A Response to CosmicSkeptic’s Worries About Evil

Why the great-making theodicy is more robust than you think

I was listened to this podcast today:

Alex O’Connor (atheist) and Joe Schmid (agnostic) kept bringing up objections to the way God constituted the world—constituted it in such a way that there is suffering.

For them, this suffering is undue.

They believe that God could have made the world such that suffering would not be “necessary.”

Once you find the rhythm of this, you see that this is essentially their best response to a great-making theodicy.

I would posture that the answer to this objection is a type of skeptical theism.

Skeptical theism, in this sense, is the position that we cannot fully know the mind of God and why He would make things a certain way.

So, in response to “God could have made the world better” one could say “how are we to know the mind of God?”

Of course, Alex and Joe are not going to appreciate this much. Yet, if they, and others like them, keeping running to “God could have made things better” the logical response to that is “how do you know?”

In the model of God most work with, God is much more knowing than any human creature. Thus, I feel that such a response works well in many situations.

Anyway, just a few quick thoughts on why I think the problem of evil argument (especially this version) is subject to second-thoughts.