There is a fawn, somewhere in a forest, and a fire has come through. The fawn is caught — pinned under a fallen tree, badly burned, and not killed. It lies in the cooling ash for several days. Then it dies. No one finds it. No one ever knows it was there. No lesson is drawn from it, because there is no one to draw one — only the animal, and the pain, and then the end of the pain, in a part of the world no human eye will ever reach. Days of agony that do no work, teach no one, warn no one, save nothing.
I did not invent that fawn. The philosopher William Rowe set it at the centre of what many careful people take to be the single strongest case against the existence of God, and I am going to build that case properly tonight, in the form he would want it built. But before we bring any argument against it, consider the plain fact. A creature in agony, for days, for nothing, where no one will ever know. The world contains that. Not once. Constantly. Far more of it than the one fawn, and most of it unseen.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is Is There Anyone There?, and it is episode three of eight. Last time we built the strongest case for — the fine-tuning argument, the constants of physics resting on so fine an edge that a hair either way gives no stars, no carbon, no us. We built it properly, set its sharpest critics beside it, and I called no winner; both were left standing. Tonight we turn to the other side: the strongest case against. It comes on two fronts. The first is suffering that seems to serve no purpose — the fawn. The second is the silence: the place where a love that genuinely wanted to be known would surely have said something, and where honest people, listening hard, hear nothing in return. Two arguments, both as strong as they can be made, each with its best answer waiting beside it. And — you can see the shape of it by now — neither one is settled by the end.
Here is the discipline again, the same one as last week, and tonight it applies to a harder case, so let me say plainly whom it falls on. Last week the rule was this: before you are entitled to criticise an argument, you have to be able to state it in its strongest form — the version its best defender would hear and say, yes, that is exactly it — and only then raise your objection. Last week I put that demand to the sceptic, because last week's argument, the fine-tuning of the constants, is the one believers tend to like and sceptics tend to wave away. Tonight the demand changes hands. Tonight the strongest arguments run the other way, against God, and so tonight it falls to the believer. If you believe, your task for the next half hour is to state the case against the thing you love, and to state it so well that an atheist would grant you have it right. That is much harder than stating the case against a stranger's position. The temptation is to flinch — to soften the argument, to state the reply before the argument has even been fully heard. Resist it. Hear it out to the end first. The only version worth answering is the one that might be right.
The strongest case against God does not begin with a slogan, the way the weak version does. The weak version is simply: look at all the suffering — how could a good God allow it? A believer has heard that since childhood and has replies ready. Free will: that love requires the freedom to do harm. Soul-making: that a world with real stakes and real loss is the only kind in which real courage, real compassion, real character can grow. Those are serious replies, and against the slogan they hold. If that were the whole problem of evil, the believer could rest. It is not.
Here is the real version, and it is William Rowe's. Notice how carefully it is built, because it is built precisely to get past those ready replies. Rowe does not say: there is suffering, therefore no God. He says something narrower, and much harder to escape. Begin with what the believer himself says God is — all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. Now, a perfectly good being who could prevent some terrible suffering would prevent it, unless preventing it would cost some greater good, or would require permitting an evil just as bad. That is not an atheist's definition smuggled in; it is the believer's own God, stated fairly. A good parent who could stop a child's agony at no cost would stop it, and a perfectly good God, with no limit on power, is held to at least that standard. So the question becomes exact. Is there suffering in the world that God could have prevented without losing any greater good and without permitting anything equally bad? If there is — even one case — then the being as described would have prevented it. And it was not prevented.
This is why Rowe reaches for the fawn. He chooses it deliberately, because it is designed to answer every ready reply at once. Free will? No human being chose this; a dry season and a lightning strike did. Soul-making, the growth of character through hardship? No one grows from it — no one even knows of it. The fawn is not a soldier whose courage means something, or a person whose loss teaches those left behind. It is an animal, alone, in agony, for days, in a place cut off from every human eye; and then it is gone, and the world is exactly as it was, save for several days of pain that bought nothing. Free will does not apply to it. Soul-making does not apply to it. The suffering simply sits there, serving no purpose.
Here is the inference Rowe actually makes, and it is more careful than he is often given credit for; the believer has to meet this, not the slogan. Rowe does not claim he can prove the fawn's suffering was pointless. He grants openly that he cannot enter the mind of an infinite being and certify there was no reason. What he says is this: look honestly, look as hard as you can, and you find no good that this suffering secures. And when you have looked that hard and found nothing, the reasonable conclusion — the one you would draw anywhere else in life — is that there probably is nothing. Not certainly. Probably. It is the same step you take when you have searched the house for your keys and they are nowhere: you do not say you have proved the keys are not in the house; you say they are almost certainly not here. So: we have searched the fawn's suffering for a point and found none, and therefore there probably is none — and a single genuinely pointless horror is one more than a perfectly good, all-powerful God would have allowed. The world we actually live in, full of suffering like the fawn's, is therefore less likely to contain such a God than to lack one. Not disproof. Evidence. The same weighing of likelihoods we did for fine-tuning last week — only now the evidence points the other way.
That is the case, in full. If you are a believer, the ready replies do almost no work against it; the slogans do not apply, because Rowe chose an example they cannot address. This is the rival you have to answer — not the cartoon how could God allow suffering, but Rowe's exact, modest, and serious claim: we look for the point, we find none, and the reasonable conclusion is that there is none. Hold it there. Do not answer it yet. There is an answer, a real one, and it is coming — but it answers both of tonight's arguments at once, so I will set out the second first. The case against does not stop at suffering. There is a second front, quieter, and for many people it goes deeper than the first.
The first front concerned pain. The second concerns absence, and it is a different charge — keep the two apart, because they are often run together and should not be. The problem of evil says there is too much pointless suffering for a good God. The second argument says nothing about suffering at all. It says there is too much silence for a loving one. The philosopher here is J. L. Schellenberg, who has spent thirty years insisting that his argument is not a version of the problem of evil — and he is right, and the difference is the whole point. So let me build it on its own ground.
Begin again with the believer's own picture of God — not a watchmaker, not a force, but a person, and specifically a loving one. That is not a detail; for most believers it is the centre. God loves you personally, the way the best parent loves a child, only without limit. Now hold on to what love is like — the ordinary kind you already know. A loving parent wants, more than almost anything, to be known by their child: to be in a relationship, present, reachable. A loving parent does not hide. If your child stood in the dark and called for you, openly, wholeheartedly, not pushing you away, and you could answer at no cost, you would answer. To stay silent in that moment, when you could speak and the child is reaching for you, is the one thing a loving parent could not do. It would contradict the love itself.
Here is the argument, and it is clean. A perfectly loving God would want to be in conscious relationship with every person capable of one. A relationship requires both sides to know the other is there — you cannot relate to someone you have no idea exists. So a perfectly loving God would ensure that anyone capable of relationship, open to it, and not refusing it, would at least believe that God exists. No sincere seeker would be left without that much. But now look at the world. There are people — many of them — who are not refusing God, not pushing away, not hardening themselves. They are searching. They want it to be true. They go to the empty church and the silent room and they say, honestly: if you are there, I am here; show me; I am not resisting. And they receive nothing. No sense of presence. No answer. Only the silence, and their own voice inside it. Schellenberg's term for this is precise: non-resistant non-belief. People who do not believe, and whose non-belief is no one's fault — not chosen, not a tantrum, not a refusal. They sought sincerely, and found no one.
And if that is real — if there is even one person who genuinely and openly sought, and met only silence — then the perfectly loving God, the one who could not have allowed it, is not there. Something else might be. A distant God, a watchmaker who wound the world up and left; a force; a ground of being that loves no one in particular. But the personal, loving God — the one at the centre of most actual faith — the silence counts hard against that one. A love that wanted to be known, and could have been, and was not, is not love at all. It is simply absence, called love.
The believer has replies ready here too, and I will name them, because we are being fair — but notice how Schellenberg has already seen them coming. First: perhaps the seekers were not really sincere. But the argument needs only the sincere ones, and to answer it this way you would have to claim that every honest seeker in all of history was secretly pretending, which is both unkind and unbelievable. Second: perhaps God hides so that we come freely, rather than being compelled by an overwhelming presence. But you can believe that someone exists without being compelled to love them — you know that many people exist whom you do not love; existence is not coercion. Third: perhaps the silence is itself part of a purpose we cannot see. And there — there — is where the real answer lies, the same answer that was waiting for the fawn, and it is strong enough to deserve its own turn. Notice: that third reply — the silence serves a purpose we cannot see — is word for word the shape of the reply to Rowe. The point you cannot find is there still; you simply cannot see it. One reply, it turns out, answers both fronts at once. So we now have two heavy charges before us — the suffering and the silence, the pain that does nothing and the love that says nothing — and a single defence that claims to meet them both. Let us give that defence its full strength, as we gave the two arguments theirs.
The answer is called skeptical theism — an ugly name for a sharp idea, and the idea concerns the size of the gap between your mind and the mind the argument is about. Here is the philosopher Stephen Wykstra's way into it. Return to what Rowe honestly claimed: I look as hard as I can for a good that would justify the fawn's suffering, I find none, so there probably is none. Wykstra asks one question of that step. When does I do not see it entitle you to it is not there? The answer: only when, if it were there, you would be likely to see it. If I look in my garage and say there is no car here, you believe me — a car is the kind of thing I would see if it were there. But if I look at a drop of pond water and say there are no microbes here, you do not believe me at all, because microbes are not the kind of thing I would see with the naked eye even if the drop were teeming with them. The step from I do not see it to it is not there holds only when you would have seen the thing, on the assumption that it exists. Wykstra gave this a name — CORNEA — but the name does not matter; the test does.
Now apply the test to the fawn. The good that would justify the suffering, if there is one, is a good in the mind of an all-knowing being — a reason that might run through centuries, through consequences no one could trace, through the whole structure of how a world holds together. Are you the kind of being that would see such a reason if it were there? Wykstra says: consider the gap. The distance between what an infinite, all-knowing mind grasps and what you grasp is not the distance between a grandmaster and a beginner at chess. It is more like the distance between the grandmaster and a one-month-old infant watching the board. When the infant sees the grandmaster give up his queen and concludes that this was a pointless loss, that no good could come of it, the infant is wrong — not because it looked carelessly, but because it is not equipped to see the reasons in play. So when we look at the fawn and find no justifying good, skeptical theism says: of course we do not. We are the infant at the board. Our failure to find a reason is exactly what you would expect whether or not there is one — which means it is no evidence either way. Rowe's step from no good we can see to no good is exactly the step our smallness forbids.
And here is why this answers both arguments and not only the first: it is the same gap. Schellenberg said a loving God would have no reason to stay hidden from a sincere seeker. But to say God would have no reason is, once again, to claim that you can survey all the reasons a being like that might have — that if some good were served by the silence, you would have found it. The same infant, the same board. Perhaps there are goods that can grow only in people who have passed through the silence: a faith reached in God's apparent absence is a different thing from one accepted in the face of an obvious presence. The philosopher Paul Moser argues that the knowledge God wants is not the cool registering of a fact but something that reshapes the whole person, and might require exactly the long silence the seeker resents. You need not find that convincing. You need only grant that you are not positioned to rule it out. The silence stops being proof of absence for the same reason the fawn does: you cannot pass from I see no reason to there is no reason when the reasons in question belong to a mind of that size.
That is the whole defence, and it is genuinely forceful. It does not dodge either argument; it goes straight at the single inference both of them rely on and says: you cannot take that step. If it is right, both objections fail. So — is it right?
Here is where it becomes interesting, and recent. There is live work on this from 2025 — from philosophers such as Paul Draper, in Atheism and the Problem of Evil, and Nevin Climenhaga, in a paper whose title runs, roughly, If we cannot tell what theism predicts, we cannot tell whether God exists. And it is not a rescue of Rowe. It is stranger than that. It says: very well, grant the skeptical theist the gap. Grant that we are too small to see God's reasons. Now watch what that does to everything else. If your mind is too small to tell what an all-knowing God would have reason to do about suffering, then it is too small to tell what such a God would have reason to do about anything. And that damages far more than the problem of evil. Return to last week. The fine-tuning argument said: a life-permitting universe is just what you would expect if a God who valued life set the constants. But how would you know what such a God would value, or expect, or intend? That is reading the mind of the very being you have just said you cannot read. Climenhaga puts it almost as a slogan: if we cannot tell what God would predict, we cannot tell whether God exists — from any of the evidence, for or against. The gap that rescues the believer from the fawn is the same gap that removes the fine-tuning argument. Skeptical theism does not decide the question in God's favour. It disqualifies everyone equally: no one, believer or atheist, gets to read God's existence off the way the world looks, because reading it off requires knowing what God would do, and that is the one thing we have just agreed we cannot know.
So consider what is now before us. The problem of evil and the hiddenness argument, both laid out whole — two serious cases that the world's pain and the world's silence are evidence against a loving God. Skeptical theism, given its full weight — a serious reply that both arguments take a step they are not entitled to take. And then the strange part: that the very reply which answers them may quietly disqualify the arguments for God as well, the ones we spent last week building. Three serious positions; each met by a serious reply. I am not going to tell you that the fawn settles the matter, and I am not going to tell you that skeptical theism settles it, because the honest situation is that neither does. The two arguments cannot get past the gap; and the reply, in getting past it, may have argued itself out of ever proving anything at all. Both fronts remain open at the end. The suffering and the silence are still before us. So is the answer to them. And so, now, is a new doubt: whether any of this — for or against — was ever the kind of thing we could settle by looking.
Before we finish, the same thing I did last week: let me point to something you did in the last half hour, without yet saying what it means — because what it means is later business. Last week you caught yourself keeping score — a quiet tally running as the fine-tuning argument and its critics went by, a point for, a point against — and you had never noticed you were keeping one. Tonight, watch what became of that tally. You came in with the same instinct, ready to add things up: the fawn, a heavy mark against; the silence, another; then skeptical theism, a mark back the other way; then the twist that cuts both ways — and now you do not even know which column that one belongs in. The tally will not close. You kept trying to total the round, and the round will not total. That strain — the score that refuses to settle, however honestly you weigh it — notice that it is happening, and leave it there. Do not go digging at it yet. We return to it next week, and it is the whole of the rest of this series.
Here is the thing to actually take and use, because you do not own an argument you have only watched; you own it when you can build it yourself, with no one setting it up for you. So, as last week, choose the side you lean against — and tonight that is harder than it has ever been, because the side you lean against is the one defending against your own strongest arguments. If you do not believe — if the fawn and the silence seem to you to settle it — then your task before next week is to build skeptical theism. Build the gap. Build the infant at the chessboard until you could put its full weight into words, until you could say to an atheist: here is exactly why your two strongest arguments take a step they have not earned — and have them grant that it is not a dodge. And if you do believe — if the gap rescued you from the fawn — then your task is the reverse: build Schellenberg. Build the honest seeker in the silent room until it is not a strawman you can pity but a real person whose open hands came back empty, and you could put into words the actual force of the claim that a love which wanted to be known would have said something. It is the same rule as last week: build the side you do not hold, then object.
And one more thing to carry away, smaller, only to notice — I am not going to do anything with it tonight. Return to the silence argument for a moment. It said that a loving God who was really there would ensure the sincere seeker at least believed — would show up, register, leave some trace the seeker could detect. Notice that the whole argument rested on that: on a quiet rule about what a real God would do — namely, provide something that counts as evidence. It did not argue for that rule. It built it in and moved on. I am not saying the rule is wrong. I am only pointing out that it was there, holding the argument up, unstated. Hold that beside the straining tally, and leave them both alone for now.
That is episode three of eight, and the most that has been asked of you so far. We have now built the strongest case for and the strongest case against, both entire, and watched them refuse to settle — and watched the very tool meant to settle them turn out to cut in every direction at once. So next week I stop putting arguments in front of you and turn the whole thing around. Instead of weighing another argument, I will ask why the last two have been so impossible to total — why the tally will not close, however fairly you keep it. It is a plainer question than any argument we have built, and I think you will find it gives you the most trouble of all.
So — is there anyone there? Tonight the case against came on two fronts, both complete, with nothing held back: a fawn burning for nothing in a forest no one walks through, and a room where an honest voice asked and asked and received only the sound of its own asking. Then the gap arrived — you are too small to know there is no reason — and the objections fell short. And then the gap turned and took the arguments for God as well. I have not moved you toward yes, and I have not moved you toward no. All three positions are still standing at the end. What has changed is only this: you have now met the real case for and the real case against, instead of the slogans — and the tally still will not balance, which may mean the trouble is not in the arguments at all. It may be in the scale on which you have been weighing them.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.