 1979 formulation of William Rowe. Wykstra’s early versions of skeptical theism emerged in response to Rowe’s evidential arguments. But what sufficed as a response to Rowe may not suffice against later more sophisticated versions of the problem of evil—in particular, those along the lines pioneered by Paul Draper. Our chief aim here is to make an earlier version of skeptical (...)
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  • The evil-god challenge.Stephen Law - 2010 - Religious Studies 46 (3):353 - 373.
    This paper develops a challenge to theism. The challenge is to explain why the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good god should be considered significantly more reasonable than the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-evil god. Theists typically dismiss the evil-god hypothesis out of hand because of the problem of good–there is surely too much good in the world for it to be the creation of such a being. But then why doesn't the problem (...)
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  • A new problem of evil: authority and the duty of interference.Luke Maring - 2012 - Religious Studies 48 (4):497 - 514.
    The traditional problem of evil sets theists the task of reconciling two things: God and evil. I argue that theists face the more difficult task of reconciling God and evils that God is specially obligated to prevent. Because of His authority, God's obligation to curtail evil goes far beyond our Samaritan duty to prevent evil when doing so isn't overly hard. Authorities owe their subjects a positive obligation to prevent certain evils; we have a right against our authorities that they (...)
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  • Reconsidering the parent analogy: unfinished business for skeptical theists.Trent Dougherty - 2012 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 72 (1):17-25.
    Skeptical theism has as its foundation the thesis that if God permits evil, his reasons for doing so will likely be beyond our ken. The only defense given for this thesis is the Parent Analogy. There is in the literature only one defense of this use of the Parent Analogy and it has never been confronted. I examine it and expose serious flaws, thus exposing a crack in the very foundation of skeptical theism.
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  • (1 other version)Sceptical Theism and Divine Lies.Erik J. Wielenberg - 2010 - Religious Studies 46 (4):509-523.
    In this paper I develop a novel challenge for sceptical theists. I present a line of reasoning that appeals to sceptical theism to support scepticism about divine assertions. I claim that this reasoning is at least as plausible as one popular sceptical theistic strategy for responding to evidential arguments from evil. Thus, I seek to impale sceptical theists on the horns of a dilemma: concede that either (a) sceptical theism implies scepticism about divine assertions, or (b) the sceptical theistic strategy (...)
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  • The normatively relativised logical argument from evil.John Bishop & Ken Perszyk - 2011 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (2):109-126.
    It is widely agreed that the ‘Logical’ Argument from Evil (LAFE) is bankrupt. We aim to rehabilitate the LAFE, in the form of what we call the Normatively Relativised Logical Argument from Evil (NRLAFE). There are many different versions of a NRLAFE. We aim to show that one version, what we call the ‘right relationship’ NRLAFE, poses a significant threat to personal-omniGod-theism—understood as requiring the belief that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good person who has created our world—because it (...)
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  • Skeptical theism.Justin P. McBrayer - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (7):611-623.
    Most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God take the following form: (1) If God exists, the world would not be like this (where 'this' picks out some feature of the world like the existence of evil, etc.) (2) But the world is like this . (3) Therefore, God does not exist. Skeptical theists are theists who are skeptical of our ability to make judgments of the sort expressed by premise (1). According to skeptical theism, if there were a (...)
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  • CORNEA, Scepticism and Evil.Jim Stone - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (1):59-70.


    The Principle of Credulity: 'It is basic to human knowledge of the world that we believe things are as they seem to be in the absence of positive evidence to the contrary' [Swinburne 1996: 133]. This underlies the Evidential Problem of Evil, which goes roughly like this: ‘There appears to be a lot of suffering, both animal and human, that does not result in an equal or greater utility. So there's probably some pointless suffering. As God's existence precludes pointless suffering, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epistemic humility, arguments from evil, and moral skepticism.Daniel Howard-Snyder - 2009 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 2:17-57.
    Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, Wadsworth, 2013, 6th edition, eds. Michael Rea and Louis Pojman. In this essay, I argue that the moral skepticism objection to what is badly named "skeptical theism" fails.
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  • (2 other versions)The problem of evil.Michael Tooley - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The philosophical case for open theism.Alan Rhoda - 2007 - Philosophia 35 (3-4):301-311.
    The goal of this paper is to defend open theism vis-à-vis its main competitors within the family of broadly classical theisms, namely, theological determinism and the various forms of non-open free-will theism, such as Molinism and Ockhamism. After isolating two core theses over which open theists and their opponents differ, I argue for the open theist position on both points. Specifically, I argue against theological determinists that there are future contingents. And I argue against non-open free-will theists that future contingency (...)
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  • (1 other version)Philosophy of religion.Charles Taliaferro - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Sceptical theism and evidential arguments from evil.Michael J. Almeida & Graham Oppy - 2003 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (4):496 – 516.
    Sceptical theists--e.g., William Alston and Michael Bergmann--have claimed that considerations concerning human cognitive limitations are alone sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil. We argue that, if the considerations deployed by sceptical theists are sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil, then those considerations are also sufficient to undermine inferences that play a crucial role in ordinary moral reasoning. If cogent, our argument suffices to discredit sceptical theist responses to evidential arguments from evil.
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  • Perry Hendricks: skeptical theism. Palgrave MacMillan, 2023, 294 + xiii pp. $99.00 (ebook); $129.99 (hardcover). [REVIEW]Timothy Perrine - 2024 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 96 (2).
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  • God and gratuitous evil: Between the rock and the hard place.Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (3):317-345.
    To most of us – believers and non-believers alike – the possibility of a perfect God co-existing with the kinds of evil that we see calls out for explanation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the belief that God must have justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see has been a perennial feature of theistic thought. Recently, however, a growing number of authors have argued that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with the existence of gratuitous (...)
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  • Is it wrong for God to create persons? A response to Monaghan.John M. DePoe - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 93 (3):227-237.
    Some have put forward a normative principle that it is immoral and highly disrespectful to create free, rational creatures (like human beings) without their prior consent. (See, for instance, Monaghan in Int J Philos Relig 88(2):181–195, 2020) If true, this principle constitutes a new argument against the existence of God since it is logically impossible to acquire the consent of someone before they are created. Thus, God’s existence is taken to be incompatible with creating any persons. I shall examine this (...)
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  • The global/local distinction vindicates Leibniz's theodicy.James Franklin - 2022 - Theology and Science 20 (4).
    The essential idea of Leibniz’s Theodicy was little understood in his time but has become one of the organizing themes of modern mathematics. There are many phenomena that are possible locally but for purely mathematical reasons impossible globally. For example, it is possible to build a spiral staircase that is rising at any given point, but it is impossible to build one that is rising at all points and comes back to where it started. The necessity is mathematically provable, so (...)
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  • Skeptical Theism, the Preface Paradox, and Non-Cumulative Inductive Evidence of Pointless Evil.Eric Gilbertson - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (5):2477-2496.
    This paper discusses an analogical argument for the compatibility of the evidential argument from evil and skeptical theism. The argument is based on an alleged parallel between the paradox of the preface and the case of apparently pointless evil. I argue that the analogical argument fails, and that the compatibility claim is undermined by the epistemic possibility of inaccessible reasons for permitting apparently pointless evils. The analogical argument fails, because there are two crucial differences between the case of apparently pointless (...)
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  • God, Tragic Dilemmas, and the Problem of Gratuitous Evil.Arash Naraghi - 2022 - Dialogue 61 (2):311-324.
    RésuméDe nombreux philosophes ont soutenu que l'existence du mal gratuit est la plus sérieuse objection contre l'existence d'un Dieu absolument parfait. Je soutiens que l'idée d'un dilemme moral (ou, plus précisément, d'un dilemmetragique) peut (1) fournir une justification morale pour que Dieu permette l'existence du mal gratuit, ou (2) offrir une théodicée de la tragédie divine pour expliquer pourquoi les maux de ce monde ne sont pas nécessairement gratuits ou, s'ils le sont, pourquoi ils ne peuvent pas fournir une preuve (...)
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  • “A Great Adventure of the Soul”: Sri Aurobindo’s Vedāntic Theodicy of Spiritual Evolution.Swami Medhananda - 2022 - International Journal of Hindu Studies 25 (3):229-257.
    This article reexamines Sri Aurobindo’s multifaceted response to the problem of evil in The Life Divine. According to my reconstruction, his response has three key dimensions: first, a skeptical theist refutation of arguments from evil against God’s existence; second, a theodicy of “spiritual evolution,” according to which the experience of suffering is necessary for the soul’s spiritual growth; and third, a panentheistic conception of the Divine Saccidānanda as the sole reality which playfully manifests as everything and everyone in the universe. (...)
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  • If We Can’t Tell What Theism Predicts, We Can’t Tell Whether God Exists: Skeptical Theism and Bayesian Arguments from Evil.Nevin Climenhaga - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion.
    According to a simple Bayesian argument from evil, the evil we observe is less likely given theism than given atheism, and therefore lowers the probability of theism. I consider the most common skeptical theist response to this argument, according to which our cognitive limitations make the probability of evil given theism inscrutable. I argue that if skeptical theists are right about this, then the probability of theism given evil is itself largely inscrutable, and that if this is so, we ought (...)
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  • Vagueness and the Problem of Evil: a New Reply to van Inwagen.Luis Oliveira - 2021 - Manuscrito: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 44 (4):49-82.
    One of the few points of agreement between most theists and non-theists working on the problem of evil is that the existence of a perfect God is incompatible with the existence of pointless evil. In a series of influential papers, however, Peter van Inwagen has argued that careful attention to the reasoning behind this claim reveals fatal difficulties related to the Sorites Paradox. In this paper, I explain van Inwagen’s appeal to sorites reasoning, distinguish between two different arguments in his (...)
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  • On an Epistemic Cornerstone of Skeptical Theism: in Defense of CORNEA.Timothy Perrine - 2022 - Sophia 61 (3):533-555.
    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 (...)
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  • Christian Lay Theodicy and The Cancer Experience.Eric Jason Silverman, Elizabeth Hall, Jamie Aten, Laura Shannonhouse & Jason McMartin - 2020 - Journal of Analytic Theology 8 (1):344-370.
    In philosophy of religion, there are few more frequently visited topics than the problem of evil, which has attracted considerable interest since the time of Epicurus. It is well known that the problem of evil involves responding to the apparent tension between 1) belief in the existence of a good, all powerful, all knowing God and 2) the existence of evil—such as personal suffering embodied in the experience of cancer. While a great deal has been written concerning abstract philosophical theories (...)
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  • Skeptical Theism Proved.Perry Hendricks - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (2):264-274.
    Skeptical theism is a popular response to arguments from evil. Many hold that it undermines a key inference often used by such arguments. However, the case for skeptical theism is often kept at an intuitive level: no one has offered an explicit argument for the truth of skeptical theism. In this article, I aim to remedy this situation: I construct an explicit, rigorous argument for the truth of skeptical theism.
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  • What if God commanded something horrible? A pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics.Philipp Kremers - 2021 - Religious Studies 57 (4):597–617.
    The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God’s necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against (...)
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  • We are not in the Dark: Refuting Popular Arguments Against Skeptical Theism.Perry Hendricks - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2):125-134.
    Critics of skeptical theism often claim that if it (skeptical theism) is true, then we are in the dark about whether (or for all we know) there is a morally justifying for God to radically deceive us. From here, it is argued that radical skepticism follows: if we are truly in the dark about whether there is a morally justifying reason for God to radically deceive us, then we cannot know anything. In this article, I show that skeptical theism does (...)
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  • The Emotional Impact of Evil: Philosophical Reflections on Existential Problems.Nicholas Colgrove - 2019 - Open Theology 5 (1):125-135.
    In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky illustrates that encounters with evil do not solely impact agents’ beliefs about God (or God’s existence). Evil impacts people on an emotional level as well. Authors like Hasker and van Inwagen sometimes identify the emotional impact of evil with the “existential” problem of evil. For better or worse, the existential version of the problem is often set aside in contemporary philosophical discussions. In this essay, I rely on Robert Roberts’ account of emotions as “concern-based construals” (...)
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  • God and the Bayesian Conception of Evidence.David Manley - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
    Contemporary arguments for and against the existence of God are often formulated within a broadly Bayesian framework. Arguments of this sort focus on a specific feature of the world that is taken to provide probabilistic evidence for or against the existence of God: the existence of life in a ‘fine-tuned’ universe, the magnitude of suffering, divine hiddenness, etc. In each case, the idea is that things were more likely to be this way if God existed than if God did not (...)
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  • Sceptical Theism and the Paradox of Evil.Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2):319-333.
    Given plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence and undercutting defeat, many believe that the force of the evidential problem of evil depends on sceptical theism’s being false: if evil is...
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  • Positive skeptical theism and the problem of divine deception.John M. DePoe - 2017 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 82 (1):89-99.
    In a recent article, Erik Wielenberg has argued that positive skeptical theism fails to circumvent his new argument from apparent gratuitous evil. Wielenberg’s new argument focuses on apparently gratuitous suffering and abandonment, and he argues that negative skeptical theistic responses fail to respond to the challenge posed by these apparent gratuitous evils due to the parent–child analogy often invoked by theists. The greatest challenge to his view, he admits, is positive skeptical theism. To stave off this potential problem with his (...)
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  • Skeptical Theism and Morriston’s Humean Argument from Evil.Timothy Perrine - 2019 - Sophia 58 (2):115-135.
    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 (...)
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  • Sceptical theism and the evil-god challenge.Perry Hendricks - 2018 - Religious Studies 54 (4):549-561.
    This article is a response to Stephen Law's article ‘The evil-god challenge’. In his article, Law argues that if belief in evil-god is unreasonable, then belief in good-god is unreasonable; that the antecedent is true; and hence so is the consequent. In this article, I show that Law's affirmation of the antecedent is predicated on the problem of good (i.e. the problem of whether an all-evil, all-powerful, and all-knowing God would allow there to be as much good in the world (...)
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  • Agatheology and naturalisation of the discourse on evil.Janusz Salamon - 2017 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78 (4-5):469-484.
    This article argues that the existence of horrendous evil calls into question not just the plausibility of the most popular theodicies on offer, notably sceptical theism, but the coherence of any agatheology–that is, any theology which identifies God or the ultimate reality with the ultimate good or with a maximally good being. The article contends that the only way an agatheologian can ‘save the face of God’ after Auschwitz and Kolyma is by endorsing a non-interventionist interpretation of the Divine providence (...)
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  • The Problem of Evil.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    The existence of evil, pain and suffering is considered by many philosophers to be the most vexed question concerning the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect deity. Why would a loving God permit wanton acts of cruelty and misery on the scale witnessed throughout human history? In this essay, Leslie Allan evaluates four common theistic responses to this problem, highlighting the benefits and challenges faced by each approach. He concludes with a critical examination of a theistic defence designed (...)
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  • (1 other version)Skeptical Theism.Timothy Perrine & Stephen Wykstra - 2017 - In Chad V. Meister & Paul K. Moser (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 85-107.
    Skeptical theism is a family of responses to the evidential problem of evil. What unifies this family is two general claims. First, that even if God were to exist, we shouldn’t expect to see God’s reasons for permitting the suffering we observe. Second, the previous claim entails the failure of a variety of arguments from evil against the existence of God. In this essay, we identify three particular articulations of skeptical theism—three different ways of “filling in” those two claims—and describes (...)
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  • Skeptical Theism and the 'Too-Much-Skepticism' Objection.Michael C. Rea - 2014 - In Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil. Wiley. pp. 482-506.
    In the first section, I characterize skeptical theism more fully. This is necessary in order to address some important misconceptions and mischaracterizations that appear in the essays by Maitzen, Wilks, and O’Connor. In the second section, I describe the most important objections they raise and group them into four “families” so as to facilitate an orderly series of responses. In the four sections that follow, I respond to the objections.
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  • God, the meaning of life, and a new argument for atheism.Jason Megill & Daniel Linford - 2016 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 79 (1):31-47.
    We raise various puzzles about the relationship between God and the meaning of life. These difficulties suggest that, even if we assume that God exists, and even if God’s existence would entail that our lives have meaning, God is not and could not be the source of the meaning of life. We conclude by discussing implications of our arguments: these claims can be used in a novel argument for atheism; these claims undermine an extant argument for God’s existence; and they (...)
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  • Ignorance, Instrumentality, Compensation, and the Problem of Evil.Marilyn McCord Adams - 2013 - Sophia 52 (1):7-26.
    Some theodicists, skeptical theists, and friendly atheists agree that God-justifying reasons for permitting evils would have to have an instrumental structure: that is, the evils would have to be necessary to secure a great enough good or necessary to prevent some equally bad or worse evil. D.Z. Phillips contends that instrumental reasons could never justify anyone for causing or permitting horrendous evils and concludes that the God of Restricted Standard Theism does not exist—indeed, is a conceptual mistake. After considering Phillips’ (...)
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  • Are skeptical theists really skeptics? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.Justin P. McBrayer - 2012 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 72 (1):3-16.
    Skeptical theism is the view that God exists but, given our cognitive limitations, the fact that we cannot see a compensating good for some instance of evil is not a reason to think that there is no such good. Hence, we are not justified in concluding that any actual instance of evil is gratuitous, thus undercutting the evidential argument from evil for atheism. This paper focuses on the epistemic role of context and contrast classes to advance the debate over skeptical (...)
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  • Cornea and Inductive Evidence.Justin P. McBrayer - 2009 - Faith and Philosophy 26 (1):77-86.
    One of the primary tools in the theist’s defense against “noseeum” arguments from evil is an epistemic principle concerning the Conditions Of ReasoNableEpistemic Access (CORNEA) which places an important restriction on what counts as evidence. However, CORNEA is false because it places too strong acondition on what counts as inductive evidence. If CORNEA is true, we lack evidence for a great many of our inductive beliefs. This is because CORNEA amounts to a sensitivity constraint on evidence, and inductive evidence is (...)
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  • Pascal’s Wager and the Nature of God.Greg Janzen - 2011 - Sophia 50 (3):331-344.
    This paper argues that Pascal's formulation of his famous wager argument licenses an inference about God's nature that ultimately vitiates the claim that wagering for God is in one's rational self-interest. In particular, it is argued that if we accept Pascal's premises, then we can infer that the god for whom Pascal encourages us to wager is irrational. But if God is irrational, then the prudentially rational course of action is to refrain from wagering for him.
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  • Skeptical theism and the problem of moral aporia.Mark Piper - 2007 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (2):65 - 79.
    Skeptical theism seeks to defend theism against the problem of evil by invoking putatively reasonable skepticism concerning human epistemic limitations in order to establish that we have no epistemological basis from which to judge that apparently gratuitous evils are not in fact justified by morally sufficient reasons beyond our ken. This paper contributes to the set of distinctively practical criticisms of skeptical theism by arguing that religious believers who accept skeptical theism and take its practical implications seriously will be forced (...)
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  • Skeptical Theism: A Panoramic Overview (Part I).Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2023 - Philosophy Compass 18 (10):e12946.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Skeptical Theism.Timothy Perrine - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Humble Theism: Wykstra’s Skeptical Theism and Moral Paralysis.Soren Moody - manuscript
    William L. Rowe cites Stephen Wykstra's skeptical theism as the most powerful objection to the evidential argument. Initially, I object to skeptical theism on the basis that skeptical theism leads to moral paralysis. I then will conclude that the skeptical theist has other resources that enable the formation of a moral code.
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  • The Mystery of God and the Claim of Reason: Comparative Patterns in Hindu-Christian Theodicy.Ankur Barua - 2022 - International Journal of Hindu Studies 25 (3):259-288.
    In a comparative study of karma theodicy and atonement theodicy, as developed by some Hindu and Christian theologians, this article argues that they present teleological visions where individuals become purged, purified, and perfected in and through their worldly suffering. A karma theodicy operates with the notion that there is some form of proportionality between past evil and present suffering, even if such correlations can only be traced by an enlightened sage or are known to the omniscient God. Christian mystics too (...)
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