  Another natural extension of skeptical theist reasoning that is illustrated in the case of animals is skepticism about whether we know their post-mortem fate. So suppose one is a reasonable agnostic, suspending judgment about whether or not there is a God, but having somewhat better reason to doubt than to believe that there is a God. If the skeptical theist can make a good argument that it is highly likely (given theism) that animals' suffering will be defeated in an afterlife – where, following Marilyn McCord Adams (2000), an evil, like suffering, “is defeated within the context of the individual's life if the individual's life is a good whole to which [the evil] bears the relevant organic unity...by being relevantly integrated into [the individual's] relation to a great enough good” (28,29) – then the agnostic's own skepticism about whether there is a God or not commits them to skepticism about whether or not animals' suffering is defeated in the afterlife. And without knowing whether or not animals' suffering is defeated in the afterlife, the case against God from animal suffering is severely blunted.