Concept

Problem of Evil

Intro

"If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?" This is the most famous challenge to Christian belief, and the one most people feel personally.

The basic shape: God is supposed to be able to stop evil, smart enough to know about it, and good enough to want it stopped. So why hasn't He?

The first thing to notice is that there are two very different versions of this challenge. The logical version says God and evil cannot both exist, ever. That version is widely treated as answered. Free creatures who can really love and choose are a real good, and you cannot have real freedom without the possibility that some will choose wrong. So evil's existence is not a contradiction with God's existence.

The evidential version is harder. It does not say God is impossible; it says the sheer amount and kind of suffering makes God unlikely. Christians have several responses: some suffering shapes character; some serves goods we cannot yet see; the cross shows that God Himself enters into suffering rather than watching from a distance; and final judgment will settle accounts that history leaves open.

There is also a sharp turn the objection can be made to take. The word evil only has bite if there really is a standard of good it falls short of. If atheism is true and there is no such standard, then suffering is just unpleasant, not evil. The complaint that the world is wrong quietly borrows the moral framework Christianity supplies.

A final note: there are three layers here that need different answers. The intellectual question (is this consistent?) gets a philosophical reply. The evidential question (is this probable?) gets a cumulative case. The pastoral question (how do I live with my own loss?) gets Job, the Psalms, and the cross. Mixing the three up makes all three harder.

In full

The challenge that the existence of evil, moral evil (sin, cruelty) and natural evil (disease, disaster, suffering), poses for belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. The most-discussed objection to theism in the history of philosophy of religion.

The basic problem

The classical formulation (Epicurus, c. 300 BC, attributed):

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Modern philosophical statement:

(1) God is omnipotent
(2) God is omniscient
(3) God is omnibenevolent
(4) Evil exists
The four claims are alleged to be inconsistent

If God can prevent evil, knows about it, and wants to (since He's good), why does evil exist?

Two forms of the problem

Logical problem of evil

Claims: (1)-(4) are logically incompatible. There is no possible scenario in which God exists alongside evil.

Most famous formulation: J. L. Mackie ("Evil and Omnipotence," Mind 1955).

Status: widely regarded as answered by Plantinga's free-will defense (see below). The logical problem is no longer prosecuted seriously by mainstream atheist philosophers.

Evidential problem of evil

Claims: while (1)-(4) are not strictly inconsistent, the amount, kinds, and distribution of evil in the actual world makes God's existence improbable. The existence of (say) gratuitous animal suffering across millions of years is hard to square with classical theism.

Most famous formulation: William Rowe ("The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," American Philosophical Quarterly 1979).

Status: still actively debated. Various theodicies (defenses of God's permitting evil) and skeptical theist responses contest the evidential argument.

Major Christian responses

1. Free-will defense

The most influential modern response. Argues:

Significant moral freedom is a great good
God cannot create free creatures who are guaranteed to always do good (transworld depravity)
Therefore some evil is the inevitable price of having free creatures at all
Therefore the existence of evil is logically compatible with God's omnipotence and omnibenevolence

Primary developer: Alvin Plantinga (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974). See Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense and Free Will Argument from Love.

This defense decisively answers the logical problem of evil. It addresses moral evil directly; natural evil requires additional moves (perhaps via fallen-angelic agency, or via free-will-permitting-conditions in nature).

2. Privation theory of evil

Evil is not a positive substance God created; it is the privation / absence of a good that ought to be present. God is the source of all being; evil is deficiency in being.

Source: Augustine (Confessions VII; City of God XI-XII; Enchiridion); Aquinas (Summa I, q. 48-49). See Evil as Privation of Good.

This addresses the metaphysics of evil rather than its theodicy directly, but it dissolves the dualistic frame (good God / evil God) and grounds the privation-of-good ontology.

3. Soul-making theodicy

Suffering serves the function of forming character / virtue (epistēmē / aretē). Without suffering, virtues like courage, patience, compassion, perseverance could not develop. A "vale of soul-making" is purposive.

Source: Irenaeus (against Augustinian-original-perfection model); modern: John Hick (Evil and the God of Love, 1966).

Critique: this theodicy struggles with apparently gratuitous suffering (extinction-level events; suffering that doesn't lead to growth) and with animal suffering (which doesn't form moral character).

4. Greater-good theodicy

God permits evil only when its permission serves greater goods that couldn't be obtained otherwise. We don't always see which greater goods are at stake.

Includes:

Free-will defense as a sub-case
Natural-evil-as-precondition-for-moral-virtue
Suffering-as-mediating-divine-grace

5. Skeptical theism

Even granting the existence of apparent gratuitous evil, we are not in a cognitive position to confidently judge that no greater-good justifications exist. Our finite, fallen cognitive faculties cannot exhaustively map all possible goods and connections.

Sources: William Alston, Stephen Wykstra, Michael Bergmann, Daniel Howard-Snyder.

This is an epistemic-humility response: not "here's the theodicy" but "here's why the absence of obvious theodicy doesn't refute theism."

6. Christological / cross-centered theodicy

The cross is God's own entry into suffering, not just a defense of God's permitting evil but God's self-implication in it. Christ suffers; God knows suffering from inside; God's defeat of evil is via voluntary participation, not detached permission.

Sources: Jürgen Moltmann (The Crucified God, 1972); Hans Urs von Balthasar; modern engagement.

This is more theological-experiential than philosophical-defensive but addresses the emotional / existential problem of evil, not just the abstract one.

7. Eschatological theodicy

Final judgment / new creation completes the answer. The final disposition of evil, its defeat, the reward of righteousness, the consummation of history, is not yet visible. Theodicy is incomplete this side of the eschaton.

Sources: classical Christian eschatology; Marilyn McCord Adams (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 1999).

The intellectual / emotional / pastoral problem distinction

Three layers of the problem:

Intellectual problem, "is theism consistent with evil?" (Plantinga's answer: yes, free-will defense settles this)
Evidential problem, "is theism probable given the world's evil?" (debated)
Pastoral / emotional problem, "how do I cope with my own / others' suffering as a Christian?" (where Job, Lamentations, A Grief Observed, the Psalms come in)

These layers are distinct and require distinct responses.

Common atheist responses to Christian theodicies

"But the amount of evil is excessive"

Response: amount-of-evil arguments require some metric for "appropriate amount." We have no such metric. Skeptical-theism response cuts here.

"Animal suffering doesn't fit free-will defense"

Response: combinations of fallen-angelic agency (William Dembski, The End of Christianity, 2009), pre-fall vs post-fall world, Romans 8:19-22 cosmic-bondage-to-decay. Or natural-conditions-required-for-free-creatures defenses. None are universally satisfying; the evidential problem remains genuine.

"Why did God create if He knew evil would result?"

Response: free-will defense applies, the free creatures + their freely-chosen evils are the price of having a world with creatures-capable-of-genuine-love. The world with these features is on balance more valuable than a world without.

"Christianity is just promissory eschatology"

Response: this is partly true, final theodicy is eschatological. But the cross is already God's entry into suffering, and the resurrection is already the firstfruits of victory. The eschatological completion doesn't make the present claims fideistic.

Inverting the problem, moral argument from evil

Some apologists note that the very concept of evil presupposes objective moral standards. A consistent atheist who denies objective moral standards can't really call anything evil, only unpleasant or unwanted. The problem-of-evil objection works only if there's real moral evil, which atheism struggles to ground (see Atheism Moral Neutrality Failure).

C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, II.1): "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line… Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist, in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless, I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality, namely my idea of justice, was full of sense."

This reverses the dialectic: the existence of real evil presupposes God; therefore the problem of evil, far from refuting theism, presupposes it.