On the Problem of Paradise

Faith and Philosophy 33 (2):129-141 (2016)
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Abstract

Matthew Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs (BHI) claim that evil must be evidence against God’s existence, because the absence of evil would be (presumably excellent) evidence for it. Their argument is obviously valid on standard Bayesian epistemology. But in addition to raising a few reasons one might doubt its premise, I here highlight the rather misleading meaning, in BHI’s argument, of evil’s being evidence against God. BHI seek to establish that if one learned simply “that there was evil,” perhaps via an oracle, one would gain evidence of some strength or other against God. But when we commonly observe that there is evil in the world, we learn a stronger proposition. And determining the evidential impact of that stronger proposition is not so easy. The interesting questions about the evidential impact of even a general awareness of evil in the world remain open.

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Author's Profile

Laura Frances Callahan
University of Notre Dame

References found in this work

Laws and symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Laws and Symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 182 (3):327-329.
Evil and Evidence.Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7:1-31.
The moral skepticism objection to skeptical theism.Stephen Maitzen - 2013 - In Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 444--457.
Agnosticism, Skeptical Theism, and Moral Obligation.Stephen Maitzen - 2014 - In Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford University Press.

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