Abstract

Stephen Law’s evil-god challenge is the argument that since an evil god is just as likely as the God of theism, there is no reason to believe that theism is true over believing there is a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnimalevolent. There have been several attempts to answer the challenge, but recently John Collins has defended the evil-god challenge and also extended the argument past Law’s original formulation. In this article, I defend the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas against the evil-god challenge. In particular, I explain how Aquinas’s theodicy involving God’s goodness and Aquinas’s privation view of evil avoid the challenge.