CSflim

Yes, I know that we've heard this argument a thousand times before. But I have yet to see a theist come up with a proper refutation of the argument as opposed to merely side-stepping the issue.
The argument can be stated very simply with what certainly seems to be water-tight logic.

Lets us perform a simple reductio ad absurdum:

Assumptions:
(1). God exists
(2). God is all powerful and all knowing
(3). God is all good.
(4). Evil exists.

God, is omniscient and hence knew, at the time of creation, how the world would develop. He knew he was creating a world with evil. If god is omnipotent, he could have created it otherwise. Therefore if god is omnipotent and omniscient, he is also nasty. But God cannot be nasty, as he is all-good.
We have now arrived at a contradiction.
Therefore at least one of our assumptions is false:
Either;
(A). God does not exist
or
(B). God is not omnipotent and omniscient
or
(C). God is not all good
or
(D). We are mistaken in our claims that evil exists.


Now one thing I want to make absolutely clear from the very outset is that this argument does not claim to disprove the existence of all imaginable gods, only a small subset of all these gods; namely those that are all powerful and all-good. You can certainly have an all-powerful God, or an all-good God. Just not both.
Another way is to take a moral-relativist stance and deny that evil exists.
If you accept (A), (B), (C) or (D) then the Argument from Evil poses no problem to you, and you need not bother attacking it.

However many people insist on taking assumptions (1) - (4) as fact (most forms of Christianity for a start), and it is these people who need to face up to the implications of this argument.
Now I am sure that as a Christian you are under the impression that the Argument from Evil is old hat, and has been refuted long ago. This is the belief that I want to challenge with this post, and I want to show that the various refutations are in-fact nothing of the sort.

Objections

1. "All evil comes from (imperfect) humans"
This argument is a) false and b) irrelevant.
False: The existence of natural evil (such as famine, earthquakes, etc.), shows us that the premise of this argument is simply false.
Irrelevant: Even if it were true, all that this would imply was that God created us and this world, in the knowledge that some of us would be the cause of evil. If he were all-good and all-powerful, he would have created it differently. The original argument still stands.


2. "All evil comes from Free Will"
Again, both false and irrelevant: False for the same reason as above; the existence of natural evil.
And irrelevant for similar reasons.
If it were true, all this would mean was that God created us and gave us Free Will, in the knowledge that it would result in evil. The original argument still stands.


3. "God has a plan"
The existence of a divine plan, of which suffering is a part, is also irrelevant to this argument. All this does is make God a divine being with a plan, who created this world and no other, knowing that it would result in evil. Therefore he is not all-good or is not all powerful.


4. "We need evil for good to exist"
This is often stated as a brute fact, and given no foundations, All I can say is that personally, I do not see it as necessarily self-evident: We knew of the existence of matter long before the discovery of anti-matter, and we knew of the existence of positive numbers before the existence of negative numbers. In a world with no evil, I don't see it as necessarily the case that we would have no concept of good.
But this is irrelevant, and I will accept for the sake of argument that it is true:
Perhaps it could be shown that with no concept of "evil", we would have great difficulty in forming a concept of "good", but this is merely a statement about human psychology, not a statement about what exists. Perhaps we would not realise that we were living in a world surrounded by goodness: but us not knowing would not alter the fact. This is a question of epistemology, not of ontology, which is what we are dealing with.
It does not change the fact that God chose to create the world with good and evil, instead of just good.


5. "An all-good world is a logical impossibility"
It is generally accepted that we cannot expect an all-powerful being to be able to perform acts of logical impossibility (drawing square circles, etc.). So if an evil-less world were a logical impossibility, an all-good, all-powerful God could be excused from not creating it.
But just like statement 4, this claim is not self-evident, and would require a logical argument to show that it is true.
But again, for the sake of argument, I will assume that it is, in fact, true, and argue that it does no damage to the argument from evil:
The important thing to realise is that though a world with NO evil may be logically impossible, a world with significantly less evil than this one, is clearly not inherently contradictory, and hence is logically possible. Therefore an all-good, all-powerful god would be expected to create a world with as little evil as possible, while remaining firmly within the bounds of logical possibility. Hence the original argument still stands in a slightly modified (but no less devastating) form.


6. "Certain types of 'heroic' goodness, logically require evil"
It could be argued that things such as charity and compassion could only exist in worlds with poverty and suffering.
This seems like a fair point, but on closer inspection, we see that it does not help our cause, due to the massive amounts of suffering and poverty that exists, and the comparatively much smaller amounts of charity and compassion. As in the previous argument, we can see that in order to secure the logical possibility of the existence of charity and compassion, we only need a small amount of evil to exist. Hence the above modified version of the argument from evil still stands.


7. "We cannot hope to comprehend God"
Another point, which could be made, is that God is omniscient, where-as we have a very finite level of intelligence. Therefore we cannot hope to understand God's motives; hence the argument from evil, while not suffering from any specific failure of logic, is invalid none-the-less.
Again, we have what on the surface appears to be a good objection, but which crumbles on closer inspection.
Though we do not (and could not) understand God's motives, we can still reason about what is logically possible and what is logically impossible. We do not need to be omniscient, to realise that no being, no matter how awesome an intellect, could construct a square circle. On the flip side, we appreciate how a God could do something miraculous (though not logically impossible), such as turning water into wine. We do not need to be able to actually grasp how it is done, to be able to see that it is indeed logically possible.
So, we do not need to be infinitely intelligent to know a logical impossibility when we see one: and the argument from evil shows us that an omniscient, omnipotent, purely benevolent God is such an impossibility.




Apologies if I seemed to be repeating myself, but the above seven objections to the argument from evil are all somewhat related, and hence, their refutations take on a somewhat similar flavour.
I also apologise for the length of the post, but I did have seven misconceived objections to counter.

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