The evil-god challenge

This paper develops a challenge to theism. The challenge is toexplain why the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient andall-good god should be considered significantly more reasonable than the hypothesisthat there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-evil god. Theists typicallydismiss the evil-god hypothesis out of hand because of the problem of good – thereis surely too much good in the world for it to be the creation of such a being.But then why doesn’t the problem of evil provide equally good grounds fordismissing belief in a good god? I develop this evil-god challenge in detail,anticipate several replies, and correct errors made in earlier discussions of theproblem of good