ABSTRACT
Stephen Wykstra’s paper, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering,” is both conceptually rich and an important advance to our understanding of the evidential argument from evil. Its conceptual richness lies in its analysis of the epistemic notion of “appears” and its advancement of a necessary condition for being entitled to make the claim: “It appears that p (not-p).” Wykstra notes that among believers as well as nonbelievers there is a “persistent intuition that the inscrutable suffering in our world in some sense disconfirms theism.” The chapter shows that the mere hypothesis of O’s existence gives us no good reason to think that things would appear to us just as they do so far as the sufferings of animals and humans in our world are concerned. Expanded theism is the view that O exists, conjoined with certain other significant religious claims, claims about sin, redemption, a future life, a last judgment, and the like.
