Stephen J. Wykstra

Background

Stephen J. Wykstra is an American philosopher of religion at Calvin College whose 1984 paper on "the Humean obstacle to evidential arguments from suffering" reintroduced skeptical theism into the contemporary literature and gave the position its two signature devices: the "noseeum" diagnosis of Rowe-style inferences, and CORNEA — the "Condition On ReasoNable Epistemic Access" — an epistemic principle stating when it is reasonable to believe p on the basis of q (SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §1.3).

The intuition is carried by his now-canonical analogies. A doctor who visually inspects a dropped needle is not reasonable in pronouncing it germ-free: his evidence would look the same either way. Likewise, given that our cognitive abilities stand to God's roughly as an infant's to a parent's, our failure to see a justifying good for a given evil is not evidence that there is none — the inference from "we see no justifying good" to "there is no justifying good" fails the CORNEA condition (ibid.).

Positions held in this wiki

• The Evidential Problem of Evil — co-architect (with Bergmann and Plantinga) of the view the article assesses as strong. Wykstra's distinctive contributions are CORNEA itself, its later probabilistic restriction to "levering evidence" (with Perrine), and the distinction between an evil's being necessary for a good and its permission being necessary — deployed against the moral-paralysis objection (SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §1.3, §5.1, §6.1).

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Wykstra's papers are copyright-locked. The position is reconstructed from the SEP 'Skeptical Theism' entry (in corpus), which quotes and formalizes the 1984 and 1996 papers, and from the evidential-problem article's treatment.

Principal critics

• William L. Rowe — the inductive argument from apparently pointless suffering that CORNEA targets; Rowe's replies drove the subsequent refinements.
• Paul Draper — shifted the debate to comparative, Humean formulations that skeptical-theist principles must be extended to meet.
• CORNEA's epistemological critics — objections that CORNEA mishandles inductive evidence or proves too much (external-world skepticism), catalogued at SEP 'Skeptical Theism' §5.

See also

• Michael Bergmann — the representativeness (ST1–ST3) wing of skeptical theism.
• Alvin Plantinga — the total-evidence and proper-basicality complements to the noseeum critique.
• Peter van Inwagen — the defense-style cousin: stories "true for all anyone knows."