Darren New wrote:
>> But there's an extra, assumed step:
>> 1b) God is good.
> 
> Well, it's not assumed by the article in the link. It's explicitly 
> stated. Obviously the same logic doesn't hold for Satan or Zeus, for 
> example.


There's a further rather critical assumption in the article that's not 
explicitly stated: That the definition of "good" as it applies to God 
coincides with the definition of "good" as it applies to human actions.

I think it's a perfectly plausible position to take that our personal 
tragedies tell us quite a bit about human morality, but nothing about 
divine morality, and in context of this his arguments don't seem to 
work.  Of course this leaves open the issue of how we can coherently 
claim that God is "good" without being able to define what "good" means, 
but I can't see how he addresses this point.

Overall I was left with the distinct impression that he was arguing 
against straw-man versions to the resolutions to the problem of evil. 
Certainly there are people who do actually believe in things resembling 
these straw-man arguments, but it doesn't seem very philosophically 
useful to exert one's efforts in this direction.


I should qualify that I've never actually done any serious study into 
the problem of evil, so I'm more or less talking off the cuff here and 
might be making various substantial oversights/omissions.

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