Thread by @EveKeneinan

I can break the Argument from Evil down schematically. It comes in two flavors: the logical and the evidential.

The logical form of the argument from evil claims to find an inconsistent triad in

1 God is wholly good
2 God is omnipotent
3 There is evil

But this is not an inconsistent triad. So that fails.

Next move is to add premises, and go for e.g. an inconsistent tetrad or pentad.

But that doesn’t work. There just isn’t a robust and non-question-begging set of evident premises that one can generate a logical contradiction from.

People *have* tried.

Philosophers nowadays don’t try.

After the logical version of the argument from evil died (there being good reason to think not that it just hadn’t been made successfully, but cannot be made at all), philosophy saw the rise of the EVIDENTIAL ARGUMENT FROM EVIL.

This parallels *exactly* the way philosophical atheism completely gave up on the argument “There is no God” and shifted away from atheism-proper to the agnostic “There is insufficient evidence for God,” that is, the Evidentialist position.

Here’s how the evidentialist argument from evil runs (1/2)

1. There exist instances of evil which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse

(2/2)

2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any evil it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
3. There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good
being

The problem here is that both the premises 1 and 2 are utterly unknowable.

As Alston puts it (regarding 1):

Those of you who follow my philosophizing will know that I put forward an argument very similar to Alston’s (not influenced by him, since I was unaware of his argument until recently) that premise 2 is in the same boat: it cannot be known to any finite intellect.

The problem, then, with the evidential argument from evil is that it wants to reach a VERY substantive conclusion, viz. “There is no God” or “Probably, there is no God” on the basis of premises which are, at best, unknowable guesses.

It is obviously unsound to argue from unknowable guesses or to base one’s substantive beliefs on them. So the evidentialist argument from evil collapses.

It seems that the “philosophical folk mind” knows this, which is why it usually presents the argument from evil as QUESTIONS.

From the QUESTION “Why is there evil?”
it does not follow that “There is no God.”

Nothing follows from a question.

Many people seem to have a FEELING or a HUNCH or a VAGUE INTUITION that there is some kind of problem hidden in the conjunction of the goodness of God and reality of evil.

But (and this is my point) this vague intuition never materializes — except by the leap of transmuting one’s vague intuition into the unjustified assertion of a strong premise (that one does not know to be true) as true.

Or two premises, as the case may be.

That is to say, there is a kind of natural repugnance human beings have toward evil, a strong pre-rational sense that EVIL SHOULD NOT BE.

And this is not in error.

It goes very wrong when it, like Job, tries to “curse God and die” because of it.

EVIL IS and yet EVIL SHOULD NOT BE is indeed the fundamental contradiction.

Only God, specifically God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit resolves this contradiction.

The argument from evil channels human horror at evil into a pseudo-rational channel as a from of rebellion against God, which of course paradoxically works to cut one off from The Good Itself, leaving one fully, nakedly prey to the horrors of evil.

In sum:

There is no set of true statements which conjoined with “there is evil” entails “there is no God.”

The premises needed to ground “probably, there is no God” are unknown & unknowable for human beings.

Those who assert them anyway do so on some other basis than reason.