Mill was a utilitarian philosopher and political economist. His essay On Nature approaches the problem of evil from a naturalistic standpoint, making an argument that is simple and devastating: the natural world is characterized by cruelty, indifference, and suffering that no benevolent creator could have intended or designed. “Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another,” he writes, “are nature’s everyday performances.” Mill’s case is not that God doesn’t exist but that nature provides no evidence of goodness — and that any religion built on the argument from design has to reckon with what nature actually looks like.