ARGUMENT FROM EVIL: DEDUCTIVE VERSION

1. If God exists, then He is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good.

2. If God is omnipotent, then He can do anything that is possible.

3. If God is omniscient, then He knows everything that is true.

4. If God is all good, knew that an evil was about to occur and that he could have prevented it, then He would have prevented it.

5. If God had prevented all evils, then there wouldn’t be any.

6. There are evils that could have been prevented.

7. God does not exist.

Observation: This argument is supposed to show that if there is any preventable evil, then there couldn’t be a God.

To put it another way, the claim is that the existence of preventable evil is incompatible with the existence of God.

Fact: A deductively valid argument of the form:

P₁

P₂

_....

P_n

not-C

demonstrates that P_n is incompatible with C if and only if all of the premises except P_n are necessary truths.