William Rowe vs. Evolutionary Universalism

[Nimzo]

I came across an interesting blog post which compares Rowe's evidential argument against naturalism to an anti-evolutionary argument of the same form. I think the author (Alexander Pruss) is right - both arguments fail, and the analogy between just-so stories for evolutionary explanations and just-so stories for theodical explanations holds. Whether such just-so stories, in either case, should be given, is another question.

What are your intuitions about the soundness of the two arguments being compared? Do you think that Pruss' analogy holds?

[Tiberius]

Never heard of Rowe's argument before, but yeah, it is a pretty bad argument. I don't see how you can get to (2) from (1). It seems a complete non-sequitur. I don't see how he can make the justification "probably" based on a lack of evidence.

[Nimzo]

Never heard of Rowe's argument before, but yeah, it is a pretty bad argument. I don't see how you can get to (2) from (1). It seems a complete non-sequitur. I don't see how he can make the justification "probably" based on a lack of evidence.

It is an inductive argument not a deductive one (so saying it is a non-sequitur isn't really much of a criticism, since inductive arguments are not deductively valid), and considered in the Philosophy of Religion to be pretty much the strongest currently-formulated argument against God's existence from the existence of (apparently gratuitous) evil.