I agree with what many others have said about this reading. While it was a very interesting philosophical argument, there were very few references to the existence of God. It seemed like much of the reading would relate back to the problem of evil and whether or not it shows evidence for or against the existence of God. By the time I was into it, I had already forgotten that that was a point of discussion early on. Other than that, it was interesting. I wasn’t expecting the story of Ashley’s suffering to figure into the conversation the way that it did, and I was much more satisfied with the philosophical debate it presented, rather than what I was expecting: a simple argument for atheism based on the fact that a benevolent God wouldn’t allow it to happen.
Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism
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I agree with you in that, the further you got into the author’s explanations, the more you forgot what he was arguing in the first place. That made it really hard for me follow along with anything he was trying to prove, let alone be swayed by it.
I liked how he used Ashley example to highlight that while it seems so reasonable that a benevolent God should ideally prevent evil wherever possible, we’re still in no position to make speculations about the nature of God, specifically whether it is true that God, in virtue of moral perfection, would necessarily and in all cases prevent evil. That is, according to skepticism we couldn’t know that God does not have legitimate reasons that we are merely unaware of.
I too found that Snyder was very long-winded in his explanations and by the time he got to his various conclusions you had lost track of what you were supposed to be focused on. I was let down by this reading–I thought I would take more out of it regarding Agnosticism than I did. Though I did come to the conclusion that I knew a very small portion of what Agnosticism was about. I am now tempted to delve further into this belief system.