The Problem of Animal Suffering.

. . . Thanks to KRFournier (one of my favourite Christian debaters on this site) for taking the challenge. He has provided an attempted short refutation of not only my argument, but every single version of the argument from evil. He has also provided a (little excessive) definition for the God he believes in. I accept the definition. KRFournier somewhat straw-man's my argument by replacing 'animal suffering' with 'evil', but I'm going to let that go in the hope of squashing one of the more popular objections to the Problem of Evil. KRFournier's attempt to form my case into a syllogism is simply incorrect. He phrases it as the logical argument from evil, which was NOT my argument. A more accurate syllogism would be this: P1. If God has the property of omni-benevolence, he would keep animal suffering to the absolute minimum. P2. If God is omnipotent, he has the ability to keep animal suffering to the absolute minimum. P3. It is probable from the vast amounts of suffering in the animal world that animal suffering is not kept to an absolute minimum. :. Such a God probably does not exist. (I apologise if I've made any mistakes in the syllogism. I've no education in philosophy) This, however, is not relevant to his attempt to refute the Problem of Animal Suffering. He doesn't even bother distinguishing my argument from evil with general arguments from evil (which is fine, since his argument would apply equally to all of them). I must say, I find his attempt to refute the argument surprising. If his objection were valid, then thousands upon thousands of Christian philosophers have been wasting their time coming up with defences and theodicies in response to the argument from evil - who knew it was so easy to defeat! Alvin Plantinga needn't have bothered writing his famous refutation of the logical argument from evil. KRFournier's objection is this: *I cannot claim that animal suffering is objectively evil without appealing to absolute morality. If I do appeal to absolute morality, then I've proven God's existence, so my argument implodes on itself* Let me try to explain why this response is not a valid way to deal with the argument from evil. Imagine I am dealing with an earnest group at my doorstep hailing from the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn. I am attempting to break them from their absurd beliefs, so I come up with the following argument; P1. Invisibility is logically incompatible with pinkness. P2. Anything with logically incompatible properties cannot exist. :. The Invisible Pink Unicorn cannot exist. Imagine that in response to this argument, one of the believers comes up with the objection that I myself do not believe the ability to be invisible exists. Therefore, I have no objective basis to claim that the invisibility is incompatible with pinkness - in fact, by appealing to invisibility in my argument, I am only supporting the claim that the Invisible Pink Unicorn exists! We can plainly see that the objection is not valid - just because I myself do not believe a certain thing exists *does not mean I can't point out that it is inconsistent with something else*. In the same way, even if I did not believe morality was objective, I would still be able to make the argument that the immense amount of animal suffering in the world is objectively inconsistent with a God with the properties of omnipotence and omni-benevolence. I am NOT trying to hold God to my own standards of right and wrong. Rather, I am showing how certain properties of the world are inconsistent with God's attributes. I have no need to appeal to any kind of objective morality to do that.