and—not least important—our much greater awareness of disasters and human suffering
occurring all over the globe, the optimism of a Leibniz-type theodicy is neither plausible
nor especially appealing.
Perhaps the most popular response during the past two decades has been what can be
termed the skeptical solution for the problem of evil. This solution, pioneered by Stephen
Wykstra (1984), admits that we are unable to construct a credible theodicy of the sort
discussed above. However, it denies that the evils by which we are surrounded, and for
which we can see no justifying reasons, provide even prima facie evidence that there is
genuinely gratuitous evil. The reason they do not is that we are simply not in an epistemic
position to detect such outweighing goods were they to exist; therefore, our failure to
detect them gives us no reason to suppose that they do not exist. Our impression that
there is unjustified evil results from our failure to recognize our severe epistemic
limitations in these matters.
This line of defense has been powerfully criticized by Richard Swinburne (1998, 25–29).
Swinburne does not deny that we suffer from epistemic limitations, affecting both our
ability to trace the causal connections between various situations and our ability to
recognize and weigh properly the goods and evils that occur. However, the skeptical
solution makes a further, completely unwarranted assumption. It assumes that these
epistemic limitations bias our judgment in one direction only: that of failing to identify,
and to weigh properly, the goods that result from particular evils. But why assume this?
Why may it not be that our limitations lead us to overlook or minimize some of the
world's evils and to overestimate the likelihood that good comes out of evil? (Arguably,
some traditional theodicies have been guilty of precisely this fault.) There is no basis in
reason or experience for assuming that our epistemic limitations cut in one direction
only—but without this assumption, the skeptical solution collapses.^4
There remains yet another strategy for replying to Rowe's argument, namely, to accept
the first premise of the argument but to reject the second (Peterson 1982; Hasker 1992).
This entails the affirmation that the goodness of God is consistent with the existence of
gratuitous evils—evils that God could prevent, without losing
end p.434
any greater good or permitting any equal or greater evil. A possible key to making this
plausible is to ask what the consequences would be if God were, in fact, known to
prevent all genuinely gratuitous evils. If we knew this to be the case, we would also know
that any evil that we ourselves fail to prevent will be allowed by God to occur only if it is
the necessary condition for some greater good that could not be achieved without
permitting the evil in question. Arguably, however, knowing this would seriously
undermine our own motivation and sense of responsibility to prevent serious evils. So it
may reasonably be held, instead, that God creates a world that makes possible a great
many diverse forms of good as well as evil, and to a very large extent leaves it to us to be
responsible for preventing or alleviating particular instances of evil. The “greater good”
on account of which evils are permitted would then be found, not (or not always) in
particular goods resulting from particular instances of evil, but rather in the “overall
structure of the world order and the values that are generally able to emerge from it”
(Peterson et al. 1998, 141). This, in turn, opens the way for a more modest type of