Megill's Multiverse Meta-Argument
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming)
| Abstract | In recent years, several philosophers have offered reasons for thinking that if theism is true, the actual world (likely) includes multiple universes. Some have further argued that a multiverse model can help theists respond to arguments from evil. The latter move has been criticized in various ways. In a forthcoming paper in THIS JOURNAL, Jason Megill offers a novel and ambitious meta-argument: he claims that the bare epistemic possibility of multiple universes defeats all arguments from evil. If Megill’s argument were sound, this would be an enormously important result in the philosophy of religion. The problem of evil, after all, is widely thought to be one of the most serious objections to theism. It has been discussed throughout the history of philosophy, and has generated an enormous and very technical contemporary literature. But can the bare epistemic possibility of multiple universes really defeat all arguments from evil, both past and present, as Megill maintains? In what follows, I contend that Megill fails to establish premise a crucial premise in his argument. I conclude with a rival account of the effect of multiverse models of theism on the debate about evil | |||||||||
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