the problem of evil, but for atheists

From Dr. Vallicella (excerpt):

A Problem of Evil for Atheists
The problem of the affirmability of life in the face of evil

Suppose you are an atheist who considers life to be worth living. You deny God, but affirm life, this material life in the here and now, and you do so unconditionally, and thus without appeal to any hinterworlds or an afterlife. Suppose you take the fact of evil to tell against the existence of God. Do you also take the fact of evil to tell against the affirmability of life? If not, why not?

In this entry I will argue that atheists face a problem of the affirmability of life that is no less serious than the problem of evil that theists face. I will assume that every atheist is a naturalist and a mortalist. For present purposes, an atheist is one who denies the existence of God, as God is traditionally conceived, and a naturalist is one who affirms that reality, with the possible exception of so-called abstract objects, is exhausted by nature, i.e., the space-time-matter system. Naturalism entails atheism. A mortalist for present purposes is one who believes that a human person is just an animated body, and that when this body ceases to exist, so does the person. Mortalism thus rules out both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body.

Our problem may be set forth as an aporetic triad. Are the following propositions logically consistent? I say they are not. I argue that anyone who accepts both (b) and (c) must reject (a).

a. Life is affirmable.
b. Naturalism is true.
c. Evil objectively exists.

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