The Problem of Evil does not Disprove a Benevolent God

IntroductionIn this debate I will be arguing in favor of the problem of evil against the existence of God or to be more concise, I will be arguing that our worlds vast amount of suffering (evil) is incompatible with the existence of a loving and protective God, as defined by Pro.Since the onus is on Chaosism, it will be sufficient for me to refute his argument.Sub-Argument 1P1 : Evil is subject to personal judgment and is a comparative concept.P2 : There exists a possibility of least Non-Evil by which Evil is judged.P3 : The definition of Evil is based upon real, perceivable possibilities.C1 : One's perception of Evil is dependent upon one's perception of possible reality.C2 : If possibilities exist, then Evil necessarily exists.Premise 1:It is quite true that people's moral standards vary. I however consider myself a moral nihilist/ error theorist, therefore I use the PoE to not pertain morality at all. Not even theists are sure what the correct meaning of 'Evil' is supposed to be(1), but, since 'Evil' is, for the sake of this debate, (in part) defined as 'any degree of physical or mental suffering', there is not much vagueness here.For me it is a simple issue of incompatibility between the existence of vast amounts of suffering (something that can be objectively assessed and is independent of any moral theory) and the meaning of God's attributes, specifically 'loving' and 'protective'.To have any meaning at all these terms must in some way reflect the meaning they have when attributed to fellow humans. It can be purely descriptive, not evaluative, to call someone 'loving' or 'protective'. 'protective' for example means something along the lines of "doing what is possible to prevent (physical) harm". Whether or not this would result in morally good or bad actions is irrelevant, this is our descriptive usage of the term 'protective'.As for loving, a mother can love her child and Hitler most certainly loved his country, these are just descriptions of feelings evoking according behavior, not value judgements.Therefore, I can completely bypass Pro's justification for subjectivity, since I do not focus on human judgements, but semantic content instead.It might be true that suffering, when evaluated by humans, is to some extend comparative, as my opponent demonstrated with his cold example, but we are talking about a loving, protective, omnipotent and omniscient deity. It would of course recognize her condition and since it is a loving and caring being, it would try to improve her condition.Moreover, the great majority of suffering, like that of the children dying of malaria everyday, is fully recognized by the affected ones.Perhaps God would allow for kinds of suffering like the persisting. unrecognized cold, but the starvation of countless innocent children is nothing a God, who has a strong feeling of attraction towards humans (loving) and is giving his best to prevent their suffering (protective), would allow for.Therefore, I reject the first premise as Evil (suffering) is objective and its comparative element negligible, since it would only defend God against unrecognized conditions, which somehow represent the norm, not the outstanding, gratuitous suffering of our world.It does not explain why this amount of suffering ok for God, but not say a world where 500 less children die of starvation every day.Premise 2:My opponent talks about "least Non-Evil" which seems to be equivalent to "most Evil", since it is just a double negative. Because of this I am perhaps misinterpreting what Pro is saying here.It makes prima facie no sense to talk about the "most Evil" to be the Moral Fulcrum and the Moral Fulcrum to be the absence of pain (meaning that the 'most Evil' would be a world without pain?).Therefore, I think "least Evil" was what my opponent intended here.Understood like this I can agree with my opponent on this premise, as long as 'possibility' is understood as a modal notion (I'll come back to this later) in the sense of "There is at least one possible world containing no suffering by which the amount of suffering in the actual world is judged".Premise 3:I think what my opponent is getting at is that the judging of something to be evil is based upon natural possibilities.Natural possibility -- What is possible within the bounds of the laws of natureFirst of all, I insist that suffering is an objective state of affairs. A God as defined for this debate would not be constraint by the meager means available to mortals. If the dog suffers from only receiving half the food it needs, then its suffering is still an objective state of affairs, even if, for a human, feeding nothing to it would be the only alternative.There is no reason to think that God would be limited to only those options presented by my opponent.There is no reason why we should only consider natural possibilities either, we are talking about a supernatural, omnipotent being after all.Concerning Conclusions 1 & 2:There is no way for my opponent to reach any of the conclusions, for his premises do not seem to support what he is trying to infer.He states that as long as there are possibilities to which one could compare her current situation, evil will always exist. However all of his examples revolve around possible circumstances of which none reflects the possible circumstance of 'least Evil' described in P2.If he can bring forth an example of a world fitting this idea of 'least Evil', yet which, through the conceivability of different realities, would nevertheless contain suffering, then his first sub-argument would have some ground.Essentially, what he would have to do is to prove the logical inconsistency of a world without suffering.Sub-Argument 2P4 : The Creator of the reality is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent.P5 : An omniscient Creator perceives all possibilities, even those excluded in reality.P6 : A benevolent Creator can create a reality that excludes Evil possibilities based on P5.C3 : By C2, a non-omniscient observer in reality can only compare perceivable real possibilities.C4 : By C1 and C3, Evil will always exist in any reality, even if created by a benevolent Creator.Premise 5:P5 could be restated as "An omniscient Creator perceives all possible worlds". Other than that, I agree.Premise 6:It is not clear what "Evil possibilities" are.Supposedly this originates from my opponents use of 'possibility' in a non-modal way. I would happily agree to a premise stating "A benevolent Creator can create a world lacking any evil (suffering)", but then it's not clear at all how the premise supports the argument. In hindsight this, too, applies to the interpretation of 'possible' as natural possibility.For once, because if God is in fact able to create a world entirely without any suffering, as P6 states, then why should God not be able to create a world entirely without any suffering, as C4 concludes?Here my opponent attempts to solve this issue by postulating that, being internal to reality, humans will always perceive evil (from Sub-Argument 1 and his diagram). However all other conceivable worlds would necessarily contain as much suffering (none) or more than the least-Evil-world, due to the simple definition of least-Evil-world, i.e., a world without any suffering.Therefore a being in such a world would perceive it as the best of all possible worlds and it is either the case that this perception of other worlds would somehow resemble a form of evil in itself, then the world in question would not actually be a world containing no suffering, or it is not the case that God can create such a suffering-free world, which would refute P6 and render the argument unsound.Either way, the premise fails to support my opponents position.The inferences to C3 and C4 are contested above.Therefore, I rest my case.Sources(1) http://plato.stanford.edu...