Sérgio Ricardo de Miranda

Theism is the doctrine that affirms the existence of a transcendent creator with a series of essential attributes, among which are omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness. A serious problem for this doctrine is the existence of gratuitous evil in the world; for how could God allow the existence of gratuitous pain and suffering if he has such great properties? Below, we present a version of this problem, known as the epistemic problem of evil, and we introduce the skeptical theist's response, based on the epistemic principle known as the “Reasonable Epistemic Access Condition” (REAC). In the following section, we discuss the counterfactual objection that the REAC principle on which skeptical theism is based is overly restrictive and we question the response offered by Wykstra and Perrine (2012). Finally, in the last section, we offer a defense of skeptical theism and a reformulation of CORNEA that avoids the counterfactual objection.

O meu objetivo neste artigo é mostrar que o teísmo cético, particularmente a versão proposta por Wykstra em “O obstáculo humiano aos argumentos indiciários do mal: evitar os males da ‘aparência”’, não é uma resposta satisfatória para o problema do mal. Para tanto, desenvolvo duas linhas de raciocínio. Em primeiro lugar, argumento que um princípio central na resposta de Wykstra, a condição de acesso epistêmico razoável, não é condição necessária para a evidência; em seguida, mostro que o argumento por analogia proposto por ele falha ou conduz a uma versão social do problema do mal.

In this paper, we discuss a family of arguments that show the inconsistency of the concept of omniscience, which is one of the central attributes of the theistic God. We introduce three member of this family: Grim’s Divine Liar Paradox, Milne’s Paradox and our own Divine Curry. They can be seen as theological counterparts of well-known semantic paradoxes. We argue that the very simple dialetheist response to these paradoxes doesn’t work well and then introduce our own response based on a framework that we call Logic of Impossible Truths. LIT is a non-dialetheist paraconsistent logic designed to represent divine ominiscience and to preserve the transparency of the truth predicate and which semantics rests on the concept of situation. Since some rules of classical logic are not valid in LIT, we are in a position to block the derivation of the paradoxes. Thus, LIT offers a way out of the dilemma of accepting that there are true contradictions or giving up the idea that there is an all-powerful, omniscient and perfectly good being.