ONLINE FIRST
published on March 16, 2016
Laura Frances Callahan
https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil201631556
On the Problem of Paradise
Benton, Hawthorne, and Isaacs (BHI) claim that evil must be evidence against God¡¯s existence, because the absence of evil would be (presumably excellent) evidence for it. Their argument is obviously valid on standard Bayesian epistemology. But in addition to raising a few reasons one might doubt its premise, I here highlight the rather misleading meaning, in BHI¡¯s argument, of evil¡¯s being evidence against God. BHI seek to establish that if one learned simply ¡°that there was evil,¡± perhaps via an oracle, one would gain evidence of some strength or other against God. But when we commonly observe that there is evil in the world, we learn a stronger proposition. And determining the evidential impact of that stronger proposition is not so easy. The interesting questions about the evidential impact of even a general awareness of evil in the world remain open.