Stephen Wykstra

Stephen John Wykstra is an American analytic philosopher of religion, long associated with Calvin College (now Calvin University) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he taught philosophy for several decades. Trained in the analytic tradition with doctoral work at the University of Pittsburgh, he became a central figure in late twentieth-century debates over the evidential problem of evil. Wykstra is best known for formulating the Condition Of ReasoNable Epistemic Access (CORNEA), introduced in his 1984 article responding to William Rowe's evidential argument from evil. CORNEA holds that an appearance that there is no God-justifying reason for some evil only counts as evidence against theism if humans would reasonably expect to discern such a reason were one to exist; given the vast cognitive gap between human and divine perspectives, Wykstra argues this expectation is unwarranted. This argument became foundational for what Paul Draper later labeled "skeptical theism," developed further by Michael Bergmann, Daniel Howard-Snyder, and others. Wykstra has continued refining CORNEA in exchanges with Rowe, Draper, Bruce Russell, and Richard Swinburne, and has written on Bayesian confirmation theory and religious epistemology. Critics including Paul Draper and Stephen Maitzen charge that skeptical theism has corrosive consequences for ordinary moral reasoning. Wykstra remains a key reference point for contemporary work on inscrutable evil and the limits of human epistemic access to divine purposes.