Guest post by Andrew Hollingsworth, based on a forthcoming paper. Bio: Andrew Hollingsworth (Ph.D., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian...
This is a guest post from Joshua R. Farris. Here is a bit about Dr. Farris. Bio: Joshua R. Farris is Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellow and...
Standard skeptical theism focuses on our ignorance of the realm of values. I want to suggest a different kind of skeptical response to an evil E.
In a blog post entitled, Two More Arguments Against an Infinite Past, Alexander Pruss offers an argument for the impossibility of an infinite past. The argument...
Doing better does not logically entail being greater. This is easy to see in cases where the agents face different choices: a devil may make a better choice than a saint if the devil’s worst option is better than the saint’s best option!
William Rowe’s argument from evil is a bad piece of non-deductive reasoning. I will explain why.
The problem of evil challenges theism by raising the following question: if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why is there evil in the actual world? Theists have proposed many responses to the problem, such as the free will response, the soul-making response, the greater good response, and so on. Whether any succeeds has been debated for hundreds of years.
There is widespread belief that compatibilism + theism cannot offer a credible solution to the logical problem of evil. Why does anyone believe that? I think they’re reasoning this way: if compatibilism is true, then, necessarily, God can actualize a morally perfect world.
Let’s grant that if skeptical theism is true, then for any evil E, we have no reason to think that the prevention of E will lead to an overall better result than letting E happen, so the fact that we do not see God preventing E is not evidence against the existence of God, since we have no more reason to think that God would prevent E than that he would not. The standard objection is that then we have no reason to prevent E, since we have no reason to think that the overall result will be better if we prevent E.
Well, this is really a challenge for skeptics of a necessary being (a necessarily existing, causally powerful entity), but I wanted a catchy title, and as a matter of sociological observation, atheists are typically (though not always) skeptics of a necessary being. The challenge is this …
Recent Comments