Stating the problem of evil

The problem of evil asks how a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent can coexist with evil and suffering.

• Moral evil — suffering caused by human choices (cruelty, war).
• Natural evil — suffering from nature (disease, earthquakes) with no human author.

The dilemma is often traced to Epicurus and restated by Hume: is God willing to prevent evil but not able (then impotent), or able but not willing (then malevolent)?

Mackie's inconsistent triad

J. L. Mackie ("Evil and Omnipotence", 1955) frames the logical problem as an inconsistent triad: (1) God is omnipotent, (2) God is wholly good, (3) evil exists. Any two, he says, deny the third — so holding all three is logically contradictory, making theism "positively irrational".

Mackie also attacks proposed solutions: he argues an omnipotent God could have created free beings who always freely choose the good, so the free-will defence fails.

Logical vs evidential: the logical problem claims God and evil are incompatible; the evidential problem (e.g. William Rowe's fawn dying in a forest fire) claims the amount and pointlessness of evil make God improbable.

Name the argument

Augustinian theodicy

A theodicy defends God's justice in the face of evil. The Augustinian type draws on Augustine:

• God's creation was wholly good; evil is not a substance but a privation of good (privatio boni) — a falling-short, like blindness is the absence of sight.
• Evil entered through the free choice of angels and of Adam and Eve (the Fall); humans, "seminally present" in Adam, share in original sin.
• God is justified in permitting evil; salvation through Christ restores the balance. This is a soul-deciding, backward-looking theodicy.

Challenges: Schleiermacher argued a perfect world could not go wrong of itself; modern biology challenges a literal Fall; and it seems to make God responsible for creating a world he foreknew would fall.

Irenaean / soul-making theodicy

The Irenaean type, developed by John Hick (Evil and the God of Love), is forward-looking and soul-making:

• Drawing on Irenaeus' distinction between the image and the likeness of God, humans are created immature and must grow into perfection.
• A world with genuine challenges and suffering — a "vale of soul-making" (Hick borrows Keats) — is needed to develop virtues like courage and compassion.
• God maintains an epistemic distance so faith and goodness are freely chosen; Hick argues for eventual universal salvation to justify the suffering.

Challenges: is the suffering (e.g. of children, of animals) proportionate to soul-making? D. Z. Phillips called it morally repugnant to justify cruelty by future good.

Which theodicy?

Plantinga's free will defence

Alvin Plantinga offers a free will defence (a defence, aimed only at showing God and evil are not contradictory, not a full theodicy):

• A world containing genuinely free creatures is more valuable than one of programmed robots.
• It is not within even an omnipotent God's power to create free creatures who are guaranteed always to choose good — that would be a contradiction (a "forced free choice").
• His notion of transworld depravity: it may be that any free creature God could create would go wrong in some situation.

This directly answers Mackie: if free choice of good cannot be guaranteed, the triad is not contradictory. Plantinga extends it to natural evil via the possibility of non-human free agents.

Whose defence?

Weighing the responses

• Does the free will defence explain natural evil, or only moral evil?
• Is "evil as privation" convincing when suffering feels intensely real?
• Does soul-making justify the scale and distribution of suffering (Rowe, Ivan Karamazov's protest in Dostoevsky)?
• Do the theodicies answer the logical problem, the evidential problem, or neither? Many philosophers think the logical problem is largely answered but the evidential problem remains live.

Sort each idea by thinker

Tap a claim, then drop it under the thinker it belongs to.

Match the key term

Tap a description, then the term or thinker it belongs to.

The big ideas to hold together

You can now separate the logical from the evidential problem and evaluate each theodicy on its own terms. Press Finish to see your score.