Res Philosophica

Volume 90, Issue 1, January 2013

Philosophy of Religion

Paul Draper
Pages 97-111

The Limitations of Pure Skeptical Theism

Michael Bergmann argues directly from our ignorance about actual and merely possible goods and evils and the broadly logical relations that hold between them to the conclusion that “noseeum” arguments from evil against theism like William L. Rowe’s are unsuccessful. I critically discuss Bergmann’s argument in the first part of this paper. Bergmann also suggests that our ignorance about value and modality undermines the Humean argument from evil against theism that I defended in a 1989 paper. I explain in the second part of this paper why this suggestion is false.