There is in this premise an implied idea that God's goodness and perfection constitute an obligation that he create and maintain a good and perfect world, or, to quote Mackie, that "good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can."

Mackie refers to this implied argument as a "quasi-logical rule."

The truth of this assumption, however, is not self-evident.

The other premise open to debate is also the weakest point of the overall argument: the premise that the suffering of animals is evil. It is tempting to categorize suffering as evil because it is unpleasant. This is essentially the argument that William Rowe makes in his essay "The Problem of Evil." Rowe claims that intense suffering is inherently evil regardless of the moral justifiability of its outcome.

But if an evil can exist as "evil" and still be...
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