A Carnapian Argument from Evil

In Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil. Wiley. pp. 83–97 (2014)
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Abstract

In this chapter, I investigate two recent arguments by Michael Tooley that begin with some facts about evil and conclude that the probability of God existing is low or extremely low. Tooley's first argument fails because it relies on a very controversial assumption about unknown rightmaking and wrongmaking properties. Tooley's second argument makes use of some ideas about formal inductive logic and logical probability that Carnap developed, but this argument fails because it applies Carnap's ideas in ways that conflict with our inductive intuitions. Thus, Tooley's arguments depend on very controversial assumptions that should be rejected.

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Richard Otte
University of California, Santa Cruz

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