CORNEA under magnifier: an assessment of usability of CORNEA against William Rowe’s evidential argument from gratuitous evil

Abstract

By introducing evidential argument, William Rowe opened a new chapter in discussions about problem of evil. Rowe’s first formulation of the problem based on the idea that because “it appears” that some evils in the world are gratuitous then they are indeed so. The most influential critique of Rowe’s argument is Stephen Wykstra’sthat is based on the epistemological principle which is called CORNEA. He shows that in the Rowe’s assumed situation we are not permitted to pass from “it appears” to “is”. According to CORNEA,considering evidence Xwe areentitled to say it appears that p, only if p were not the case, probably X was different in a discernable way. The goal of this paper is firstly to introduce CORNEA as an answer to the problem of gratuitous evil, then introduce and assesse some selected critiques ofCORNEA and to defencethe principle and finally compare between skeptical theism - that CORNEA is an instance of – and approaches of Islamic thinkers to the problem of evil.

Keywords

• william rowe
• stephen wykstra
• problem of evil
• gratuitous evil
• cornea
• skeptical theism
• islamic thinkers