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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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