Divine Deception and Hidden Purposes

William Rowe's 1979 paper introduced what became the standard modern form of the evidential argument from evil, moving beyond the logical problem (which most philosophers agree Plantinga's free will defense adequately answers) to a probabilistic claim. Rowe imagined a fawn trapped in a forest fire, suffering and dying slowly with no human or animal ever aware of it, and asked what possible good could be served by permitting precisely this suffering, in this way, unobserved. His conclusion was not that such gratuitous evil is logically incompatible with God's existence, but that its apparent pointlessness makes God's existence improbable.

The argument's structure is straightforward: (1) probably, no good exists that would justify God in permitting this suffering; (2) an omniscient, wholly good being would prevent suffering unless doing so required forfeiting some greater good or permitting equal or worse evil; therefore (3) probably, no such being exists. The persuasive force of premise (1) rests entirely on our failure, after serious reflection, to identify any candidate justifying good. Rowe took this failure itself as evidence.

It is this last inferential step, from 'we cannot identify a reason' to 'there is probably no reason,' that skeptical theists have targeted. The move seems natural in everyday reasoning: if a friend claims a decision was justified but we search hard and find no plausible justification, we usually conclude there was none. Whether this ordinary inferential pattern transfers to reasoning about an omniscient being is exactly what is disputed.

Stephen Wykstra's 1984 response introduced the 'Condition Of ReasoNable Epistemic Access' (CORNEA): the claim 'It appears that p' licenses belief in p only when, if not-p were true, it would likely still appear that p. Applied to Rowe's argument, our failure to see a good reason for the fawn's suffering counts as evidence there is none only if we have grounds to expect that, were such a reason to exist, we would probably be able to detect it.

Wykstra's analogy is a very young child watching a parent make painful decisions, a difficult surgery, a strict punishment, whose reasons are entirely opaque to the child, not because there are no reasons but because the child's cognitive and experiential development cannot yet track them. If God's mind stands to human minds even remotely as an adult's stands to an infant's, Wykstra argues, then our failure to discern God's reasons tells us almost nothing about whether reasons exist.

Michael Bergmann formalized this into three skeptical theses (often labeled ST1-ST3): we have no good reason to think the possible goods we know of are representative of the possible goods there are; the same for evils; and the same for the entailment relations connecting permissions of evils to greater goods. Together these theses claim that our sample of the total space of value-relevant facts is almost certainly unrepresentative, given the plausible vastness of what an infinite being might know that we do not.

This is a genuinely modest-sounding claim on its face: it does not assert that good reasons definitely exist, only that our inability to find them is not strong evidence they do not. Critics, however, note that 'modest' epistemic claims can carry immodest downstream consequences, which is the heart of the deception objection.

Erik Wielenberg's 'Skeptical Theism and Divine Lies' (2010) presses what has become the sharpest challenge to skeptical theism. If our cognitive access to God's total reasons is as radically limited as ST1-ST3 claim, Wielenberg argues, then we likewise have no good reason to think that our perception of God as trustworthy, or of scripture as morally reliable, or of any particular divine communication as sincere, tracks the truth. An inscrutable being might have unfathomable reasons for allowing us to believe false things about himself, a possibility skeptical theism cannot rule out without contradicting its own premises.

Wielenberg strengthens this with biblical examples some scholars read as involving divinely sanctioned deception, such as the 'lying spirit' sent to deceive Ahab's prophets in 1 Kings 22, arguing that scripture itself does not treat divine deception as unthinkable in principle, which makes the theoretical worry more than a hypothetical thought experiment.

The structural problem, as Wes Morriston and others have pressed it, is symmetry: the same cognitive-gap reasoning skeptical theists use to explain away apparent gratuitous evil could equally explain away apparent divine trustworthiness, apparent divine goodness in scripture's more troubling passages (herem warfare narratives, for example), or apparent answered prayer. If the reasoning is selectively applied only where convenient (blocking the evidential argument but never blocking trust), that selectivity itself needs independent justification.

Bergmann's central reply, developed further with Michael Rea in responses to the 'too-much-skepticism' objection, is that skeptical theism is a narrow, local skepticism about a specific inferential move in theodicy, not a global skepticism about moral knowledge, perceptual knowledge, or trust in testimony generally. On this view, one can consistently believe murder is wrong, believe Christ rose from the dead on independent historical grounds, and still hold that one cannot infer from 'I see no reason for this suffering' to 'there is no reason for this suffering.'

The plausibility of this reply depends on whether the relevant kinds of knowledge really are evidentially separable. Immediate moral perception (that torturing an innocent for pleasure is wrong) seems to rest on a different cognitive basis than speculative judgments about whether some unknown future or transworld good outweighs a given evil in God's total providential plan. Defenders argue this really is a difference in kind, comparable to trusting a physicist's basic claim that particles exist while remaining unable to evaluate cutting-edge quantum field theory calculations oneself.

Critics reply that this comparison actually favors their objection: we trust physicists because independent verification (predictions, technology, peer review) confirms their reliability, whereas skeptical theism offers no comparable independent check on divine reliability once cognitive-gap reasoning is granted its full force. The dispute, at bottom, concerns how much collateral epistemic damage a limited skeptical concession inevitably does.

It is worth noting that skeptical theism's basic structure is not a modern philosophical invention. The Book of Job ends not with God explaining Job's suffering, but with a series of speeches (Job 38-41) asserting the vast gulf between divine and human knowledge ('Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?'), while pointedly declining to justify the specific evils Job endured. This has long functioned, within the wisdom tradition, as a kind of proto-skeptical-theism: an assertion of epistemic humility rather than a theodicy.

What Job's narrative also preserves, notably, is an insistence that Job's protests were not sinful and that his friends' confident theodicies (that his suffering must be deserved punishment) were themselves condemned by God (Job 42:7). This suggests that even within a text often cited in defense of skeptical theism, there is a warning against using divine inscrutability to silence legitimate moral protest, a caution directly relevant to how skeptical theism should and should not be deployed today.

Skeptical theism, carefully stated, does something real: it identifies a genuine gap in Rowe's inference from 'no known reason' to 'no reason,' a gap analogous to real asymmetries of understanding found elsewhere. It does not, and does not claim to, positively explain why God permits any particular horror, nor does it remove the emotional and existential weight of suffering.

The deception worry pressed by Wielenberg and Morriston identifies a real cost, not a decisive refutation: skeptical theism's logic, if applied without qualification, threatens to erode confidence in exactly the divine trustworthiness that makes theism worth holding in the first place. The most responsible use of the view treats it as a narrow, technical block on one argument, paired with an explicit acknowledgment that trust in God's character must rest on other grounds (historical, experiential, testimonial) and that skeptical theism should never be invoked to dismiss moral objections to specific claims about what God has done or commanded.

Readers should walk away recognizing this as unfinished business in philosophy of religion: a defensive tool with real logical force against one specific argument, wielded by careful philosophers on both sides, and incapable by itself of resolving the deeper existential question of how to trust a good God amid genuinely inexplicable suffering.