The Problem of Evil (XXVII)

[Neo-Scholastic]

Perhaps you have an idiosyncratic doctrine of God which is different than the historically orthodox all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good (tri-omni) God believed in by the overwhelming majority of Christians and Christian philosophers.

You are flat out wrong. As confirmed by the Aquinas quote I gave above, I am in full agreement with the Roman Catholic Church’s definition of omnipotence, the clearly premiere Christian denomination. It is you that maintain an unorthodox definition of omnipotence and as such your formulation of the PoE has no relevance to Christianity.

It sounds…as though you've misconstrued what we mean by a tri-omni God.

And when you say ‘we’ you mean atheist skeptics who dishonestly use an unchristian version of god in their so-called refutation of the Christian god.

Your objection is to the second premise. As far as "proving" that a possible world with less gratuitous suffering than this one exists, you do actually need to show a logical contradiction with the proposition.

I need do no such thing. Traditional Christian doctrine acknowledges that evil exists, where evil is defined as the lack of the good that ought to be present (originally from Augustine and now RCC orthodoxy). Your positive claim is that some of the evil we see is gratuitous. You have not demonstrated that any, much less all, evil is gratuitous. I am not obliged to prove that all evil is necessary to refute your unsupported premise. Moreover, you have not excluded that possibility which makes your whole syllogism an argument from ignorance.