Following last week's class on the Problem of Evil, a couple of you have asked me how I (as amateur theodicist) would get around the problem raised at the end of the handout, "The Problem of Evil," viz.: Granted that scripture does not even suggest that God is omnibenevolent, wouldn't a *perfectly good* deity be omnibenevolent nonetheless?--so how can the theist maintain that God is perfectly good?
    For my preferred response, see the fragment from my paper "Suffering and the Goodness of God," now on the course web site.  (Entirely optional, only for those who are interested, not an official course handout.)
    Incidentally, PK's objection to SIDC is a version of what is called "the Epistemic Problem of Evil."  That problem goes as follows:  Granted, there is no strictly logical incompatibility between traditional theism and the existence of suffering and evil.  But we must ask whether the world as we find it is the kind of world *we should expect there to be* if traditional theism is true.  And the answer seems to be No.  An omnipotent and perfectly good God would (very probably) not have set up the whole business in a way that involves so much savagery and suffering for innocent bunnies and baby ducks.
    That anti-theistic argument is not deductive and could not be considered anything like a proof.  But it is well within the spirit of Natural Theology; if theism seems to be *empirically disconfirmed* to a degree, so much the worse for the theist.
    I am not very much impressed by the Epistemic argument, though I agree that if traditional theism is true, natural selection is an odd way for God to have behaved.  My more official response would be as to the original Problem of Evil, in the paper mentioned above.

                                                                                                                    --WGL