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One of Wright's respondents argued for what he called a "skeptical theism" with regard to the problem of evil. The main points are:
1) We don't have the cognitive equipment to figure out whether God intends to achieve goods that are morally sufficient to justify His permission of evil. When someone asks for a straightfoward theodicy, the skeptical theist will say that this demands the kinds of answers that human beings are inequipped to give.
2) Besides, we ourselves are tainted by sin, which further disqualifies us from making judgments.
3) Yet, we do have (or might well have) sufficient reasons to believe that God does have sufficient reasons to justify His permission of evil. He pointed particularly to the biblical narratives of how God deals with evil, which encourage us to trust that, whatever His reasons, He is perfectly just and good.
He also made a neat application of the book of Job: God's appearance dissolves Job's questions in the same way the presence of a loved one whom we have suspected of betrayal can dissolve suspicion. Once the loved one appears, all doubts vanish. That does not give us an answer to the problem of evil of the kind that theodicy seeks; it provides the kind of knowledge that cannot be put into propositional form.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 07:57 PM
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