The Problem of Evil (PoE)

"Put simply, it renders belief in the kind of God defined less likely, on the basis that gratuitous evils exist." Excellent, now we have a statement which can be expressed through Bayes Theorem[1] which allows quantitative probabilistic inferences, or simply stated - how likely is it that something it true given something else is observed. Now here is where I will make my first objection : O1) The resolution as defined is not a truth-apt proposition as it is to vague to be falsified/confirmed. Noting that belief is less likely is not something that can be supported by argument because there is no quantification on how much less likely has to be seen in order for it to really be less likely. Consider the following scenario : I give you two buckets and ask you to fill them with water to equal amounts. You carefully take a graduated cylinder and pour an equal amount, as defined by the graduations on the cynlinder, into the buckets. When you return I rebuke you because I meant the exact same amount of molecules, not simply 1/10 of a ml (a typical limit on graduated cylinder precision). Note that until I let you know fully what equal really meant you had no way to know if one of the buckets had "less water" because less was not defined. Similar until Unitedandy quantifies the "less likely" part with both a measure and a metric to obtain said measure then the resolution is negated by default as the burden of proof can not be sustained. P1) "Given these attributes, God knows, can and wants to prevent any evils." Second objection; now to be clear the wording from Unitedandy is very particular to my argument, but to my defense, this is an argument that he advocates strongly and is very familiar with and thus he has to be held to task rigerously for his exact claims. O2) The assertion as stated is impractical and still undefined as the alternate world is not described Consider what is it that Unitedandy is actually asking God to do? What should the world be in his view if there was no PoE? Is it clear you you as it certainly is not to me. For example he has defined evil to include death, and thus if God can not allow evil he can not allow death then obviously he can not allow birth. Without death then the Earth is simply over populated in a trivial amount of time and then what happens, populations crush each other - but exist without death forever in some kind of apathic non-suffering non-dying existence? Given the nature of God would he want to create such a world? In general it is impossible to know what God would want to do because Unitedandy has not even bothered to present even a hint of what the alternative world he is talking about should be actualized. Again, Unitedandy has made what appears to be an "obvious" conclusion but has not even explored trivially the consequences of this conclusion or even attempt to sketch out what God should be doing which would make it "more likely" not less likely that he exists. In order to sustain the burden of proof this alternate reality with God has to be described fully and warrant supplied that it is a more likely world given God's existence and not simply vaguely asserted. P2) "Given the way I defined evil, I am truly astonished that Con denies P2." Continuing with the objections. O3) There will always be evil as long as there is anything remotely resembling life as we know it Note again Unitedandy makes a claim with no effort, not even a trivial one to describe how things would be in the alternate existence he is saying should exist. What exactly is a world without evil? We can look around and pick something to us which is most evil and then say well that thing there that should obviously not be, and on the face of it that seems obvious. But consider the following, we by our nature are relative creatures meaning how we feel about something or even what we feel as pain and suffering are not absolutes[2]. Simply consider the following - take the most horrible thing you can imagine, the thing that on a scale of 1-10 of awful defines a 10 for awful. Now imagine a world where that thing does not exist, does this mean that your scale of awful only goes to nine? Of course not, it still goes to ten and you are just as outraged by that new ten as you were by the old ten. What does all of this mean? It means that if I were to now magically blink out of existence all of the things from 2-10 on Unitedandy's scale of evil and erase all knowledge of them from him, he would then generate a new list of truly evil things and this new scale of 1-10 would be all things which were 1 on his old scale which then he would have tolerated. Now if you would say well a thing which was one on the old scale is still evil, then simply consider something which is 0.1 on the old scale, or 0.01, or 0.0001, etc. . The point is simple, with all the things from 0.0001 to 10 removed then the new scale will be just as "good/bad" in our eyes because we judge by what we experience. The point of all this is simple, in order to remove evil as an absolute what we would be left with would not be anything similar to what we call life now. Second, Unitedandy has not even explored this at all. He has just stated "it is a bad thing" but has not even considered at a basic level the alternature which is says would make God "more likely" so there is no way he can claim to have satisfied the burden of proof. P3) "The problem here is that this is disanalogous, because we have reason to suppose gravity exists in the first place. If someone tells me there's an 8 foot elephant in the garage, and I see no evidence for it at all, and every reason to jettison such a story (the person that told me was a notorious liar, my garage is too small, elephants don‘t tend to live in UK, etc), no amount of retreats to the possible and appeals to absurdity will give me pause to doubt my conclusion." Final objection : O3) There are lots of reasons/evidence for God Here is where Unitedandy makes a dramatic leap, again with no warrant at all, and now makes the following absurd resolution "Given that there is no evidence for God at all - anything which makes God unlikely forces a conclusion that God is unlikely to exist." Now is that really sensible, is that even a premise which can be asserted to an audience which is anything but completely ignorant of modern theology and philosophy? Of course not. This debate is not about the exisence of God, but as Unitedandy has trivialized this argument so extremely then something has to be said to combat this as it is one of the foundational cores of his argument. I will thus present (as an overview) the main arguments for God as stated by one of the promient Christian apologists, Dr. William Lane Craig (these are in my own words) [3] 1) Kalam Cosmological Argument 2) Ontological Arguments 3) Fine Tuning 4) Ressurection of Jesus 5) Divine witness, revelation, miracles, etc. It is not the intent here to show that these arguments do (or even can) sustain the burden of proof to assert a claim for God's existence, but simply to show there is a wealth of evidence and argument for the existense of God. Even for just one of these lines of argument then there are a nearly steady stream of academic publications which explore the argument in detail[4]. Thus it is clear that Unitedandy's support for P3 falls completely flat and is absurd. In closing : "Given that this is Con's last chance to put something substantive and challenging to the argument that I can interact with, I welcome him to get on with stating his objections to the argument at hand." That is all well and good, but an argument has to be presented before it can be refuted. [1] http://yudkowsky.net... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... [3] http://www.reasonablefaith.org... [4] http://www.iep.utm.edu...