Here … let me fix you an omelette. 
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I understand you’re not explicitly arguing that, but it seems to nevertheless follow from your argument. You appear to acknowledge that there’s something tragic in a premature death. Isn’t a premature death an “evil” of a kind? I think it is. And if you agree with that, both evolution as in the process, and the scale of deep time, makes the problem of evil worse. Because evolution works through a process of lots of immature deaths (the struggle for survival), and the sheer number of them of course builds up over time, so deep time makes it worse.
I don’t agree that I have to argue that at all. I can make an argument from the sheer number of lives lost at a very young age, which I think is a kind of evil. Given facts about the process of evolution (the average mutation is negative, so to beat the odds and ensure there are likely to be births with more positive than negative mutations—or at the very least achieve a net of neutrality to prevent eventual extinction—many more births need to happen than can possibly survive to adulthood), and deep time, an argument from scale now has force through that alone.
Of course, an argument from scale can also be made on the basis of some animals who’s lives really do consist of a lot of suffering. Even if the average animal is not living in constant agony from being devoured alive by some predator, evolution ensures some animals will.
Given the nature of evolution, disease and parasitism is intrinsic and unavoidable. Mostly through pathogenic microoganisms that strictly don’t cause debilitating injury. Being pestered by either fungi causing rashes or fevers, by ticks, worms, flies and/or mosquitoes for much of your life won’t strictly kill you, it might not even affect your reproductive fitness noticeably. But it’s certainly a kind of suffering.
There’s a difference between the net suffering experienced by each individual animal, and the net sufffering of all animals as a whole. Supposing we tallied up the total suffering of all animals as a whole and found that this net total showed animals lived a positive rather than negative life (with way more thriving than suffering in total), this still leaves an important question in my view, which is if this net total of thriving comes at the cost of the mostly suffering of others. Could it be the case that for 10 animals to mostly thrive, 3 have to mostly suffer, for a net of thriving over suffering? If so, that seems to make the whole endeavor fundamentally broken in some way that doesn’t sit right with me. Imagine an argument for slavery built on such an arithmetic.
On an individual level your arithmetic could work, if for every hour of suffering every individual experienced way more thriving (say 10 hours hard work created weeks of joy and happiness). But suppose some individuals suffer their entire lives so that others can live lives of mostly joy and happiness. That seems to me to create a fundamental unfairness in the world, which to my mind is certainly a kind of evil. Evolution and deep time would give an argument from scale force with these concerns of fairness in mind too.
Of course it is enough that bad things prevent good things. What a strange claim. That means something bad happened (an evil) where a good thing, given more ideal circumstances, could have instead.
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Would the problem of natural evil be lessened, or even done away with, if we postulate the resurrection of animals as well as humans? It seems to me that the main issue with natural evil is that the evil that (some) animals experience doesn’t outweigh the good they experience, and so this evil is unjustified, at least from the perspective of the individual animal. If animals are resurrected, then the same theodicies that apply to humans (e.g. soul-making theodicy) could apply to animals. @Rope
Edit: I know this leads to other questions (such as where will all these extra animals go? certainly they couldn’t all fit on the earth) but I’ve personally held the belief that all nephesh organisms will be resurrected for some time. Maybe it’s a scripturally and philosophically naive position, IDK.
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I asked an AI to make a song about the goodness and beauty of turtle eggs, and it came up with a similar defense:
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Tim, I just want to end our discussion on a more positive note: while your interpretations of me were indeed misrepresentations as others stated, I nevertheless found your comments about yourself and how you see the problem of evil interesting and clearly stated. I also thought your basic question about the proportion of value and disvalue in the animal world was one worth discussing.
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That’s a great question - I think the perspective of the individual animal is indeed ultimately the core of the problem, rather than the problem of scale etc. Just this kind of theodicy of possible animal resurrection is defended quite well by Trent Dougherty in his book The Problem of Animal Pain. It is speculative but I would say it has some theological plausibility and could have a role in addition to the other theodicies. Also, the resurrection is said to involve a “new heavens a new Earth”. Although there is debate about whether this means a recreation or the massive renewal of the present cosmos, one would assume having enough room won’t be a problem.
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What I can tell you is that at least one prominent YEC evangelist believed it around 40 years ago when I had a conversation about it with him. I asked his reasons for rejecting an old earth, and he said that he couldn’t believe in millions of years of animal suffering and death. Unfortunately I don’t recall his name.
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Once again, let’s remember that plants want you to eat their fruit. It’s how they disperse their seeds. That’s the entire point of fruit.
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Yeah, I have a hard time interpreting this YEC comic (which is fairly popular in AiG circles, I remember seeing it a few times back when I was a YEC) as making any other claim than “deep time [‘evolution’] increases natural evil.”
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Rumraket, this is precisely the sort of argument addressed in the article.
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I don’t know if fruits “want” me to eat them, but I take your point. I suppose that is why Adam and Eve plucked and ate an apple, so as to support a sustainable Eden. For who’s benefit it is not exactly clear, since they managed to get kicked out within a pages of being created. But then what it if the Devil, aka the talking serpent, had cajoled them into eating a carrot, or potato or a turnip? Or maybe a yam, or, heaven forbid, a beet. Yuck…
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[Chorus]
Turtle eggs, oh so divine (so divine)
A taste that’s truly one of a kind (one of a kind)
From the sea to our plate, a meal so rare (so rare)
Turtle eggs, a flavor beyond compare
Let’s not ask it to write any songs about cannibalism - we don’t want to give SkyNet any ideas.
… or bacon! 
(Yes, I know it’s not kosher, but I’m pretty sure that rule came about later.)
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AND
I don’t agree that I have to argue that at all. I can make an argument from the sheer number of lives lost at a very young age, which I think is a kind of evil.
I don’t think it’s fair to ask Rope to defend all possible interpretations of the Problem of Evil in a single article.
I also think that trying to quantify evil makes sense except in idealized cases (ie: The Trolley Problem). Premature death might be an evil, unless that death prevents some greater evil, and there is no way to resolve that sort of “What If?” question.
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In your article you write:
However, in order to claim that something about evolutionary theory and natural history makes the problem of natural evil worse, we need to distinguish between factors of the problem that would exist even if God had created the same sorts of beings through other means.
Right, and if God had created all living species directly through divine intervention, there would not have had to have been eons of excess reproduction that couldn’t possibly survive, most of which would have died young. There’s something about the process of evolution itself, as a supposed means of creation (of man?), that leads to a lot of lives being terminated early. It’s just intrinsic to how it works. It is not merely that animal’s lives are in some sense “used for an end”, which I would agree with you is not necessarily a bad thing (a lonely person could adopt an abandoned dog for the end of getting company, and both could find value in that company, say).
It’s that there’s something (to borrow your own term) tragic about premature deaths. I couldn’t find anything in your article that seemed to fit as a response to this. Certainly not something that either wouldn’t lead to all sorts of other problems(such as undermining whether any sort of death, such as murder, is wrong at all), or didn’t simply dismiss it with a question-begging suggestion (the good ole “God could still have unknown reasons prove me wrong”).
Evolution doesn’t really require any premature deaths, just that some individuals have more offspring than others. Contrariwise, you can have lots of premature death accompanied by no evolution at all. At any rate, the deaths you talk about are a function of time, not of evolution.
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I wonder if that’s actually true. It seems to me competition ensures everyone will try to beat everyone else by being the one to make the most offspring, and it will just become unavoidable with random deaths occurring that the young are preferentially sampled, since at any given moment the majority of the population will consist of recently spawned offspring, those will be the majority of the ones sampled for death. And in actual practice there’s reasons why the very young are also more likely to be sampled, as they’re more vulnerable, less experienced, smaller etc.
It doesn’t matter that we can imagine a situation in principle where random deaths occur in a subset of the population at a particular age. Even if that could result in evolution occurring, it seems to me there’s no mechanism that could ensure it would happen in that way. Well except God of course.
The question being posed in the paper isn’t just about what needs to happen in order for adaptation to take place in principle, but about how evolution really happened and continues to happen. As you say, a considerable part of the question involves the history of organisms over deep time as it actually occurred.
Heck, the fact that evolution can happen in principle without lots of premature deaths really just raises the question why it nevertheless does happen if it’s being used as a means to create by an omnibenevolent God.
I also consider the comparison being made rather odd:
However, in order to claim that something about evolutionary theory and natural history makes the problem of natural evil worse, we need to distinguish between factors of the problem that would exist even if God had created the same sorts of beings through other means.
It seems to me this is asking us not to compare the world as it is right now and with it’s evolutionary history, with how it would be expected to look like if it had been created by an omnibenevolent deity, but rather
A) The world as it is with evolution having occurred over deep time
and then
B) The world as it is having been divinely created to look like it evolved over deep time*.
“The same sorts of creatures” I take to mean everything is the same, it was just magically created (presumably relatively recently), with every organism the same in every detail down to the last atom, and if so then evolution will begin occurring at the instance of creation. Is A (where evolution has already occurred) worse than B (where all the organisms have all the same quirks as those produced by evolution in A) where evolution will begin occurring at the instance of creation?
Isn’t that a really odd comparison?
Yes, they definitely think evolution and the increase scale makes the problem of evil worse. I meant that they probably would not think the average animal life adds more disvalue to the world - so it will be difficult for them to respond to my counterarguments, I think.
In the article, I also quote many non-YEC’s who think the scale adds to the problem, like Phillip Kitcher.
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One can well think that animal death, perhaps especially the deahts of young animals, is tragic in some way, while thinking that the problem of scale does not add to the severity of the problem. For the problem of scale you have to ask if it would have been been better for the turtle eggs, or young turtles, to not have existed at all. The considerations I state in the article are very relevant here. For example, you have to add the good of the existence of young turtles, not just the deaths of these turtles and the eggs to feed other animals.
Do you personally think it would be better for turtles not to exist as they are, given that so many eggs and young turtles get eaten? In other words, do turtles overall add more disvalue than value to the world, so that adding a great amount of turtles due to deep time will then multiply this disvalue without any compensating goods?
Personally, although I do not think turtle reproduction is a morally evil feature of the cosmos, I do not argue in the article that some evolutionary adaptations might not be ugly or even contribute more bad than good to the world. But in that case, it would be that specific feature that is the problem, rather than evolution as such.
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A case might be made for evolution requiring new variations or new combinations of genetic material, some of which are inevitably going to lead to premature death or other suffering simply because they don’t work very well.
Of course it’s true. Adaptive evolution requires only differential reproductive success among genotypes, however achieved. You’re thinking only of r-selected species rather than K-selected species. And there’s another level here: evolution happens even in the absence of selection, even in the absence of differences in reproductive success. In a finite population it’s unavoidable.
Evolution, including adaptive evolution, happens under a great many different ways in nature, not just the competition for fecundity you propose here. But my point is that it’s deep time itself that results in all the suffering and death, with or without evolution or selection.
Of course a creationist would deny that it looks that way.
I’d like to see someone make that case. I think you’re confusing evolution with mutation.
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