Does Divine Mystery Lead to Moral Paralysis? The Agency of the Spirit and the Skeptical Theist Response to the Problem of Evil (Part 5)

The intuitive appeal of skeptical theism for the Christian lies in the claim that we must have due humility in the face of our understanding of God and evil. Indeed this seems to be the point of the Job narrative in the Old Testament, that as finite human beings, it is simply not given to us to know why God allows evil to occur. Thus, retaining a strong sense of divine mystery has been an important feature of the Christian tradition, one that I think the skeptical theist position tries to articulate. The problem enters when the skeptical theist allows her skepticism to become too pervasive, when divine mystery is emphasized above positive knowledge of God. As Colin Gunton notes in reference to negative theology, “What might appear to be a proper human modesty before the divine can turn into the supreme blasphemy of denying revelation.”[1] The skeptical theist position as described above does fit in the stream of the via negativa in relying on human ignorance to do the heavy lifting when it comes to theological language. The potential danger, then, of skeptical theism is that it promotes a picture of God apart from the picture that He has painted of himself for us in divine revelation, in Scripture. While it is clear that retaining a sense of divine mystery is a healthful aspect of the Christian’s beliefs, that sense of cognitive limitation should not also remove Scripture from giving knowledge of God. Therefore, from a theological, as well as from a philosophical, perspective, complete skepticism is not desirable or warranted. 

Critics of skeptical theism often pose this dilemma:[2] on the one hand, if we confess our cognitive limitations in the realm of values or in the realm of discerning God’s purposes, we end up morally paralyzed. On the other hand, if we begin to provide reasons for thinking we understand goods, evils, and God’s purposes concerning them, we have taken the path of theodicy, we must reject divine mystery, and can no longer call ourselves skeptical theists. But what reason is there for thinking that the skeptical theist must be committed to this dichotomy? While this dichotomy may hold for the skeptical theist who accepts ST 1-3 or a bare LST, I take it that these positions are not essential for skeptical theism. The defining feature of the skeptical theist is that she rejects the noseeum inference. She believes that our inability to spot (all) the reasons God may have for allowing evil isn’t evidence that there are no such reasons. This position is perfectly compatible, however, with the skeptical theist being able to spot some reasons. The skeptical theist doesn’t need to claim that God’s purposes are wholly inaccessible to us, but merely that we lack a complete and comprehensive knowledge of those purposes. At the same time, our cognitive limitations must not interfere with our ability to act in any given moral situation.

The skeptical theist, then, needs an alternative model that appropriately identifies the locus of her skepticism. Rather than understanding our cognitive limitations in terms of general considerations about value (as in ST 1-3) or a blanket skepticism of divine intentions (as in LST), I suggest we fuse LST, the skepticism about our knowledge of divine purposes, with what we know about divine agency. This model will make the following claims:

(1) Some, but not all, of God’s purposes are beyond our cognitive capacities.

(2) God has revealed to us the purposes of divine agency, which are relevant to our moral obligations.

(3) Therefore, we have revealed to us divine purposes relevant to our moral agency while divine purposes are not fully understood.

---

[1] Colin Gunton, Act and Being (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 36.

[2] See Sehon, “The Problem of Evil: Skeptical Theism Leads to Moral Paralysis,” 72; and Mike Almeida and Graham Oppy, “Reply to Trakakis and Nagasawa,” 7.