Justified True Belief

(P1) The probabilistic version of the problem of evil concedes the logical compatibility of God and evil but contends that the horrendous evils we observe render God's existence improbable. + The probabilistic version is the strongest live formulation of the atheistic problem of evil today. Most contemporary atheist philosophers have abandoned the logical version (which would have required proving strict logical contradiction) and now press the more modest claim that the evil we see makes God's existence improbable. This argument focuses on that probabilistic challenge specifically. For the logical version, see the parallel argument; for emotional and external versions, see the other PoE arguments. (1) The atheist concedes what the logical version could not establish. The probabilistic version begins by conceding that God and evil are logically compatible (that there is some possible world in which both exist together). What it claims instead is that, given the actual evils we observe, the probability that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God exists is low. This is a substantial concession. It means the atheist no longer claims theism is logically impossible, only that it is empirically unsupported. (2) The focus has shifted to horrendous evils. The contemporary version of the argument focuses not on evil in general but on specific horrendous evils: a child raped and murdered, a fawn dying slowly in a forest fire, the Holocaust, animal predation across millions of years. Philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams defines a horrendous evil as one so awful it calls into question whether the victim's life could be a great good to them on the whole. The intuitive force of these specific cases is what drives the contemporary probabilistic argument. (3) The canonical formulations come from Rowe and Draper. Two formulations dominate the literature. Philosopher William Rowe argues that since we cannot identify a justifying good for many horrendous evils, probably no such good exists, and therefore God probably does not exist. Philosopher Paul Draper argues that the actual distribution of pain and pleasure is more probable on the hypothesis of indifference (the view that no benevolent or malevolent being is behind the world) than on theism. Both arguments are evidential, not logical: they aim at improbability, not contradiction. (4) The shift to probability changes the dialectical situation. Probability claims require an epistemic framework to be assessed: probability relative to what evidence, judged from what cognitive vantage point. The questions for the theist are therefore not whether contradiction can be ruled out (the logical version's question) but whether the atheist has handled the probability assessment correctly. Three lines of theistic response will be developed in what follows. Therefore, the probabilistic version of the problem of evil aims at showing that horrendous evils make God's existence improbable, and the theistic response must address whether that probability assessment can be sustained.

(P2) Probability is relative to background information; on the total relevant evidence (the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments, the historicity of Christ's resurrection, the testimony of religious experience), the positive case for theism substantially outweighs any probabilistic disadvantage from evil. + (1) Probability is always relative to a body of evidence. A claim is never simply "probable" or "improbable" in the abstract; it is probable or improbable relative to some body of background information. The same proposition can be highly improbable on one body of evidence and highly probable on another. Think of it this way: relative to the bare fact of your reproductive biology, your own personal existence is astronomically improbable (the specific sperm, the specific egg, the specific moment, all multiplied across generations). Yet you exist, and you are perfectly rational to believe so, because your background evidence (memories, mirror reflections, conversations) makes your existence highly probable on the total evidence. The improbability on a thin slice of evidence does not survive on the total evidence. (2) The atheist typically considers only evil in isolation. The probabilistic argument from evil usually claims that God's existence is improbable on the evidence of the evil in the world. But that is a claim about a thin slice of evidence, not about the total evidence available. If God's existence were improbable on the evil in the world considered alone, that would be a significant philosophical achievement, but it would not yet show that God's existence is improbable on the total evidence. (3) The total evidence includes the cumulative case for theism. The Christian theist has at hand a substantial body of positive evidence for God's existence. This includes the cosmological argument for a necessary first cause; the teleological argument for an intelligent designer of the cosmic fine-tuning; the moral argument for an ultimate moral lawgiver; the ontological argument for a maximally great being; the historical evidence for Jesus Christ's life, death, and resurrection; and the widespread testimony of religious experience across cultures and centuries. Each of these arguments raises the probability of theism on its own; together they constitute a powerful cumulative case. (4) Even granting the atheist's narrow claim, the total balance tips toward theism. The theist can grant, for the sake of argument, that the evil in the world taken in isolation makes God's existence somewhat improbable. What the theist denies is that this isolated probability survives when the total evidence is considered. If the cumulative arguments for God's existence are strong (as the Christian theist maintains), then the scales tip back toward theism even after the evidence of evil is weighed. The atheist who wishes to press the probabilistic argument must therefore engage the positive arguments for theism, not bracket them. Therefore, even if evil considered alone makes theism somewhat improbable, the total evidence shifts the assessment substantially back in theism's favor.

(P3) Our inherent cognitive limitations make us incompetent to confidently judge that God lacks morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evils we observe. + (1) The atheist's argument requires a god's-eye view it cannot supply. The probabilistic argument typically moves from "we know of no justifying good for this evil" to "probably no justifying good exists." But this inference is only sound if our cognitive faculties are competent to detect the relevant goods if they were there. We are finite beings, limited in space, time, intelligence, and insight. To know that no possible good justifies a given evil requires surveying every possible justifying good across all of time and across all causal connections, a vantage point only an omniscient being could occupy. (2) The chaos theory analogy makes the point concrete. Consider what physicists call the butterfly effect: a butterfly fluttering its wings in West Africa may, through cascading causal effects, contribute to a hurricane forming over the Atlantic months later. Tiny perturbations in complex systems generate massively amplified consequences that no finite observer could trace from the starting point. Now consider a horrendous evil today: a child's brutal death, say. The morally sufficient reason for God's permitting this evil may ripple through history for centuries, manifesting in goods that emerge only in another country, another generation, or in eternity itself. We are simply not in a position to trace such chains. (3) Non-theists recognize these limitations in other contexts. The very same cognitive limitations are widely acknowledged outside the problem of evil. One of the most damaging objections to utilitarian ethical theory is that it is quite simply impossible for us to estimate which present action will ultimately produce the greatest amount of happiness across the indefinite future. Actions that appear disastrous in the short term may produce untold good in the long run, and short-term boons may issue in great misery. Non-theists who readily concede these limitations in ethical theory should concede them no less when assessing God's reasons. (4) Sceptical theism is not an appeal to mystery but an epistemic point. What philosophers sometimes call "sceptical theism," developed by Stephen Wykstra and William Alston, is not the claim that we know nothing about God. It is the more modest claim that we are not in a good position to confidently judge that God has no morally sufficient reasons for permitting any particular evil. It is one thing to say "I cannot see what good this evil serves." It is quite another, much stronger thing to say "Therefore probably no good is served by it." That inference is sound only if we have reason to think that we would see the good if it were there, which is precisely what is in question. Therefore, the atheist's confident probability judgment that no morally sufficient reason exists exceeds what our cognitive faculties can support.

(P4) Christian theism entails specific doctrines (the chief end of human life is the knowledge of God, humankind is in a state of rebellion against God, God's purposes extend into eternal life, the knowledge of God is itself an incommensurable good) which raise the conditional probability of God-and-evil co-existence substantially above bare theism. + Since the probabilistic argument is presented as an internal problem for the Christian theist, the Christian is fully entitled to draw on all the resources of the Christian worldview in responding. Four specific doctrines significantly raise the probability that God and the evils we observe would co-exist. (1) The chief end of human life is the knowledge of God, not happiness in this world. The probabilistic argument typically assumes that if God exists, his purpose for human life is to make us comfortable and happy. Christian theism flatly denies this. The chief end of human life is the knowledge of God (which alone can bring true and everlasting human fulfillment), not happiness as we ordinarily understand it. Many evils that appear pointless with respect to producing earthly happiness may not be pointless with respect to producing deeper knowledge of God in the sufferer or those around them. Tellingly, evangelical Christianity has historically grown most rapidly in countries that have endured severe hardship (Mao's China, war-torn El Salvador, famine-stricken Ethiopia), while growth curves in the indulgent West are nearly flat. Suffering and the knowledge of God are not strangers. (2) Humankind is in a state of rebellion against God. The Christian doctrine of the fall holds that humanity is alienated from God by its own free choice, morally guilty before him, and pursuing false gods of its own making. On this view, the horrendous moral evils of human history are not surprising; they are exactly what the Christian doctrine expects. As Paul writes in Romans 1, God has given humankind up to the sin it has freely chosen, not interfering to stop it, in order to heighten our moral responsibility and our awareness of our need for forgiveness. The atheist who finds human evil surprising on theism is reasoning from a theology Christianity has never affirmed. (3) God's purposes extend beyond this life into eternal life. This life is not the whole story. Christian theism holds that God promises eternal life to those who trust in Christ, an eternity in which the sufferings of this life will appear, by comparison, "light and momentary" (the Apostle Paul's phrase from 2 Corinthians 4:17, written by a man whose own life included beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, and finally martyrdom). The longer one spends in eternity, the more the sufferings of this brief life shrink toward an infinitesimal moment by comparison. Any probabilistic argument that brackets the afterlife is treating Christian theism as if it were Deism, and failing to engage Christianity at all. (4) The knowledge of God is an incommensurable good. Christian theism holds that knowing God, the locus of infinite goodness and love, is itself a good so great that no finite suffering is comparable to it. A finite quantity divided by an infinite quantity approaches zero. The person who knows God can therefore truly say, even in the midst of horrific suffering, that God is good to him, because the incommensurable good of communion with God dwarfs the finite evil he endures. This is not an emotional dismissal of suffering, it is a philosophical claim about the relative magnitudes of finite and infinite goods. Therefore, on Christian theism (not bare theism), the probability of God-and-evil co-existence is substantially higher than the atheist's argument supposes.

William Lane Craig, Systematic Philosophical Theology, Volume IIb: On God: Excursus on Natural Theology, On the Trinity. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2026. William L. Rowe, "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1979): 335-341. William L. Rowe, "Evil and Theodicy," Philosophical Topics 16, no. 2 (1988): 119-132. William L. Rowe, "The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look," in Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Paul Draper, "Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists," Noûs 23, no. 3 (1989): 331-350. Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Daniel Howard-Snyder, "Theism, The Hypothesis of Indifference, and the Biological Role of Pain and Pleasure," Faith and Philosophy 11, no. 3 (1994): 452-466. Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. William P. Alston, "The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition," Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 29-67. Stephen J. Wykstra, "The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of 'Appearance,'" International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16, no. 2 (1984): 73-93. Michael Bergmann, "Skeptical Theism and Rowe's New Evidential Argument from Evil," Noûs 35, no. 2 (2001): 278-296. Peter van Inwagen, "The Argument from Evil," in Peter van Inwagen, ed., Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Alvin Plantinga, "The Probabilistic Argument from Evil," Philosophical Studies 35, no. 1 (1979): 1-53. Stephen Law, "The Evil-God Challenge," Religious Studies 46, no. 3 (2010): 353-373. Peter Millican, "The Devil's Advocate," Cogito 3, no. 3 (1989): 193-207. William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, From Fear to Faith: Rejoicing in the Lord in Turbulent Times, rev. ed. Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2011. Jason Mandryk, Operation World, 7th ed. Colorado Springs: Biblica, 2010. See also: • CO / PoE: Intellectual PoE: Logical • CO / PoE: Intellectual PoE: External • CO / PoE: Emotional PoE • CO / PoE: Proof of God from Evil

+ Consider William Rowe's example: a fawn trapped in a forest fire suffers terribly for days before finally dying. Or consider the brutal rape and murder of an innocent child. Or the Holocaust. These specific horrendous evils are so awful that no possible good could justify a good God in permitting them. The intuitive force of these cases is overwhelming. Surely we know enough to say that a perfectly loving God would not allow such things if he could prevent them.

1. The intuitive force of horrendous evils is real, but it is not a confident probability claim. The theist need not deny that horrendous evils are emotionally and morally shocking. The Christian tradition has never minimized the horror of suffering; the cross of Christ is itself an emblem of God's full engagement with horrendous evil. What the theist denies is the inference from "I cannot see what justifies this" to "probably nothing justifies this." The first is a confession of finite perspective; the second is a sweeping claim about every possible justifying good across all of time. 2. The chess novice analogy makes the gap precise. Think of it this way: a chess novice watches a grandmaster sacrifice his queen and concludes the move is catastrophic. Five moves later, the sacrifice secures victory. The novice's intuitive sense that the move was bad was grounded not in the move's actual badness but in the novice's limited grasp of the game. We are in roughly the position of the novice when we assess God's permitting horrendous evils. We see one move (the evil) without seeing the unfolding game across history and into eternity. 3. Christian theism is committed to the reality and horror of these evils. Unlike certain forms of Hinduism or pantheism that treat evil as illusory, Christianity affirms that the evils the atheist points to are genuine evils that grieve God himself. Christ wept at the tomb of Lazarus; he was "a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief." The Christian doctrine of the incarnation holds that God himself entered into human suffering and bore the worst of it on the cross. The atheist who urges that horrendous evils are real is in this respect agreeing with, not refuting, Christian theism. 4. The intuitive case for gratuity is a probabilistic case, addressed by the main argument. The intuitive force of these specific evils is precisely the substance of the probabilistic argument as a whole, and the three lines of response in the main argument (total evidence, cognitive limitations, Christian doctrines) apply to it. The detailed engagement with the formal versions of this objection (Rowe's evidential argument, Draper's hypothesis of indifference) is given in subsequent defeaters.

+ Philosopher William Rowe's expanded formulation of the evidential argument runs as follows. Premise one: no good state of affairs we know of justifies God in permitting horrendous evils. Premise two: therefore, no good state of affairs justifies God in permitting horrendous evils. Conclusion: therefore, God does not exist. The key inductive step is from "we know of no justifying good" to "no justifying good exists." This is the standard pattern of reasonable inference from absence of evidence: we have looked, we have not found, and therefore probably there is nothing to find.

1. The inductive step requires that we would see the good if it were there. The move from "we know of no justifying good" to "probably no justifying good exists" is what philosopher Stephen Wykstra calls a "noseeum inference," from "no see 'um" to "there ain't 'em." This kind of inference is only valid when we have reason to think that, if the thing in question existed, we would likely see it. If you look in your refrigerator and see no elephant, you may reasonably infer that no elephant is there, because elephants would be highly visible if present. But the conditions for noseeum inference do not obviously hold in God's case. 2. The case of justifying goods is unlike the elephant case. There is good reason to think that God's reasons for permitting evil, if they exist, would often fall outside our cognitive grasp. The disparity between a transcendent omniscient mind and our finite minds is incomparably greater than the disparity between an adult mind and an infant's. We expect a parent's reasons for permitting a child's painful vaccination to be opaque to the child; how much more should an omniscient God's reasons be opaque to us. The conditions for noseeum inference therefore fail, and Rowe's inductive step cannot be sustained. 3. The argument requires a positive case that we are in a position to judge. Rowe's argument depends on the unstated premise that human cognitive faculties are competent to detect the relevant goods if they were there. But this premise is precisely what the theist denies, and Rowe never argues for it. The atheist who presses the argument must first establish that finite minds are competent to survey every possible chain of justifying consequences across all of time and into eternity, and that is a burden no atheist has carried. 4. The main argument's third premise addresses this directly. The third premise of the main argument (concerning inherent cognitive limitations) is the substantive response to Rowe's noseeum inference. It does not merely appeal to mystery; it argues from the chaos theory analogy, from non-theist concessions in ethical theory, and from the disparity between finite and omniscient minds, that our epistemic position is too weak to ground the inductive step Rowe needs.

+ Philosopher Paul Draper has offered the most sophisticated contemporary version of the probabilistic argument. The actual distribution of pain and pleasure in the world, including biologically useful pain, biologically gratuitous pain, and animal suffering across evolutionary history, is far more probable on what Draper calls the "hypothesis of indifference" (the view that no benevolent or malevolent agent is behind the natural order) than on theism. Therefore the distribution of pain and pleasure constitutes significant evidence against theism. This is a Bayesian formulation that does not depend on confident judgments about specific evils.

1. Draper's comparison still depends on contested probability judgments. The Bayesian formulation is more rigorous than the simple noseeum inference, but it still requires assessing the conditional probability of the observed pain and pleasure given theism. To say the actual distribution is "more probable on indifference than on theism" requires knowing what God would likely do, and that judgment runs into exactly the cognitive limitations developed in the third premise of the main argument. The Bayesian framework does not bypass the need for substantive probability judgments; it makes them explicit. 2. The total evidence still matters in Bayesian assessment. Bayes's theorem assesses the probability of a hypothesis given the total evidence. Even if the distribution of pain and pleasure is, taken alone, more probable on indifference, that is only one piece of evidence. When the cumulative positive case for theism is added to the Bayesian calculation (the cosmological fine-tuning, the moral facts, the historical evidence for Christ's resurrection, religious experience), the posterior probability of theism need not be low. Draper's argument has force only when other evidence is bracketed; in a properly Bayesian total-evidence assessment, the picture is different. 3. Theism's predictions about pain and pleasure are not as clear as Draper assumes. Draper argues that the observed distribution is "more probable" on indifference, but the calculation depends on what we should expect on theism. As philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued, theism does not straightforwardly predict any particular distribution of pain and pleasure. Christian theism in particular, with its doctrines of human rebellion, soul-making, and eternal life, makes the observed distribution far less surprising than Draper's bare-theism comparison suggests. The conditional probability of the observed evidence on Christian theism is much higher than on the abstract theism Draper considers. 4. The hypothesis of indifference is not naturalism. Draper's argument compares theism to "indifference," but indifference is not naturalism, and indifference is not by itself a positive metaphysical view. Even if pain and pleasure were more probable on indifference than on theism, that would not establish naturalism over theism; it would only show that an indifferent supernatural agent is one alternative the theist must rule out. The cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, which support a personal and good Creator, provide reasons to rule out the indifference hypothesis on independent grounds.

+ The theist's appeal to cognitive limitations is too costly to accept. If we genuinely cannot tell whether any apparent evil is gratuitous (because we cannot survey God's reasons), then we also cannot tell whether anything we observe is genuinely evil at all, since some unseen good might justify it. This destroys our ordinary moral knowledge. We could no longer condemn the Holocaust as evil, since perhaps God had reasons we cannot see. The theist's response to the probabilistic argument is therefore a Pyrrhic victory: it saves theism only by undermining morality itself.

1. The objection conflates two distinct epistemic claims. The theist's claim is not that we cannot tell whether evils are evils, but that we cannot tell whether evils are gratuitous (that is, whether they are permitted without any morally sufficient reason). These are very different claims. We can know with high confidence that the Holocaust was a horrendous evil, that the perpetrators were morally guilty, and that the victims were wronged. What we cannot know with confidence is whether God lacked any morally sufficient reason to permit it. The first kind of knowledge concerns the moral character of the act and its consequences; the second concerns God's reasons in a vastly larger providential order. 2. Our moral obligations are not tied to our knowledge of all goods. Christian ethics holds that we are bound to oppose evil and to do good as best we can discern, even when we cannot survey all the consequences of our actions. A parent who allows a child to undergo a painful surgery for the child's long-term health is not condoning evil; the parent permits it for a morally sufficient reason. The surgeon performing the procedure has different obligations than the parent. Likewise, God's permitting evils for morally sufficient reasons does not entail that we should permit them; our roles and our knowledge are different. 3. Non-theists make the same epistemic move in ethical theory. The same cognitive limitations are widely conceded outside the problem of evil. Utilitarian ethics faces the well-known difficulty that we cannot estimate which actions will ultimately produce the greatest happiness, because the long-term consequences of our actions are beyond our cognitive grasp. Yet utilitarians do not conclude that we have no moral knowledge. They distinguish between rules of thumb suitable for finite agents and the underlying moral facts that an ideal observer would know. The theist's position is parallel: we have moral knowledge as finite agents, while granting that the full providential calculation is beyond us. 4. The objection actually reinforces the case for sceptical theism. Philosopher Michael Bergmann has noted that the very fact that we cannot survey all goods is part of the basic data of the human cognitive condition, recognized in many areas beyond the problem of evil. If accepting this fact undermines ordinary moral knowledge, then our cognitive limitations were already undermining it, independent of any theological argument. The sceptical theist does not introduce a new epistemic vulnerability; they note an old one that everyone already has to live with.

+ Philosopher Stephen Law has developed a powerful parity argument. If the theist responds to the problem of evil by saying God has reasons we cannot fathom, then a "diabolist" who believes in an omnipotent, omniscient, all-evil god can respond to the problem of good in exactly the same way: the evil god has reasons we cannot fathom for permitting the goods we observe. All the theist's moves (theodicy, sceptical theism, defenses) can be parodied symmetrically by the diabolist. Therefore the theist's response is no better than the diabolist's. Since the evil-god hypothesis is absurd, the good-God hypothesis is no better justified.

1. The symmetry argument concedes the central theistic point. Law's argument actually concedes what the theist needs: that we are not in a position to make confident probability judgments about a supreme being's reasons for permitting what it permits. The theist need only insist that the symmetry holds: in neither case (good God or evil god) are we in a good epistemic position to assess such probabilities. The conclusion to draw is that the probabilistic problem of evil fails on both sides, not that theism is undermined. As philosopher William Lane Craig argues, the symmetry simply means neither belief is justified by simple inspection of the world's goods and evils. 2. The two hypotheses are not actually symmetrical on independent evidence. The theistic case rests on far more than the evidence of good and evil in the world. The cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments support an absolutely good, perfect being, not a malevolent one. The historical evidence for Christ's life, sacrificial death, and resurrection is evidence for a particular God of love, not an evil deity. The widespread religious experience of God's love and goodness is positive evidence for theism, with no parallel evidence for an "evil god." Once these are added, the symmetry breaks decisively. 3. An evil supreme being is conceptually incoherent. Craig points out that an evil being cannot be supreme. If a being is evil, it fails to discharge its moral obligations, which presupposes that those obligations exist. But moral obligations come from a supremely good being who is the source of moral law. The "evil god" Law envisions is therefore conceptually parasitic on a real, supremely good God whose moral nature the evil god is violating. If an evil being of the relevant kind exists, then God exists too, because God is the ground of the moral obligations the evil being is flouting. 4. The challenge actually points to the emotional problem of evil. When Law suggests it is "obvious" that an evil god would not permit the goods we see (rainbows, children, love), he is appealing to the same emotional intuition the theist deploys against the evil-god hypothesis. Craig notes that this kind of argument is at root an appeal to emotion rather than a probabilistic argument from inscrutable evidence. The proper response to such appeals is given in the Emotional PoE argument.

+ The theist's appeal to specific Christian doctrines (knowledge of God as chief end, human rebellion, eternal life, the incommensurable good of knowing God) is methodologically illegitimate. These doctrines are added only to raise the probability of God-and-evil co-existing; they are not independently motivated. By that logic, any theory can be made probable by adding enough auxiliary hypotheses. The theist is essentially saying, "If you add enough free parameters to my hypothesis, it can explain anything." This is the classic mark of an ad hoc rescue, the same vice that makes flat-earth or geocentric theories unfalsifiable.

1. The Christian doctrines are not added for this argument; they predate it. The doctrines in question (the chief end of human life is the knowledge of God, the fall, eternal life, the incommensurable good of communion with God) are not theological add-ons invented to solve the problem of evil. They are central elements of Christian theology that predate the modern probabilistic argument by nearly two millennia. The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens with "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever," a formulation rooted in the Apostle Paul's writings and the Patristic theological tradition. These are independently established Christian doctrines, not auxiliary hypotheses. 2. The objection misunderstands the dialectical situation. The probabilistic argument from evil is offered as an internal critique of Christian theism, claiming that Christian theism's commitments make God's existence improbable. As philosopher William Lane Craig argues, since the probabilistic argument is being pressed as an internal problem, the Christian theist is entirely entitled to draw on all the resources of the Christian worldview in answering it. To insist that the Christian respond only on the basis of "bare theism" (a thin philosophical abstraction Christianity has never affirmed) is to refuse to engage Christianity at all. 3. Genuine ad hoc rescues are unmotivated; Christian doctrines are deeply motivated. An ad hoc rescue is one that adds a hypothesis solely to save a theory from refutation, with no other reason to believe the added hypothesis. But Christian doctrines about human rebellion, eternal life, and the incommensurable good of knowing God are believed for many reasons (the testimony of scripture, the witness of the church, the resurrection of Christ, religious experience). They are not free parameters added to fit the data; they are independently grounded claims that, as a consequence, also bear on the problem of evil. 4. The principle of total evidence cuts both ways. If the atheist insists that the Christian theist must respond only to "bare theism" without the Christian doctrines, the atheist should be willing to assess "bare theism" against "bare naturalism" without naturalistic auxiliary hypotheses either. In practice, every assessment of a worldview is an assessment of the whole worldview, with all its commitments. The Christian's appeal to Christian doctrines is no more illegitimate than the naturalist's appeal to evolutionary explanations of religious belief, or any other auxiliary commitment that belongs to a coherent worldview.

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