This is going to be a stretch, but hear me out. In my most recent PoE thread (Special Pleading and the PoE (Part 3)), I put forth an argument based on the incongruence between certain theodicies and the way our moral compasses register things.
For background:
Let's say that the proposition "our moral faculties are geared towards correctly detecting moral good and bad" is equivalent to the proposition "our moral faculties are not faulty," and call this proposition K.
Then let's say that the proposition "our moral faculties tell us that giving or allowing children to get leukemia when it's possible not to give/let children have leukemia" is called L.
Then let's say that the proposition "God has a good reason for giving/letting kids have leukemia" is called G, and keep in mind we have sub-premises that God is omnipotent and omniscient.
The argument is simply this: P(G|K&L) is low or inscrutable: someone arguing G is arguing up a massive hill and will need to have really good justification for their argument.
That's it, all that background for that simple argument.
For background:
- By "moral compass," I mean that faculty by which we judge things to be morally good or morally bad under the assumption that theism is true, God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, God is responsible for giving us cognitive faculties that are geared towards finding the truth (they aren't just random nonsense), and that God is ostensibly responsible for having given us our moral compasses.
- In the PoE (part 3) post, I pointed out that if God is in charge of our moral faculties being geared towards correctly detecting moral good and bad (that a benevolent God would not bestow a faulty faculty), there is a problem in that we look at something like a child suffering and dying from leukemia and our moral compass usually points to "if someone caused or allowed this when it could have been otherwise, that would be bad."
- Now the theodicy in question retorts: "Suffering that God allows isn't bad because God has some unknown reason for it that actually justifies it in a way that's congruent with benevolence." The argument would be that just as a child doesn't understand why they're being stabbed with a needle during a vaccine to ultimately foster some greater good (gaining immunity to something much worse), perhaps God has some reason for setting up the world in such a way that children get leukemia and suffer and die that's congruent with benevolence.
- Baye's Theorem lets us calculate a probability based on prior probabilities and the probabilities of components of some state of affairs, such as if we want to know the probability that somebody in the room was born before a certain year given some other factor like the usual demographics that attend the type of meeting held in that room.
- It's expressed thusly: P(A|B) = [P(B|A)*P(A)]/P(B) (read as: the probability of A given B...)
Let's say that the proposition "our moral faculties are geared towards correctly detecting moral good and bad" is equivalent to the proposition "our moral faculties are not faulty," and call this proposition K.
Then let's say that the proposition "our moral faculties tell us that giving or allowing children to get leukemia when it's possible not to give/let children have leukemia" is called L.
Then let's say that the proposition "God has a good reason for giving/letting kids have leukemia" is called G, and keep in mind we have sub-premises that God is omnipotent and omniscient.
The argument is simply this: P(G|K&L) is low or inscrutable: someone arguing G is arguing up a massive hill and will need to have really good justification for their argument.
That's it, all that background for that simple argument.