In response to a post by Chris at Mixing Memory, Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty posted a response to my post on God and Natural Evil. It's worth reading, because it gives me a chance to clarify a bit what I saw myself as doing. Here's what I put in the comments:
Well, in all fairness, I really wasn't trying to satisfy anyone, but just answer the question; and the most immediately relevant issue on that is whether I think there are any good arguments for the existence of God (and the like) that wouldn't be affected by the problem of evil. And I do, so it poses no problem for me on these issues. The problem of evil is really only troublesome for people who believe that there is a God entirely on the basis of design arguments.
However, I think what Chris found most interesting about my post was the omniscience objection: if the problem of evil is supposed to generate some logical inconsistency, it appears to require the assumption that we know all the relevant factors omniscience would know. And this isn't a 'mysteriousness' objection; it's just good sense. We know from just about every other problem we deal with that we often miss relevant information. Some problems take centuries to solve simply because it takes a long time to gather all the relevant information. It's silly to assume you've covered all relevant factors unless you have some good reason for thinking you have. So for the problem of evil to be a logical problem for the theist, either the theist has to accept the circumscription assumption (that we have basically covered all the relevant things to know), or we have to have a proof that the assumption is true. And I certainly have never come across the latter; indeed, it's hard to find any argument at all that the assumption should be accepted. If they are trying to indicate a logical inconsistency, atheists are being lazy on the key point of their argument. If they are not trying to indicate a logical inconsistency, it isn't clear why there's anything here that's a problem for the theist as a theist.
And note, too, that there is nothing in this response that implies that we can't make headway on figuring out how natural evil would fit into a divine plan, or anything like that. Quite the contrary: the response is that the atheist hasn't shown that we can't make headway on the problem; the atheist has to show that we've already made all the headway on it that we can.
I should, incidentally, have said in the first paragraph "The problem of evil is really only troublesome for theism itself for people who believe that there is a perfectly benevolent God entirely on the basis of design arguments." As Hume recognized quite clearly in the Dialogues, it is entirely possible to hold, in the face of the problem of evil, that God exists, even if one holds it only on design arguments; the problem that evil poses is not really for God's existence but for our knowledge of God's nature and plan [again, if you try to build that knowledge entirely on design arguments and arguments like it--ed.]. If treated as a problem in this way, it presupposes that we don't have independent reasons for our views of God's nature and plan; if treated as a problem for theism as such, it seems to require that some sort of logical contradiction be generated from the premises (and it has not been shown that there is any generated contradiction).
Other interesting posts on this issue: at Fides Quarens Intellectum, at Maverick Philosopher, at diachronic agency, at prosthesis, and at Mode for Caleb (who lists yet more).
