Naturalism Next

Merry belated Christmas, readers of the Naturalism Next Blog. I am a guest writer and friend of the Blog, you can find my blog here , and my twitter handle here . The post you are about to read was originally posted on reddit , and then extended, edited, and improved to go on my blog . This version is further edited per the request of the Naturalism Next Blog contributors. Feel free to skip the introduction, it was originally intended to introduce the basics of the problem of evil and theodicy for uninformed redditors. Introduction The problem of evil is an argument for the non-existence of God ('God' here is understood as a being with omni-attributes, omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence), which starts with some facts or observations, of evil, or suffering we see in the world. For instance, the occurrence of evil and suffering generally, or more concrete horrific examples of evil or suffering such as a Fawn burning to death in a forest fire ( Rowe 1979 ). There are two k...

               I recently wrote a response to an article on Matthew Adelstein's blog responding to moral realism. He has defended his piece on his blog , and here I make some comments on his defense. Intuitions                Matthew’s first complaint is that I did not address his arguments defending phenomenal conservatism. That’s true, but as I said in my original post, I never intended to. Rather, my intent was to caution the relative weight we should place on intuitions. In my view, intuitions are a weak defeasible starting point, and nothing more. Matthew made a few points in response to the research I cited in defense of this more modest aim. I think they are all misleading or untrue. While visual seemings are far from infallible as this shows, this does nothing to undermine the fact that things tend to be how they appear. The research I cited in my first post is often taken to imply that o...