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Welcome to Counter Apologetics.
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Welcome to Counter Apologetics. I'm your host, Emerson Green, and today we'll be discussing skeptical theism. You're probably already familiar with skeptical theism, even if you don't know it by that name. "God works in mysterious ways." "Everything happens for a reason." "We are to God as an ant is as to a human." What hope do we have of understanding why he does what he does, permits what he permits? "God is God and I am not."
This is one of those rare cases where philosophy of religion meets with Christianity as it's actually known out in the wild. Skeptical theists, in response to the seemingly gratuitous evil we witness in our world, point out that we're not in the same epistemic position as God, since we're not omniscient. We can't claim to know all the intricate connections between the events of our world. Something may seem like a tragedy, but it may have led to some greater good of which we're simply unaware. That's how skeptical theism works as a response to an argument from evil.
We can all agree that there appears to be gratuitous evil in the world. But just because it appears that way doesn't mean that's how it is in reality. How do you know this apparently tragic event didn't happen for a reason? That there isn't a higher moral purpose to the terrible suffering we witness?
So here's an argument for you:
1. If God exists, gratuitous suffering wouldn't exist.
2. Gratuitous suffering exists.
Conclusion: God does not exist.
Skeptical theists question the second premise. That's what they're skeptical of: the actual existence of gratuitous suffering.
Okay. So, what do we mean by gratuitous suffering? Since God is good, he wouldn't allow terrible things to occur for no reason. That's what gratuitous suffering is: suffering that God would have no morally sufficient reason to permit or to create.
According to William Rowe, an instance of suffering is gratuitous if an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented it without losing some greater good or permitting some evil that was equally bad or worse. In other words, if the suffering was pointless.
But I can think of plenty of examples of pointless suffering. Suffering which led to no greater good. We'll go into a few specific cases later, but for now, let's just use William Rowe's standard example of a fawn in a forest fire.
"Suppose in some distant forest, lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire, the fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. It seems quite evident that no greater good would have been lost had the fawn's suffering been prevented."
So, here we've got a non-moral agent, a fawn, being horribly burned by a forest fire started by lightning, natural evil, and suffering for days alone before finally dying. That suffering did not lead to a greater good.
Pointless suffering is a problem for theism because if God is good, he wouldn't allow terrible evil to occur unless he had a reason. For the sake of argument, I'll grant you that God might allow suffering to exist in order to fulfill some greater purpose. But a good being wouldn't want there to be avoidable, pointless, unnecessary suffering. And an all-powerful being would be able to prevent such suffering. A being who allows suffering or causes suffering that serves no purpose and which occurs for literally no reason is not a good being.
So, imagine if I stood by watching an elderly couple being mugged. The mugger has their money, but he's beating them and they're totally defenseless. For the sake of the example, let's say I judged myself able to prevent the mugging if I wanted to. It would be really easy for me for whatever reason. But I continue to watch this helpless old couple receive a ruthless beating until they're unconscious. Then the police arrive and ask why I didn't stop the mugging. They ask, "Were you afraid?" And I reply that I was not afraid. "Was he armed?" "No, he wasn't armed." "And you watched the whole thing happen?" "I sure did." "So why didn't you try to stop the assault?" "No reason. No reason at all." Many words come to mind to describe such a person, but "good" isn't one of them. A being who harms others or allows them to be harmed for no reason is not good.
If a good God is to allow terrible evil to befall humans and non-human animals, he must have a reason. To quote Daniel Howard-Snyder: "On the face of it, the idea that God may well permit gratuitous evil is absurd. After all, if God can get what he wants without permitting some particular horror or anything comparably bad, why on earth would he permit it?"
So, we had to take that little detour because some Christians bizarrely argue that being good is perfectly compatible with causing or allowing suffering to befall conscious creatures for no reason. Even though we would never do that, and we're supposed to be little worms and sinners, God can do that and still be considered maximally good.
So, here's that argument again:
1. If God exists, gratuitous suffering wouldn't exist.
2. Gratuitous suffering exists.
Conclusion: God does not exist.
And we can even add "probably" to make it easier to swallow:
1. If God exists, gratuitous suffering probably wouldn't exist.
2. Gratuitous suffering probably exists.
Conclusion: God probably does not exist.
Here, we're not trying to defend the idea that if God exists, suffering wouldn't exist. We're saying that if God exists, pointless suffering wouldn't exist. Evil that has no justifying reason, evil for evil's sake, that shouldn't exist if a good God exists.
So, here's how Ryan Stringer sets up skeptical theism:
"According to the skeptical theist response, we can all agree that there appears to be gratuitous evil in the world, but we cannot infer its reality from its appearance. Such an inference assumes that if there are morally sufficient reasons for God to permit or create the world's apparently gratuitous evil, then we will probably discern them. But this discernability assumption is questionable in virtue of our epistemic limitations. Because of these limitations, we might be currently or permanently unable to discern the morally sufficient reasons that God could have for permitting or creating the world's apparently gratuitous evil. Our epistemic limitations make the possibility of there being mysterious, morally sufficient reasons for God to permit or create the world's apparently gratuitous evil."
Skeptical theism is a strategy for responding to the problem of evil. Human cognitive limitations being what they are, we shouldn't expect to understand God's plan, his actions, or his reasons for allowing suffering. Just as we would expect a small child to be blind to the reasons an adult has for allowing her to suffer. For example, in the case of undergoing necessary medical treatment, we should expect that we will be blind to the reasons God has for allowing suffering. You don't have knowledge of all the events that will ever occur and how they're interconnected. You're not a Laplacean demon.
The world seems morally unintelligible. So what? The skeptical theist says, "How do you know there isn't a higher moral purpose to children with cancer, or the Holocaust, or to innocents who become terribly maimed in accidents, or the millions of years of animal suffering, or to children trapped under rubble alone after an earthquake? How do you know?"
To me, this diminishes suffering, like we just mentioned. When you actually look at concrete cases of suffering, the skeptical theist response seems almost perverse. And it's practically a form of radical skepticism. So they're appealing to radical skepticism in order to argue that fawns burning alive in the forest and children starving to death isn't what it looks like. And they're not really even giving a reason why. They're just saying there might be a reason why. We can't know for sure there isn't one.
So before we move on to my several objections to skeptical theism, I want to talk about a few examples of gratuitous suffering so it doesn't become too abstract and we don't lose sight of the moral significance of what we're discussing.
I took this example from real events that occurred somewhat recently, but it could describe any number of people over the millennia. An earthquake, natural evil, topples buildings and traps people under the rubble. They don't die right away, but of dehydration. And this includes children. So there have been young children who died alone, trapped under rubble for days before dying of dehydration. If they had to die, why not die instantly rather than slowly and agonizingly in isolation before finally dying? What was the point of that? Does that seem necessary to you?
And keep in mind, we're not just talking about the suffering of adult humans. We're talking about the gratuitous suffering of moral agents and of non-moral agents as well, where there seems to be very little chance of growth and greater goods resulting from the ordeal. And a moral agent is a person who has the ability to discern right from wrong, to act according to moral considerations, and to be held accountable for their actions. When a lion kills, we don't say it's guilty of murder. So, young children and non-human animals are non-moral agents since they can't engage in moral reasoning. Their gratuitous suffering is especially hard to explain. It's one thing for an adult human to suffer. It's quite another for a non-moral agent to suffer, which again seems harder to explain due to the diminished probability of soul-building.
So, this is from Arthur Schopenhauer:
"An explorer saw an immense field entirely covered with skeletons and took it to be a battlefield. However, they were nothing but skeletons of large turtles 5 ft long, 3 ft broad, and of equal height. These turtles come this way from the sea in order to lay their eggs and are then seized on by wild dogs. With their united strength, these dogs lay them on their backs, tear open their lower armor, the scales of the belly, and devour them alive. But then a tiger often pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery is repeated thousands and thousands of times, year in year out. For this then are these turtles born? For what offense must they suffer this agony? What is the point of this whole scene of horror?"
Here's one more example before we move on. In 1993, the photographer Kevin Carter took a famous photograph of a starving child during a famine with a vulture eagerly waiting behind him.
"Carter headed out into the open bush. There he heard whimpering and came across an emaciated toddler who had collapsed on the way to a feeding center. As he took the child's picture, a vulture landed nearby. Carter scared the creature away and watched as the child continued towards the center. He then lit a cigarette, talked to God, and wept."
In July 1994, he took his own life, writing, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses, in anger, in pain."
The fact that there's a jarring photograph helps make the pain concrete. But it should be noted that there are millions, if not billions, of similar cases that we've never heard of that have occurred throughout evolutionary history. For me, it's absurd on its face to suggest that suffering like this works out in the end towards some higher purpose. It's hard enough to explain with adult humans, but it seems impossible with the suffering of young innocent children as they endure starvation and disease. For those cases, as in the case of animals, there is seemingly no soul-making purpose or greater good that could be achieved. To claim that there is some higher purpose known only to God seems as implausible as it is insulting to those who endure such pointless suffering.
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Paul Draper has argued that while it's possible that God has unknown reasons for permitting evil, it's also possible, and antecedently just as likely, that God would have unknown reasons for preventing evil. So when a skeptical theist claims that God has secret, morally sufficient reasons for allowing the brutal rape and murder of a child, or a fawn burning alive in a forest fire, or starvation due to famine, the problem is that it's equally likely that God would have unknown reasons for preventing those evils.
To quote Jeff Louderback: "The possibilities of unknown reasons for allowing evil and unknown reasons for preventing evil cancel out. We're right back where we started, namely working with what we do know."
And here's another angle on this point. In his debate with William Lane Craig, Draper said: "While there might be reasons we can't understand why it's a good thing to allow this to happen, there might also be reasons we can't understand why it's a bad thing to let it happen." So, while there may be greater goods, of which we're ignorant, this point cuts both ways. It's equally likely that more evil results from these tragedies than we know about. Maybe there are greater goods, but it's equally plausible that there are greater evils of which we're ignorant. They are equally strong points. So, the appeal to unknown greater goods doesn't allow the theist to escape any more than an appeal to unknown greater evils helps my argument. Again, these cancel out and leave us right where we began: trying to make sense of the evidence we actually have.
So honestly, in my opinion, Draper's point is enough to put skeptical theism to bed. But as you may have gathered, we have not exhausted the reasons skeptical theism annoys me.
One of my issues with skeptical theism is that it's compatible with any possible set of observations. No matter what was going on, you could make the same point. It's basically a form of radical skepticism, like the idea that you're a brain in a vat or in the Matrix. And of course, I think it's true that there's often a distinction between appearance and reality, but this is not a blank check to believe anything you please. If some suffering in our world appears gratuitous, it's safe to say that it is gratuitous in reality until shown otherwise.
So, this brings me to another objection to skeptical theism. I'm somewhat sympathetic to an idea called phenomenal conservatism. And as it turns out, so are many theists. According to Martin Smith, phenomenal conservatism is a prominent view in epistemology that says: "If it seems to one that X is true, then in the absence of defeaters, one has justification for believing that X is true."
The world seems a certain way to you. Until you've been given good reason to think otherwise, you're justified in thinking that the world is how it seems. If suffering seems gratuitous, we're justified in thinking that it is gratuitous until we've been given reason to think otherwise. Not just suggested that there might be reasons to think otherwise. Of course, there might be reasons we could be wrong. That could be said about any hypothesis that's ever been offered. Everyone agrees that there seems to be gratuitous suffering. So, until you've offered a defeater for that seeming, then we're rationally justified in affirming that the world is how it seems in this regard. And since the existence of gratuitous suffering is far more likely on naturalism than it is on theism, the fact that we observe gratuitous suffering is strong evidence against theism.
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We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the world is not morally intelligible to us because of God's choice to make it that way. If the world were just obviously morally intelligible, we wouldn't be having this conversation. A lot of people wouldn't be atheists. So from the theist perspective, we're imagining a problem that doesn't exist, and many have lost their faith as a result, which, according to many Christians, gets you sent to hell for an eternity.
Think about the fact that God made the natural world coherent to us. The laws of nature are discoverable and intelligible. He made things this way. So why has he made the world morally unintelligible? When the skeptical theist says there could be unknown morally sufficient reasons, they're admitting that the world seems morally unintelligible. First of all, they wouldn't have brought up skeptical theism otherwise. But they're implying, absurdly, that God has decided to make the world morally unintelligible to us. Why? Why on earth would he intentionally cause us to hallucinate a problem, especially one that would lead human beings away from a relationship with him? Doesn't he want a relationship with us?
So, people are being sent to hell for an eternity because God decided to create the illusion that the world was morally incoherent. If the world really is morally intelligible in reality, that means God is the author of confusion here. Why not make it so we can just tell that it's morally intelligible? We wouldn't be having this conversation right now. Atheists would lose one of their better arguments. Many of us wouldn't have lost our faith if the world were morally coherent.
To quote Thomas Nagel: "The theistic responses to the argument from evil, of which I'm aware, seem unpersuasive, and I find it hard to understand how belief in an all-good and all-powerful deity can survive in the face of it. Even if a theist supposes that the problem has a solution that we humans are unable to grasp, that would mean that God, who created us with the capacity to discover the laws of nature and to find the world scientifically intelligible, has made us incapable of finding the world morally intelligible. These are powerful reasons to doubt and they have certainly destroyed the faith of some believers."
Sometimes you'll hear believers say something to the effect of, "We are to God as an ant is to a human. We can't possibly understand his reasons." Well, whose fault is that? God chose to make us this way. That we can't understand why bad things happen to good people, why the wicked prosper, why so much suffering on earth seems to be without a purpose itself causes even more suffering. And again, God is the author of this confusion. And as a result, many have lost their faith and consequently are now burning in hell. Manufacturing a problem where there isn't one is baffling enough. But in this context, where the stakes are so high, it's worse than confusing. It's monstrous.
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Let's say you had a daughter who needed to go to the doctor to undergo some medical treatment. The treatment wasn't going to be pleasant, but there's a good reason for it. This is essentially what many theists believe about apparent tragedies. There is some greater moral purpose, some justifying reason why God is allowing it to happen. We may not know what it is, but rest assured, there's a reason.
But a good father would be there for his daughter in the medical scenario. He would try to explain that there is a purpose. He would make her understand if he could. Regardless, he would try to be a comforting presence. However, many victims of tragedies don't feel God's comforting presence. Some do, some don't. This fact of divine silence during tragedies is much more likely on naturalism than theism.
Many theists give the same analogy I just gave to defend skeptical theism. We're all like the child undergoing medical treatment. We're experiencing pain, but it's for a good reason that we just can't appreciate at the moment. Our loving father, however, does understand the reason. I'm embracing their analogy. What a good father does in that situation, if he can't make his child understand, is be a comforting presence in the midst of that suffering. But many who are enduring tragedy do not feel God's comforting presence. On naturalism, this is not surprising. On theism, it's quite surprising. And by the way, if you're wondering why I'm using that sort of language, you know, "surprising on this hypothesis, not surprising on that," that has to do with a certain understanding of evidence and prediction. And in the show notes, I go through the sort of generic form of the argument I'm making.
Another objection to skeptical theism is what's called the Pandora's Box objection. Once you've endorsed radical skepticism as a response to the argument from evil, it's hard to keep that skepticism from influencing other things that you'd rather it not influence. As many atheists and Christians have pointed out, appealing to human cognitive limitations to defeat the evidential argument from evil is inconsistent with the general project of apologetics. If our cognitive limitations really do prevent us from assessing whether God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil, then apologists cannot consistently appeal to other popular arguments for God's existence. Consistent skeptical theists should also claim that human cognitive limitations prevent us from assessing the antecedent probability of fine-tuning on atheism, the probability of our universe beginning to exist on theism, even the resurrection. This is one reason why someone like Richard Swinburne thinks Christians ought not rely on skeptical theism and instead should actually attempt to provide explanations for why God would allow the suffering we observe in our world.
Another Pandora's Box style objection to skeptical theism is moral paralysis. To quote Aaron Lucas: "If we are so ignorant of good and evil that we are in no position to assess whether an instance of suffering is pointless, then much of our ordinary moral reasoning goes out the window. Ordinarily, if we saw something terrible about to happen, such as an infant crawling into traffic, we would immediately come to the child's rescue. This is because we implicitly make the judgment that the child's death would be on the whole a bad outcome. However, skeptical theism tells us that we are in no position to make such a judgment. So, if we endorse skeptical theism, we should always be in doubt about whether we have an obligation to prevent seemingly bad outcomes."
Skeptical theism essentially asserts that humans suffer from a massive cognitive bias. We see gratuitous suffering where there is none. In fact, this alleged cognitive bias is arguably the most pervasive cognitive bias in the human catalog. Sometimes we mistake correlation for causation. Sometimes we experience pareidolia and see faces in random patterns. And we often judge suffering to be unnecessary. How silly of us. If we aren't in any position to assess whether suffering is actually gratuitous or not, are we in any position to trust our cognitive faculties as reliable at all? After all, God must have had good reasons for implanting this powerful cognitive bias into our minds. How can we be sure that he hasn't created our faculties to be inaccurate, deceptive, and misleading in other ways? The skeptical theist already supposes that God has made our cognitive faculties deceptive and inaccurate in this way. So, we should lose trust in our cognitive faculties in general, shouldn't we? After all, God might have a good reason for allowing us to be deceived.
Actually, a Christian could reject skeptical theism on these grounds. God wouldn't create our faculties to be deceptive. But skeptical theism is predicated on the idea that God has created our minds with a massive cognitive bias, and one that's far more bewildering and dangerous than ordinary cognitive biases at that. If the theist supposes that God would provide us with reliable moral faculties, they can reject skeptical theism.
To quote Aaron Lucas again: "Taken to its logical conclusion, skeptical theism prevents us from saying that God wouldn't have good reasons for allowing our cognitive faculties to be wildly inaccurate and deceptive. For all we know, God has very good reasons for instilling us with false memories or making us brains in vats. Skeptical theism thereby gives us reasons to be skeptical of memory, perception, a priori reasoning, and so on."
Skeptical theism is in conflict with the claim that on theism, the probability that we can trust our cognitive faculties is high. The cost of skeptical theism here is that theists can no longer confidently make that claim. As is probably clear by now, skeptical theism causes problems that are worse than the one it aims to solve. It opens the floodgates for radical skepticism, including moral skepticism and moral paralysis.
Let's say you were a witness to an attempted sexual assault. You believe that you could prevent the assault if you wanted to, but you're a skeptical theist. If you had found out about the rape five minutes later, after the fact, then you would have concluded that the event was not an instance of pointless suffering. But you're a witness to it now, and you could prevent it. Everything you know suggests that you should help, but you just can't discount the possibility that the best thing to do would be to allow the rape to occur.
Let me quote William Lane Craig on skeptical theism: "The brutal murder of an innocent man or a child's dying of leukemia could produce a sort of ripple effect through history such that God's morally sufficient reasons for permitting it might not emerge until centuries later and perhaps in another land. When you think of God's providence over the whole of history, I think you can see how hopeless it is for limited observers to speculate on the probability that God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting a certain evil. We're just not in a good position to assess such probabilities."
So, here are the two conflicting thoughts for you as a skeptical theist: I ought to prevent this rape because I judge that it's how goodness is best served, and I cannot judge how goodness is best served. I mean, do you want to prevent greater goods from emerging in another land? If you give up your ability to judge whether certain events are cases of pointless suffering, then how can you make moral judgments and therefore take moral actions? There's an intimate connection between moral judgment and moral action. If you give up your powers of assessing whether suffering is unnecessary, then how can you act?
Think about the example of the daughter undergoing painful but necessary medical treatment. That's essentially the situation theists claim that we're in. Preventing apparently gratuitous suffering could be as foolish as preventing your daughter from getting the polio vaccine because it would be painful. You'd rather her take the shot to prevent the possibility of polio in the future. But if that's the case with the evils of our world, you'd be profoundly foolish to try to do anything about them, or at least many of them. Trying to prevent that rape or trying to stop the toddler from crawling into traffic could be as foolish as trying to stop your daughter from getting the polio vaccine because you don't want her to be pricked with a needle.
But if they say, "I think this suffering would be terrible and unnecessary, so I'm going to prevent it." Then they're tipping their hand. They, along with me, believe that the world is as it seems. There is gratuitous evil in the world. It's not all necessary pain like receiving a vaccine against polio. And that's why we should do something about the suffering in our world if we can.
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There are genuine tragedies in our world. Gratuitous evils. Times when the good to come out of a terrible situation is negligible or non-existent. The existence and abundance of tragedies is far more likely on a hypothesis of indifference than on theism. On theism, you'd expect some good to overcome the weight of the tragedy. In other words, there shouldn't be genuine tragedies. And for skeptical theists, tragedies are a myth. There are only apparent tragedies, since God will either make it right in the end or he has a justifying reason for allowing this seemingly gratuitous evil. For skeptical theists, there is no case of a calamity that was visited upon an innocent and that's all. There must be some kind of higher moral purpose. So if you believe in tragedies, times when something terrible really wasn't justified and wasn't outweighed by any notable good, then you can't be a skeptical theist. What's more, that's evidence against theism. The probability of the existence of gratuitous suffering on a hypothesis of indifference is quite high. But on a hypothesis like theism, it's quite low.
So, we've discussed several reasons to doubt skeptical theism. Draper's objection, phenomenal conservatism, that skeptical theism is compatible with any possible set of observations, the point about moral unintelligibility, divine silence during tragedies, Pandora's Box, and moral paralysis.
I also can't let it go without pointing out that the skeptical theist strategy amounts to saying, "God works in mysterious ways." Wow, well done expending so much energy on a philosophy that you could have found stitched onto a pillow at your grandma's house. I've made it no secret that I have contempt for skeptical theism. How one can look at a starving child and confidently say, "Hey, there might be a good reason for this," strikes me as an obtuse form of radical skepticism. You're simply failing to appreciate the reality of the situation, which is that there are tragedies occurring, some of them on our watch. You're failing to appreciate the world in which you live. You'd rather not deal with it, so you pretend it's otherwise than it is.
One reason skeptical theism is not just incorrect but dangerous is that it excuses the tragedies of our world and diminishes the suffering that's right in front of our eyes. If you're convinced that the world is the way that it is for a reason, I can't see why you'd change it. In reality, some of the gratuitous suffering is within our control to alleviate. The world doesn't have to be quite as awful as it is, and it's in our power to improve it somewhat. But if it's not really gratuitous suffering, why try to prevent it? Why ease pain if it's guaranteed to be aimed at a higher purpose? There's no such thing as pointless suffering. Remember, it's an illusion. Why try to make the world better if you're already confident that there is literally no gratuitous suffering in the world? Skeptical theism engenders a sense of complacency. It strips you of the outrage you would have felt at unjust suffering. And of course, skeptical theists behave like normal people. Their ordinary moral intuitions reassert themselves when they're not trying to defend skeptical theism and excuse why God is behaving in a way indistinguishable from non-existence. But the belief that everything is fine, that there is no pointless suffering, in other words, suffering we should prevent, is not a belief I'd like to see spread and take root.
Okay, that's all I have for you today. I have new patrons to thank: Eric Carlson and Andrew Fletteryan. Thank you, Eric, and thank you, Andrew. And I have a new Hall of Famer to welcome: Grim Frenzy. So, thanks to my Hall of Fame patrons: Phil Stillwell, Richard Crossson, a hoopy fruit who knows where his towel is, Pre-Nifty, Rory Beowski, and Grim Frenzy. And you can support this show on a per-episode basis at patreon.com/counter where you can get early access to every episode and access to bonus episodes. If you don't have the money to support on Patreon, but you still want to send people to hell and pretend like it's their fault, you can follow our social media on Twitter and Facebook, subscribe on YouTube, leave a five-star review, or tell your friends about the podcast. You can also subscribe to and leave a review of our sister show, Walden Pod. Our theme music was written and performed by the band Whalers. The song is called "Magic Tricks" and was used with permission. Thank you for joining me today. I've been Emerson Green and I'll talk to you next time.
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