The argument from evil establishes the probable nonexistence of God.

Although there are many arguments which call themselves “the argument from evil,” and debate rages as to which is most compelling, in this debate I will present and defend the following argument which comes from William Rowe[1]. Let us first define a couple of situations:(E1) Lightning strikes a tree in a forest, causing a forest fire. A fawn is caught in this fire, and suffers intense agony for an extended period of time before finally dying. (This has undoubtedly happened many times in the Earth's history.)(E2) A five year old girl is, by her mother's boyfriend, severely beaten, raped and strangled to death. (This is drawn from an incident in Flint, Michigan in 1986, but something like it has certainly happened quite a number of times.)The argument:(P) No good state of affairs that we know of is such that God, by bringing it about, is morally justified in permitting E1 and E2.Therefore, probably:(Q) No good state of affairs is such that God, by bringing it about, is morally justified in permitting E1 and E2.Therefore, probably:(R) God does not exist.The inference from Q to R should be self-evident: if Q is true and God exists, God would not have permitted E1 and E2. But they did happen. I am not aware of any serious challenges to this inference. So there are two parts to defending the argument from evil: showing that P is true, and showing that the inference from P to Q is valid.P is justified by the fact that every state of affairs we know about which are such that God, by bringing it about, is morally justified in permitting E1 and E2, upon reflection, either are obtainable by God without his having to permit both E1 and E2, and/or in obtaining would not morally justify God’s permitting both E1 and E2[2].To justify the inference from P to Q, we appeal to the principle of induction. Making epistemic leaps from the known to the unknown is something that humans do every day, and is regarded as not only justified, but standard. For instance, we see no thousand foot tall human beings; therefore, we are justified in concluding that no thousand foot tall humans exist. The strength of that justification depends on the exhaustiveness of the search. In the case of thousand foot humans, we have today seven billion normal sized humans who would no doubt speak up if they saw one, as well as various types of monitoring technology operating in and around the populated areas of the world. If a thousand foot human existed, we would probably know it.In the case of Christianity, we have a history of two thousand years of scholars and theologians, having collectively spilled billions if not trillions of words of ink on the subject, trying to come up with a successful theodicy. If one existed, we would probably know it.This basic principle is used by humans all the time. To argue against it is, in Rowe's words, "simply to encourage radical skepticism concerning inductive reasoning in general."[3] This holds for everything we observe in the natural realm, and since the existence of God would have observable consequences in this realm, there's no reason why it should not hold for that as well.I contend, therefore, that the argument from evil is sound and establishes that God probably does not exist.[1] As presented in "The Empirical Argument from Evil," in Audi, et al, eds., Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment (Cornell University, 1986).[2] William Rowe, "Ruminations about Evil," Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991); see also Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Temple University, 1992), Theodore Drange, Nonbelief and Evil: Two Arguments for the Nonexistence of God (Prometheus, 1998), Nick Trakakis, The God Beyond Belief: In Defence of William Rowe's Evidential Argument from Evil (Springer, 2007) for detailed discussions of such states of affairs.[5] Rowe, 1991.