Problem of Suffering

Philosophers distinguish the logical problem of evil, which claims that God and any evil at all are strictly incompatible, from the evidential problem, which claims only that the amount, intensity, and distribution of suffering makes God's existence improbable. Alvin Plantinga's free will defense is widely regarded, even by atheist philosophers like William Rowe, as having solved the logical version by showing no formal contradiction is demonstrable.

The evidential version is harder and is where contemporary debate concentrates. Rowe's argument does not claim to prove atheism outright but argues that specific instances of intense, apparently pointless suffering make theism significantly less probable than it would otherwise be. Answering this version requires more than logical possibility; it requires showing why such suffering is not, in fact, good evidence against God.

A world containing agents with morally significant freedom is, on classical Christian theology, a genuine good worth the risk of moral evil, since forced goodness is not the same good as freely chosen love or virtue. This addresses moral evil directly but leaves natural evil, disease, disaster, and animal suffering, only partly addressed by the further claim that a stable, law-governed cosmos is itself a precondition of any coherent, freedom-supporting world.

Critics rightly note this does not explain every instance, especially suffering that seems to have no connection to any human choice or opportunity for growth, such as a child's death in infancy from a genetic disorder. Christian thinkers generally concede this is among the hardest cases and turn to additional resources rather than claiming the free will and natural law considerations alone suffice.

Stephen Wykstra's skeptical theism argues that our failure to perceive God's reason for a given evil is not good evidence there is no reason, because we have no basis for thinking we would detect God's reasons even if they existed, given the vast disproportion between divine and human cognitive access to the full moral and causal web of history.

This move is philosophically serious but has real costs. Critics worry it proves too much, potentially undermining confidence in any moral judgment about God's actions, including the judgments that make theism attractive in the first place. Careful defenders like Michael Bergmann restrict the skepticism narrowly to judgments about God's total reasons for particular events, while preserving ordinary moral knowledge such as 'gratuitous cruelty is wrong.'

John Hick's Irenaean theodicy proposes that a world involving struggle and difficulty is the necessary context for the formation of deep virtues such as courage, compassion, and freely chosen trust in God, drawing on the idea that humanity is created immature and grows through engagement with a genuinely difficult environment.

Marilyn McCord Adams pressed the hardest objection: horrendous evils like prolonged torture, genocide, or the abuse of a child can overwhelm and destroy a person rather than build character, seeming to make any positive meaning impossible from the sufferer's own perspective in this life. Her own answer moves beyond soul-making to the claim that God can, in the resurrection, give even ruined lives positive meaning through intimate relationship with God that outweighs the horror without denying its evil.

What separates the Christian response from generic theism is the incarnation and cross. Jürgen Moltmann's The Crucified God argues that in Christ's suffering and cry of dereliction, God does not remain a detached explainer of evil but enters into it, which reframes the question from an abstract puzzle about a distant deity's permissions to a claim about a God who bears suffering with and for creatures.

This does not answer every 'why' but changes the relational posture available to the sufferer, and is reflected pastorally in how many Christians facing severe suffering report finding comfort not in intellectual answers but in the sense of a God who has been there.

Adams distinguishes 'balancing off' evil, weighing it against unrelated goods elsewhere, from 'defeating' evil, integrating it into a good whole in relation to the sufferer's own life. Christian eschatology, especially bodily resurrection as developed by N.T. Wright, claims this defeat is literal and future: death, mourning, and pain will be ended, not merely outweighed by unrelated joys.

This hope is not empirically checkable now and rests on the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus rather than an independent proof of an afterlife, which is an honest limitation of the argument that should not be minimized.

Even granting every move above, cases like prolonged suffering of infants, animals, or those who die without any apparent opportunity for growth or redemption in this life remain the hardest test cases, and serious Christian philosophers do not claim to have fully dissolved the difficulty here.

The honest Christian position is cumulative and partly humble: several distinct considerations reduce the force of the argument from evil without eliminating its emotional and intellectual weight, and ultimate resolution is placed in a future the argument itself cannot verify in advance.