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The epistemic question posed by evil is whether the world contains undesirable states of affairs that provide the basis for an argument that makes it unreasonable to believe in the existence of God. This discussion is divided into eight sections.
Open any contemporary introductory textbook and philosophy and it becomes clear that the problem of evil in contemporary philosophy is thought of as an argument for atheism. Since, the atheist contends, God and evil are incompatible, and evil clearly exists, there is no God.
The Validity of the Argument. That the argument is deductively valid can be seen as follows. First, let us introduce the following abbreviations: \ (\textit {State} (x)\): \ (x\) is a state of affairs.
5. The Problem of Evil. The arguments of Hume’s that we have considered so far may all be described as sceptical arguments that are critical of efforts to prove the existence of God. No argument considered so far aims to prove that God does not or cannot exist.
The page references for Paul Draper’s 1989 article are to the reprinting of it in Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 12–29. This is a file in the archives of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Consideration of any present-day introductory textbook of philosophy reveals that the problem of evil in contemporary philosophy is standardly regarded as an argument for atheism. The atheist contends that God and evil are incompatible, and given that evil clearly exists, God cannot exist.
For a fuller account and defense of Hume’s argument, see Michael Tooley, (2011) “Hume and the Problem of Evil,” in Philosophy of Religion: The Key Thinkers, edited by Jeffrey J. Jordan, London and New York, Continuum, 159–86.
Critics argue that the problem with action-based accounts is that it seems sufficient for evil personhood to have evil feelings or motivations, and thus, evil persons need not perform, or be disposed to perform, evil actions.
One major argument from evil is what we’ll call the “Outweighing Goods” argument. This section explains a basic outweighing goods argument, a standard way of defending it using “noseeum inferences,” and a skeptical theistic critique of that defense.
If there is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect person, there are no states of affairs in which animals die agonizing deaths in forest fires, or where children undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer.