Dr. Retard

'Skeptical theism' is the usual label for theism that rejects evidential arguments from evil due to the limits of human knowledge and cognition. There may well be an unknown-to-us justifying purpose for all the evil we encounter, and since we can't rule out that possibility, we cannot infer atheism from that evil.

Here are some crazy consequences of skeptical theism. It should be said that not all versions of skeptical theism are the same. So not all of these crazy consequences follow from all skeptical theisms. Moreover, perhaps some of them don't really follow (e.g., I think (2) has a problem). But I think every skeptical theism I've seen leads to some of these crazy consequences. In any case, they provide good tests: if your version of skeptical theism leads to these consequences, you should reject your skeptical theism.

1. Let Hell-World be a world like ours, just with much, much, much more evil. Life is pure, non-stop agony. No one can think of a single good reason why God would allow all the evil they encounter. But Hell-World's inhabitants cannot infer atheism from these facts. After all, there might well be a God-justifying reason beyond their ken. In fact, no matter how much evil there is, and no matter how inscrutable it is, there is never any good reason for we limited humans to infer atheism from evil.

2. Sometimes we are faced with a decision, whether to prevent some evil we encounter, or instead allow it to happen. But, every reasonable theist knows that whatever happens, no matter how bad it looks, is objectively justified in the grand scheme of things. So, when a reasonable theist encounters evil, he should conclude that it doesn't matter what he does. For if he prevents the evil, things will be objectively justified. And if he allows the evil to happen, things will still be objectively justified. So everyday moral decisions are irrelevant for reasonable theists.

3. It's now a common-ground position that theodicies are lousy. Tons of brilliant theists and atheists have been considering theodicies for thousands of years, and it looks like they're all no good. But this doesn't matter at all. The fact that we can't think of any good theodicy -- the fact that evils are completely inscrutable -- makes it no more reasonable to infer atheism from evil. Someone who inferred atheism from evil without even considering a single theodicy is just as reasonable as someone who infers atheism from evil after carefully considering many theodicies with help from great thinkers from history and the present. Both inferences are equally unreasonable. Trying to come up with theodicies was a completely riskless game for theists, and its failure means nothing.

4. Natural theology is completely misguided. It attempts to show that theism is the best explanation of some natural phenomenon. But in order to make that judgment, we would have to be able to judge how likely the phenomenon is on theism. And, for any phenomenon, there might well be divine reasons for creating it or for not creating it, all beyond our ken. So we can make no judgment how likely a phenomenon is on theism. So natural theology must fail; it couldn't possibly work.

5. Any divine action, no matter how seemingly vile, cannot be ruled out for God. He might torture us, he might deceive us, he might give us misleading religious experience, whatever. After all, he might have good reasons for doing these things, reasons beyond our ken. So we can never trust God to do anything or to not do anything. No holds are barred for God, as far as we can know.

6. Lunatics are off the hook. They hold ridiculous beliefs about Cartesian demons deceiving us, about the earth's age, about the Church of Scientology, etc. They might be troubled at first by all the evidence that seems to disconfirm their crazy theories. But they shouldn't be, because maybe God (for unknown but good reasons) is fooling us about the evidence, making it look bad for the lunatics, when actually the evidence supports the lunatics. We can't rule this out, so the lunatics can rest content, unworried by the mountains of seeming disproof.

7. Theodicy is completely misguided. It attempts to give a good reason for God to permit evils. But we could never reasonably accept a theodicy, because we can never reasonably rule out the possibility that there are good beyond-our-ken reasons for God to prevent the evils, reasons that would outweigh the known reasons for permitting the evils. It might look like God should respect our free will, but perhaps he should actually cancel our free will. Who knows? No matter how good a theodicy looks, we can never reasonably accept it.

(I used (1) in a 1998 USENET post. Since then, a 2000 Jim Stone paper has used the same idea and the name "Hell-World", and William Rowe's "Skeptical Theism: A Response to Bergmann" (2001) gestures to the same idea. (2) comes from Dean Stretton's "<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dean_stretton/mae.html" target="_blank">The Moral Argument from Evil</a>". Paul Draper's "The Skeptical Theist" used (4). Bruce Russell and Richard Gale have made (6)-style arguments.)

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Dr. Retard:

"2. Sometimes we are faced with a decision, whether to prevent some evil we encounter, or instead allow it to happen. But, every reasonable theist knows that whatever happens, no matter how bad it looks, is objectively justified in the grand scheme of things. So, when a reasonable theist encounters evil, he should conclude that it doesn't matter what he does. For if he prevents the evil, things will be objectively justified. And if he allows the evil to happen, things will still be objectively justified. So everyday moral decisions are irrelevant for reasonable theists."

Yeah, I think the usual problem is that maybe the best situation would be "Theist prevents evil and evil doesn't happen," which is better than "Theist doesn't prevent evil and evil happens" or "Theist doesn't prevent evil and evil doesn't happen" or "Theist tries to prevent evil and evil happens," basically. Is that the problem you mentioned?

Have you read Tattersall's new-ish paper about Stretton and this argument family?

[ October 05, 2002: Message edited by: Thomas Metcalf ]</p>

Dr. Retard

This is perhaps an example of the more general problem I have: theists don't have to maintain that anything that happens is objectively justified -- that, whether the theist intervenes or not, things will be equally good. All they have to maintain is that God is justified in not intervening. And, they can say, sometimes it would be better for an onlooker to intervene, even though God is justified in not intervening.

What kinds of cases fall under this description? The best I can think of are cases wherein the 'onlooker' is depressed or indolent, deciding whether to do something to help himself. It would be good for him to make the right decision and do what he needs to do; and it would be worse if he made the wrong decision, because it would leave him even more depressed or indolent. But, in any case, God is justified in not intervening, because this is the sort of thing that the agent has to work out for himself, to be any more than a temporary fix. God's involvement might even engender dependency, making things worse.

But even with this case, it's hard to see why God is justified in not making a permanent fix -- miraculously granting the agent a more productive and active disposition, the way that antidepressants are supposed to do non-miraculously.

In general, it's hard to come up with a case where we can see why it would be good for an onlooker to intervene, but bad for God to do so. Usually, we can't see any relevant difference. Does our failure to see a difference provide grounds for believing there really isn't a difference? Only if the classic 'noseeum' inferences of Rowe work. So it seems to me that we're back in the same game.

Nope. I can't find it, either.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Dr. Retard:

"Nope. I can't find it, either."

It was on GODEXIST and it might show up in Philo. I think I downloaded the draft and left it on my other computer. So you could try emailing Tattersall and asking for a draft, or wait till this weekend when I have access to my other computer.

tergiversant

If God's primary goal in creating humanity is to grow up a species capable of fostering moral good on their own (as a species) it might behoove God to follow a sort of divine "prime directive" of nonintervention. Sound plausible?

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by tergiversant:

"If God's primary goal in creating humanity is to grow up a species capable of fostering moral good on their own (as a species) it might behoove God to follow a sort of divine 'prime directive' of nonintervention. Sound plausible?"

I think we'd at least have to modify that to make it work. Humanity would be capable (or incapable) of fostering moral good on their own whether or not humans intervene in any specific instance of evil. The theist must believe that the greatest good in a situation would be the human intervening rather than God intervening, but it's still hard to make this intuitively plausible.

Maybe other humans ought to observe this one human intervening, because it produces some special moral character in them. But if this is the case, God could make them think another human intervened when in fact no one did.

Maybe if God intervenes, this will convince humans that they don't need to worry about intervening in any case, because God will take care of things. But God need not make His hand visible in these situations, and God might even simply intervene a lot more than He does now without intervening all the time.

Maybe if God intervenes, this removes the human's choice to intervene. But the human has already made her choice if God needs to intervene in the first place.

Any response requires that the best thing for humanity is for the human to intervene freely, but we must simply subject this to the test of intuitive plausibility. God is aware of the moral character of His subjects, and He can observe for Himself whether any particular human decides to intervene in any case. So if a human decides not to do so, He could influence her to intervene after all, while making her think that she did so freely.

The only thing left to deal with is therefore a form of the free will defense; it is important to God that humans (1) make certain choices (covered already) but also (2) have these choices come about. This does not seem intuitively likely. God limits the results of our choices, even our moral ones, fairly frequently. It is not clear why the possible intervenor's free will's actualization is more important than the victim's free will's actualization when the victim chooses not to suffer this evil. Whether free will exists at all is not uncontroversial, especially given some forms of God's omniscience. And it is simply not too plausible that God's allowing possible-intervenor S to run around letting people suffer is really more important for the purposes of an omnipotent, omniscient God than victim V's lack of suffering in the worst cases.

hinduwoman

If god constantly follows the principle of non-intervention, then it follows that in daily life God is not needed, and all morals are subjective and anyone who claims to be in contact with him is a lunatic. so that is worse from the traditional theistic view.

Dr. Retard

My question would be whether this is a good goal for God to have, the kind of goal befitting a morally perfect deity. I allow that there are good reasons to let people foster moral good on their own. First, it's a very effective way for them to learn how to do it. Second, moral good self-fostered is especially valuable, as it in turn fosters a sense of self-worth.

But there's no reason to go whole hog. First, there are more valuable things than autonomy, as the case of a child drinking Lysol illustrates. No sensible nonintervention policy would say, "aw, just let the little bugger figure things out on his own". And the same goes for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the gulags, the Holocaust, and female genital mutilation. Second, it's unclear that calamitous cascades of tragedy like the foregoing do a single thing to help us develop moral autonomy. They seem to instead help us develop paralyzing fear, madness, hatred, and the ability to rot. Third, there are many cases of nonintervention that obviously do nothing to help moral autonomy -- the plague, for instance. It's hard to see how anyone's moral autonomy could be hindered by preventing said disease from ravaging Europe. To suppose otherwise would be to revive the theory that it was our sinfulness that brought it about. If securing God's primary goal requires this kind of complete nonintervention, then his goal is loopy.

galiel

Skeptical theism is an oxymoron.

tergiversant

Thanks to Mr. Metcalf and Dr. Retard for their replies. It would seem to me that the skeptical theist who wishes to maintain moral realism must assert that it is objectively good for humans to prevent moral and natural evil, but not objectively good for God to do so. Certainly this seems to me a logical possibility, but before it can be seriously entertained I would require some sort of justification for the agent-specific nature of the moral norm at hand.

Thus far the most plausible I have seen is that God's intervention somehow weakens the overall "do-it-yourself" moral character of humanity - to quote James Morrow, "spare the rod, spoil the species." For this excuse to work, though, one must posit a God who is far more concerned with the alleged intrinsic good of moral independence than the obvious evil of suffering and premature death.