The Divine Wisdom and the Evidential Problem of Evil

The discussions regarding evil are generally classified as follows: the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil. William Leonard Row has presented one of the impressive explanations of the evidential problem of evil which is based on the idea of arbitrary evils. He shows that the existence of arbitrary evils demonstrates that believing in the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful God who is the absolute good is not reasonable. Most of his critics have tried to exactly analyse the epistemological bases of his premises and show their weakness. The common point between these critical approaches is that they all try to present some principles to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions of a reasonable way of concluding ‘not being’ from ‘not finding’. The critics believe that various considerations such as the absoluteness of God’s knowledge and the restriction of human’s knowledge, show that bases of Row’s demonstration (especially his first premise) does not satisfy the above conditions. Therefore it can be proved that the demonstration of evidential evil is not reasonable.