William L. Rowe

Background

William Leonard Rowe (1931–2015) was an American philosopher of religion who spent most of his career at Purdue University. Where Mackie claimed that God and evil are strictly incompatible, Rowe conceded the free-will defense and built the argument that has dominated the field since 1979: the evidential argument from apparently pointless suffering. Rowe described his own stance as "friendly atheism" — atheism that grants theists may be rationally justified — and his careful, concessive style made him the standard interlocutor for a generation of theist philosophers. He was also a significant historian of the cosmological argument.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Evidential Problem of Evil — the canonical inductive argument. From two concrete cases — E1, a fawn dying "in lingering and terrible fashion" in a forest fire, and E2, a young girl brutally raped, beaten, and murdered — Rowe argues: "(P) No good that we know of has J" (the property of justifying God's permission of E1 or E2), therefore probably "(Q) No good has J" (SEP PoE §3.2, quoting Rowe 1991, 72–73).
• Against the skeptical-theist reply that justifying goods may lie beyond our ken, Rowe answers that such a demand "is simply to encourage radical skepticism concerning inductive reasoning in general" (Rowe 1991, 73, quoted at SEP PoE §3.2).
• Rowe later advanced a Bayesian-style version of the argument, which receives extended critical treatment in the SEP (SEP PoE §3.4); see the article's Strongest-counter-arguments section for the Total Evidence objection pressed against it.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Rowe's papers and books are copyright-locked; none is in raw/. His argument is reconstructed, with verbatim quotation of his premises, from SEP 'The Problem of Evil' §§3.2 and 3.4. Logged in meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics

• Alvin Plantinga — pressed the "noseeum" criticism: the P-to-Q inference is justified only if a justifying good would likely be within our ken.
• Stephen J. Wykstra — CORNEA, the epistemic principle behind skeptical theism, was formulated against Rowe's inference.
• Michael Bergmann — skeptical-theist replies to Rowe's later formulations.
• Michael Tooley — a critic from Rowe's own side: the instantial-generalization defense of the inductive step fails, since Rowe needs a universal generalization over all goods (SEP PoE §3.5).

See also

• Paul Draper — the comparative Bayesian alternative that avoids Rowe's inductive step entirely.
• J. L. Mackie — the logical-argument predecessor whose retreat made Rowe's program the live one.
• David Hume — Philo's Parts 10–11 speeches are the argument's fountainhead.