Free Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole by Stephen Law

of which this Being allows known suffering should very often be beyond our ken.” 19
    Notice that Wykstra is not here making an entirely gratuitous and unjustified appeal to mystery, as in Quentin Smith's example. Wykstra's suggestion is that, if there is a God, then we should expect there to be many things we cannot understand. In particular, we should expect there to exist many evils for which God's reasons remain mysterious. In which case, the fact that there exist such evils is not good evidence that there's no such God.
    While this sort of appeal to mystery to deal with the evidential problem of evil may be intellectually rather more sophisticated and respectable than that considered by Smith, I can't see that it ultimately fares much better than the cruder version. First, notice that when loving parents inflict suffering on the child for that child's good, the parents will do their very best to explain to their child that they do care for them and that this suffering is for their own good. They will even make some sort of attempt to explain why they are causing this suffering, even if only in the kind of oversimplified terms a child might understand. A parent that did not do these things would rightly be considered callous and uncaring. Yet our cosmic parent figure, if he exists, fails tomake himself clearly known, fails to provide any such reassurance to those he makes suffer appallingly, and fails to provide any kind of explanation at all for the horror he unleashes. Surely we do, then, have excellent evidence that even if there is an all-powerful god, he is not particularly caring or benevolent.
    In reply, some may insist God does provide these kinds of reassurances and explanations—they are all in the Bible. But it's hardly clear to me, or indeed to the majority of humans currently suffering on this planet, that such explanations and reassurances are to be found there—why didn't God make them clearer? In any case, what about the countless generations of humans that suffered before the Bible was written? Why did God unleash millions of years of agony before finally getting around to providing us with some reassurance that, actually, it is all, in some mysterious way, for the best?
    Second, notice that there are presumably limits to how much evil can be put down to God's mysterious ways. Suppose the world contained even more evil and hardly any good at all. Suppose it resembled a vast Hieronymus Bosch–like vision of hell: a landscape of endless torture and despair with not a jot of beauty or happiness. Would it still be reasonable to say, “There's no compelling evidence here that the world was not created by a supremely powerful and benevolent creator. It's still entirely reasonable for us to believe in an all-powerful, all-good God!”? Surely, as the level of evil increases, we do eventually reach a point where we can justifiably say, “There may be a creator god, but it's not that one.”
    Third, and most significantly, notice that precisely the same immunizing strategy can be employed to defend belief in an evil god against the evidential problem of good. Someone who believes in an evil god can say: “Evil god's fiendish intelligence is boundless. So we should expect there to be many goods his evil reasons for which lie beyond our ken. In which case, the amount of good that exists is not good evidence that there is no such evil god!”
    Clearly, this won't wash. We know we are justified in supposingthere is no evil god on the basis of the amount of good we observe. There are limits to the amount of good that can be put down to an evil god's mysterious ways, and those limits are clearly exceeded by what we see around us. There are vast amounts of good in the world, far too much for it to be the creation of an evil god. But then there are also, very obviously, vast quantities of evil—seemingly far too much for this to be creation of a good God.
    THE MORAL OF THE UNSOLVED CASE
    An example of one last