Showing papers on "Skeptical theism published in 2007"
TL;DR: This paper argued that religious believers who accept skeptical theism and take its practical implications seriously will be forced into a position of paralysis or aporia when faced with a wide set of morally significant situations.
Abstract: Skeptical theism seeks to defend theism against the problem of evil by invoking putatively reasonable skepticism concerning human epistemic limitations in order to establish that we have no epistemological basis from which to judge that apparently gratuitous evils are not in fact justified by morally sufficient reasons beyond our ken. This paper contributes to the set of distinctively practical criticisms of skeptical theism by arguing that religious believers who accept skeptical theism and take its practical implications seriously will be forced into a position of paralysis or aporia when faced with a wide set of morally significant situations. It is argued that this consequence speaks strongly against the acceptance of skeptical theism insofar as such moral aporia is inconsistent with religious moral teaching and practice. In addition, a variety of arguments designed to show that accepting skeptical theism does not lead to this consequence are considered, and shown to be deficient.
20 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that Bergmann and Rea are mistaken: skeptical theists cannot consistently rely on what they take to be God's commands, and they argue that the evidence of the existence of a moral obligation can be found in the Bible.
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.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the Bayesian formulation of the argument from evil for atheism against the background of the contemporary debate on Rowe's initial inductive formulation, and discuss the most important challenges to Rowe's weak and strong claims.
Abstract: The aim of this article is to present the Bayesian formulation of the argument from evil for atheism against the background of the contemporary debate on Rowe’s initial inductive formulation of the argument. At the beginning I present the key premises and basics of the Bayesian formulation (esp. Bayes’s theorem, the notion of epistemic probability, etc.), then I discuss the most important challenges to Rowe’s weak and strong claims. The main problem with the Bayesian formulation of the argument is that it does not accomplish what it was intended for: it fails to avoid the confrontation with skeptical theism . The latter has to be refuted in order to save Rowe’s argument (no matter which formulation we take into account, the inductive or the Bayesian). It seems that the debate on Rowe’s evidential argument from evil has reached a deadlock – more and more analytic philosophers of religion claim we should return to the logical formulation of the problem of evil.
2 citations