My point was just that I don’t think this is a reasonable general principle (since there are instances where it seems obviously erroneous), and hence, that its applicability in this specific setting is, at the very least, in need of argument. Beyond that, I think it’s unlikely that such an argument could be very convincing, as this link between appearance and reality is exactly what Skeptical Theism denies, so there’s at least some contingent of people who think this is a sensible position. So that we can just take appearances for even probabilistic evidence of realities, without further argument, seems rather dubious to me.
Anyhow, I think that it might be useful if we were to take stock of our respective positions, chart where we may have common ground, and where there’s areas of disagreement. So to that extent, I’ve attempted to draw up a little taxonomy of attitudes towards evil and its problems for a tri-omni God. I’m not gonna claim that this is necessarily an exhaustive list, but I do think it’s fairly representative of the positions taken in this thread so far. So my hope would be that if anybody finds some errors or omissions with the following, they’d offer up corrections, and otherwise, indicate which of the offered positions best represent their stance.
So to me, these seem to be the possible positions as so far articulated here:
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All evil / suffering is evidence against God. I don’t think anybody here that accepts the failure of the logical PoE seriously defends this view anymore; the failure of the logical PoE directly entails that God may exist, yet so does evil. Moreover, it gives us a positive reason to believe that despite God’s omnibenevolence (and other properties), evil or suffering may not be avoidable. The probability of seeing evil is nonzero, and so is the expected amount of evil, but more can’t be said; in particular, this tells us nothing about amount, kind, quality, or pattern of evil we should expect. But we can say that there should be a nonzero amount: if it is possible for God to instantiate a world with evil E, it can’t be also possible for them to instantiate a world with evil E’ < E, since then, by omnibenevolence, it wouldn’t actually have been possible to instantiate the first world, because all evil exceeding E’ would necessarily be gratuitous.
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The sheer amount of evil / suffering is evidence against God. This is the ‘hell world’-proposal: while pointing to some particular evil may not yield evidence against God, the sum total of all evil eventually may tip the balance. The logical PoE’s failure gives us grounds to expect some evil, but there is some threshold such that the total amount of evil, exceeding this, will make the existence of God increasingly unlikely. The problem with this is that we have no idea where that threshold may be: what the minimum amount of necessary evil is that God would have to accept. Thus, this would need further argumentation to establish such a threshold.
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Only gratuitous evil / suffering is evidence against God, but all evil / suffering appears gratuitous, and that appearance is sufficient to yield evidence against God. Near as I can tell, this is @Mijin’s current position. This would take the lesson of the failure of the logical PoE on board, yet still entail that all evil / suffering we observe yields effective evidence against God. I think this is obviously problematic, because in fact, not all evil / suffering appears gratuitous. The suffering of me burning my hand so that I can retract it and keep myself from greater injury (a ‘natural evil’ in the same sense, if not to the same extent, as a fawn perishing in a forest fire) seems very sensible; the evil of lying to a murderous mob about the location of their intended victim seems more than offset by their survival. There is lots of apparently necessary evil in the world, and if the inference from apparently unnecessary evil to actually unnecessary evil is warranted, as this position holds, then so is the one from apparently necessary evil to actually necessary evil. (Although this inference itself is highly dubious, see the next point.)
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Only gratuitous evil / suffering is evidence against God, some evil / suffering appears gratuitous, and that appearance is sufficient to yield evidence against God. On this position, not all evil provides evidence against God. Rather, there is evil that apparently is necessary, and as a result, probably actually is, provided one grants the inferential link here, and hence, can’t form evidence against God. But of course the inference from apparently unnecessary suffering to actually unnecessary suffering is a rather weak one: just as with a pet being driven to the vet, or a child receiving a scolding from a better-informed parent, there is a huge discrepancy in the sufferer’s ability to discern the necessity of their suffering as compared to the one inflicting or allowing it. At the very least, it would require a substantive argument to establish, and can’t be just taken for granted, as it is clearly false in many analogous scenarios (apparently unnecessary car parts should not be taken to be actually unnecessary car parts; their necessity would be immediately obvious to those with a better epistemic access to the facts at hand, e.g. mechanics). Besides, if we were to allow this inference to stand, we’d necessarily get wrong results at least sometimes: if we were in the best possible world, and God did exist, then still, there would probably be lots of suffering that appears gratuitous to us. If we allow that to inform our judgments, we would probabilify the wrong conclusion; but then, this just means that we ought not expect evidential reasoning to yield even probabilistically trustworthy results, and the evidential problem pulls the rug out from under itself. Rather, we should recognize that, because of the epistemic discrepancy between us and God, if they were to exist, there would probably be lots of (at first blush) unnecessary suffering; hence, the presence of apparently unnecessary suffering is not in and of itself in tension with the hypothesis of the existence of God.
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Only gratuitous evil / suffering is evidence against God, some evil / suffering appears gratuitous, and we have to make an inductive case for some particular evil / suffering to be gratuitous in order to yield evidence against God. This is, to the best of my understanding, the position of the classical evidential PoE. We propose a case that, upon careful examination, does seem highly unlikely to constitute suffering such that it is offset by some equal or greater benefit, or which if permitted to occur prevents another instance of equal or greater suffering, and seems both within God’s ability and interest to prevent. These are cases like Rowe’s Bambi or Sue. Such suffering, if it exists, certainly is in tension with the hypothesis of God’s existence, and thus, yields valid evidence against it. Given that our argument towards the gratuitous nature of that suffering are inductively valid, we have inductive reason to lower our credence in God’s existence.
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All evil / suffering fails to be evidence against God’s existence. This is the position of Skeptical Theism, which I think has only been tangentially discussed in this thread so far. Its basic point is, as I understand it, that the inference from ‘some evil appears unnecessary’ to ‘some evil is unnecessary’ is simply never warranted, the discrepancy between our finite and God’s infinite point of view just being too great to bridge. It would appear to be a consistent stance, but I find it singularly unappealing: not only does it leave us epistemically stranded, helpless amid the tides of forces we can’t hope to understand, it also carries the moral hazard that we may excuse any and all evil as happening for a reason we just can’t begin to fathom. But of course, these are only aesthetic objections, which unfortunately carry little weight as far as influencing the actual facts of the matter go. A committed theist might well seek refuge to such a position, but thank God I’m not among that number.
To me, 1.-4. seem obvious non-starters, for the reasons indicated, and only 5. is a version of the evidential argument that could have any hope of having real bite. I think that this is born out by the fact that, at least as reviewed in the thread so far, all real-world evidential arguments broadly take the approach of 5.: first, a premise is argued for that has some inductive justification, and thus yields at least a probabilistic judgment that there may be gratuitous evil; to the extent that this justification is sound, we have thus evidential warrant to lower credence in the existence of God. But evidently, others disagree, so I hope that the above list might at least serve to throw such points of disagreement as there are into sharper relief.
Of course, I don’t see myself as having bitten any particular bullet. If all you know of a quantity is that you ought to expect it to be nonzero, then you don’t have any good reason to expect it to be below a certain threshold; doing so would just be assuming facts not in evidence. Also, I’ll just note that this position, too, has been defended, see e.g. this article. This comes from the point of view of Skeptical Theism, which as noted I’d be reluctant to advocate, but it also argues against a view that starts from an evidential argument that starts with a specific evil. Against a position that only starts from generic evil, such as yours, one need not endorse the commitments of Skeptical Theism.