Abstract
According to Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy, adherents of skeptical theism will find their sense of moral obligation undermined in a potentially ‘appalling’ way. Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea disagree, claiming that God’s commands provide skeptical theists with a source of moral obligation that withstands the skepticism in skeptical theism. I argue that Bergmann and Rea are mistaken: skeptical theists cannot consistently rely on what they take to be God’s commands.
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Notes
Wykstra, S. J. (1996). Rowe’s noseeum arguments from evil. In D. Howard-Snyder (Ed.), The evidential argument from evil (pp. 126–150). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bergmann, M. (2001). Sceptical theism and Rowe’s new evidential argument from evil. Noûs, 35, 278–96; p. 279.
Ibid.
Almeida, M., & Oppy, G. (2003). Sceptical theism and evidential arguments from evil. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 81, 496–516; p. 511.
Almeida and Oppy, pp. 505–506, first emphasis added.
Bergmann, M., & Rea, M. (2005). In defence of sceptical theism: A reply to Almeida and Oppy. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 83, 241–251; p. 244, emphases in original.
Reliance on God’s commands is not the only reply that Bergmann and Rea gave to Almeida and Oppy’s charge of moral paralysis. But, it is nevertheless a reply that merits separate attention because it is a reply that is both understandably tempting for theists to make and yet very difficult to sustain. Evaluation of Bergmann and Rea’s other replies must await another occasion.
I owe this objection to an anonymous referee for Sophia.
William L. Rowe vividly addresses this point about our estimating likelihoods: ‘[According to skeptical theists,] since we don’t know that the goods we know of are representative of the goods there are, we can’t know that it is even likely that there are no goods that justify God in permitting whatever amount of apparently pointless, horrific evil there might occur in the world. Indeed, if human life were nothing more than a series of agonizing moments from birth to death, their position would still require them to say that we can’t reasonably infer that it is even likely that God does not exist’ (Rowe, W. L. (2001). Skeptical theism: A response to Bergmann. Noûs, 35, 297–303; p. 298, emphasis in original).
For the record, Bergmann and Rea (p. 241) identify themselves as skeptical theists and thus as theists.
One complication for Christians in answering this question arises from Jesus’s pacifistic command in Matthew 5:39 that they ‘resist not evil.’
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Maitzen, S. Skeptical Theism and God’s Commands. SOPHIA 46, 237–243 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0032-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0032-5