Doing better does not logically entail being greater. This is easy to see in cases where the agents face different choices: a devil may make a better choice than a saint if the devil’s worst option is better than the saint’s best option!
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.
There are indispensable entities in many thought experiments, which we don’t admit into our ontologies, like frictionless planes and ideal gases. Nonetheless, those ideas are useful in many thought experiments. But why should they be so useful? I think it is because they substantively entail certain facts were they to actually obtain.
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.
Let’s grant that if skeptical theism is true, then for any evil E, we have no reason to think that the prevention of E will lead to an overall better result than letting E happen, so the fact that we do not see God preventing E is not evidence against the existence of God, since we have no more reason to think that God would prevent E than that he would not. The standard objection is that then we have no reason to prevent E, since we have no reason to think that the overall result will be better if we prevent E.
Well, this is really a challenge for skeptics of a necessary being (a necessarily existing, causally powerful entity), but I wanted a catchy title, and as a matter of sociological observation, atheists are typically (though not always) skeptics of a necessary being. The challenge is this …
Let me try out this proof of universalism in which perfect goodness and perfect justice seem to coincide.
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