Skeptical Theism and the Scope of our Moral Horizons

Reconciling the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God with the evil that exists in our world is one of the most enduring problems for the Judeo-Christian tradition. Skeptical theists attempt to defend their theism against this problem of evil by appealing to the limits of human wisdom. On this view, our inability to understand goods, evils, and long-term consequences causes a failure in the inference from appearance of unjustified evil to reality of unjustified evil. One prominent objection to skeptical theism, the moral skepticism objection, argues that this view of human moral knowledge undermines our ordinary moral practices. In this paper, I will reject the most popular theistic reply to the moral skepticism objection that we can depend on likely consequences, given the available evidence, for our moral practices. This expected utility reply causes skeptical theists to face a dilemma about how to delineate which consequences are relevant to us, given our epistemic limits. I will argue that neither horn of the dilemma can save the skeptical theist from moral skepticism.