Evidential Problem of Evil

The Evidential Problem of Evil grants that the existence of evil is not strictly inconsistent with the existence of an omnipotent and wholly good God, but argues that certain features of the actual world’s suffering provide strong evidence against such a God. The canonical statement is William Rowe‘s 1979 paper “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” which centers on a fawn dying slowly in a forest fire that no human ever sees and that produces no detectable greater good.

The argument’s force is not that any single instance of suffering establishes atheism, but that the totality of apparently gratuitous suffering, suffering for which we cannot identify a justifying greater good even on careful reflection, makes theism less probable than its denial.

The standard theistic response is Skeptical Theism: the position that we should not expect to be able to detect the goods that would justify divine permission of evil, since the cognitive gap between us and an omniscient God is too large. Whether skeptical theism is a successful response or whether it overgeneralizes into a thoroughgoing skepticism is itself a substantial debate.

What distinguishes Rowe’s version of the argument is its tone. Rowe is a “friendly atheist”: he holds that some theists are rational in their belief, that the question is genuinely difficult, and that one can take the arguments seriously without finding them sufficient. The fawn case is meant to be taken seriously, not to score a debating point.