The Evil God Challenge: Two Significant Asymmetries

Several authors have maintained that every argument in support of God, indeed everything that a theist claims about God, can be reversed and used in support of an evil god. The most salient example is the alleged symmetry between theodicies and reverse theodicies: God gave us free will to promote good, evil god gave us free will to promote evil; God allows evil for soul making, evil god allows good for soul destruction; our suffering is compensated for by the eternal bliss in the afterlife, our happiness is compensated for by the eternal damnation in the afterlife. Considering such symmetries, it is argued that there is no reason to think that the existence of God is more plausible than the existence of an evil god. The foregoing reasoning is known as the evil god challenge. The challenge is to explain why the God hypothesis should be considerably more reasonable than the evil god hypothesis. In this paper, I take up the challenge on behalf of theism. I indicate damaging asymmetries between an evil god and a good god, and between theodicies and reverse theodicies, showing that the existence of a good god is considerably more plausible than the existence of an evil god