[alex_young]

I think I understand the argument well, but I don’t see that there is much room for an ‘evil’ upon we could all agree given the observational reality we find ourselves in.

Leaving aside the religious matter of a higher power, I think it’s safe to say that evil in the general context means something more than merely undesirable; perhaps intrinsically wrong from all possible rational observers or something like that.

Finding that biological systems have desirable or undesirable situations and that they having higher order communication systems can agree on a set of shared undesirable outcomes still doesn’t quite get to that concept of evil does it? If not, then I think we can agree that hurricanes are bad for us in general, but not exactly evil unless there is some unobservable force acting upon us which sounds a bit like magic to me.

[pmoriarty]

While the technical term in philosophy is "The Problem of Evil", it's really more about suffering and imperfection than it is about the loaded term "evil" as such.

It can be reduced to the general question "if god is perfect, why is the world imperfect?"

Or, to narrow the question a bit while still avoiding the use of the word "evil", we can ask "if god is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, why does suffering exist?"

We can agree that hurricanes, earthquakes, other natural disasters and diseases cause suffering, without getting in to the question of whether they're "evil" per se.

Such non-human causes of suffering don't seem to be necessary in a world created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly benevolent god.. yet they still exist. Why?

Couldn't such a perfect god have created a world without all this suffering?