Skeptical Theism

Abstract

Most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God take the following form: 1 If God exists, the world would not be like this (where ‘this’ picks out some feature of the world like the existence of evil, etc.) 2 But the world is like this. 3 Therefore, God does not exist. Skeptical theists are theists who are skeptical of our ability to make judgments of the sort expressed by premise (1). According to skeptical theism, if there were a God, it is likely that he would have reasons for acting that are beyond our ken, and thus we are not justified in making all-things-considered judgments about what the world would be like if there were a God. In particular, the fact that we don’t see a good reason for X does not justify the conclusion that there is no good reason for X.11 Some skeptical theists claim that the fact that we don’t see a good reason for X provides no evidence for the claim that there is no good reason for X. A more nuanced version claims that not seeing a good reason for X provides prima facie evidence for the claim that there is no good reason for X, but that this prima facie evidence is outweighed by the realization that we would likely not see the good reason even if it were there. Thus, skeptical theism purports to undercut most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God. What follows is an account of the nature of skeptical theism, an application of skeptical theism to both the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, and a review of the cases for and against skeptical theism.