Rowe's Fawn

The argument's structure

Rowe distinguished between the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil. The logical problem holds that God and evil are strictly incompatible. Rowe thought Plantinga had largely answered that version. The evidential problem is weaker in form but harder to dismiss: certain evils make God's existence unlikely.

The fawn burns to death over several days. No human is present. No one's character is being tested. No greater good seems to follow from the suffering. Rowe called this an instance of gratuitous evil: suffering that serves no morally sufficient purpose.

His argument has two steps. First, there appear to be instances of gratuitous evil. Second, a perfectly good God would prevent all gratuitous evil. Therefore, probably, God does not exist.

The sceptical theist response

The most influential theistic response is sceptical theism, developed by Stephen Wykstra and later Michael Bergmann. The core idea is that our inability to see what good could justify the fawn's suffering is exactly what we should expect if God exists.

God's knowledge vastly exceeds human knowledge. The range of possible goods and the connections between events that we cannot perceive may be enormous. Our inability to identify the greater good served by the fawn's death no more suggests there is none than a child's inability to understand a surgeon's reasoning suggests the surgery has no purpose.

The analogy is sometimes called CORNEA: the Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access. We are only entitled to judge an appearance as evidence of reality when we have reasonable access to the relevant facts. Where God's reasons are concerned, we may lack that access entirely.

Why Rowe considered this the most powerful challenge

Rowe explicitly called himself a friendly atheist: someone who believed theism was false but thought theists could be rational in holding it. He thought the fawn case was the strongest challenge not because it was unanswerable, but because the sceptical theist response, however defensible, comes at a cost.

If we accept that we cannot identify God's reasons in cases of extreme suffering, we simultaneously undercut our ability to trust any moral reasoning that relies on what seems good or bad to us. The same scepticism that protects God from the fawn case threatens our grounds for trusting moral intuition anywhere.

This is sometimes called the moral scepticism objection to sceptical theism. Rowe's fawn does not end the debate, but it sets up a dilemma that theists and atheists are still working through.