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Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Intro to Philosophy (College) Quiz Question

Hello, I'm 41 and going to college for the first time because I find my current job unrewarding. One of my GE classes I decided is Intro to Philosophy because I find it interesting and want to learn as many different areas outside of my major as possible to expand my mind.

On our midterm, we had 23 questions with the last being an essay answer. I was looking for opinions on how my professor answered because the mean score is a C in class, with high scores being B's. He's also fairly condescending towards students and their writing, however I have 105% in my Writing class currently, so I do generally write well. I do understand that logical writing may differ, which is why I'm here, as I want to be clear when engaging in rhetoric.

The question has us pick one of two prompts. I chose the below:

 **1**. ABDUCTIVE POE (a) Please fully present/explain the “abductive” version of the POE. (b) Does this argument have a key or central premise? Explain. (Note: I’m not asking you to evaluate the APOE.) 

My Answer:

>1: APOE  
>  
>To build an abductive POE argument we would look at evil, which we can observe under an agreed upon convention, and say that it is not that it exists. It is that it exists in such numbers and in such enormity, so that if God did exist he is either not omnipotent as he is unable to stop such evils being all knowing and all good; Not omniscient, in that he could not be all powerful and all good, and yet know evil exists and not stop it; Or not be omnibenevolent, being all powerful and all knowing, but not (all) good enough to stop evil. There is no lack of evil within the word, either man-made or natural. Evidence to support a strong abductive argument is plentiful given our current cultural agreed upon convention of what "evil" is defined as.  
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>The central argument is, that evil is too prevalent in too much of an enormous way that God being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent would allow such to exist according to the JCI doctrines. Therefore, the better explanation is simply that God does not exist, which fits the model of the world we view, with less mental gymnastics and religious apologetics.

My professor's reply:

> YOU WRITE: "To build an abductive POE argument we would look at evil, which we can observe under an agreed upon convention, and say that it is not that it exists. " This is confused writing. "It is not that it exists"? You need to provide context for this statement, namely, that one might suppose that the Problem of Evil (for Theism) is that there are evils. No, the problem is not that evil exists; it is that there are so many evils and they are so terrible. You do nothing to provide that necessary context. What is "It"? You need to explain the issue here. Like all abductive arguments, this one starts with a set of facts to be explained: the amount and awfulness of the evils of our world. The issue is: what best explains such a world? We consider the possible explanations (there are two via the Law of E M). We then evaluate each for quality, using standard criteria. the APOE asserts that the "the JCI God does not exist" explanation is superior to the "the JCI God exists" explanation. That's the argument. You make little of this clear. What are the facts to be explained? What are the competing explanations? PLEASE SEE IDEAL ANSWER. D 50 

After our quiz, my professor posted the "ideal answers" for each of the prompts along with a grade scale. I did receive 230 out of 300 points on the quiz, which puts be at a B+ just shy of an A. However, I feel like I'm missing so much by not receiving more points. I'm usually someone who picks up material quickly and grasps complex topics with ease. For reference, here is the ideal answer.

 

>**1. ABDUCTIVE POE (a) Please fully present/explain the** **“abductive” version of the POE****. (b) Does this argument have a key or central premise? Explain. (Note: I’m not asking you to evaluate the APOE.)**  
>  
>STARTING POINT: The Abductive Problem of Evil (APOE) *starts with a set of facts to explain*, namely, the kinds and amounts of evil that seems to occur in our world. For the APOE, *the problem of evil is not that there are any evils; rather, it is that there are so many and such terrible evils*. To see the point, consider what one would encounter if one were to do a kind of inventory of evils of our world:  
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>THE SHEER AMOUNT. Our world does now and has always contained a tremendous *amount* of evil in the form of pain, injury, and death. Constant war, disease, criminality, and natural disasters have been and continue to be routine. (Consider the Black Death of the 14th Century, which killed 30 percent to 60 percent of the European population.)  
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>THE ENORMITY OF MANY EVILS. It is worth noting that some routine evils of our world are truly disturbing, such as the slow torture of small children either by disease or at the hands of evildoers or predators.  
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>SUPREME INJUSTICES. It seems clear that, in our world, a great many beings suffer and die despite their utter innocence, such as infants born with terribly diseases, and the many nonhuman animals that suffer and die (as nonmoral agents, they are innocent).  
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>APPARENT UNNECESSARY EVILS. There are many apparent isolated evils that occur the necessity of which (for an omnipotent being) is difficult or impossible to discern. We have every reason to believe, for example, that chicks in nests burn alive in isolated forest fires. What good depends on the occurrence of such suffering? That such suffering is somehow necessary seems grossly implausible.  
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>TWO HYPOTHESES: Now, obviously, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic type of God either *exists* or *He does not* (I’m appealing to the *Law of Excluded Middle*, according to which, for any proposition S, either S is true or it is false and there is no further possibility). And so we must ask: which of these situations is a better fit with—a better explanation of—the world with its many and terrible evils?  
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>**Hypothesis 1: the Judeo-Christian-Islamic type of God exists**  
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>This explanation would seem to be very problematic. That is because, roughly speaking, the last world anyone would expect to exist in a JCI God-dominated world is *our* world, with its many and terrible evils. Such a being might well allow, for instance, some fears as a necessary condition for the opportunity to attain such virtues as courage, but it is difficult to see how such a being would permit such catastrophes as the Holocaust, or the endless ravages of cancer, or the factory farming industry—something that, by itself, involves the suffering and death of *billions* of creatures every year.  
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>**Hypothesis 2: the Judeo-Christian-Islamic type of God does NOT exist**  
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>This comes in two forms:  
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>**2a: There is no God**  
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>**2b: there is a god but not a JCI type of God**  
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>If there were no God, the world that exists—with its indifference to suffering or justice—is pretty much the world we might expect to exist. It is a world that follows physical laws that yield an indifferent pattern of happiness and misery.  
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>Suppose, alternatively, that there is a god, but an incompetent or malicious or foolish god (i.e., a non-JCI God). Again, the actual world is pretty much the world we might then expect, given this hypothesis. In the real world, things sometimes seem to go well; they just as often seem to go very badly, as though the man in charge doesn’t quite know what he is doing—or just doesn’t care what happens to sentient creatures.  
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>**KEY PREMISE**: Based on the above, one might well judge that the 2nd hypothesis is by far the better explanation for our world and its evils. Hence, as far as the “goodness & evil” of the world are concerned, it seems likely that there is no JCI type of God.  
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>Or so suggests  this kind of reasoning. (Obviously, one needs also to consider any arguments for God’s existence. Do they provide evidence of a JCI God’s existence?)

 Is my answer so far off that 50/90 seems correct? Do I generally understand this or is my writing confused as he claims?
gpt
Your writing is a little confusing, but it seems like the greater deficiency is that the structure of your answer doesn’t really communicate the structure of an abduction in a way that would lead the grader to think you knew what an abduction was.

In philosophy, rather than some English classes, you often need to avoid writing for effect and make your prose sparser and more precise.  You’re trying to demonstrate that you know something very specific, and that sometimes requires laying things out in a very plain, very structured way.  You can see that the ideal answer is almost hilariously hyper-organized to show that an abduction is happening.