HistoricalChristian.Faith

Skeptical theism — can we judge an evil to be gratuitous?

Type: argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — skeptical theism is the leading reply to the evidential problem of evil. It grants the argument’s logic and even most of its data, and denies only its load-bearing inductive step: from “we can see no God-justifying good for this evil” we are not entitled to conclude “there is none,” because a finite mind has no reason to think its grasp of the possible goods, evils, and their connections is representative of the whole. The core epistemic point is genuinely strong; the standing objection — that the same skepticism “proves too much,” corroding ordinary moral knowledge, providential reasoning, and even confidence in God’s revealed goodness — is also serious and unresolved. The debate is a real stand-off. · advanced by Stephen Wykstra (1984), Michael Bergmann, William Alston, and Daniel Howard-Snyder

Related arguments: the modern analytic problem of evil — the logical problem & free-will defense · the evidential problem of evil

See also: the evidential problem of evil this argument answers; the modern-debate survey; and the patristic appeal to a providence we cannot survey — God’s reasons real but beyond us — of which this is the modern, epistemological form.

The claim

Skeptical theism is not itself a theodicy: it offers no positive account of why God permits evil. It is a narrower, defensive thesis about the limits of human insight, aimed squarely at one step in Rowe’s evidential argument. Rowe reasons from “so far as we can see, the fawn’s suffering is pointless” to “the fawn’s suffering is pointless” — a “no-see-um” inference: we no see ’um, so there ain’t any. Skeptical theism denies the entitlement to that inference.

Stephen Wykstra’s statement of the constraint is the founding one, his CORNEA principle (“Condition On ReasoNable Epistemic Access”):

On the basis of cognized situation s, human H is entitled to claim “It appears that p” only if it is reasonable for H to believe that, given her cognitive faculties and the use she has made of them, if p were not the case, s would likely be different than it is in some way discernible by her.

— Stephen Wykstra (1984).¹ A no-see-um inference, in other words, works only where, if the thing were there, we could reasonably expect to see it — I may infer “no elephant in the garage” from seeing none, but not “no flea.” And, Wykstra argues, the goods for the sake of which an infinite God permits suffering are far more like the flea: given “the sort of being theism proposes for our belief, it is entirely expectable – given what we know of our cognitive limits – that the goods by virtue of which this Being allows known suffering should very often be beyond our ken.”² The gap between divine and human wisdom, he suggests, is at least as wide as that between a parent and a one-month-old infant — and no one infers from a baby’s failure to grasp its parents’ reasons that they have none.

Michael Bergmann later distilled the position into three skeptical theses about the reach of human insight:

ST1. We have no good reason for thinking that the possible goods we know of are representative of the possible goods there are.
ST2. We have no good reason for thinking that the possible evils we know of are representative of the possible evils there are.
ST3. We have no good reason for thinking that the entailment relations we know of between possible goods and the permission of possible evils are representative of the entailment relations there are.

— Michael Bergmann (2001).³ If any of these holds, the move from “no known good justifies this evil” to “no good justifies it” is unwarranted — and Rowe’s premise 1 loses the support it needed.

Who advances it

The label “skeptical theism” is recent, but the move is old. Its patristic ancestor is the appeal to a providence the creature cannot survey: Boethius’s Lady Philosophy holds that what looks like the reign of chance is the unfolding of a divine reason “seated in the Supreme Being,” opaque to us but real; the book of Job ends not with an explanation of Job’s suffering but with God’s challenge from the whirlwind that Job was not there when the foundations were laid. The modern, sharpened, epistemological form is Wykstra’s (1984), pressed against Rowe; it was developed into a systematic position by William Alston (“The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” 1991), Michael Bergmann, and Daniel Howard-Snyder, and is now the most-discussed theistic reply to the evidential argument. Wykstra himself later coined the memorable name for the inference it targets — the “noseeum” inference.⁴

The evidence for

CORNEA is a general epistemic principle, not an ad hoc dodge. The constraint on no-see-um inferences is one we accept everywhere: an inference from “I don’t detect an X” to “there is no X” is only as good as the assumption that I would detect an X if there were one. Where that assumption fails — fleas, subatomic particles, a grandmaster’s reasons for a move a novice cannot fathom — the inference is worthless, and we all know it. Skeptical theism simply applies the ordinary rule to an extraordinary case, and the case is one where the disproportion of insight is, if theism is even coherent, enormous by hypothesis.

The disproportion is exactly what theism predicts. This is the sharpest form of the point. It is not that a theist needs our insight to be limited and conveniently posits it; it is that a being of the kind theism describes — omniscient, ordering ends across all of history — would as a matter of course act for goods a finite mind could not survey. So the failure to see God’s reasons is precisely what one should expect whether or not those reasons exist — and an observation equally expected on both hypotheses is no evidence for either. Rowe’s datum, on this reading, does not discriminate between theism and its denial.

The record of moral discovery cuts its way. Humanity keeps finding goods and connections it had not conceived — that suffering can deepen compassion, that a wrong long past can be woven into a later good, that outcomes ramify unpredictably down the centuries. That we have repeatedly been wrong about what suffering could be “for” is inductive support for ST1–ST3: our present inventory of possible goods has never yet been complete, so we have little reason to treat it as complete now.

Adversarial assessment

The standing objection: it proves too much. The gravest charge against skeptical theism is that the skepticism it needs will not stay put. If our grasp of the space of goods, evils, and their entailments is too paltry to judge that this evil is gratuitous, the same limitation seems to reach much further than its users want — and several distinct over-extensions have been pressed:

• Moral paralysis. If I can never tell whether a horror before me secures some outweighing good beyond my ken, why intervene to stop it? Perhaps my preventing it would thwart the very good for which God permits it. Almeida and Oppy argue that consistent skeptical theists “should reason that they should never intervene in preventing seemingly unjustified evils” — a corrosion of ordinary moral obligation the position cannot easily contain.⁵
• Undercutting divine commands and revelation. If we cannot assess what reasons a good God would or would not have, we cannot check a purported command against “would God have reason to command this?” — so, Maitzen and others argue, skeptical theism corrodes the believer’s ability to identify genuine divine commands, and more broadly to trust testimony about goods (an eternal union with God) that rests entirely on assessing God’s character and purposes.⁶
• The reflexive worry. The believer’s own confidence that God is good rests on some grasp of what goodness would do; a skepticism deep enough to block Rowe’s inference threatens to block that grasp too. The very reasoning skeptical theists reject in Rowe (a no-see-um about God’s reasons) looks “incredibly similar” to reasoning they must rely on elsewhere.⁷

Skeptical theists answer that the objection overstates their commitment: their claim is only that we cannot survey the space of God-justifying reasons for permitting evils, not that moral knowledge, God’s revealed goodness, or ordinary induction collapse wholesale; God may have reasons to permit an evil that give a creature no warrant to cause or fail to prevent it (our obligations track our knowledge, not God’s).⁸ Whether that line can be drawn stably — skeptical enough to defeat Rowe, restrained enough to spare everything else — is exactly what the literature has not settled.

CORNEA may be too strong, and its target has moved. Rowe replied that CORNEA, strictly applied, would forbid too many reasonable appearance-based beliefs, and in any case recast his argument so that it no longer depends on the bare inference CORNEA blocks — arguing probabilistically that the known distribution of goods and evils makes gratuitous evil likely, not certain.⁹ Against the Bayesian form the skeptical thesis must do more than block a fallacious step; it must show that the representativeness we lack really neutralizes the probabilistic force of the evidence — a harder and still-disputed task.

What holds, and how far. The core move is genuinely powerful, and this wiki does not treat “God’s reasons may be beyond us” as a mere evasion — it is the epistemically honest recognition that a finite mind cannot inventory an infinite one, and it is continuous with Job and with the patristic appeal to inscrutable providence. But it is a defensive thesis that buys its safety at a price the critics have not been shown to be wrong about: the same skeptical solvent, applied evenly, threatens more than the one inference it was mixed to dissolve. The reply that the skepticism can be quarantined is available but contested; the position neither collapses nor prevails.

Assessment

Contested. Skeptical theism is the strongest available reply to the evidential problem of evil, and its central insight is sound as far as it goes: a no-see-um inference is only as good as our reasonable expectation of seeing the thing, and we have no such expectation about the goods an omniscient God might weigh — indeed the disproportion is what theism itself predicts, so our not seeing those goods is no evidence against them. That is enough to make Rowe’s premise 1 a genuinely open question rather than a datum. What holds it short of sound is the unresolved “proves too much” objection: the skepticism it deploys to block Rowe’s inference appears, applied consistently, to reach moral obligation, the discernment of divine commands, and the believer’s own grasp of God’s goodness — and the attempts to quarantine it, while serious, have not carried consensus. Like the evidential argument it answers, this is a live philosophical stand-off with no agreed winner: strong as an epistemic corrective, costly as a global posture. Rate it, and the argument it rebuts, as the open dispute they jointly are.

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