The Bible underneath it

The Problem of Evil

The two arguments philosophers take most seriously.

Set the frame first

Do not claim this proves God does not exist. The strictly logical version is generally conceded to fail. The version philosophers actually defend is evidential: the amount and distribution of suffering makes God's existence unlikely, not impossible. Stanford Encyclopedia

The suffering free will does not explain

The free will defense covers moral evil. It does not touch natural evil: cancer, earthquakes, birth defects.
Scale it up: roughly 500 million years of animals starving and being eaten alive, long before any humans existed to grow spiritually from it.

William Rowe’s case, the one philosophers actually argue about

"In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering."

No human free will involved. Nobody learns anything. Nobody is even watching.

The argument in full

Divine hiddenness

Harder to answer than the problem of evil, because you cannot lay it at the feet of human sin. It is four steps, and every step is ordinary.

A perfectly loving God would be open to a relationship with anyone capable of oneThis is not a critic’s premise. It is what love is taken to mean in the tradition itself.

You cannot have a relationship with someone you do not believe existsAlso uncontroversial.

So there should be no nonresistant nonbelieversPeople who are open, who are sincerely looking, and who simply are not convinced.

They demonstrably existI was one of them for months. Stanford Encyclopedia on divine hiddenness

The common rebuttals

"We cannot know God's reasons." A genuinely respected position with real force. But it carries a steep cost. If our moral judgment is too weak to conclude that a burning fawn is pointless suffering, it is also too weak to conclude that God is good. It proves too much.

"Hiddenness preserves free will." Those goods do not require nonbelief. You believe your parents exist and still freely choose whether to have a relationship with them.

"Nonbelievers are secretly suppressing it." This is unfalsifiable by construction. Any sincere seeker who reports honest doubt gets reclassified as self deceived.

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