Why Would a Good God Allow So Much Suffering? The Problem of Evil

Begin not with a syllogism but with a child. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan tells his devout brother Alyosha the true-to-life story of a little girl beaten and locked in a freezing outhouse by her own parents, smearing her face with excrement, weeping through the night to "dear, kind God" for protection that never comes. Ivan does not deny that God exists, nor even that some final harmony might one day reconcile all things. He refuses the harmony. "It's not God that I don't accept," he says, "only I most respectfully return Him the ticket."¹ If the entrance fee to heaven is the tears of one tortured child, Ivan will not pay it. He hands the ticket back.

This is where any honest treatment of the problem of evil must begin: not with an argument to be won but with a wound that bleeds. The twentieth century gave Ivan's protest a name and a place. Auschwitz. The murdered children of the Holocaust, the famines, the genocides, the slow private agonies of cancer wards and abusive homes. For a great many people, evil is not a puzzle to be solved over coffee. It is the reason they cannot pray. And it would be a kind of obscenity to march past that grief toward a clever defense, as though a syllogism could be set against a screaming child and the screaming child would lose.

So let it be said plainly, before any argument is offered: no argument removes the pain. The philosophical responses surveyed below may show that belief in God is not irrational in the face of suffering. They do not, and cannot, make suffering hurt less. When the church meets a grieving person, its first calling is not to explain but to be present — to sit in the ashes, as Job's friends did rightly for seven days before they ruined it by talking (Job 2:13). Scripture's own response to catastrophe is largely lament: a full third of the Psalms are complaints flung at God, and the shortest verse in the Gospels is "Jesus wept" (John 11:35), shed over a death he was about to undo. The believer who has buried a child is not obligated to feel that the problem of evil has been answered. Often it has not. What follows is offered in that spirit — as the careful, limited work of the mind, which is never the whole of a faithful response and never a substitute for compassion.

Stating the problem at its strongest

The challenge is ancient — Epicurus is traditionally credited with an early version, and the Scottish skeptic David Hume gave it lasting form in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779): "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"² Modern philosophy distinguishes three versions of the difficulty, ascending roughly from the most ambitious to the most stubborn.

The logical problem claims a flat contradiction: it is impossible that an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God and any evil could both exist. The evidential (or probabilistic) problem makes a humbler but harder claim: even if God and evil are not strictly contradictory, the sheer scale and apparent pointlessness of suffering is strong evidence that no such God exists. And the existential problem — Ivan's — is not an argument at all but the lived crisis of trust. These must be treated separately, because they fail and succeed in different ways.

The logical problem, and why most philosophers think it failed

The sharpest twentieth-century statement of the logical problem came from the Australian atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie. In his 1955 paper "Evil and Omnipotence," Mackie argued that the theist's core beliefs are "positively irrational": God is omnipotent, God is wholly good, and evil exists. The contradiction is not immediate, Mackie argued, but becomes explicit once we add the principle that "a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can."³ Free will, Mackie thought, was no escape, for surely an omnipotent God could have created people who always freely chose the good.

The decisive reply came from the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, most fully in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974). Plantinga offered not a theodicy — an account of why God actually permits evil — but a defense: a demonstration that it is merely possible for God and evil to coexist, which is all that is needed to break an alleged contradiction. His Free Will Defense runs roughly thus: a world containing creatures who freely choose good is more valuable than a world of puppets who cannot do otherwise. But genuine freedom entails the possibility of choosing evil. It is therefore at least possible that God could not create a world with moral good but no moral evil without contradicting the freedom that makes the good worth having. Against Mackie's point that God could have made free creatures who always choose rightly, Plantinga introduced the provocative idea of "transworld depravity" — the possibility that every creaturely essence God might instantiate would go wrong in some circumstance. Whether or not that is true, it is possibly true, and possibility is enough to defuse a charge of strict contradiction.⁴

Remarkably, this argument is now widely regarded — even by atheist philosophers — as having succeeded against the logical version. William Rowe, himself a leading atheist critic, acknowledged that the bald charge of self-contradiction has not held up, and granted that Plantinga's defense lays out a logically possible scenario in which God and evil coexist.⁵ The point is modest but real: the bald claim that theism is self-contradictory has not held up. We should be honest about the limit, though. Plantinga's defense shows only logical consistency; it claims nothing about whether the free-will story is true, and it does little to address suffering that flows not from human choices but from earthquakes, disease, and the agonies of animals. The logical problem is the version theism handles best — and it is the least of the three.

The evidential problem: the genuinely hard one

Here is where the argument bites. In his 1979 paper "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," Rowe asked us to imagine a fawn trapped in a distant forest fire, badly burned, lying in terrible agony for several days before death — suffering no human will ever know about, that seems to serve no purpose whatever.⁶ Rowe's argument is disarmingly simple:

(1) There exist instances of intense suffering an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. (2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any such suffering it could. (3) Therefore, there does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.⁷

The argument is valid; the second premise is hard to deny. Everything turns on the first — on whether there is gratuitous evil, suffering that secures no outweighing good. Rowe concedes he cannot prove the fawn's suffering is pointless. But, he argues, it is eminently reasonable to believe it is. We look hard and can find no justifying reason; the rational inference is that there is none. This is not a deductive proof but an inference to the best explanation, and it is far more resistant than Mackie's. Theistic responses fall into several families.

Skeptical theism. Stephen Wykstra replied in 1984 that Rowe's inference smuggles in an assumption we cannot justify. Wykstra's principle, CORNEA (the "Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access"), holds that one may move from "I see no justifying reason" to "there probably is none" only if it is reasonable to expect that, were there such a reason, one would likely see it.⁸ But why expect that? If God exists, the gap between divine wisdom and ours is plausibly vast — like the gap between a parent's reasons and an infant's grasp of them. A child cannot see why the doctor's needle is good; our failure to see a reason for the fawn is what we should expect whether or not the reason exists. The "noseeum" inference ("I no see 'um, so there ain't none") is therefore unreliable for matters this far beyond us. This is, for many, the most powerful single response — and it is purchased at a cost, which honest critics press hard (below).

Soul-making theodicy. John Hick, in Evil and the God of Love (1966), revived an Irenaean theme: God did not create finished saints but immature creatures placed in a world of real hardship — a "vale of soul-making" — so that through struggle, choice, and even suffering they might grow freely into mature persons fit for relationship with God.⁹ A world without obstacles would be a world without courage, compassion, or perseverance. There is something to this; the deepest human goods do seem forged in difficulty. But its limits are severe, and Hick knew it. Much suffering destroys rather than ennobles — the abused child who grows into a broken adult, the dementia that erases the self. Hick was driven to a universalist hope of post-mortem growth for all, a move many orthodox Christians reject and which, in any case, still leaves the fawn unaccounted for.

Greater-good and free-will defenses generalize the point: God permits evils that are necessary conditions for goods that outweigh them, including the great good of genuine creaturely freedom. These have force for much moral evil. They strain against natural evil — the tsunami, the childhood leukemia — though some extend them via the value of a stable, law-governed world in which free agents can act and learn.

Horrendous evils and divine solidarity. The philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams argued, in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999), that the abstract calculus of "goods outweighing evils" is the wrong tool for the worst evils — those that threaten to render a person's life not worth living. No generic greater good can balance the torture of a child as if on a ledger. What is needed is not balancing but defeat: God must so relate to the sufferer that the horror is integrated into a life the person can finally recognize as a great good. For Adams, this requires the specifically Christian resources of God's own incarnate suffering — Christ entering, sharing, and ultimately defeating horror from within.¹⁰ This shifts the conversation from explanation to redemption, and it is where the distinctively Christian response begins.

The cross: not a theodicy but a presence

The Christian gospel does not, in the end, offer a tidy ledger that makes every evil add up. It offers something stranger. It claims that God did not remain a spectator above the suffering of the world but entered it — that in Jesus of Nazareth, God was "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3), betrayed, tortured, and executed, crying out from the cross the opening line of a lament psalm: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1). Whatever else this is, it is not a deity who answers Ivan's protest from a safe distance. It is a God who, in the language of the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann's The Crucified God (1972), takes the suffering of the godforsaken into God's own being＊Holding the classical lineIs sayingThe Son, who is truly God, entered real human suffering and death on the cross — God is not a spectator above our pain.Not sayingNot that the divine nature "dies," nor that the Father suffered (an error called patripassianism). Moltmann presses this further than classical impassibility allows; the guardrail the site affirms is that God the Son suffered in his human nature, while the divine life does not end..¹¹

Two things follow that no theodicy alone provides. First, solidarity: the Christian claim is that there is no pit so deep that God in Christ has not been there first. This does not explain the pit. It populates it. Second, hope grounded in an event: the New Testament locates the answer to evil not in a present explanation but in a future defeat, anchored in a past one — the resurrection of Jesus, which Christians take as the first installment of a promised world where God "will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore" (Revelation 21:4). On this view evil is real, monstrous, and unexplained — and also doomed. Here Christian traditions differ on the mechanics of providence: whether God positively ordains each event (a strong Reformed reading), permits it within sovereign purpose, or works responsively within creaturely freedom (Arminian and much Catholic theology), and how grace cooperates with human choice. These are real and unsettled differences within orthodoxy; the shared core is that God is neither the author of evil nor indifferent to it, and that in Christ he has acted to defeat it.

The critic's last word — and a reply

The honest reader will feel that the skeptic still has something to say, and he does. Let Rowe and his successors have it. The cost of skeptical theism. Critics such as Paul Draper and Michael Bergmann's interlocutors press that if our cognitive grasp is too feeble to judge that any evil is gratuitous, the same skepticism may corrode our ability to trust any moral or providential judgment at all — including the judgment that God is good, or that the apparent goods of the world really are goods. Skeptical theism, pushed consistently, threatens to prove too much; it can purchase God's escape from the evidential argument at the price of a general skepticism no one can live by.¹² And Rowe's underlying intuition does not simply evaporate: when we contemplate the fawn, or the murdered child, the sense that this served no purpose is not obviously a mere failure of imagination. It may be moral perception. That intuition retains real evidential weight, and an honest theist should feel its pull rather than explain it away.

The reply is not a refutation but a reframing. The skeptical theist need not claim we know nothing of value or of God's goodness — only that we lack the vantage to survey all the goods and connections that bear on a given evil, which is a far more modest claim and arguably one any theist already holds about a being whose ways are "higher than your ways" (Isaiah 55:9). And the believer's confidence in God's goodness, on the Christian account, is not chiefly an inference from a balanced ledger of the world's pains and pleasures; it rests elsewhere — on the character of Christ, on the resurrection as a public event, on encounter and testimony. If there are independent grounds for trusting that God is good, then unexplained evil is a genuine difficulty to be borne, not a decisive disproof. That is a real and defensible position. It is not a victory, and it should not be sold as one.

The honest state of the question

What can be claimed, and what cannot? Three things can be said with reasonable confidence. The logical problem — the charge that theism is self-contradictory — is widely judged to have failed; even many atheist philosophers grant this.¹³ The evidential problem remains live and unresolved by either side: there is no consensus that gratuitous evil disproves God, and none that it has been explained away. And the existential problem is not the sort of thing philosophy can close at all.

It would be dishonest to end on a note of triumph. The theistic responses surveyed here do not deliver an explanation of why this child suffered this way; they do not make the fawn's agony intelligible; they do not relieve grief. At most they show that the believer who has other grounds for faith is not thereby convicted of irrationality, and that the Christian story supplies resources — divine solidarity and promised defeat — that a bare philosophical theism lacks. The believer is left, finally, holding two things at once: a defense (faith is not irrational in the teeth of evil) and a trust grounded elsewhere than in a completed theodicy. Job is never told why; he is met by God, and that meeting is offered as enough — though Scripture lets his protest stand uncensored to the end.

Ivan returns his ticket, and the honest believer must not pretend the gesture is foolish. It is among the most serious things ever said against faith. The Christian answer is not a better argument that would make Ivan ashamed of his tears. It is the claim that the God against whom he protests has wept the same tears, entered the same outhouse, and promises — not explains, but promises — to wipe every one of them away. Whether that promise is true is the question the resurrection, not the problem of evil, is meant to decide. The believer holds the wound and the hope together, and waits.