Perry Hendricks. Skeptical Theism.

Epicurus succinctly formulated the problem of evil during the era when Aristotle's most famous student was razing the late classical world.Epicurus reasoned that an all-powerful being can eliminate any evil, an all-knowing being knows everything relevant to eliminating any evil, and an all-good being aims to eliminate any evil.Hence, God-an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being-prevents any evil from occurring.The fact of evil is inconsistent with God.There's been some discussion on the problem of evil since Epicurus's formulation.For the most part the positions in logical space are well-understood.There are greater good defenses appealing to goods that outweigh evils.There are limitation defenses (moral and structural) appealing to necessary constraints on what a perfect being can do.Skeptical theism aims to explore a different route: epistemic limitations on the ability of humans to map out the space relevant to God and evil.Hendricks's book is the first scholarly monograph entirely devoted to skeptical theism.Hendricks aims to defend several skeptical theist theses.The book consists of an introduction and then eight main chapters.The introduction briefly discusses the objection that theodicy is immoral (4-8).Hendricks isolates two objections: that the project of theodicy causes moral harm by displaying an insensitivity to sufferers and that the project of theodicy causes epistemic harm by minimizing what the sufferer knows.Hendricks initially dismisses these objections somewhat lightly with "Oh please" (5), but a more careful and nuanced response would better address the seriousness of these concerns.His more considered response is that these are reasons to practice theodicy more carefully (7).While this is true, I wasn't convinced that the 'be careful' lesson is the main lesson to draw from the epistemic harm objection.A sympathetic skeptic may hold that we aren't in a position to understand what the sufferer understands.Our epistemic limitations with respect to God and evil prevent us from engaging in a theodicy that threatens to minimize the sufferer's knowledge.Chapter 2, "Axiological Skeptical Theism Proved," defends the idea that we have no good reason to think that an evil's perceived value resembles its actual value ( 16).Let us call this thesis AST.Hendricks's initial formulation of the thesis is complex (13), and his simplified formulation is more complicated than it needs to be (16).A virtue of Hendricks's approach is his stress on public reasons, reasons which are "in principle, equally available to everyone" (13).His argument for AST is curious.He writes, "Axiological Skeptical Theism is true definitionally until and unless we are given a good public reason for thinking it's likely that for some evil , its perceived value resembled its actual value" (17, emphasis in the original). After this brief definitional argument, he spends the remainder of the chapter (18-48) replying to objections where the reader is treated to a tour of much recent discussion of skeptical theism.A virtue of Hendricks's monograph is that every stone on the skeptical theism path is turned over.