William Rowe’s argument from evil is a bad piece of non-deductive reasoning. I will explain why.
The problem of evil challenges theism by raising the following question: if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why is there evil in the actual world? Theists have proposed many responses to the problem, such as the free will response, the soul-making response, the greater good response, and so on. Whether any succeeds has been debated for hundreds of years.
The problem of divine hiddenness is, in some reasonable sense, a “deeper” problem than the problem of evil. If God were vividly present to us, we could suffer almost anything—at least the kinds of things we find on this planet—without (evidential) doubt that God exists (and also with little emotional doubt). But, one clearly could have some (evidential) doubt that God existed, even if God were vividly present to them throughout the suffering.
There is widespread belief that compatibilism + theism cannot offer a credible solution to the logical problem of evil. Why does anyone believe that? I think they’re reasoning this way: if compatibilism is true, then, necessarily, God can actualize a morally perfect world.
Sometimes an atheist argues against the existence of God based on the problem of evil, while believing that there is such a thing as objective evil. The standard explanation of the apparent inconsistency here is that the atheist is arguing on the assumption that there is objective good and evil. I used to think this was a perfectly satisfactory story about what the atheist is doing. But no longer.
I maintain a bibliography of work on the problem of evil. I have shared it in a couple of other places and thought I’d share it...
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