Skepticism of antitheodicy and evidential argument from evil

Abstract

A distinctive feature of the contemporary debate on the problem of evil is a two-sided critique of theism. On the one hand, there are arguments against the existence of God (or for the low probability of His existence) based on evil. On the other hand, theistic responses to atheistic arguments—theodicies and defences— are criticised in the way of antitheodicy. This criticism relies on the fact that theodicies and defences are justifying evil and suffering or, at least, interpreting them as meaningful. It is obvious that both sides of atheistic criticism rest on the supposedly intuitively knowledgeable fact that there are evil states of affairs and suffering in the world. Appeal to this fact is in the basis of important assumptions, including epistemological ones, of the arguments from evil. These assumptions could be divided into two parts. Firstly, it is the assumption of the immediate givenness of the facts of evil in cognition. Secondly, it is the assumption that the facts of evil serve as evidence against main tenets of theism (e.g. the existence of God, the origin of evil, the possibility of justification of evil in the world). In the paper I analyse these premises within the project of transcendental antitheodicy offered by Sari Kivistö and Sami Pihlström in “Kantian Antitheodicy. Philosophical and Literary Varieties”. I demonstrate that the transcendental antitheodicy simultaneously plays two roles in the discussion. On the one hand its scepticism (the impossibility to know the suffering of another) allows to get rid of “an evidentialist game of argumentation”, on the other hand, the basic proposition of the transcendental antitheodicy might be seen by theodicists as rebutting defeater and hence it still in the “evidentialist game”.