“Policy debates should not appear one-sided” doesn’t in this case give credence to the idea that a world with suffering implies the possibility of the God. Quite the opposite. That is a post-hoc justification for what should be seen as evidence to lower the probability of “belief in just and benevolent God.” This is analogous to EY’s example of the absence of sabotage being used as justification for the concentration camps in “Conservation of Expected Evidence”
I didn’t mean to suggest that the existence of suffering is evidence that there is a God. What I meant was, the known fact of “shared threat → people come together” makes the reality of suffering less powerful evidence against the existence of a God.
Except it really doesn’t, because a truly omni God (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc) realistically wouldn’t help against the problem of evil. The point of the reality of suffering being evidence against God isn’t about omnibenevolence existing within a vacuum, but about omnibenevolence existing within the context of joint omnipotence and omniscience—Mackie’s inconsistent triad, so to speak. A God possessing both of the latter wouldn’t have to worry about puny human concerns like logic and the like, so logic or rationality-based theodicies (including those around finding a shared enemy) don’t, in my opinion, provide adequate arguments against the problem of evil.
“Policy debates should not appear one-sided” doesn’t in this case give credence to the idea that a world with suffering implies the possibility of the God. Quite the opposite. That is a post-hoc justification for what should be seen as evidence to lower the probability of “belief in just and benevolent God.” This is analogous to EY’s example of the absence of sabotage being used as justification for the concentration camps in “Conservation of Expected Evidence”
I didn’t mean to suggest that the existence of suffering is evidence that there is a God. What I meant was, the known fact of “shared threat → people come together” makes the reality of suffering less powerful evidence against the existence of a God.
Except it really doesn’t, because a truly omni God (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc) realistically wouldn’t help against the problem of evil. The point of the reality of suffering being evidence against God isn’t about omnibenevolence existing within a vacuum, but about omnibenevolence existing within the context of joint omnipotence and omniscience—Mackie’s inconsistent triad, so to speak. A God possessing both of the latter wouldn’t have to worry about puny human concerns like logic and the like, so logic or rationality-based theodicies (including those around finding a shared enemy) don’t, in my opinion, provide adequate arguments against the problem of evil.