5) A Response to the Problem of Evil: a Challenge to Premise (2)

I would next like to challenge (2): if God was omnibenevolent, then he would fulfill your personal standards.  There are a host of examples within the immediately observable world which challenge the validity of this premise.  We will consider only one out of these: let us consider parents.  For the vast majority of us, parents are, or once were, inconvenient.  They not-so-infrequently forbid us from doing thing which we really want to do – they are, in other words, constantly forsaking our personal standards.  But I doubt if any of us would say that our parents were anything but benevolent, regardless of their forbidding us to do as we pleased.  In fact, it is those parents that constantly appease their children which we consider far less than benevolent.  That child is certain to become bratty, entitled, and unable to function in a world of mature adults.  The fact that parents constantly forsake our personal standards makes them benevolent. 

It is also fruitful to ask ourselves why parents have to forsake the personal standards of their children.  When you are a child, you think, reason, and emote like a child.  You have little experience, and far less capacity for making good judgments than your parents.  Thus, when you devise a personal standard as a child, it is based on faulty and limited cognition.  Your parents, in comparison, are far more competent to know what is best for you.  They must necessarily curb your personal standards because they are not based on the reality of things.

If parents know more than you, and thus have to forsake your personal standards, and are considered benevolent for it, how much more would God, if he existed!  If there was a God, he would necessarily know a lot more than you.  Your personal standards would be immature in comparison to him.  In favor of the objective goodness of the world, God would have to annoy a lot of people, simply because they are people and less than him in terms of cognition and reasoning.  Clearly, as demonstrated through the example of parents, a benevolent being does not have to fulfill the personal standards of those over whom he rules in order to qualify as benevolent.  Often times, it is required of a benevolent being to forsake the personal standards of his inferiors.  Premise (2) is void.

To undo the subjective evil argument against God, we would only need to demonstrate one of the premises as false.  But we have gone above and beyond that, demonstrating that two of the premises are false.  Thus, the subjective evil argument against God crumbles.  If the standard which judged evil was subjective, we would not be able to object to God’s existence on account of evil.