I am trying my best to identify where and why we disagree. “Without further information” implies knowledge of some information. What knowledge are you assuming?
You laid out three possible explanations to the evidentiary problem of evil. For simplicity sake, they can be compressed into two:
- (Tro-omni) God exists, and this is the best compossible world.
- The (tri-omni) God does not exist, and this is not the best compossible world.
We agreed that (I am proposing the nested premises for agreement):
- any gratuitous suffering is incompatible with the existence of tri-omni God
- (gratuitous suffering means suffering not necessary for the best compossible world)
- we observe lots of suffering
- some observed suffering has local instrumental value (“locally justified suffering”)
- (locally justified suffering may or may not be gratuitous)
- some observed suffering has no apparent local instrumental value (“locally unjustified suffering”)
- (locally unjustified suffering may or may not be gratuitous)
- in theory, suffering can have non-local instrumental value (“cosmically justified suffering”)
- (cosmically justified suffering is not gratuitous)
You then argue that without further information, the more locally unjustified suffering we observe, the more reason we have to conclude gratuitous suffering exists. If gratuitous suffering probably exists, then explanation (1) is probably wrong.
Is this accurate?
I want to know why observing more locally unjustified suffering gives us confidence that gratuitous suffering exists.
If we want to test explanation (1) as a hypothesis, we would need to prove the existence of gratuitous suffering. Merely observing locally unjustified suffering does not provide evidence against the hypothesis unless we have reason to doubt such suffering is cosmically justified. Whether observed suffering is cosmically justified is unfalsifiable without additional information, i.e. cosmic knowledge.
~Max