The Problem of Evil (PoE) is sound

Contra-P1 Alleged ContradictionsContra-P1 are in principle arguments & Contra-P3 are in fact arguments. So both cases aren’t contradictions but alternatives. Even so:For P1, God is free to act even though his intervention is limited & specific towards his plans. The RA preserves our ability to gradually discover God’s plan for humanity as he reveals to us through [*R]’s exceptions.For P3, ST only affirms that say, God’s reasons for permitting pain may not be discernible years from now, & we’re too limited in time to presently discern God’s reasons with good enough confidence to warrant P3. So God isn’t beyond our ken, for Christ’s atonement was gradually discovered even though the Jews went through what seemed like gratuitous suffering while coming out of Egypt, etc.Theodicy states that insofar as moral SFCs are possible, then God is justified in permitting defeatable evils in light of his special revelation through Christ’s atonement, & the eternal glory that was promised by a risen messiah. (Not much induction there, & RA coheres perfectly with this!)God of LawFirst, an “evil God” is a contradiction since God is necessarily good by definition: a being worthy of worship. Second, the world is morally ambiguous, & that’s not how theists arrive to God’s goodness- by inferring it from the pleasure in the world: Anti-God argument does, & thus it shows the PoE’s conclusion to be inflated & so invalid. For just as any pleasure doesn’t disprove anti-God, so any pain doesn’t disprove God. And since the 2 cases are equal, it follows that the PoE’s conclusion doesn’t informally follow. For pain, & pleasure, are existential events; they exist as a necessity (de re) of agent existence in a material world. Existence then is to blame, not God's lack of love. So at best we ought not prefer a relationship with God given better possible worlds. But that wouldn’t disprove God like the PoE concludes! Therefore, far from removing my case, Pro has inadvertently undercut his own. For he's shown that pain is really a practical, not theoretical, problem. Hence the conclusion is inflated which means this PoE is informally invalid & thus unsound. The resolution is therefore false & so I declare victory.Resolution Argument (RA)God's overriding motivation was to instantiate his creation with [*R] & so our existence would clearly be "more pressing" than for God to never enter into [*R] while failing to instantiate us. This motivation itself requires only limited intervention, given the anthropic necessity of [*R], not that God can't act in the world. For “the creation of a real world of entities distinct from God requires that divine intervention in that world be the exception rather than the rule, but it does not require that all intervention be excluded.” (Koons)Limited intervention includes validating revelatory messengers (prophets / apostles), the revealed God in Christ (miracles permitted to surround Christ’s ministry) & petitionary prayers. Of course God wouldn’t entirely reveal such exceptions to us. But this gives us back control over a world fallen into sin, & encourages us to petition God in all we do thereby cultivating a relationship of trust (a virtue). Thus far from preventing God’s action & our knowledge of it, the RA preserves such divine means while considering an overriding motivation necessary for our existence, which makes God’s love compatible with pointless pain. Justification: [*R] is essential to human nature. For if mankind were created without [*R], then we’d be altogether different (origins essentialism). The eternal weight of our moral decisions would be destroyed as well.Pro misidentifies God's [*R] either as a compensating good or not. It's neither, it's an anthropic condition.Baseline Argument (BA)Pro pushes the gratuity-measure back, but the fallacy remains. What threshold has he defined for evil in “excess”? Pro constructs measurable indices & passes them off as the 'real thing.' But the BoP falls on Pro to prove that real qualities of evil can be measured as ‘better / less than.’But why think God created the world as a substance of value in terms of “better / less than”? Clearly God simply creates incommensurately good things for good purposes, & so Pro’s mistaken to think that any value whatsoever can be assigned to the totality of things God does. Free agents capable of creating good / bad choices have similar consequences for each. And in a fallen world, incommensurately bad things are expected. How can these be measured? A & B are “best” actions B is better than C It doesn’t follow that A is better than C A & C, like A & B, may be incommensurable! Pro mistakes that every evil must occur for some “greater good.” But maximization ethics are atheistically impersonal in character & thus un-Christian, “[Such ethics] treat individual human beings as mere containers of the stuff that really matters (desire-satisfaction, frustration, etc) ... This profoundly unbiblical perspective has more to do with classical economics and Benthamite psychology than moral theology.” (B.Williams) Christian ethics are deontic with a concern for other-centeredness, purity of intention, etc.. This doesn’t translate to a divine obligation to minimize suffering, nor to maximize the totality of happiness. Hence P1 remains irrelevant to Christianity. Contra-P3 *Pro never responds to my argument of the noetic effects of sin in regards to natural evils, argument extended.*Pro fails to deal with my origins essentialism, argument extended.STI never said animals & infants can’t feel pain, but that we’re ignorant on if they're aware of it in the same way we are. And so an argument can’t be constructed from this. Mere behavioral reactions to stimuli preserves the beasts life & so is selectively advantageous. But we can’t argue they know pain as we do.Pro's response wholly ignores that negative probability judgements ≠ positive ones, & so Pro still must first show us we’re within a good epistemic situation to affirm all of his justifications for P3. His fallacious inference is, I see no morally sufficient reason for X Thus, there is no morally sufficient reason for X This is a negative probability judgement & so can't logically follow the principle of credulity. But then Pro self-ascends to an even more outlandish implied epistemic position, "I’m arguing from 'absolutely everything we know of evil’” … his case then rests upon, Our knowledge of evil is sufficient to ignore our ignorance of every possible morally sufficient reason for X in the world both through all time & all space. Sounds extremely hasty, what justification is given to ignore this massive ignorance? Pro's garage isn't the history of mankind over all geographical locations so why be "supremely confident that apparent gratuity supports actual gratuity" in a world much larger / complex than his basement? We’re clearly more inductively limited on this scale than what Pro lets on, & he has yet to prove otherwise.TheodicyI argued that one's self-forming response to existential events (which may or may not include pain) can be the mode in which virtue is built. And insofar as any existential event yields a just/unjust-SFC, then that event can’t logically be gratuitous.Pro calls such a theodicy narrow, yet the BoP is on him to cite where in reality we don't find some existential event in which a just SFC can’t be made in response to that event. Lastly, this Theodicy only maintains that God’s justification for evil is the possibility of justly achieved complete happiness, “… because not just any person deserves to experience perfect happiness… it must be delayed to another life. In order to determine who receives perfect happiness, God gives a period of time (e.g., this life) wherein a person is free to make a choice that serves as a basis of justly granting or denying to him the experience of perfect happiness.” (Goetz)