William Rowe's Evidential Argument From Evil and the Skeptical Theists' Responses

Abstract

William Rowe’s various works on the evidential argument from evil now occupies a central place in the Western discussions on the problem of evil. In one of his formulations, Rowe tries to justify the atheistic belief by showing the likelihood of gratuitous evil’s existence based on some particular instances of intense suffering. However, some of the philosophers, who are called skeptical theists, attempt to show that if there is a God, it is completely rational to accept that the humans are not in a cognitive position to make true judgments about all of the divine intentions and actions. Therefore, we cannot infer God’s justification(s) for the prescription of what seems to us to be an instance of intense suffering. Our aim in this paper is to show that skeptical theism offers a good reason to reject the evidential problem of evil developed by William Rowe.