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There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse

Arguments for this claim

The Inference from Inscrutable Evil

  1. There are evils — such as a fawn burning slowly to death in a remote forest fire — for which prolonged reflection reveals no outweighing good.
  2. If prolonged reflection reveals no outweighing good served by an evil, that is good (defeasible) evidence that there is none.
  3. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. from 1, 2

Rowe's support for the factual premise of the evidential argument. Wykstra's 'noseeum' objection targets step 2: given the gap between our cognition and God's, our failure to see an outweighing good is poor evidence that there isn't one.

William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”, American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (4): 335–341, 1979.

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