William Rowe

William Rowe spent most of his career at Purdue and is, with J. L. Mackie and J. L. Schellenberg, one of the three figures who define the modern atheist literature in analytic philosophy of religion. Rowe was a “friendly atheist”: he held that some theists are rational in their belief, that the question is genuinely difficult, and that one can take the arguments for God seriously without finding them sufficient. His tone is in this respect closer to David Hume than to many of his contemporaries.

His most influential paper, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (1979), introduced what is now standardly called the Evidential Problem of Evil. The paper centers on the example of a fawn dying slowly in a forest fire that no human ever sees and that produces no greater good detectable by any inquiry. Rowe argued that such suffering, if it occurs, is evidence against the existence of a wholly good and omnipotent God, even granting Alvin Plantinga‘s Free Will Defense against the logical version of the problem.

The fawn case is the example Margaret Halloran sat with for hours after a workshop in March. The argument as Rowe states it is not novel, but the example is. Margaret writes in her journal that the fawn does something the abstract problem of evil never did: it makes her flinch.