Problem of Evil

If God is omnipotent, he can prevent any evil. If omniscient, he knows of every evil. If perfectly good, he would want to prevent it. Evil exists in staggering quantity. Therefore either no such God exists or one of the attributes fails.

A Christian who softens this before answering it is not doing apologetics; scripture itself does not soften it. Job, Psalm 88, Lamentations, and Habakkuk state the complaint without resolution, and Jesus's cry from the cross quotes the opening of Psalm 22. Any response that arrives too quickly at reassurance has failed the text as well as the objector.

Mackie's 1955 formulation claimed a strict logical contradiction: no consistent set of propositions includes both an omnipotent, wholly good God and any evil at all. Plantinga's response in The Nature of Necessity does not attempt a theodicy — an account of God's actual reasons — but a defense: a possible state of affairs whose truth would remove the contradiction, whether or not it is actual.

The core is transworld depravity. It is possibly the case that any free creature God could create would freely go wrong at least once in some circumstance. If so, then a world containing free creatures who always freely do right may not be feasible for God to create, even though it is logically possible. Omnipotence does not extend to bringing about states of affairs that are not logically possible, and 'God causes a creature to freely choose rightly' is not coherent on a libertarian account of freedom.

The professional consensus, including among atheist philosophers such as William Rowe, is that the logical problem fails. That is a real result and it should be stated, but it should also be kept in proportion: it shows only that theism and some evil are not strictly contradictory. It does nothing about quantity or distribution.

Rowe's version is the standard: there exist instances of intense suffering that an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some equally bad or worse evil. His illustration is a fawn burned in a forest fire, dying over days, unobserved. If such suffering serves no purpose, and a good God would prevent purposeless suffering, then no such God exists.

Paul Draper's version is arguably stronger and less easily deflected: it does not require that any suffering be provably gratuitous, only that the distribution of pleasure and pain — closely tracking biological utility, indifferent to moral desert — is far more expected on the hypothesis of indifference than on theism.

Natural evil sharpens this. Free will explains the Holocaust in a way it cannot explain childhood leukemia, tsunamis, or the several hundred million years of predation and extinction preceding any human choice. Any theist who deploys the free will defense against natural evil has misapplied it.

Skeptical theism, developed by Stephen Wykstra and Michael Bergmann, denies the inference from 'we see no reason' to 'there is no reason'. Given the gap between divine and human cognitive capacity, our failure to discern a justifying good is weak evidence of its absence, much as a novice's failure to see the point of a grandmaster's move is weak evidence that it has none. The cost, pressed hard by critics, is that this can undermine moral knowledge generally: if we cannot assess whether God has reasons to permit suffering, can we assess whether we should intervene?

Soul-making theodicy, from Irenaeus through John Hick, holds that a world with genuine stakes and real hazards is required for the development of courage, compassion, and character; a padded world would produce a padded species. Its weakness is proportionality — some suffering destroys rather than builds, and dies unwitnessed.

Free will theodicy explains moral evil as the cost of genuine love, which cannot be coerced. Natural-law theodicy adds that a stable, regular universe is required for agency at all, and stable laws will sometimes harm.

The distinctively Christian contribution is not a further theodicy but a claim about God's relation to the problem: on the cross God does not explain suffering from outside it but enters it. This is a theological and pastoral answer rather than a philosophical solution, and describing it as the latter overstates it.

An honest scorecard: the logical problem is answered; the evidential problem is not solved, and most theistic philosophers do not claim that it is. What they claim is that it is one body of evidence to be weighed against others, and that the total case can favor theism even with a substantial debit here.

There is also an underappreciated point in the other direction. If the argument from evil requires objective moral facts — genuinely gratuitous, genuinely wrong suffering — then the objector may need a grounding for those facts, which is where the moral argument re-enters. This is not a refutation, since the objector can run the argument as an internal critique of the theist's own commitments, and presenting it as a knockdown reply is a mistake.