On Luke Tracey's Logical Problem of Evil

A few years back, atheist blogger Luke Tracey formulated an ingenious new version of the logical problem of evil. The argument goes as follows: there are two types of properties, good-making properties (GMP) and evil-making properties (EMP). All EMPs are such that they are not entailed by any GMP, which is proven by the fact that God (who instantiates all GMPs) may exist alone, without His contingent creation. In this "alone world," all GMPs would exist (as instantiated by God), and no EMPs would exist. Thus, it is possible for all possible good-making properties to exist without any evil-making properties. Therefore, the existence of EMPs is innately superfluous, and since God would not allow superfluous evil, it follows that God does not exist.

It seems to me that the best response for the theist is to deny the existence of evil-making properties. The classical theist tradition (as epitomized by Augustine, Aquinas, etc.) has usually held that evil as-such does not exist; rather, evil is a privation, the absence of due goodness. Ben Page and Max Baker-Hytch (2020) explain this as follows:

Badness is a privation... because something is only ever ‘bad’ in virtue of its failure to exhibit (or to exhibit to a sufficient degree) a property that a member of a given kind ought to have.

On this view, so-called "evil-making properties" do not exist, and Tracey's argument loses all force. In addition, Tracey's argument relies on the idea that God would not allow any gratuitous evil to exist, a view which has been increasingly challenged by theistic philosophers (e.g. Rubio 2018, Murphy 2019). One could also adopt the view that God is free from moral obligations, as He is not a part of the moral community (see the aforementioned papers from Rubio and Murphy, as well as Davies 2006 and Feser 2021). 

Finally, I would draw attention to Kenneth Pearce's (2019) response to the logical problem of evil, in which he argues that "a certain way of thinking about the nature of mind—which is widely held by naturalists but might also reasonably be endorsed by theists—has the consequence that the existence of (non-divine) minds is impossible in the absence of evil." This would arguably serve to undercut Tracey's argument, which hinges on the notion that God could instantiate all good-making properties without this entailing any evil-making properties. If Pearce is correct, then Tracey's line of reasoning would lead us to conclude that the creation of any non-divine minds at all is impermissible for God, which is a highly implausible conclusion.