Skeptical theism

Skeptical theism is the view that human cognitive limitations prevent us from reliably judging whether any particular instance of evil is genuinely gratuitous — that is, whether it serves no morally sufficient purpose that an omniscient God might recognize. The position emerged in direct response to William Rowe's evidential argument from evil (1979), which argued that apparently pointless suffering — a fawn dying in agony from a forest fire, a child tortured and killed — constitutes strong evidence against the existence of God. Where Alvin Plantinga's free will defense resolved the logical problem of evil by showing that God and evil are not strictly contradictory, skeptical theism addresses the evidential problem by challenging the inference from "we cannot see a reason for this suffering" to "there likely is no reason for this suffering." The position was introduced by Stephen Wykstra in 1984, developed by William Alston in 1991, and given its most systematic formulation by Michael Bergmann in 2001. It has become one of the most discussed responses to the problem of evil in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion.^{1, 6}

Skeptical theism is not a theodicy. It does not claim to identify the reasons God permits evil. Rather, it challenges the epistemic basis of the evidential argument: our inability to discern a reason for some evil does not constitute good evidence that there is no such reason, because we have no grounds for believing that the goods and entailment relations accessible to human cognition are representative of all the goods and entailment relations there are.^{3, 11}

Rowe's evidential argument

Skeptical theism is best understood against the argument it targets. In his 1979 paper "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," William Rowe presented the most influential version of the evidential problem of evil. Rowe's argument proceeds from a factual premise about the existence of gratuitous evil to a conclusion about the non-existence of God:²

P1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

P2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

C. There does not exist an omniscient, wholly good, omnipotent being.

Rowe illustrated P1 with the case of a fawn caught in a forest fire started by lightning. The fawn lies in agony for days before dying. No human agent is responsible, no human learns a moral lesson, and no greater good appears to be served by the prolonged suffering. Rowe acknowledged that he could not prove that no greater good is served, but argued that after careful reflection, the inference from the apparent pointlessness of the suffering to its actual pointlessness is reasonable. This inference — from "we cannot see a reason" to "there likely is no reason" — is the critical step in the argument and the precise target of skeptical theism.^{2, 7}

The inference has been labeled the "noseeum" inference (a colloquial contraction of "no-see-um"), after a type of small biting insect so tiny that one does not see it even when it is present. The name captures the skeptical theist's central contention: just as the invisibility of a no-see-um does not warrant the conclusion that it is absent, our inability to see a reason for some evil does not warrant the conclusion that no reason exists.^{6, 11}

Wykstra and the CORNEA principle

The first systematic skeptical theist response came from Stephen Wykstra in 1984 in "The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering." Wykstra argued that Rowe's inference from the appearance of gratuitous suffering to the reality of gratuitous suffering is epistemically unwarranted. To make this case, Wykstra introduced the CORNEA principle — the Condition Of ReasoNable Epistemic Access:¹

CORNEA. A person is entitled to claim "it appears that p" (in a way that provides evidence for p) only if it is reasonable for that person to believe that, given their cognitive faculties, if p were not the case, things would likely appear different to them.

Applied to the problem of evil: a person is entitled to claim "it appears that this suffering is gratuitous" only if it is reasonable to believe that, if the suffering actually served a morally sufficient purpose unknown to us, things would appear different — that is, we would be able to detect the difference between genuinely pointless suffering and suffering that serves a purpose beyond our comprehension. Wykstra argued that, given the vast gap between human cognitive capacities and the mind of an omniscient being, we have no reason to think we would detect the difference.¹

Wykstra drew an analogy between a human attempting to discern God's reasons for permitting suffering and an infant attempting to understand a parent's reasons for permitting a painful vaccination. The infant cannot see the good served by the injection and, from the infant's perspective, the suffering appears entirely gratuitous. But this appearance provides no evidence that the suffering actually is gratuitous, because the infant's cognitive limitations are such that the good reason, even if present, would be invisible to it. Wykstra contended that the gap between human cognition and divine omniscience is at least as great as the gap between an infant's understanding and a parent's, and therefore our inability to see God's reasons for permitting suffering provides no evidence that such reasons do not exist.^{1, 6}

Rowe responded to Wykstra by noting that the parent-child analogy has limits. Parents regularly expose children to suffering the children cannot understand, but the children do eventually come to understand the reasons — they grow up. In contrast, there is no analogous "growing up" with respect to the goods that God might be pursuing, and no independent reason to think that our inability to see God's reasons is temporary or corrigible rather than a permanent feature of our epistemic situation. Rowe also argued that CORNEA is too strong: it would prevent us from making reasonable inferences in many ordinary cases where our evidence is indirect or incomplete.^{2, 4}

Alston's catalogue of cognitive limitations

William Alston developed the skeptical theist position in a different direction in his 1991 paper "The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition." Rather than formulating a single epistemic principle like CORNEA, Alston catalogued the specific ways in which human cognition is inadequate to the task of assessing whether any particular evil serves a greater good. Alston identified several dimensions of limitation:⁵

First, our grasp of the range of possible goods is limited. There may be goods — forms of value, states of affairs, types of relationship — that are as far beyond our comprehension as quantum mechanics is beyond the comprehension of a dog. We cannot survey the full space of possible goods and determine that none of them would justify God's permission of the evils we observe. Second, our understanding of the necessary conditions for the realization of goods is limited. Even among goods we can conceive, we may not understand the conditions required for their realization. A particular evil might be a necessary condition for a good we can identify but whose causal prerequisites we do not fully understand. Third, our knowledge of the total consequence of any event is limited. The full downstream effects of any particular evil extend indefinitely into the future and across an indefinite number of lives. We are in no position to calculate whether the total consequences of permitting an evil, over the entire history of the universe, are on balance negative.⁵

Alston concluded that our cognitive resources are "radically insufficient" to support the premise that any particular instance of suffering is genuinely gratuitous, and that the inductive argument from evil therefore collapses. Alston did not call his position "skeptical theism" — he called it "agnosticism" about whether evils are gratuitous — but the position is functionally identical and has been incorporated into the skeptical theist literature.^{5, 11}

Bergmann's three skeptical theses

Michael Bergmann provided the most systematic formulation of skeptical theism in a pair of articles in the journal Noûs in 2001. Bergmann distilled the position into three skeptical theses, which he labeled ST1, ST2, and ST3:³

ST1. We have no good reason for thinking that the possible goods we know of are representative of the possible goods there are.

ST2. We have no good reason for thinking that the possible evils we know of are representative of the possible evils there are.

ST3. We have no good reason for thinking that the entailment relations we know of between possible goods and the permission of possible evils are representative of the entailment relations there are between possible goods and the permission of possible evils.

Each thesis targets a different aspect of the noseeum inference. ST1 challenges the assumption that we can survey the space of possible goods: there may be goods beyond human comprehension that would justify God's permission of the evils we observe. ST2 challenges the assumption that we can survey the space of possible evils: there may be forms of evil whose prevention requires the permission of evils we find inscrutable. ST3 challenges the assumption that we understand the causal and logical connections between goods and evils: even among goods and evils we can identify, the entailment relations between them may be opaque to us.^{3, 16}

Bergmann argued that if any one of these theses is true, Rowe's noseeum inference fails. The inference from "we cannot see a reason for this suffering" to "there is no reason for this suffering" presupposes that the goods, evils, and entailment relations accessible to us are representative of the total set. If they are not, the inference is no more reliable than an inference from "I cannot see a no-see-um" to "there is no no-see-um." Bergmann contended that all three theses are plausible given the vast difference between human cognitive capacities and the cognitive capacities that would be required to survey the total space of goods, evils, and their interconnections.³

Rowe responded in the same issue of Noûs, arguing that Bergmann's theses, while perhaps true in the abstract, do not defeat the evidential force of particular cases of suffering. Rowe maintained that the fawn suffering in the forest fire is a case where we can make a reasonable judgment that the suffering is pointless: we know the fawn dies, we know no one learns from it, and we have no reason to think that its suffering is connected to any good that might justify it. Rowe argued that skeptical theism amounts to the claim that we should never trust our considered judgments about cases of suffering, which is a skepticism too sweeping to be plausible.⁴

The noseeum inference in detail

The noseeum inference lies at the heart of the debate between skeptical theists and evidential atheists, and much of the philosophical literature has focused on clarifying the conditions under which it is or is not reliable. The inference has the following structure: we have looked for a reason that would justify God's permission of this evil; we have not found one; therefore, there probably is no such reason. The question is whether this inference is analogous to reliable inferences (such as "I have looked for an elephant in the room and found none; therefore, there is no elephant in the room") or unreliable inferences (such as "I have looked for a no-see-um in my tent and found none; therefore, there is no no-see-um in my tent").^{6, 11}

Wykstra and Perrine refined the CORNEA principle in 2012 by introducing what they called CORE (Condition On ReasoNable Epistemic access — Revised and Extended). CORE specifies more precisely the conditions under which an absence of perceived reasons constitutes evidence of an actual absence. The key factor is the expected probability of detecting the reason, given that it exists: if the probability of detection is high, then failure to detect is strong evidence of absence; if the probability of detection is low, failure to detect is weak or no evidence of absence. Wykstra and Perrine argued that the probability of detecting God's reasons for permitting evil is low, given the cognitive gap between humans and an omniscient being, and therefore the noseeum inference fails.⁹

Critics have responded that the probability assessment itself is question-begging. To say that the probability of detecting God's reasons is low presupposes that God exists and has reasons we cannot detect — which is precisely what is at issue. Draper has argued that the distribution of pain and pleasure in the biological world is more probable on the hypothesis of indifference (no God exists) than on the hypothesis of theism, and that this probabilistic assessment does not depend on the noseeum inference at all. On Draper's approach, the evidential problem of evil is formulated as a comparison of likelihoods rather than an inference from undetected reasons, and skeptical theism does not straightforwardly apply.^{14, 12}

Evidential argument from evil: key inferences and skeptical theist responses^{6, 11}

The moral skepticism objection

The most widely discussed objection to skeptical theism is that it leads to a debilitating moral skepticism. The objection proceeds as follows: if we cannot reliably judge whether any particular evil serves a greater good — if, for all we know, God has inscrutable reasons for permitting the suffering we observe — then we also cannot reliably judge whether we ought to prevent suffering when we can. For suppose a person is about to prevent a child from being tortured. A skeptical theist, the objection contends, should reason: "For all I know, God has an inscrutable reason for permitting this suffering. If I intervene, I may be thwarting a divine purpose I cannot comprehend. Therefore, I should not intervene." Skeptical theism, on this reading, paralyzes moral agency.^{8, 12}

The objection has been developed by several philosophers. Oppy argues that if skeptical theism's epistemic humility is taken seriously, it extends not just to judgments about gratuitous evil but to all value judgments that might be affected by goods and entailment relations beyond our ken. A consistent skeptical theist should be uncertain about whether any action promotes genuine good, whether any suffering is genuinely bad, and whether moral deliberation is reliable at all. The result is a global moral skepticism that is far more damaging than the evidential argument from evil.¹²

Dougherty has pressed a related point: skeptical theism, if applied consistently, undermines not only the evidential argument from evil but also the evidential arguments for God's existence. If we cannot trust our judgments about whether suffering serves a greater purpose, we also cannot trust our judgments about whether the order and beauty of the universe serve as evidence of design, whether religious experience provides evidence of God's presence, or whether the moral law points to a moral lawgiver. The same epistemic humility that blocks the argument from evil blocks the teleological, experiential, and moral arguments as well.¹⁵

Responses to the moral skepticism objection

Bergmann has addressed the moral skepticism objection in multiple publications, arguing that skeptical theism does not have the implications its critics claim. In "Commonsense Skeptical Theism" (2012), Bergmann distinguishes between two kinds of judgment. First, there are judgments about what we ought to do given what we know — practical moral judgments about how to act in our epistemic situation. Second, there are judgments about what God ought to do given what God knows — theoretical assessments of whether the divine permission of evil is justified. Bergmann argues that skeptical theism restricts only the second kind of judgment. We are in no position to assess what God ought to do, because we do not have access to the full range of goods, evils, and entailment relations that God's decision depends on. But we are in a perfectly good position to make practical moral judgments about our own actions, because those judgments depend only on information available to us, not on the total economy of divine providence.¹³

On this view, a person who sees a child being tortured and is able to intervene at no risk to themselves has a clear moral obligation to do so — not because they can assess whether God has a reason for permitting the suffering, but because the information available to them (that the child is suffering, that they can help, that no countervailing consideration they know of outweighs the child's suffering) is sufficient to ground the obligation. The fact that there might be inscrutable goods achieved by the suffering does not enter into the practical moral calculation, because those goods (if they exist) are by hypothesis beyond human cognition and therefore beyond the scope of human moral deliberation.^{13, 16}

Critics have questioned whether this distinction is sustainable. If we truly cannot assess whether the child's suffering serves a greater good, then for all we know, intervening to stop the suffering would produce a worse outcome than allowing it to continue. Bergmann's response is that practical moral reasoning operates on the basis of available evidence, and the bare logical possibility of inscrutable goods does not constitute evidence that should affect our practical deliberations. A doctor who treats a patient is not paralyzed by the theoretical possibility that the patient's illness might serve some unknown cosmic purpose; the doctor acts on the basis of the medical evidence available.¹³

Broader epistemic concerns

A second major line of objection concerns the epistemic implications of skeptical theism beyond the problem of evil. Several critics have argued that the skeptical theses, if accepted, generate consequences that extend far beyond their intended scope.

Dougherty argues that from the perspective of a commonsense epistemology, skeptical theism is difficult to sustain. If we have no reason to think the goods we know of are representative of the goods there are (ST1), then we have no reason to trust our evaluative judgments in general — not just in the context of the problem of evil but in every context where our assessment of value might be mistaken. The skeptical theses, Dougherty contends, undermine the reliability of practical wisdom, moral intuition, and aesthetic judgment, because all of these depend on our grasp of goods being at least approximately representative of the goods that exist.¹⁵

Oppy develops this concern into a dilemma. Either the skeptical theses are restricted in scope (applying only to judgments about divine purposes) or they are general epistemic principles. If restricted, then they require an independent justification for why our cognitive limitations are relevant specifically to divine purposes but not to other domains — a justification that skeptical theists have not provided. If general, then they generate a sweeping skepticism that undermines not only the evidential argument from evil but the entire enterprise of natural theology: the cosmological, fine-tuning, and ontological arguments all depend on human cognitive capacities that the skeptical theses call into question.¹²

Wykstra and Perrine have responded that the skeptical theses are not general epistemic principles but domain-specific claims about the limitations of human cognition relative to divine cognition. The claim is not that human cognitive faculties are generally unreliable but that they are unreliable in a specific domain: the assessment of whether particular evils serve divine purposes that involve goods, evils, and entailment relations beyond human comprehension. In other domains — ordinary moral reasoning, scientific inquiry, aesthetic judgment — our cognitive faculties are well-calibrated to the objects of judgment and function reliably. The asymmetry is grounded in the nature of the objects, not in a general skepticism about human cognition.⁹

Relationship to theodicies and other responses

Skeptical theism occupies a distinctive position in the landscape of theistic responses to the problem of evil. It is neither a theodicy (which claims to identify God's actual reasons for permitting evil) nor a defense in Plantinga's sense (which claims only logical possibility). It is an epistemological thesis about the limits of human judgment, and it can be combined with either theodicies or defenses or held independently.

A theist might hold, for example, that John Hick's soul-making theodicy provides the actual explanation for much human suffering, while maintaining (as a skeptical theist) that we are not in a position to verify whether any particular evil fits the soul-making pattern. The theodicy provides a positive account of divine purposes; skeptical theism provides a reason for epistemic humility about whether those purposes apply in every case. Similarly, a theist might hold Richard Swinburne's view that natural evil is necessary for moral knowledge and free moral agency while acknowledging that our ability to trace the specific connections between particular evils and the goods they produce is severely limited.^{7, 10}

Some philosophers have argued that skeptical theism is in tension with theodicy-building. If we truly cannot assess which goods justify which evils, then the theodicist's claim to have identified the actual reasons for evil is undermined by the same cognitive limitations that the skeptical theist invokes. Bergmann has acknowledged this tension and argued that skeptical theism is best understood as a "last line of defense" — a fallback position for cases where no specific theodicy is convincing, rather than a replacement for theodicy altogether.^{16, 8}

Skeptical theism also intersects with reformed epistemology. Alvin Plantinga's argument that belief in God can be "properly basic" — warranted without inferential evidence — provides an independent epistemic foundation for theistic belief that does not depend on the success or failure of natural theology. If belief in God is properly basic, the skeptical theist's concession that we cannot assess divine purposes does not undermine the rationality of theistic belief, because that rationality was never grounded in our ability to comprehend divine purposes in the first place.¹¹

Draper's alternative evidential challenge

Paul Draper's 1989 paper "Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists" presented an alternative version of the evidential problem that is specifically designed to resist skeptical theist responses. Draper's argument does not rely on the noseeum inference. Instead, it compares the probability of the observed distribution of pain and pleasure on two hypotheses: theism (an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good God exists) and the hypothesis of indifference (there is no being that cares about the welfare of sentient creatures). Draper argued that the biological role of pain and pleasure — their systematic connection to survival-relevant stimuli, their distribution across species in proportion to neurological complexity, and the existence of intense suffering that serves no apparent adaptive function — is much more probable on the hypothesis of indifference than on theism.¹⁴

The significance of Draper's formulation for the skeptical theism debate is that it does not require the claim that any particular evil is gratuitous. Draper does not argue that we can identify pointless suffering; he argues that the overall pattern of pain and pleasure in the biological world is better predicted by indifference than by theism. Skeptical theism, which challenges our ability to assess whether particular evils serve divine purposes, does not straightforwardly apply to a comparison of likelihoods across entire hypotheses. Bergmann has responded that the skeptical theses do apply to Draper's argument: if we cannot assess the entailment relations between goods and the permission of evils (ST3), we also cannot reliably assess the probability of the observed distribution of pain and pleasure on theism, because that assessment depends on assumptions about what pattern of pain and pleasure a God with inscrutable purposes would produce.^{3, 14, 16}

Whether skeptical theism can address Draper-style arguments remains an active area of debate. Some philosophers regard Draper's formulation as the strongest version of the evidential problem precisely because it shifts the argumentative burden from identifying gratuitous evils to comparing overall probability, a move that is less obviously vulnerable to skeptical theist rebuttals.^{12, 14}

Contemporary assessment

Skeptical theism has generated a large secondary literature since its introduction four decades ago. The 2014 Oxford University Press volume Skeptical Theism: New Essays, edited by Trent Dougherty and Justin McBrayer, collects twenty essays representing the state of the art, with contributions addressing the epistemological foundations, the moral objection, the relationship to divine hiddenness, and extensions to the problem of animal suffering. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on skeptical theism, also by Dougherty and McBrayer, provides a comprehensive overview of the position and its reception.^{8, 11}

The contemporary assessment of skeptical theism depends heavily on prior commitments. Theistic philosophers tend to regard it as a reasonable expression of epistemic humility: given the infinite gap between human cognition and divine omniscience, the inability to see God's reasons should carry little evidential weight. Atheistic and agnostic philosophers tend to regard it as an epistemically costly strategy that protects theism from evidential challenge at the price of undermining the evidential enterprise altogether — if human cognitive limitations are severe enough to block the argument from evil, they are severe enough to block the arguments from design, from fine-tuning, and from the applicability of mathematics.^{12, 15}

Skeptical theism: key proponents and contributions¹¹

The debate over skeptical theism remains unresolved. The position has successfully shifted the argumentative terrain: after Wykstra, Alston, and Bergmann, the noseeum inference can no longer be taken for granted, and evidential arguments from evil must either defend the inference explicitly or, as in Draper's case, reformulate the argument to avoid it. Whether this constitutes a genuine advance for theism or merely a strategic retreat into epistemic inscrutability is itself a philosophical question that continues to generate productive disagreement.^{6, 10}