john stuart mill

  1. nature exhibits brutality incompatible with a just and benevolent creator.

  2. Mill personifies nature as gratuitously murderous and torturous.

  3. nature inflicts various hideous deaths, regardless of human nobility.

  4. even unintentional actions by nature show a wantonness in afflictions.

  5. natural disasters deprive livelihood, adding to the malevolence.

  6. Mill rejects the idea of a caring God based on nature's evidence.

  7. arguments for a loving creator, like Paley's, are countered by Mill.

  8. Mill suggests that if God exists, he must be malevolent.