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Moral motivation and the evil-god challenge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2020

LUKE WILSON Open the ORCID record for LUKE WILSON [Opens in a new window]
LUKE WILSON*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN, 47907, USA
*
e-mail: wilso761@purdue.edu
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Abstract

The evil-god challenge holds that theism is highly symmetrical to the evil-god hypothesis and thus it is not more reasonable to accept one rather than the other. But, since it is not reasonable to accept the evil-god hypothesis, it is not reasonable to accept theism. This article will primarily focus on defending the challenge from two recent objections which hold that it follows from the nature of moral motivation that theism is intrinsically much more likely to be true than the evil-god hypothesis. However, I will also argue that there is a different intrinsic asymmetry between the hypotheses which favours theism.

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Type
Original Article
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Religious Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 703 - 716
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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