Limiting Knowledge to Make Room for Faith

If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there so much suffering in the world? It is one of the oldest questions in philosophy, and one of the most personal.

This post introduces one popular response, called sceptical theism, and the problems it runs into. I then suggest that the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant can help solve them. It’s adapted from a talk I gave to students at Magdalen College School, Oxford, and is based on my paper forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy.

The problem of evil in a nutshell

The philosopher William Rowe asks us to imagine a fawn caught in a forest fire. It is badly burned and suffers for days before it dies. No one sees it, and nothing good seems to come of it.

Philosophers call suffering like this gratuitous: pointless, serving no greater purpose. Rowe’s argument runs roughly like this:

1. A good and all-powerful God would not allow pointless suffering.
2. The fawn’s suffering looks pointless, so it probably is.
3. So God probably does not exist.

The crucial move is step 2: going from it looks pointless to it is pointless.

The sceptical theist’s reply

Sceptical theists — “sceptical” because they doubt how much we can know, “theists” because they believe in God — challenge exactly that step.

Think of a young child having an injection at the doctor’s. To the child, the pain seems completely pointless. But the child simply isn’t in a position to understand the reason. The fact that she can’t see a reason doesn’t show there isn’t one.

Sceptical theists say we stand in a similar position in relation to God. The connections between good and bad things across the whole of history are vast and complicated. A painful event now might, in ways we can’t trace, be tied to goods we will never see. So when suffering looks pointless to us, that isn’t strong evidence that it really is pointless.

If this is right, Rowe’s argument doesn’t succeed. Indeed, most of sceptical theism’s critics accept that. Their complaint is different: they think the view comes at too high a price.

Three worries

1. Should we still help people who are suffering? If any instance of suffering might be serving some hidden good, perhaps we shouldn’t step in to stop it. We might be getting in the way of God’s plans. But that seems monstrous: of course we should pull a drowning child out of a pond.

2. Could God be deceiving us? If God’s reasons are completely beyond us, how can we rule out that God has some hidden reason to mislead us? And if we can’t rule that out, it becomes hard to trust anything God is said to have revealed. We trust friends because we understand how they think. An agent whose motives are totally opaque is hard to trust.

3. Can we still argue for God at all? Many arguments for God’s existence rely on predicting what God would do. For example, a good God would want to create a world fit for life. But if we can’t predict God’s reasons when it comes to suffering, why think we can predict them anywhere else?

Two ideas from Kant

Kant is famous for drawing limits around what human reason can know. Two of his ideas are especially useful here.

We see the world through our own lenses. For Kant, we never experience things exactly as they are in themselves. When I look at a pair of scissors, my mind shapes that experience — placing it in space and time, organising it into categories. A rough comparison is wearing glasses you can never take off. What follows is that some deep questions about reality lie permanently beyond us. Notably, this includes how all the good and bad in the universe ultimately fit together. For Kant, that’s not because we lack information, but because of what human minds are like.

Morality applies to everyone — God included. For Kant, the basic moral law isn’t a local human rule. It binds every rational being simply as a rational being. God knows far more than we do, but God isn’t playing by a different moral rulebook. Kant thought the claim that “God’s ways are not our ways”, in the sense of God having a different morality, was a terrible defence of God.

Crucially, Kant thought our limits in theoretical knowledge (what reality is like) don’t carry over to our moral knowledge (what we ought to do). We can be deeply uncertain about the first while being confident about the second. He also admired the biblical figure of Job, who honestly admitted he didn’t understand his suffering instead of inventing explanations — a model of intellectual humility.

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Putting Kant to work

Combine these ideas with sceptical theism and you get what I call Kant-inspired Sceptical Theism. It keeps the core sceptical claim — we can’t tell whether apparently pointless suffering really is pointless — but adds that we can still know right from wrong, and that God is bound by the same moral law as us. Here’s how that helps with each worry.

Helping those who suffer. Our uncertainty is about how good and bad fit together across the whole universe. It isn’t uncertainty about what we ought to do. Morality tells us to help a drowning child, and we can’t excuse ourselves by guessing at what God might be up to. And even if God allows suffering for deep reasons — like giving us free will — rescuing one child doesn’t take free will out of the world. Nothing we do in a single case can undo God’s bigger purposes.

Divine deception. We may not know God’s ultimate plans, but we do know that deceiving people is wrong. Since God is perfectly good and bound by the same moral law, God would not lie to us. Our trust in God rests on what we know about morality, not on seeing God’s hidden reasons.

Arguing for God. This is where the strictly Kantian version gives ground. Kant himself thought the traditional proofs of God’s existence fail, because they try to reason beyond the limits of human knowledge. So a Kantian simply accepts this worry. That doesn’t mean giving up on God: for Kant, belief in God rests on moral grounds instead of proofs. But many people won’t want to sign up to Kant’s whole theory of knowledge.

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Do you have to be a Kantian?

No — and this is the part I find most exciting. Look back at how the first two worries were answered. Neither relied on Kant’s theory about the lenses we see the world through. Both relied on the idea that morality applies equally to everyone, God included.

So I propose a lighter version, Moral Sceptical Theism. It drops Kant’s theory of knowledge and keeps only the moral idea. We are still sceptical about how good and bad fit together. We just say our limits are a matter of fact, not something built into human minds.

This version also handles the third worry better. If God is bound by the same morality as us, then we’re not completely in the dark about God. We can still have some reasonable expectations about what God is like. Job is a good example: he admitted he couldn’t understand his suffering, but he didn’t stop believing that God was just and good. And some arguments for God, like those based on cause and effect, don’t depend on knowing how good and bad balance out at all.

Why this matters

Sceptical theism is a powerful reply to the problem of evil, but it has often seemed to cost too much. Kant shows a way to keep its humility about the big picture without becoming sceptical about morality or about God’s goodness.

One question remains open. Is it right to hold God to the same moral standards as human beings, or does that make God too much like us? That’s a debate for another day — and I’d love to hear what you think.

If you’d like the full argument, look out for my paper “Kant-Inspired Sceptical Theism and the Unconditionality of Morals“, forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy.