asbestosman wrote:JohnStuartMill wrote:No, but it's by far the most common one. The onus is now on apologists to come up with another justification.
Why on us? The proof (or rather argument) against God using the problem of evil isn't a usual case of burden of proof. The argument follows the basic ideas in a mathematical proof which might show, for example, that there are no cases of three consecutive integers all of which are prime. The PoE argument in essence seeks to prove that a certain sort of God cannot exist given the current state of the universe.
I claim, therefore that the onus is on proponents of this particular proof to demonstrate its soundness just as would be needed in a mathematical proof. If you want to play with the burden of proof then you don't need, indeed shouldn't use, the problem of evil. All you need to do is ask me to give good reasons to believe in God and reject them all as being insufficient. Simple. Boring.
I'm feeling generous today, so I'll give a possible reason, not that it's my duty to disprove that proof. One possible reason is that it lets mankind to work together to solve some of these issues as we have with other medical difficulties. Even now we are trying to make great strides against dementia, alzheimer's, and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Having us work together instead of solving all our problems for us gives us the opportunity to learn compassion, cooperation, and other such noble qualities. Maybe other reasons exist. I don't even claim that the possibility I offered is the right one.
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It is true that there is such a thing as a logical argument from evil where someone argues that the existence of observed evils is logically incompatible with the existence of God.
However,
The argument from evil can and often is worded as an evidential argument. It goes something like this:
If God (defined in a particular way) exist, then pointless suffering does not exist
Pointless suffering likely exists
Therefore, God likely does not exist.
To the extent we have reason to believe pointless suffering exists, we have reason to believe God (again, defined in that particular way) does not. Of course, there might be reasons to believe God exists that overwhelms the evidence against it, but, really, there isn't.
Defenses against this argument come in two varieties. It's an obvious fact that
inscrutable suffering exists. One must make an inference between suffering that seems to have no point and suffering that actually has no justifiable point. One type of defense is an effort to explain what the point of the various suffering we see is. You offered one classic example of this. It's called a "soul-making" theodicy. I don't know how seriously you offered it, but if you want it taken seriously, I'll discuss why it isn't a good response to the problem of evil. Without getting into it, theodicies on the whole are woefully inadequate and often quite abhorent when you think about it a little.
The second type of defense is to attack the inferences without actually attempting to explain the point to the suffering you see. The most common version of this is known as the "unknown purposes defense" where someone argues that God may have reasons beyond our ken for doing the things he does, so we can't infer that something we see, such as holocaust victims reliving their torture through brain degeneration, is actually without a good point.