Answering Stephen Law’s Evil God Challenge
2. Does God Exist?, Apologetics, christian, ethics, Evil God, Gospel, John Ferrer, Moral Argument, naturalism, Philosophical Apologetics, Problem of Evil, Stephen Law, theism, www.IntelligentChristianFaith.com
If you’ve followed the problem of evil at the popular or academic level, then there’s a good chance you’ve come across the rather interesting objection from Stephen Law which he terms the “Evil God challenge.” In essence he contends that skeptics can reverse any efforts from theists to explain God’s goodness in spite of the facts of evil in the world. The conventional problem of evil claims that God doesn’t exist or probably doesn’t exist given the facts of evil (gratuitous evil, animal suffering, moral evil, etc.) in the world. While theists typically appeal to things like free and sublime unknown divine purposes to explain away these evils, the skeptic can counter that these evils are equally good evidence that there exists a maximally evil God. Free will is the accommodation that…