If God existed, he would be so far above us epistemically , that the mere fact that we cannot conceive of a way that God might be justified in allowing some instance of suffering to occur doesn’t give us ANY reason at all to infer that, probably there is no justifying good.
Moreover, if we take the bible seriously , as I think Max does, as a revealed source of divine assertions about all things including the nature of God – then it becomes immediatly clear that we simply should not expect to know God’s ways.
In the book of Job 11:7-9, we read
“Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the almighty? They are higher than the heavens – what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave – what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.”
Another example can be found in Isaiah 55:8-9
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “ As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
However, Max’s views here don’t just line up well with revealed scripture, he is also in strong intellectual company. Regarding this epistemic chasm that Christians believe exists between them and their God and its relationship to issues like the problem of evil, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes,
From the theistic perspective, there is little or no reason to think that God would have a reason for a particular evil state of affairs only if we had a pretty good idea of what that reason might be. On the theistic conception, our cognitive powers, as opposed to God’s are a bit slim for that. God might have reasons we cannot so much as understand.[3]
Similarly , Christian philosopher Stephen Wykstra writes,
If we think carefully about the sort of thing theism proposes for our belief, it is entirely expectable – given what we know of our cognitive limits – that the goods by virtue of which this being allows known suffering should very often be beyond our ken”….he goes on to say… “This is not an additional postulate; it was implicit in theism all along.”[4]
William Lane Craig steps in line as well when he writes,
We are not in a good position to assess the probability of whether God has morally sufficient reasons for the evils that occur. As finite persons, we are limited in time, space, intelligence, and insight. But the transcendent and sovereign God sees the end from the beginning and providentially orders history so that His purposes are ultimately achieved through human free decisions. In order to achieve His ends, God may have to put up with certain evils along the way. Evils which appear pointless to us within our limited framework may be seen to have been justly permitted within God’s wider framework.[5]
Now, it seems that Max, the Bible and prominant Christian philosophers are of one mind here. If a religion’s scriptural and intellectual traditions won’t allow the central inference in such argument like the evidential problem of evil, it wouldn’t make much sense to use it.