Skeptical theism says that for all we know there are goods that depend on and justify the existence of evils. My argument, following William Rowe, begins with saying that skeptical theism faces the absurdity that God could allow any evils whatever. In Part 1 I imagine a nightmare God who creates and sustains a world of infinite conscious suffering. In Part 2 I offer an analysis of suffering that explains our conviction that the nightmare God is not loving. In Part 3 I show how the key feature of the nightmare world that proves its creator unloving—unbearable suffering—is found in the actual world. Therefore, just as we can see that there cannot be a Nightmare God of Love, we can see that there cannot be a God of love of the actual world.
Part 1: The Nightmare God of Love
My argument is inspired by William Rowe, who says the following about skeptical theism:
Because we cannot rule out God's knowing goods we do not know, we cannot rule out [the possibility of] goods that justify God in permitting any amount of evil whatever that might occur in our world. If human and animal life on earth were nothing more than a series of agonizing moments from birth to death, the position of my friends would still require them to say that we cannot reasonably infer that it is even likely that God does not exist. . . . But surely such a view is unreasonable, if not absurd. Surely there must be some point at which the appalling agony of human and animal existence on earth would render it unlikely that God exists.[*1]
My strategy is the following:
Step 1: Describe a nightmare world such that it's impossible for an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God to be the creator and sustainer of it.
Step 2: Identify those features of the nightmare world that explain why it's impossible for an all-loving God to be the creator and sustainer of it.
Step 3: Identify those features in the actual world.
If we can see how the Nightmare God of Love is impossible, and if we can see that there is no relevant difference between the Nightmare God of Love and the hypothetical creator of the actual world, then we can see that a loving God cannot exist.
We imagine the following:
Nightmare World = an infinite number of people experience maximal suffering (e.g., burning in a lake of fire) for an infinite amount of time. If you don’t believe in actual infinities, then posit a potentially infinite number of people experiencing maximal suffering for a potentially infinite amount of time.
Nightmare God = the creator and sustainer of the nightmare world.
Nightmare God of Love = the creator and sustainer of the nightmare world, and we stipulate that he is perfectly loving.
Imagine being covered in third-degree burns 24/7, surrounded by an endless sea of people like you screaming in agony. All you want, all the time, is to die or to be sent to a better world. One day, the Nightmare God of Love hovers above the lake of fire and speaks to a group of you (he numbs your pain just enough so you can focus on what he is saying). He says that he loves all of you and he's doing this for your own good, but those goods are beyond your ken, so you'll just have to trust him. Would you believe him?
You should have absolute certainty that this God is either lying or confused. Maybe the God is lying because he is cruel and delights in giving others false hope (considering he created and maintains a world of complete torture, that would check out). Maybe he is lying to perform a social experiment. If the God genuinely thinks he is doing you a favor, then he is definitely confused. Regardless of exactly how the nightmare God fails to be perfectly loving, he certainly fails nonetheless. If the God had the tiniest bit of love, just enough to take pity on his creatures, he would cease their suffering at once. So not only is this God not perfectly loving, but he is not loving even in the most minimal sense.
I will ward off a particular objection right away, as doing so will help set the context for my argument. The opponent of my argument can try to find a relevant difference between the actual world and the nightmare world in the following way: Many theodicies are applicable to our world, but no theodicies are applicable to the nightmare world. Whether any theodicy succeeds in making it more plausible than not that God has access to goods that justify evils is something to be debated. But there is no such debate possible in the nightmare world; not a single imaginable theodicy can get off the ground in the nightmare world.
But this misses the point. The Nightmare God of Love argument is, like Rowe's reductio ad absurdum, an argument against skeptical theism. It’s not relevant to skeptical theism whether God has access to plausible justifying goods—the entire thrust of skeptical theism is that we are not in a position to know whether God has access to justifying goods. But when we apply this skepticism to the nightmare world, we get the absurd result that members of the nightmare world are not in a position to know whether there are goods beyond their ken that justify their eternal torture. But surely members of such a world are in a position to know that such justifying goods cannot exist. My argument is striking explicitly against skeptical theism: I'm claiming we can see when justifying goods cannot exist.
The Nightmare God of Love (NGL) is certainly perfectly loving, because we stipulate him as such, and yet he is certainly not perfectly loving, as demonstrated by the fact that he is the creator and sustainer of the nightmare world. That's the contradiction. We can be certain that NGL is a contradictory being and thus does not exist. If we can be certain of anything, it’s that the God who tortures you day and night for eternity does not love you perfectly, or really at all. The trick is to prove that NGL is not perfectly loving. In virtue of what exactly can we say for certain that NGL is not perfectly loving? That is the question I take up in Part 2.
*1 - Rowe, William. “An exchange on the problem of evil.” In God and the Problem of Evil, edited by Daniel Howard-Snyder, Michael Bergmann, & William Rowe, 124–158. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001.
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