The Evil-God Challenge: Extended and Defended

Religious Studies 55 (1):85-109 (2019)
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Abstract

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend the evil-god challenge by showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections.

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John Collins
East Carolina University

Citations of this work

Meeting the Evil God Challenge.Ben Page & Max Baker-Hytch - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (3):489-514.
The Intrinsic Probability of Grand Explanatory Theories.Ted Poston - 2020 - Faith and Philosophy 37 (4):401-420.
Is Meaning in Life Constituted by Value or Intelligibility?Iddo Landau - 2021 - Philosophical Papers 50 (1-2):211-234.

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