Carlo Alvaro has recently argued for what he calls the "Heaven Ab Initio" Argument from Evil (HAIAFE):
1. As a perfect being, God’s goal is to create free-willed creatures that choose to love God and forever exist with him in a state of eternal bliss.
2. An omnibenevolent God would want to create free-willed beings in a state of eternal bliss devoid of evil if he could and if evil and suffering were unnecessary.
3. An omnipotent God can create free-willed beings directly in a spiritual state of eternal bliss devoid of evil.
4. However, God created physical creatures in a physical world that is full of unnecessary evil and suffering.
5. Therefore, God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good.
A minor problem with the argument as stated is that the conclusion includes omniscience despite the fact that the argument has no premise that requires it; perhaps it is taken to be assumed in (3). A more serious problem is that (1) tells us that God intends to create free-willed beings that choose to love God and forever exist with him in a state of eternal bliss, but choice drops out of the rest of the argument. That God can create free-willed beings directly in a spiritual state of eternal bliss does not necessarily imply that doing so is consistent with creating free-willed beings whose love of God is a choice. And, in fact, it's not difficult to find people who would deny it.
It's easy enough to see where the main problem in the argument is, however; (1) is highly equivocal. To say that something is "God's goal" has the implicature of its being His only goal; and this is indeed how it has to be understood for the rest of the argument to work (it is necessary for the "if he could" in (2) and the "unnecessary" in (2) and (3)). But there is no particular reason to think that God has only one goal; almost no theist, perhaps no theist at all, thinks this is true. God is not an eternal-bliss-maximizing machine. And the concept of "perfect being" certainly doesn't entail single-mindedness of goal, either. Thus the sense in which (1) works in the argument is not a sense that anyone thinks plausible; the sense in which it seems plausible is too weak for the argument.
The broader diagnosis for the argument, however, is the usual one with analytic arguments from evil; it violates the principle of remotion. How are we supposed to know any of these premises? It has to be by something like direct intuitive perception, or causal inference from effects, or trustworthy testimony (like divine revelation). Do we have direct intuitive perception of (1), (2), or (3)? We do not have it by direct intuitive perception of God, because if we did, God would have to be a perfect being who is omnipotent and 'omnibenevolent', and we would already know the argument is wrong. We do not have it by direct examination of our ideas of perfection, omnipotence, or 'omnibenevolence'; if the ideas were so adequate and trustworthy as to ground the premises, the most plausible explanation of this would again be God existing with these qualities. So do we get (1), (2), or (3) by causal inference? We do not; the argument from evil is itself an argument that the effects do not allow the kind of inference to a cause described by those premises. Do we then get (1), (2), or (3) by testimony? We don't get it directly; where is the alleged divine revelation that directly gives us (1), (2), or (3) without any qualification? One would have to argue that we get it indirectly from testimony, by inference, but we would need to know the particular testimony and the particular inferences in question; and it is pretty clear that most people are not inferring (1), (2), and (3), without any qualification or nuanced contextualization at all, as the most obvious interpretation of the Bible or the Koran. The premises look probable, but they are in fact pulled out of air, either by saying something like what theists might say but without the qualifications or outside of the specific context in which they might say it, or by saying something that sounds good but that we could not possibly know. Beyond some very generic claims that might be made on the basis of some causal inferences and some specific but very narrow and limited claims that might be made on the basis of divine testimony, we don't really know anything about divine motivations or plans, for the obvious reason that we are not 'omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent' beings, and therefore have only the haziest idea how such a being would view the world.
