Michael Tooley

Background

Michael Tooley is an American-trained analytic philosopher, long at the University of Colorado Boulder, who works across metaphysics (causation, laws of nature) and philosophy of religion. In the problem-of-evil literature he occupies a distinctive position: he rejects both Rowe's instantial generalization and Draper's abductive strategy, and instead grounds the evidential argument in formal inductive logic — a Carnapian theory of logical probability. He is the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry 'The Problem of Evil', the very survey through which this wiki reconstructs the whole debate, and he debated the question book-length with Plantinga in Knowledge of God (2008).

Positions held in this wiki

• The Evidential Problem of Evil — Tooley figures twice under this view. As critic: Rowe's instantial-generalization defense fails, because from "each unobserved A is probably B" it does not follow that "all unobserved As are probably B" — and Rowe's Q quantifies over all goods (SEP PoE §3.2–3.5). As proponent: his own inductive-logic version rebuilds the argument on "a certain very fundamental and very plausible equiprobability principle" over families of unknown rightmaking and wrongmaking properties, yielding the result that the probability that an apparently-wrong-to-allow action is not wrong all things considered "must be less than 1/2" — and, generalized over n such events, a quantitative upper bound on the probability of theism (SEP PoE §3.5).
• Against skeptical theism, Tooley argues that appeals to human cognitive limitations provide no purchase on the equiprobability version, since its probabilities are a priori (see the skeptical-theism discussion in The Evidential Problem of Evil).

Key works in our corpus

• SEP 'The Problem of Evil' — in corpus; Tooley is its author, and §3.5 is his own argument stated in his own voice.
• Corpus gap: Knowledge of God (2008) and the 2012 paper are copyright-locked; represented via the SEP entry. Logged in meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics

• Alvin Plantinga — his co-author and opposite number in Knowledge of God; the free-will and warrant replies.
• Michael Bergmann and Stephen J. Wykstra — skeptical theists who dispute that any a priori equiprobability principle over moral properties is available; the SEP itself notes the objection that bringing in such a principle is contentious (SEP PoE §3.5).

See also

• William L. Rowe — the direct-inductive formulation Tooley's version is designed to repair.
• Paul Draper — the rival abductive route to the same evidential conclusion.
• J. L. Mackie — the incompatibility predecessor; Tooley's SEP entry records how Plantinga's replies to Mackie set the agenda.