Coming Soon!

November 16th, 7:00 PM. Location: Morton Hall 200-- Ted Poston (The University of South Alabama)

"Skeptical Theism Within Reason"

This world contains inscrutable evils, evils that we cannot fathom what would justify a perfect being in permitting those evils.Skeptical theists claim that inscrutable evils do not provide evidence that there are gratuitous evils, evils that lack a reason for permitting.Skeptical theism rests on the natural judgment that the cognitive distance between human beings and a perfect being is so great that we are not in a position to reliably judge whether there are gratuitous evils.Critics of skeptical theism stress that this move cuts deeply into a theist's position by undermining her justification for central claims in arguments for the existence of a perfect being and also undermining her justification for natural claims about moral obligation.Poston's goal in this talk is to argue for the consistency of skeptical theism within a framework that permits arguments for the existence of a perfect being and also supports natural judgments about our moral obligations.