The argument replaces our original 3 by

            3'.  God is perfectly good,

and adds a further premise:

            P.  A perfectly good being does not willingly cause, or even fail to prevent, needless suffering.

3' and P together restore incompatibility.  And 3' is far harder to deny than was 3.  P is also easily supported:  If (a) someone is suffering in my presence, (b) the suffering is "needless" in our sense of not being logically required for greater overall good, (c) I have the power to relieve or end the suffering, (d) it would cost me nothing at all to relieve the suffering, (e) I know all these things, and nonetheless (f) I willingly do not relieve the suffering, I am therein morally deficient.  (Let us waive the libertarian question of whether I have a strict duty or obligation to relieve the suffering of a perfect stranger; strict duty or not, failure to help would reflect badly on my moral character.)  By definition, a perfectly good being has no moral deficiencies.  Hence P.
    Rejecting omnibenevolence in favor of perfect goodness thus sharpens the Problem considerably, for unlike omnibenevolence, moral perfection is probably as central to the concept of God as is omnipotence; it is not at all obvious that rightminded Jews and Christians would prefer keeping omnipotence to keeping perfection.  But those who continue to find [Rabbi Harold] Kushner's position paradoxical and intuitively repugnant  still have considerable room for maneuver, especially since our newly revised version of the Problem incorporates two new theses, each of which is open to dispute.
    3' is open to dispute for the first of the two reasons for which 3 was: that scripture suggests otherwise.  As depicted in the Old Testament, Yahweh is notoriously open to criticism as peevish, petty, deceitful, untrustworthy, vindictive, and (to say the least) unfair and unjust.  These traits are muted a bit in the New Testament, but by no means completely.  Though God is conceived by official thinkers as "perfectly good," the traits and actions attributed to Him by scripture are themselves generally considered nothing of the sort.  Judeo-Christian theists need to think a good deal more carefully about perfect moral goodness.<9>

    The premise P is open to dispute for a less direct but in a way more obvious reason: If God is the fount and source of all moral goodness, He makes the rules, and we do not get to carp or criticize.  If we agree that the Judeo-Christian God does not act in accordance with P, then P is false, at least for God if not for us, and we will have to learn to live with that.

    There is indeed something incongruous in the idea of philosophers' (of all people) passing judgment on God's moral character--passing judgment at all, that is, much less our passing judgment and finding that God has failed to meet even our minimal standards of everyday decency.<10>   But care is needed here, for the slogan "God makes the rules" can be taken in either of two ways.
    If it just the flat claim that God has certain preferences and the brute power to enforce them, then the slogan is useless to the theodicist; it would bring God no moral credit and exonerate Him from no moral charges.  Suppose a sadistic U.S. Marshal named Horsewhip McThugg rules a lonely and wild Wyoming territory with an iron hand.  McThugg is, as we say, a law unto himself.  He keeps order after a fashion and suppresses crime for the most part, but he does so by brutal methods including torture, the murder of infants and so forth.  Honest ranchers are glad of his protection, but no one likes him and no one would think of suggesting that he is perfectly good.  More to the point, he deserves no credit for the bare fact of his "making his own rules" or "obeying McThugg's law," whether or not he gets credit for the independently good things he may do.
    For purposes of theodicy we must, rather, take "God makes the rules" as the claim that Divine morality is simply a higher law than human morality and we should recognize it as such.  Thus, contrary to human moral intuition, P is mistaken and that is that.  But now, we want to ask, what does "good" mean, if principles like P fail for reasons totally unfathomable to us?<11>   The word "good" is a word of English, invented by humans for humans and having the meaning it does only in virtue of that invention.  The trouble with the present suggestion is that it makes "Divine morality" alien from us and perhaps unintelligible to us; and what is unintelligible to us cannot be a reason for us to admire and praise it.<12>
    C.S. Lewis addresses this point, and argues that alienness per se precludes neither intelligibility nor even powerful and rightful attraction.   Indeed, Lewis says, there are common real-life situations in which we find ourselves surrounded by a new, disconcerting and alien morality, but at the same time begin to recognize that the "alien" morality is right and we have been wrong.

When I came first to the University I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be.  Some faint distaste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach--of chastity, truthfulness and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music.  By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law.  Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine.  Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as `white' what was hitherto called black.  The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but `as lords that are certainly expected.'  You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them.  But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into society that one is unfit for....  The Divine `goodness' differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel.  But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.   (Op. cit., pp. 38-39)

    In American university communities at least, vegetarianism is currently making what have to be counted as great strides.  Cafeterias offer lavish vegetarian options.  Eating meat is significantly if not yet widely felt to be gross, disgusting and wrong.  (I would say around half the graduate students in my own department are vegetarians.  Some are very militant, and even the most militant are respected by almost all the other students.)  On a lesser scale, vegetarianism is attracting the wider public as well.  No prudent airline would omit vegetarian options from its inflight menu.
    Now until very recently in America, vegetarianism was an eccentricity, largely manifested by cranks--food cranks, Buddhist and Hindu converts, and partisans of other very special ideologies.  All this has changed during the 1980's:  Even people who claim to be unmoved by vegetarian arguments have cut down drastically on their meat-eating.  When you see James Garner on television advertising beef as "real food for real men," you know the Beef Board is on the run.  The situation is scented with emerging moral consciousness.  Eating meat, or at least eating lots of meat, or certainly participating in the killing and butchering of meat animals, are regarded with increasing moral unease if not widespread distaste.
    Now, there are lots of moral replies that carnivores can make against the vegetarians.  Most of the moral arguments actually given by vegetarians are not very convincing taken objectively and on their own.  Accordingly, you might think that dialectically skilled carnivores would simply reject the arguments and write off their vegetarian opponents, however pleasantly, as holding ill-supported and arbitrary views.  But that is not usually what happens.  Typically the carnivores who confront vegetarians at all are uncomfortable and defensive, rather than just disagreeing.  "...the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into society that one is unfit for...."  The carnivores tend to rationalize, and, in argument, to reach, as if recognizing that there is a great deal more to the vegetarian position than shows in the first few salvos.
    Compare the antismoking movement of only slightly longer ago.  The reversal of social attitudes toward smoking has been unbelievably fast.  Almost overnight, smoking has gone from being the normal, indeed (alternatively) the suave and urbane or the robustly bucolic and outdoorsy thing to do, to being an embarrassing and somewhat shameful habit, as if no one would smoke unless they were badly hooked.  Note carefully the moral tone here:  The antismokers' zeal far outruns any reasonable objection to contact damage or even paternalistic concern for the general health.  Antismoking partisans feel morally superior to smokers, and smokers have begun to fear or even concede in their hearts that the antismokers are right.
    Now, it is hard actually to argue that smoking is morally wrong, except in cases in which it actually does harm someone else without their consent.  But it is considerably easier to argue that eating meat is wrong, since eating meat involves the enslaving, ill-treatment, and butchery of fellow creatures.  Although vegetarian arguments are problematic, far from conclusive, and easy to resist on technical grounds, they effectively both reverse the initiative  and give to the carnivores' cause a sense of rearguard actions and Parthian shots.
    We may be on the verge of a genuine moral revolution; I have a feeling we are.  Perhaps ten years from now people will look at the few remaining carnivores as addicts and sickoes, just as some have begun looking at smokers with pity and loathing.  And this provides a specific and current example of Lewis' phenomenon, a morality that is at once alien and incipiently, perhaps inexorably, attractive--a morality whose time is about to come.
    But there is an obvious objection to be addressed; with it I shall close.  The objection is that there is at least a tangible, specifiable continuity between vegetarianism and ordinary pre-vegetarian morality, in that the things we do to animals to make them into food would be hideously wrong if we did them to humans.  There is not any such continuity between human morality (including P) and the alleged Divine morality that rejects P; for we do not have that characteristically deja vu and at the same time prescient feeling that P may be false--that a willing failure to prevent suffering may be permissible after all--in the way some of us feel that eating meat may be wrong after all.
    Let us see what replies might be made to this; I can think of three.

    First reply:  P certainly applies to us, to every human being--that is more obvious than any thesis of anyone's theology.  What is not at all obvious is that P applies to God, even if we reject the idea that human morality and Divine morality are quite different.   In particular: He created us, and so we owe our entire existence to Him, which to say the least distinguishes Him from other humans as regards his obligations to us.  There is of course a question of distributive justice; why should God get to cause needless suffering even if He did create us?  Granted, we already know He is not just in the conventional sense.  But should He be, nonetheless?
    Distributive justice is a means of interpersonal relations, made for human life, particularly in conditions of less than fully abundant resources.  Why should anyone suppose that distributive justice applies to the Author etc. of the universe?  Also, once we realize that God is arguably an exception to rules of interpersonal relations, a sense of deja-vu-cum-prescience does creep in:  There are things, some of them horrible things, that the faithful are expected to bear and hoped by God to bear nobly.  That is the way it is.  To complain specifically against God is spoiled and petulant, even if it is only natural and even if an exactly parallel complaint made against a human being would be undeniably valid.

    Second reply:  Perhaps, contrary to a famous remark of John Stuart Mill's, God is just not a Utilitarian; He does not agree that happiness is good and unhappiness is bad and that is all there is to value, right and wrong.  Personally, it would grieve me to find out that God is not a Utilitarian, for I am one (in real life) and would be reassured if God agreed.  But sad to say, most philosophers nowadays are not Utilitarians.  The assumption that pain and unhappiness are intrinsically evil requires justification, and justification transcending the fact that we don't like them.  It's a tough world, there is no doubt about it, but that is just the way the system works.  Among humans, regarding solely topics of human concern, we would say there's a better system; with God that is not obvious.  That we do not always (even dimly) perceive a compensating higher good is disturbing, but not per se an objection.

    Third reply: You would not expect the vegetarian's sort of continuity between Divine goodness and human goodness, God's nature being as different from our own as it is.  By itself that remark seems to vitiate Lewis' original point, but in fact it is part of a familiar general truth about religious language:  That virtually none of the attributes we ascribe to God can apply to Him literally in the first place; we can speak of God only analogically.  Personal characteristics in particular cannot be ascribed to God in the same sense as they are to humans, for God has neither a body, nor needs, nor (therefore) a psychology, nor an environmental niche, nor even any location in spacetime.  When we speak of God's love, God's plan, God's will, God's power, and the rest, we cannot and do not use those terms in exactly the same senses in which we apply them to humans, but only derivatively.
    Please note that in saying that, I am neither belittling religious discourse nor saying anything particularly controversial.  No theologian thinks that anthropomorphic terms apply directly and literally to God, for under the circumstances they could not.  Now, it is true that some philosophers, particularly during the Logical Positivist period, have taken that fact to show that religious discourse is cognitively meaningless or at any rate merely poetic rather than descriptively factual; at least a weak version of atheism ensues.  But the Positivist argument presumes something regarding linguistic meaning: that genuine or factual meaning is invariably literal rather than derivative or analogical.  And that presumption is untenable.  Indeed, almost all of everyday factual discourse is analogical and "nonliteral" to some degree.  And there is a reasonably well worked-out theory of analogy mechanisms in lexical semantics, to explain how analogical meanings are projected from more basic ones without loss of meaningfulness.<13>
    Note that the analogical nature of religious language applies to "good" in particular.  Since God does not literally have a human psychology, He could hardly literally have a human character.  Whatever "perfect goodness" might mean when applied to God, we already know that it cannot mean just what it would mean if applied to a human being.  What it does mean may not easily be explicated and may simply remain mysterious.  But the mystery is predictable, and not of the sort that disgusts us when we find it at the heart of, say, an allegedly explanatory theory in science.

    I conceded in my opening paragraph that my P-denying theodicy is not very satisfying.  But it is self-consistent and consistent with all known facts; moreover it is theologically sound, in the sense of fitting well with Judeo-Christian scripture (however unpleasing that scripture itself may be to some readers).  The question of whether anyone has adequate reason to believe in the Judeo-Christian God is wide open, and perhaps its answer is negative.  My claim in this paper is only that the Problem of Evil is no conclusive obstacle to theism.
 

9.  In countenancing the possibility that God is not perfectly good, I am rejecting only the analyticity of the claim that God is perfectly good.  That does not rule out the synthetic metaphysical impossibility of what is still epistemically possible.  So one need not be troubled by the apparent conditional truth that if God is perfectly good, He is necessarily so.

10.  As Robert Farrar Capon puts it (op. cit., pp. 2-3), "[God's apparent] standards for the conduct of...[His] love affair with the world...are lower even than our standards for lunch with an enemy."

11.  See T. Penelhum, Religion and Rationality (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 248-251.

12.  Mill: "If, instead of the `glad tidings' that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that `the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving' does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may.  But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not."  (An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1865), p. 129)  Mill goes on to add that "if such a being can sentence me to hell for not...calling him [good in the same sense as that applied to my fellow-creatures], to hell I will go."

13.  J.F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); WGL, Modality and Meaning (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), Ch. 13.