Does skeptical theism make all evils inscrutable?

This reminds me of a worry I have about not only the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil, but to any response that suggests or states explicitly that God might (or will) have a good reason for allowing or causing an instance of evil. One paradox is the following: If all evils have or might have sufficient divine reasons behind them, then any evil we either cause directly or intentionally fail to prevent necessarily will or may have happened for a good reason. Hence it is that we always have a good reason to commit heinous evils: Necessarily, God will have good reasons for either allowing or causing them.

This is a broader worry than what's present in the quotation, but I think it relates.

"Hence it is that we always have a good reason to commit heinous evils: Necessarily, God will have good reasons for either allowing or causing them."

I don't know if that's right. It seems to assume that whatever reasons A has for allowing B to X are reasons that apply to B's X-ing in such a way that there's a permission for B to X whenever there's a permission for A to permit B to X. I shouldn't prevent you from smoking and act like some anti-smoking fascist. But, you shouldn't smoke. If tolerance is a virtue and it's permissible to act like the tolerant person, I think the point that I think you're trying to make will need to be modified.

Clayton,

I think you need to clarify that objection to my position. I have a reason to quit smoking. My quitting smoking is a different action than you forcing me to quit smoking. Whatever reasons show that you shouldn't force me to quit smoking, apply equally to all moral agents. This is just the sort of point I am making.

So let's say that some principle of tolerance makes it so that you shouldn't force me to quit smoking. This will apply generally, unless some particular agent has some special relation to me (or some other morally relevant feature), such as moral authority. Thus it is that parents can discipline their kids in ways that strangers ought not. Richard Swinburne thinks this sort of reasoning shows that God has special rights over his children, which are supposed to include his right to (presumably) let them die horribly painful and humiliating deaths. Do you support this line of reasoning? Is the only problem with me letting a child drown that I didn't create the child?

But the skeptical theist response is broader than that - it just says that maybe God has a good reason, so we should suspend judgment on whether or not, say, an evil is gratuitous. Well, if I decide not to stop a child from drowning, why don't we also suspend judgment there? Maybe God has an excellent reason for allowing me to do that. If God had a good reason to allow me to do that, it's not a far leap to suppose I could have a good reason to allow the drowning. In fact, maybe God caused me to do that. Why not maintain our skeptical humility and leave that as a possibility?

Just for fun, I'll add another objection: It seems that we could be skeptical moralists in general with respect to human reasons. Who is to say you know all of Charles Manson's reasons for his crimes? Surely human beings are more complex than we could ever fathom. Why not, in epistemic humility, reserve judgment on those cases?

If it's not obvious, I strongly dislike the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil.

According to skeptical theism, we should never regard it as likely that we'd spot God's morally sufficient justification for permitting some evil [...]

This seems to be a very strong thesis. Why can't we have a weaker form of sceptical theism?

Why is it a problem for theism that anything we do might have divine reasons for allowing it? Isn't that what theism has always traditionally affirmed (open theism being the exception)? As long as you can distinguish between divine motivations and human motivations, as scriptures themselves do, then you can explain why God might have a good reason to allow someone to do something that is genuinely evil to do. It's a strange criticism to point out that a view has a consequence that it already affirms.

As for the problem in the post, I think we need to keep in mind the distinction between doing and allowing. There might be some intrinsic good that we aren't aware of that might justify God in allowing some evil and some explanation for why it might be morally justifiable to do something that in most cases is itself evil. Whether we should withhold judgment on a particular case of unexplained evil depends on how sure we should be that we understand all the intrinsic goods, all the complex causal processes that God understands, and what possibilities there might be for avoiding the evil. We have good reason to think our epistemic status is not that good in comparison with God.

Now you could give a similar argument about when an action that is almost always wrong might be ok. But it does involve a higher burden of proof to justify something that is normally wrong. It's normally wrong to lie, even if there are exceptions when it's morally justified or even morally required. But the burden of proof is much higher to do something normally wrong than it is to allow someone else to do something morally wrong.

This is increased even further if the lying would be done in express contradiction to scriptural statements about God not lying and about a prophet's veracity being 100% undermined because of one purported prophecy turning out false. The fact that the result of such a lie would make scripture contradictory raises the burden of proof so much that I think a case can be made that the burden of proof to allow lying has become so high that we should be more skeptical of the suggestion that a statement about God's motivations in the scriptures is a lie than we should of the argument from skeptical theism undermining our knowledge from the scriptures of God's motivations.

At the very least this should be a weaker skepticism than the skepticism about possible responses we're not aware of to the problem of evil.

I just have a 'wonder' here. (This is in line with the comment made by Joshua B. and builds upon it - I hope.) If the skeptical theist is correct and God could have a reason for allowing someone to do something terribly evil does it not have to minimally suggest that the terrible evil is a necessary condition for an equal or greater good possibly occurring? (This assumes that a good moral agent would eliminate needless evils.)If this is so, then is not a terrible evil that God allows to exist an instrumental good and if in fact the equal or greater good were to occur then we should be glad that the terrible evil exited and praise God accordingly for allowing it to happen. In this case, the victim of rape ought to thank, even praise, the rapist if she is able to overcome the evil done to her as suggested by the theodicy of Adams and others. This would mean that the victim of rape could never meaningfully claim that she wished she had not been raped if she is able to overcome the evil of being raped because then she would be claiming that she did not want the greater good to occur which seems irrational given the idea that we would want greater goods to occur if it were in opur power to bring them about. This seems paradoxical to me. (Without going to deeply into the question of God having foreknowledge - if the rape victim does not overcome the evil of being raped and commits suicide for example, if God knows that this is going to happen then can he allow the rape to occur? This can be avoided by adoping some version of libertarian free-will but that is another issue I suppose.)

I have another 'wonder.' Why do we assume that if God is all-knowing and we are not, that because God has knowledge that we do not have that this knowledge must include knowledge pertaining to what is morally permissible that we do not have? For example, if we know that we should stop the rapist if it is within our power and that failing to do so would make us blameworthy, what is it that we do not know that God knows that justifies him in allowing some rapes to occur that only he can prevent? I see no reason to grant him this type of knowledge. If we did stop a rapist no one would accept as a justification for our failing to do so that we are giving the victim of rape the opportunity to overcome evil and become a stronger person.

It seems to me that skeptical theism does not really solve any issue by granting God the possibility of possessing knowledge that we do not have and within this knowledge is the justification for allowing some evils to exist, it only places a greater epistemic distance between God and us (if God does indeed exist). I do not see how this helps us understand evil. If the experiences of our lives are supposed to be such that we and God want to have a close personal relationship, then making it impossible to understand why God allows evil to exists removes the epistemic possibility of this type of relationship developing. To me it is not much comfort simply to know that God might have a reason that justifies him in allowing evil ('might' implies 'might not)- I want to know that reason and need to know it in order to enter into a meaningful relationship with him.

According to skeptical theism, we should never regard it as likely that we'd spot God's morally sufficient justification for permitting some evil, and hence our failure to spot a justification is never evidence that God doesn't have one.

Stephen, I think the most the skeptical theist can claim is in (1) and (2).

1. If the probability of theism is high, then, if there is one, it is unlikely that we'd spot the morally sufficient justification for some evil.

2. If the probability of theism is low, then, if there is one, it is likely that we'd spot the morally sufficient justification for some evil.

So the skeptical theist's assertion that we'd would be unlikely to observe the God-justifying goods for observable evils is epistemically irrelevant if we believe theism is improbable. It is relevant only if we already believe theism is probable. It is the fact of theism that is supposed to have bad epistemic implications for our cognitive faculties re the goods justifying evils. If theism is false, then we might find justification for natural evils such as forest fires in their evolutionary purposes, for instance, and we'd expect those to be easily within our ken.

But suppose we do have reason to believe theism is true. What is your argument for your (2)? I see how it might go, but what's the argument?

Would this line of reasoning apply also to goods, making them inscrutable? I.e., we have cases in which we think we see how various goods fit into God's beneficent plan, but given our epistemic limitations, we have little reason to place any credence into these guesses of ours.

Thanks to Matthew for posting my question. The related issue that Joshua raised and to which Clayton and Jeremy responded is interesting, but I won't chime in on it just now. I'll reply instead to Mathis and to Mike and then briefly to a statement Jeremy makes in his last post.

Mathis asks, "Why can't we have a weaker form of sceptical theism?" One implication of my post is that we can't stop the advance of skepticism once we start down the skeptical path. It's a popular way to criticize skeptical positions in general, including skeptical theism. The impetus for my question was a response I saw to Erik Wielenberg's paper "Skeptical Theism and Divine Lies." Wielenberg argues that skeptical theists can't reasonably trust God's testimony, whether it's revealed to them directly or in scripture. Elsewhere I've argued that skeptical theists can't reasonably rely on what they take to be God's commands.

Mike asks for an argument for my claim that skeptical theism turns every evil into an inscrutable evil in my sense (2) of "inscrutable," i.e., an evil such that we can't reasonably claim to have spotted God's justification for permitting it. One argument is a CORNEA-style move of the kind that motivates the skeptical theism of Stephen Wykstra and others. Suppose we spot a potential justification J for God's permitting evil E, a justification good enough that we regard J as God's actual justification (maybe J is an independently compelling justification, or maybe scripture says that J is God's justification, or both). According to CORNEA, we can reasonably claim (a) "J is God's actual justification for permitting E" only if we can reasonably claim (b) "Were J not God's actual justification for permitting E, we'd recognize that and so wouldn't believe that J was God's actual justification." But claiming (b) presumes greater insight into God's mind than skeptical theism allows us to presume: it presumes that the justifications we find compelling God must also find compelling. While CORNEA has implausible consequences all by itself, I think I'm entitled to use it in an ad hominem argument against skeptical theists who accept CORNEA.

In his last post, Jeremy relies heavily on the doing/allowing distinction, and (having been persuaded by arguments of James Rachels) I don't think the distinction can bear the moral weight Jeremy needs it to bear. But never mind that. The claim that "[God's] lying would be done in express contradiction to scriptural statements about God not lying and about a prophet's veracity being 100% undermined because of one purported prophecy turning out false" is significant only if we assume that those latter scriptural statements aren't themselves divine lies, i.e., untruths being offered for our belief, but that assumption lands us back in Wielenberg's problem.

Mike (and anyone else who has an answer to this question),

If the theist acccepts Michael Murray's hypothesis that only humans have a 'level 3' experience of pain, but that animals can only have a 'level 2' experience, how serious do you think the problem of animal suffering remains for the theist? Even if, consequently, it does not constitute a big problem (which I'm not saying necessarily that it wouldn't nevertheless), I think we can grant that the theist still has reason not to mistreat animals.

Murray distinguishes three levels in an ascending pain hierarchy:

Level 1: information-bearing neural states produced by noxious stimuli resulting in aversive behavior.

Level 2: a first order, subjective experience of pain.

Level 3: a second order awareness that one is oneself experiencing.

Hey Joshua,

"I strongly dislike the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil."

I tend to dislike all the theist responses to the problem of evil. If it weren't for POE, I'd have to be one of those annoying fence-sitting agnostics. Ugh.

You had said:
"If all evils have or might have sufficient divine reasons behind them, then any evil we either cause directly or intentionally fail to prevent necessarily will or may have happened for a good reason. Hence it is that we always have a good reason to commit heinous evils: Necessarily, God will have good reasons for either allowing or causing them."

I can imagine a theist saying that the antecedent of the conditional isn't satisfied. There are evils that do not have any divine reasons 'behind' them. Just as we have no good reason to smoke or juggle chainsaws, it doesn't follow from the fact that God has sufficient reason to stand back while we do these things that there's sufficient reason for these things to be done. I don't know if much more is needed to block this first argument of yours but I'm also a little tired right now. I could be way off.

In your follow up post, you wrote, "Well, if I decide not to stop a child from drowning, why don't we also suspend judgment there? Maybe God has an excellent reason for allowing me to do that."

I can imagine a skeptical theist saying the following. I have some idea what your reasons could be because my evidence suggests that you and I aren't that different. However, my evidence suggests that there's a massive difference between me and some (hypothetical) God that could explain why God's reasons are very different from ours. For example, suppose that what any agent ought to do is do what they can reasonably expect will be best. If I can't make any reasonable judgments about what some (hypothetical) God could reasonably judge to be best but can make reasonable judgments about what creatures like me can reasonably judge to be best, it may well be that God will be permitted to do things that you are not and that I reasonably judge that you are not. In the end, I don't know if this is the most promising line in the world but it's a start. I wonder if that sort of response works for the Manson example, too.

To justify X is to show how X rightfully happens. . .

Steve,

I take natural events E to be justified (in non-theistic worlds) just in case there are causal consequences of C of E such that the value of (C & E) is on balance positive.

On your earlier point, suppose I concede the CORNEA shows what you believe it shows about justified evils (incidentally, I don't find Wykstra's interminable CORNEA saga particularly persuasive). But conceding the argument, what bad things follow for theism? I can't see that much bad follows, since agreeing with CORNEA already concedes a lot to the theistic position.

"The claim that "[God's] lying would be done in express contradiction to scriptural statements about God not lying and about a prophet's veracity being 100% undermined because of one purported prophecy turning out false" is significant only if we assume that those latter scriptural statements aren't themselves divine lies, i.e., untruths being offered for our belief, but that assumption lands us back in Wielenberg's problem."

And what's the problem with making that assumption, if we call it that? Skeptical theism is used as a defensive maneuver which elaborates on truths contained within Christian theism. It's simply bringing to bear certain consequences of the Christian worldview on the problem of evil. God's complete truthfulness is simply part of that broader position being defended. Skeptical theism isn't a stand alone or ad hoc response to the problem of evil. When Christianity is presented as a package, criticisms like rest on assumptions that lands us back in Plantinga's responses ala the de jure question is offered without consideration of the de facto question.

Hey Jesse,

I posted some material from Mylan's review of Murray's book in the other thread that you might consider. I'd be interested to know what you thought. (My first thought in response to your comments was that it's likely that some infants don't satisfy the conditions for suffering only if no non-human animals do and that seems really, really bad. Infants matter. Of course, those who think infants matter likely reject those views that seem to imply that infants can't suffer in a morally significant way. (I don't think leaving an infant in a car on a hot day while you go in for ice cream is morally like accidentally taking birth control pills instead of vitamins and thereby preventing a pregnancy that would have otherwise occurred.) It seems to me to be a promising line of response to the position that I think you're floating (but, as I note there, I've not had the opportunity to read Murray's book).

One may reply that God's justification might sometimes be scrutable to us, as when God spells out his justification in the Bible. But that reply assumes that God has no morally sufficient justification for lying in a particular biblical passage, something that skeptical theism denies us the right to assert.

Not, sure this follows, it seems sceptical theism is compatible with affirming that our moral duties are co-extensive with what God prescribes or commands. Either the sceptical theist could follow Quinn and Adams and hold that wrongness depends on or is identical with Gods commands, or they could argue the weaker thesis that a perfectly good being would command what is morally right and never command what is morally wrong.

But , if Gods commands are co extensive with our moral duty, then its not clear that the line argument you mention follows. A command is by definition promulgated in some way, I doubt you can coherently command X and keep the same people deceived as to whether you commanded X.

Second, suppose God did lie to us about what our duties are, this on the thesis of sceptical theism would occur only when God had an overriding reason to deceive us about what our duties are, this would however suggest that there is an overriding reason to not do the right thing, (knowledge of the right thing being a necessary condition of doing the right thing) but I am not sure the idea of an overriding reason to do wrong makes sense. Isn’t a wrong action one that we have an overriding reason to do.

"A command is by definition promulgated in some way, I doubt you can coherently command X and keep the same people deceived as to whether you commanded X."

The first part is right, but I've just issued a command to my ninjas and I'm not about to tell you what I've commanded them to do. To prevent you from determining what I've commanded them to do, I'll scatter this earth with letters that tell lies about what I've told the ninjas to do so that if you were ever to see their letter, you wouldn't know it from the fakes. You'll find out what my ninjas are up to soon enough.

Seems coherent.

As for the second point, I don't know why God would need the overriding reason to deceive us. Was God to have commanded God to refrain from deceiving us without good reason to do so on some prior occasion? If you opt for the stronger version of divine command theory and opt for a kind of skeptical theism, there's no guarantee that the texts we get from God won't contain deceptions. At any rate, I had the impression that Maitzen was saying that something (i.e., that God would never deceive us) doesn't follow from skeptical theism. Showing that ST is consistent with some other claim (e.g., DCT) and showing that DCT entails God won't deceive us is not a way of showing that ST entails that God won't deceive us. It's not that easy to dispense with premises.

I don't see how you got from my "God spells out his justification in the Bible" to your stuff about God's commands. My original claim was that ST makes us unable to identify any given justification as God's actual justification

Sure, but presumably a person looks to the bible to see what God has commanded them and hence what their duties are. The response you propose suggests God might have lied or decieved us in the bible about what he has commanded us ( perhaps he commands not X but in the bible commands X) problem is I am not sure this makes sense. If we are truly decieved about all or most of Gods commands to us then presumably they are not commands. Moreover if we know what God has commanded us then we are not decieved.

Not, sure this follows, it seems sceptical theism is compatible with affirming that our moral duties are co-extensive with what God prescribes or commands. Either the sceptical theist could follow Quinn and Adams and hold that wrongness depends on or is identical with Gods commands, or they could argue the weaker thesis that a perfectly good being would command what is morally right and never command what is morally wrong.

Hi there. It seems to me the best response to this is not to say that skeptical theism commits us to agnosticism re: the goodness of a morally perfect God's commands; rather, it should be to say that skeptical theism commits us to agnosticism about whether or not any super-intelligent being is morally perfect (and hence whether or not he's God, assuming moral perfection is built into the definition of "God"). Why should I believe that any godlike entity is making morally correct demands of us, given that I'm in no position to evaluate whether his arrogation of Godhood/moral perfections are pure lies told for inscrutable reasons?

Isn't the case of testimony different from observing an action in an important way.

The inference from 'I see no J' to 'there is no J' is a bad inference because if the latter were false there is no reason to think the former would also be false.

However, The move from 'I have been told there is a J' to 'there is a J' is good because were the latter false one would not expect to be told it.

"Again, Wielenberg's paper (see link above) lays out this reasoning better than a short post can."

Steve,

In reading Wielenberg, I did not see where he "anticipated" or even answered the point I brought up in my post. I may have missed it, however. If so, can you point me to the relevant page(s)?

Of course, not being aware of any defeaters doesn't mean that there aren't any defeaters.

Is that in general true? I think Plantinga's view of defeaters makes it a necessary condition that you're aware of them. I guess I could be misremembering that.

Matthew: You wrote, "That's a fairly strong view of testimony, one which I think has been rejected by most of the people working on the epistemology of testimony." I'd question whether their views, presumably focused on the epistemology of human testimony, carry over to the epistemology of divine testimony. According to ST, we shouldn't expect to be able to fathom God's reasons or justifications; no sensible theory of human testimony would say the same about the reasons or justifications of our fellow humans. I think that difference is relevant to the epistemology of each kind of testimony. I'd accept your penultimate sentence if you changed (a) "it's equally likely that he's lying as telling the truth" to (b) "it's not unlikely that he's lying." I don't think you need something as strong as (a) to get Wielenberg's problem going.

Paul: I took your point to be, as you wrote, "God's complete truthfulness is simply part of that broader [Christian] position being defended" by ST. Wielenberg's comment on p. 17 answers it: "Another reason a Christian theist in particular may find the Kant-inspired view that it is always wrong for God to lie untenable is that Christ is sometimes described as doing precisely that." He then cites 2 Thes. 2:11 [God's deception] and John 7:8-10 [Jesus's deception]. Is he misreading those verses?

Hi Steve,

I thought that might be what you were thinking. Sorry if I was confusing. I did not mean to say that I hold the "Kant-inspired view that it is always wrong for God to lie," I hold the view wide-spread view in traditional Christian theology that God cannot lie.

I think there are many weaknesses in Wielenberg's paper, I may list some later (btw, I obviously don't agree with his implied interpretation of those verses and I found it disingenuos to throw them out without serious exegetical work, especially when he said (twice) that he wasn't a theologian and didn't want to weigh in on biblical interpretation.)

Hi all,

Since my paper is under discussion here, it might be helpful to consider the most recent version of it, available here:

http://fs6.depauw.edu:50080/~ewielenberg/

Paul, I'd be interested in any weaknesses you find in this version of the paper. I recognize that the view that God cannot (or at least does not) lie is held by many Christians. The goal of the paper is to make the case that there is a tension between that view and skeptical theism. Perhaps it will come as no surprise to hear that I don't quite see how pointing out that the view that God cannot lie is held by many Christians constitutes an adequate response to the argument of the paper. But perhaps there is more to the reply than that.

Erik:

I am having a hard time finding the paper on the site. Can you post a direct link?

Without reading the paper, it seems to me that there are four plausible arguments for the claim that God can't lie.

A: Transcendental: If God could lie, we couldn't know anything.
B: Deontic: Lying is always wrong, no matter by whom, for what purpose and with what consequences, and God cannot do wrong.
C: Power+Weak Deontic: Lying is prima facie wrong, and an omnipotent being could always avoid it, so God doesn't lie.
D: God is Truth: Whether lying is always wrong or not, it is one of the basic facts about the divine nature that God is absolutely trustworthy.

I am guessing that skeptical theism primarily attacks C, right? Maybe indirectly D also, because D seems to depend on Revelation, and Revelation on divine veracity.

But I have a hard time seeing how skeptical theism would have much impact on A or B, unless by inducing a general skepticism (which it might well, but that's a matter for a different argument).

For the record, my reason for thinking God can't lie is B, maybe with a bit of A (though I don't have A worked out well enough to put much weight on it).

Here is the direct link to EW's paper:

http://fs6.depauw.edu:50080/~ewielenberg/Skeptical%20Theism.doc

Thanks for the link!

So, it looks like Erik argues against my B in three ways: (1) citing Plato and Mill who think lying is sometimes permissible; (2) giving some passages of Scripture where God isn't being perfectly straightforward; and (3) giving some scenarios that make it plausible that one is permitted to lie sometimes.

The argument from authority is unhelpful here. Moreover, neither authority is a Christian philosopher. Playing the authority game, I can off the top of my head cite Augustine, Aquinas, Alfonsus Liguouri and Cardinal Newman on the other side. :-) It's slightly weird to see the position that lying is always wrong described as Kant's position, when in fact there are a number of earlier philosophers who have defended it. The paper, furthermore, does not address the arguments of Kant and Aquinas, which are not so implausible.

The passages of Scripture are inconclusive. The Festival of Booths passage (John 7:8-10) has textual variants--in some manuscripts Jesus says "yet". To send a delusion that leads people to believe what is false is not the same as to lie. For instance, if I am escaping from an enemy, come to a cross-roads, and make a false track in one direction while going in the other, I am not lying. The reason for that is lying essentially involves assertion (by speech or perhaps gesture), and--more speculatively (here I am following Jorge Garcia, as well as a lot of conversations with Mark Murphy)--a connection to interpersonal trust. Lying and causing a false belief by non-assertoric speech are also different.

And of course for any strict deontic prohibition it is easy to generate examples where not doing the prohibited action leads to much greater evils, and the deontologist simply has to bite the bullet. Thus, it is wrong to kill one innocent person painlessly to save a googolplex of others from being slowly tortured to death, and it is wrong to lie to one person even if doing so prevents a googolplex of people from believing a falsehood in a crucially important matter--or to save a googolplex of lives for that matter. (I originally had infinity in place of googolplex, because I forgot that I no longer believe in the possibility of actual infinities.) Now maybe this is more plausible in the case of killing than in the case of lying, but I am not sure why that would be so.

However, Erik also makes the interesting and widely believed suggestion that lying to one's children is particularly justifiable (witness the common practice of lying to one's children about the source of Christmas presents; justifications making reference to being inspired by the spirit of St Nicholas Thaumaturgus, and hence to St Nicholas being causally behind the presents, may help in some cases, but (a) they may be sophistical given the actual words of the parents and (b) it is likely that many parents are not thinking along that line). Here I disagree very strongly. Because parents are the primary educators of the children, they have a particularly strong duty of truth with respect to the children. Just as it is more wrong for a physics professor to lie to one about physics than it is for a biology professor to do so, it is more wrong for a parent to lie to her children than for a non-parent.

As far as I see, the paper doesn't address D, but then D has not been developed very much. I actually think D has a significant plausibility to it--there is an attribute of divine faithfulness which may go beyond divine righteousness, and guarantee that God will keep his promises to us even if we release him from them (i.e., that God's promises are all covenants), whereas mere righteousness does not require one to keep promises one is released from.

I may be confused here, but as I (clumsily) gestured at before, I think issues regarding God's ability to lie are a red herring. We can distinguish two different claims here:

1. Skeptical theism implies that we can't/shouldn't trust the claims of an omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect and/or "Truth-identical" (a la Alexander Pruss' point D.) entity, i.e., the claims of God. (Taking "God" here to be defined in some general manner of classical theism.)
2.Skeptical theism implies that we can't/shouldn't trust the claims of the Biblical entity rigidly designated by "Yahweh."

If it turns out that Yahweh is God, then the second point collapses into the first and so arguments along the lines of A. through D. above may have some force (though I don't think they do). However, we can't simply assume this is the case. If our only reasons to think that Yahweh is God come from Yahweh's own mouth, then skeptical theism kicks in and we're in no position to evaluate the likelihood such a being is telling us the truth. Therefore, arguments from God's honesty essentially beg the question. The problem of being able to trust particular religious claims remains.

If our only reasons to think that Yahweh is God come from Yahweh's own mouth, then skeptical theism kicks in and we're in no position to evaluate the likelihood such a being is telling us the truth.

That depends on the the description that was used to fix the reference of 'Yahweh' in the second case you describe. If the reference fixer descibed an essentially truthful being, say, or something along those lines, then, if the 'Yahweh' refers at all, it rigidly picks out someone you can trust.

That depends on the the description that was used to fix the reference of 'Yahweh' in the second case you describe. If the reference fixer descibed an essentially truthful being, say, or something along those lines, then, if the 'Yahweh' refers at all, it rigidly picks out someone you can trust.

Assuming something in the vicinity of the causal-historical theory of reference is correct, "Yahweh," at least as I'm using it, isn't really defined in terms of any properties at all. So while it may be that "Yahweh," used in this way, successfully picks out someone essentially truthful, he's only going to be trustworthy if we have some reason to think this being is essentially truthful (or at least just honest in general). But this is where skeptical theism comes in. We can't simply assume that being (imagine me here pointing to the figure who caused the Flood, made a covenant with Abraham, etc.) conveniently possesses the properties it would take to evade the worries of Professor Wielenberg's paper. Without antecedent reason to suppose that being has those properties, that being's self-ascriptions seemingly ought to be taken with a grain of salt if skeptical theism is correct. For it seems that the intuitions underlying skeptical theism - Wykstra's CORNEA, say - should apply equally to any powerful alien superintelligence; and that being, whatever he may in fact be, is clearly powerful, clearly alien and clearly very intelligent.

The spirit of Wielenberg's paper, I take it, is to challenge skeptical theists' confidence in their particular religious beliefs. If it turns out we can be confident in one sort of deity's teachings, but also that we can't be confident any religion's deity actually is that sort, we're still stuck with a big problem, no?

M.:

What if we go as follows?

1. Argue that God exists.
2. Argue that Y*WH exists, based on miracle reports, the resilient history of the Jewish people, etc.
3. Argue that Y*WH has some property that only God has.

I was thinking one would have to go with something along those lines. But there are two problems with that strategy that I can't think of a great fix for.

First, with your step 1. I don't really know of good non-theological arguments (i.e., arguments that don't rely on trusting the content of religious texts) for the existence of God, where "God" is defined as being omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect, etc. The cosmological and teleological arguments and the like may get us to extremely smart, extremely powerful beings, but presumably not to truly almighty ones, much less morally perfect ones. (After all, it seems obvious that the world might turn out to be designed by a malicious Demiurge, doesn't it?) Maybe you think some version of the ontological or transcendental argument succeeds, but I really don't. On the other hand, maybe you think belief in an omnimax deity is properly basic and not in need of argumentation. I think there are serious problems with this epistemology, and in any case it's of no help to non-theists like me; but it seems like the road theists should want to go.

Second, with your step 3. I don't know how this could possibly argued. To illustrate my point, Christianity posits the existence of powerful supernatural entities called demons without really placing any bounds on their power or intelligence. Without such bounds, how could we distinguish between an act of God and an act of a powerful demon? (There's a paper in a recent Sophia called "The Devil's Lying Wonders" which I think argues precisely that we couldn't, but I haven't gotten my hands on it so I can't be sure.) Maybe if the only supernatural agent we have prior reason to believe in is God, then for reasons of simplicity we'd have evidence that Yahweh is God; but as soon as we subscribe to the existence of other supernatural agents (as all real-world religions tell us to do) we can no longer say this.

Assuming something in the vicinity of the causal-historical theory of reference is correct, "Yahweh," at least as I'm using it, isn't really defined in terms of any properties at all. So while it may be that "Yahweh," used in this way, successfully picks out someone essentially truthful, he's only going to be trustworthy if we have some reason to think this being is essentially truthful (or at least just honest in general).

I assumed you had in mind a Kripkean theory of names, given you hypothesis that 'Yahweh' might be a rigid designator. If so, then what you say here is false. I agree that 'Yahweh' isn't defined at all, and nothing I say assumes that. I said whether you can infer that Yahweh is trustworhty depends on the reference fixing phrase that introduced the name. For instance, if it was introduced as a name for 'the really trustworthy being who created all', then it is apriori true that Yahweh is trustworthy (assuming 'Yahweh' refers at all). You then know that Yahweh is trustworthy without further question, if there is a Yahweh. If the name was not introduced in that way, or was introduced without a reference fixing phrase, then you can get the worries you talk about.

I assumed you had in mind a Kripkean theory of names, given you hypothesis that 'Yahweh' might be a rigid designator. If so, then what you say here is false. I agree that 'Yahweh' isn't defined at all, and nothing I say assumes that. I said whether you can infer that Yahweh is trustworhty depends on the reference fixing phrase that introduced the name. For instance, if it was introduced as a name for 'the really trustworthy being who created all', then it is apriori true that Yahweh is trustworthy (assuming 'Yahweh' refers at all). You then know that Yahweh is trustworthy without further question, if there is a Yahweh. If the name was not introduced in that way, or was introduced without a reference fixing phrase, then you can get the worries you talk about.

Yes, you're right. It would've been wiser of me to have said that "Yahweh" wasn't introduced with a reference-fixing phrase; and if he were introduced with the phrase "the really trustworthy being who created all," the point I've been pressing would constitute an argument that skeptical theism undermines our ability to know "Yahweh" has a referent at all, at least judging from super-intelligent beings' self-descriptions.

M.:

As for step 1, I suspect that the approach Aquinas uses in STh Part I has a pretty good chance of working. A lot of it I do not understand. But whenever I do come to understand a part, it seems to work. Which gives me an inductive argument that it works. :-)

As for step 3, there is an apologetic tradition of identifying certain kinds of miracles that only God can do. Raising from the dead is an example. As is forgiving sins. (The latter is problematic in that it is not directly observable. But if a righteous person claims to forgive sins in the name of Y*WH, there is an argument from testimony available.) Of course, work is needed to fill out the details, to argue that only God can do these things, etc.