ABSTRACT
Designs are influenced by temperament: theists could be understood as optimists who focus more on goodness and beauty in nature things and naturalists as pessimists who focus on natural evil. The strength of natural evil as evidence against theism will then depend on how contrary to theistic expectations these phenomena are. Hume's evidential argument from evil is based on a comparison of hypotheses. Against Intelligent Design (ID), the problem of natural evil is typically formulated as the problem of bad design. Proponents of ID argue that even suboptimal or bad design can still be designed in the case of human artefacts. The problem of natural evil has also been a cornerstone of several prominent theological responses to ID. Because of the problem, ID has even been argued to be theologically heretical or at least close to it. To relate scepticism about our capability to evaluate the goodness of nature to another theistic strategy for responding to the problem of evil.
