The Problem of Evil: The Oldest Argument in Theology

The problem of evil is pretty simple to state, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, then God both can and wants to prevent suffering. And yet suffering exists, on a scale that is, by any measure, staggering. Children die of cancer. Earthquakes kill thousands. People do terrible things to each other. Either God can't prevent this, or God won't, or God doesn't exist. The first two options seem to compromise the classical conception of God. The third is the atheist conclusion.

This is the logical problem of evil and it's been around in some form since at least Epicurus. The modern version was sharpened by J.L. Mackie in the 1950s, who argued that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. You can't have both.

The most common theistic response is the free will defense: God gave humans free will, and free will is valuable enough that a world with free will and evil is better than a world without either. The suffering caused by human choices, war, cruelty, oppression, is the price of genuine moral agency. God could have made us incapable of evil, but that would have made us incapable of genuine goodness too.

This is a serious argument, and I think it partially works. But it doesn't address natural evil, earthquakes, tsunamis, childhood cancer, the suffering of animals over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. No human free will caused the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands and prompted Voltaire to write Candide as a direct attack on theodicy.

The soul-making theodicy, associated with John Hick, takes a different approach. Suffering is necessary for moral and spiritual development. A world without adversity would produce shallow, undeveloped souls. God allows suffering not because God is indifferent to it, but because a world with the possibility of genuine growth requires the possibility of genuine loss. This is more plausible for natural evil, but it requires accepting that the suffering of innocents is instrumentally justified, a conclusion many people find morally repugnant.

The most honest response I've encountered is the skeptical theist position: we shouldn't expect to be able to see God's reasons for permitting evil, any more than a child can understand why a parent allows a painful medical procedure. Our cognitive limitations mean we're not in a position to judge whether the evil we observe is gratuitous. This is epistemically humble, but it comes at a cost, it also makes God's goodness essentially unverifiable.

I don't think the problem of evil is a knockdown argument against theism, necessarily. The responses are too sophisticated for that. But I do think it's the strongest challenge classical theism faces, and the fact that it's been argued about for two and a half millennia without resolution tells you something about its depth. It's not a puzzle. It's a genuine problem.