Skeptical Theism

Skeptical Theism is the standard theistic response to the Evidential Problem of Evil. The position holds that the cognitive gap between us and an omniscient God is large enough that we should not expect, even on careful reflection, to be able to identify the goods that justify divine permission of any given observed evil. From the fact that we cannot see what good is served by the suffering of William Rowe‘s fawn, it does not follow, on the skeptical-theist view, that no such good exists.

The position is widely deployed and widely contested. Critics charge that it overgeneralizes: if our cognitive gap with God is too wide for us to evaluate divine permission of evil, it may also be too wide for us to evaluate divine commands, divine promises, or our own moral judgments about what God would or would not do. Defenders argue that the skepticism it requires is local rather than global, applying specifically to our ability to assess the goods that come from particular evils, and not to other dimensions of our knowledge.

Margaret Halloran writes about skeptical theism in her March entry. She finds, troublingly, that it does less for her than she expected. The fawn case lands. Skeptical theism does not, in the moment, lift the weight.