If God Is Good, Why Is There Evil?

Foundations

The Challenge

• If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why does evil exist?
• It is widely regarded as the most serious objection to belief in God.
• We'll state it at full strength before looking at any responses.
• Honesty means not pretending the problem is small.

Key idea: Take it seriously: this is the hardest question, and a fair treatment begins by granting its force.

Source: M. Peterson et al., Reason & Religious Belief (standard philosophy of religion text).

Foundations

Two Versions of the Problem

• The logical problem claims God and evil are strictly contradictory.
• The evidential problem claims evil makes God's existence unlikely, not impossible.
• Most philosophers think the logical version has largely been answered.
• The evidential version remains a live and forceful debate.

Where things stand: Even many atheist philosophers grant the logical problem failed; the serious discussion now centers on the evidential version.

Source: J. L. Mackie (logical problem); William Rowe (evidential problem); Alvin Plantinga.

Foundations

Key Terms

• Moral evil — suffering caused by free creatures' choices.
• Natural evil — suffering from disease, disasters, and natural processes.
• Theodicy — an attempt to say why God might permit evil.
• Defense — a weaker claim: that God and evil are at least logically compatible.

Source: standard philosophy of religion glossaries.

Responses

The Free Will Defense

• Genuine love and goodness may require free creatures who can also choose wrong.
• A world of beings who freely love may be better than programmed compliance.
• Plantinga's version is widely credited with answering the logical problem.
• It addresses moral evil directly; natural evil needs more (next slides).

Key idea: If real freedom is a great good, permitting its misuse may be the price of a world that can truly love.

Source: A. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil.

Responses

The Soul-Making Response

• Some goods — courage, compassion, perseverance — may grow only in a world with hardship.
• On this view the world is a place for moral and spiritual development.
• A challenge-free existence might produce shallow, untested character.
• Critics ask whether the sheer amount of suffering is really needed for this.

Source: John Hick, Evil and the God of Love.

Responses

Natural Evil — the Harder Half

• Disasters and disease are harder to tie to free choices.
• Responses include a stable, law-governed world (needed for free action) and creaturely freedom.
• Some appeal to a fallen creation; others to the conditions life itself requires.
• This is widely seen as the tougher part of the problem.

Honest note: Pinning all natural evil on human choices is strained; thoughtful theists treat natural evil as the harder case, not a solved one.

Source: M. Peterson et al., Reason & Religious Belief; discussion in R. Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil.

The Hard Case

The Evidential Problem at Full Strength

• Rowe points to seemingly pointless suffering — e.g. an animal dying unseen in a forest fire.
• If we can't see a reason, perhaps there is none — making God less likely.
• This is the objection's strongest form, and it deserves a real answer.
• The replies turn on whether our not seeing a reason shows there is none.

The crux: Does “we can't see a good reason for this suffering” show there isn't one? That question drives the whole debate.

Source: William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.”

Responses

The “Skeptical Theism” Reply

• We may not be positioned to see all the goods a reason might secure.
• A limited mind failing to spot God's reasons isn't strong evidence none exist.
• Compare a child who can't see why a painful surgery is good.
• Critics worry this reply, pushed too far, could erode ordinary moral knowledge.

Source: S. Wykstra; M. Bergmann (skeptical theism), with critics noted fairly.

Responses

Suffering and Meaning

• Beyond logic, people ask how to live through suffering, not only how to explain it.
• Many traditions answer with solidarity: God enters and shares human suffering.
• In Christianity, the cross is read as God-with-us in pain, not aloof from it.
• This addresses the lived problem even where the intellectual one stays hard.

Key idea: There are two problems here — the philosophical puzzle and the lived ache — and they need different kinds of answers.

Source: M. M. Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God.

Worth Noting

A Cost on the Other Side

• Some argue that calling things genuinely “evil” assumes a real standard of good.
• They ask what grounds that standard if there is no God.
• Atheist thinkers offer answers (e.g. secular accounts of ethics), and the debate continues.
• So the problem of evil connects to larger questions about morality's foundation.

Careful: This is a real argument, not a gotcha — atheists have serious replies. It shows the issue cuts in more than one direction.

Source: contemporary metaethics and philosophy of religion discussions.

Honest Limits

What the Responses Claim

• No response claims to detail God's reason for each particular evil.
• The aim is to show belief in God can be reasonable in the face of evil — not to explain it all away.
• Sincere people weigh the same evidence and reach different conclusions.
• Intellectual honesty means owning what remains genuinely hard.

Key idea: The goal is reasonableness, not a tidy explanation of every tragedy — and the difficulty is real.

Source: M. Peterson et al., Reason & Religious Belief.

Conclusion

The Big Takeaway

• The logical problem is widely judged answered; the evidential problem remains forceful.
• Free will, soul-making, and skeptical theism are the main lines of response.
• Natural evil and pointless-seeming suffering are the hardest pieces.
• A fair verdict: a serious objection met with serious, if incomplete, answers.

In one line: Belief in God can be reasonable in the face of evil — but the problem stays genuinely weighty.

Source: Plantinga; Hick; Rowe; Adams; Peterson et al.