Michael Bergmann

Background

Michael Bergmann is an American philosopher at Purdue University and, alongside Wykstra, the most careful contemporary formulator of skeptical theism. Where Wykstra's CORNEA is an access principle, Bergmann's contribution is a representativeness critique of the inference from "no known good justifies this evil" to "no good justifies it": a sample-to-group inference is reasonable only if one may reasonably believe the sample representative — and the goods we know of are neither randomly drawn nor drawn from a "charted" group (SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §2.2).

His canonical statement is the skeptical theses, beginning: "ST1: We have no good reason for thinking that the possible goods we know of are representative of the possible goods there are" (Bergmann 2001: 279; cf. 2009: 376, ibid.), with parallel theses for possible evils and for the entailment relations between goods and the permission of evils. Bergmann urges the theses on theist and non-theist alike as a general lesson in modesty about the realm of value: "it just doesn't seem unlikely that our understanding of the realm of value falls miserably short of capturing all that is true about that realm" (2001, 279, as quoted in The Evidential Problem of Evil).

Positions held in this wiki

• The Evidential Problem of Evil — ST1–ST3 supply the article's formal premises 4–5 for the view it assesses as strong. Against the objection that such skepticism generalizes to external-world skepticism, Bergmann invokes epistemic externalism (SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §5.3).

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Bergmann's papers are copyright-locked. The position is reconstructed from the SEP 'Skeptical Theism' entry (in corpus), which quotes the 2001 formulation verbatim.

Principal critics

• William L. Rowe — the inductive argument the theses are built to block.
• Paul Draper — Humean comparative arguments; the skeptical-theist counter is that ST1–ST3 undermine the precise predictions about theism that Draper's comparative premise requires (SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §7.2).
• Moral-consequence objectors — critics who argue the theses breed moral paralysis or global value-skepticism; replies are catalogued at SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §6.

See also

• Stephen J. Wykstra — the CORNEA wing of the same program.
• Alvin Plantinga — the total-evidence complement.
• Peter van Inwagen — defense-style stories as a parallel anti-evidential strategy.
• William P. Alston — an early co-developer of the representativeness critique (Alston 1991, 1996, per SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §2.2).