Question

Here's my almost-twenty-years-old memory of Rachels' argument (I read it in an introduction-to-ethics class at a community college):

If God existed, there would be a being more important, morally, than our moral autonomy.
Nothing can be morally more important than our moral autonomy.
Therefore, God doesn't exist.

This echoes one horn of the trilemma of the problem of evil: "If God is perfectly good, It is not (given the actual world) maximally powerful." Can that horn be subverted(?)? So to say: "If God is not perfectly good, then God is not maximally powerful." Then:

If God were perfectly good, God would be maximally powerful (this is a different premise than the subversion: the presupposition is that having the power to be perfectly good would mean being maximally powerful ipso facto (c.f. Kant's attribution of final power to the divine nature on the basis of the requirement that God would be able to balance the entire negative and positive causal orders in favor of the good, which is an act "no greater than which can be conceived"...)).
If God were maximally powerful, God would prevent x amount of evil (that we don't see being prevented) (premise).
Therefore, God isn't maximally powerful.
Therefore, God isn't perfectly good.
Or, then: there is no perfectly good and maximally powerful being at all.

Is ultimate goodness a prerequisite for eternal power? Now if divine knowledge were a prerequisite of divine goodness such that any divine knower would be maximally good in turn, then (5) can be expanded to and there isn't a divine knower, either.

Answer 1

The question addresses the problem of evil and the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God. The argument suggests that God does not exist based on the existence of natural evil and the logical analysis of God's attributes. It raises questions about the compatibility of an all-perfect deity with the existence of moral evil.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question is addressing the problem of evil and the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God. The argument presented is that if such a God existed, there would be no natural evil. However, since there is natural evil, the conclusion is that God does not exist. This argument is based on the logical analysis of the concept of an all-perfect deity and the existence of moral evil.

The argument suggests that if God were perfectly good, God would be maximally powerful, and as a maximally powerful being, God would prevent a certain amount of evil. Since we observe the existence of evil that is not being prevented, it is concluded that God is not maximally powerful and therefore not perfectly good. This leads to the conclusion that there is no perfectly good and maximally powerful being.

Overall, the argument raises questions about the compatibility of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good deity with the existence of moral evil and whether it is necessary to change the conception of the supreme being or the nature of evil to account for this inconsistency.