Theists and their sceptical opponents have clashed over the problem of evil for more than two millennia without coming any closer to a resolution than they were when Cleanthes wrote his "Hymn to Zeus." To believers, in the words of John Calvin, God "reveals and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe;" and the faithful encounter the horrors of mortal life as tests of their fidelity to God and as opportunities for the realization of redemptive value. In their view, nonbelievers are blinded by ignorance and/or sinfulness to an omnipresent reality which would be obvious to them if only they had eyes to see and ears to hear. Meanwhile, agnostics and atheists think about the drought in Africa, the tidal waves in the Bay of Bengal, and the Holocaust in Europe; and they see faith in a benevolent world-ordering deity as a fatuous and irrational dream. Thus, in a standoff oddly reminiscent of Wonderland, the evils which buttress and give meaning to faith on one side look like conclusive evidence of the absurdity of belief from the other.
In 1963, Nelson Pike opened a new phase in the philosophical debate about this problem by arguing that the theist who confronts the recalcitrance of the issue, with no plausible solutions forthcoming, might claim correctly that there must be a true theodicy even if neither she nor any other human knows what it is. 1 This result, Pike alleged, follows from other beliefs the theist holds, namely that there is a God, that God has the omni-characteristics traditionally attributed to the divine nature, and that God is morally perfect. Taken together, these propositions entail that God has morally sufficient reason(s) for allowing as much evil as there is in the world, even if no one but God knows what