Distrusting God

I'm going to comment on an essay by the late Richard Gale. He was one of the more competent philosophical atheist. In this essay his primary target is freewill theism: R. Gale, "Evil as Evidence Against God", J. P. Moreland, C. Meister, & K. Sweis eds. Debating Christian Theism (Oxford 2013), chap. 15.   

What, in general, is an evil and what are the different types of evil? An evil is something that, taken by itself in isolation, is an ought-not-to-be, an "Oh, no!" Examples are physical and mental suffering by a sentient being, including lower animals, immoral action, bad character, and a privation in which something fails to measure up to what it ought to be, such as a human being born blind. The qualification "taken by itself" is important, since some evils are justified because they are so-called a blessing in disguise, being necessary for the realization of an outweighing good or prevention of an even greater evil. As members of such a larger whole, they are not an ought-not-to-be. 

In some respects that's a good definition. However:

i) To say congenital blindness is a natural evil is a teleological judgment. But naturalistic evolution rejects final causes. If there's no telos, there's no dysteleology. Congenital blindness is only a natural evil if the eyes were designed to see. But naturalistic evolution is a nondirective process rather than a goal-oriented process. Eyes have no purpose in naturalistic evolution. 

ii) How much mental and physical suffering do lower animals experience? And is that a natural evil? Notice how some animals deliberately seek out what looks like a painful experience. Like lions fighting for control of the tribe. If it's excruciating, why don't they avoid it? 

Strategic inscrutability

There's a family of objections to God as an explanatory principle. There's Elliott Sober's objection that you can't draw a design inference unless you know the intentions of the designer. There's a related objection to skeptical theism as a double-edged sword: it relieves the problem of evil at the expense of making God generally inscrutable and our corresponding intuitions generally unreliable. 

But let's take a comparison. In games like chess, poker, and football–as well as stratagems in warfare–the intentions of the agent are often inscrutable to an outsider. Why did the chess player make this move rather than that move? 

It would, however, be erroneous to conclude that just because we may not be able to figure out what the agent is up to, therefore the agent's actions are random. That there is no reason for what he did.

Indeed, we can put a sharper point on that. In the aforesaid examples, the agent will deliberately mask his intentions. He doesn't want his opponent to know what he's up to. He tries to throw him off the scent.

Not only are his intentions obscure, but they are obscure by design. Strategic inscrutability. 

So even if an agent's intentions are puzzling, that doesn't mean we should be agnostic about his having intentions. That doesn't mean the outcome is equivalent to chance. Indeed, in cases like military deception, we should infer design especially when the agent's behavior is puzzling. It's not merely that the agent's intentions happen to be obscure; rather, they are intentionally obscure.