The Problem of Evil (XXVII)

[Gemini]

Can you clearly define what gratuitous suffering is and how your argument gets around the greater good and free will defense?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a pretty good explanation of gratuitous suffering:

"...specific types of evil—in particular, situations where animals die agonizing deaths in forest fires, or where children undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer. The thrust of the argument was then that, first of all, an omniscient and omnipotent person could have prevented the existence of such evils without thereby either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods, and, secondly, that any omniscient and morally perfect person will prevent the existence of such evils if that can be done without either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods..." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#...cForEviFor

If you've read Plantinga's free will defense of natural evil, you know amounted to something out of the Silmarilion, where volcanoes and earthquakes etc. are caused by malevolent supernatural persons like Morgoth exercising their free will. It makes for good fantasy, but as philosophy, it was only intended to establish the mere logical possibility that the existence of evil could be compatible with a tri-omni God (and even this is controversial; Quentin Smith argued that Plantinga still failed http://www.apologeticsinthechurch.com/up...m-evil.pdf).

David Lewis argued that trying to defeat the logical argument from evil with a preposterous theodicy like that was pretty cheap.

The greater good defense requires extreme skepticism of our ability to understand morality, and ends up undermining pretty much everything theologians would like to believe about God. If God permits a world so saturated with gratuitous suffering as this one apparently is for the greater good, perhaps he lies to us for the greater good as well.