How HOW MUCH DOES HORRENDOUS EVIL DECREASES THE PROBABILITY OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD?

AN ASSESSMENT OF THE PROBABILISTIC ARGUMENT AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF GOD FROM THE PARENT ANALOGY

Abstract

I draw the argument of William R. Rowe (1979, 1984, 1988, 1996) that defends the low probability of the existence of God in given our ignorance of the goods resulting from the horrendous evils in the world. After explaining this argument, I present the answer proposed by Stephen Wykstra (1984, 1996), which became known as "skeptical theism". Then I move on to evaluate a crucial point in Wykstra's defense, which is the parental analogy. The parental analogy is the view that the knowledge of God, compared to ours, is analogous to the knowledge of a parent compared to a human children of a month old. In this way, even if there were goods that proceed from the horrendous evils allowed by God, we would probably be ignorant about some of them. Wykstra and Rowe's debate about the parent analogy has continued for almost twenty years, at the end of the past decade. My overall aim is do a critical analysis the parental analogy to determine to what extent Rowe's probabilistic argument decreases the probability that existence of God.