The Problem of Evil — Answered Honestly

The atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie argued that "God exists" and "evil exists" cannot both be true, given that God is omnipotent and wholly good — a strict logical contradiction, like a married bachelor.

Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defence (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974) is the standard reply, and it is widely regarded — including by many non-theist philosophers — as having succeeded against the logical form. The argument: a world containing creatures who freely choose good is more valuable than a world of puppets who cannot do otherwise. God cannot cause a person to freely do only good — that is a contradiction in terms. So it is possible that God could not create a world with free creatures and no moral evil. If that is even possibly true, then "God exists" and "evil exists" are not a contradiction.

The point is modest but real: the defender does not have to show the explanation is true, only that it is possible, to break a claim of strict contradiction. After Plantinga, the philosophical literature largely moved on from the logical problem. Mackie himself conceded the Free Will Defence shows "there is no explicit contradiction."

Two lines of reply, offered as possibilities rather than certainties:

A law-governed world. Free, responsible action requires a stable environment where actions have predictable consequences. A world with regular natural laws will inevitably produce situations where those laws harm someone — fire that warms also burns; tectonic activity that recycles nutrients also causes quakes. A world with no such regularities might have no natural evil, but also no science, no agency, no growth.

The reach of the fall. The Christian tradition also holds that the disorder in nature is not the world as it was meant to be — that creation is "subjected to futility" (Romans 8:20) and awaits restoration. On this view natural evil is real evil, not a design feature, and its defeat is part of what redemption means.

William Rowe's example: a fawn is trapped in a forest fire, burned, and lies in agony for days before dying, unseen by anyone. What good does that serve? If we cannot see one, isn't it reasonable to conclude there is none — and that a God who permits gratuitous evil probably does not exist?

This is the honest form of the problem. Three responses, none of them complete:

1. Skeptical theism (Stephen Wykstra). The move from "I can't see a good reason" to "there is no good reason" is only valid if we'd expect to see the reason if there were one. But if God exists, his knowledge exceeds ours the way an adult's exceeds an infant's. A child cannot see why the doctor allows the painful injection. Our failure to spot a justifying good is weak evidence there isn't one — we are not in a position to survey all the goods and connections involved.

2. Greater-good theodicies. John Hick's "soul-making" account: a world with real stakes, real loss, and real difficulty is the only kind of world in which courage, compassion, forgiveness, and perseverance can actually be formed. A pain-free world would be a world without moral depth. This explains a great deal — though, as critics rightly say, it strains at the extremes (the suffering of infants, of animals, of the person destroyed rather than refined by their pain).

3. Honest limit. No theodicy accounts for every case, and Christian philosophers like Marilyn McCord Adams and Eleonore Stump have argued that the abstract "greater good" approach is the wrong frame for horrendous evils. Their alternative is not a general formula but a personal one: that God is present in the suffering, that he redeems and restores the sufferer individually, and that the sufferer will one day judge the outcome worth it — a claim that can only be assessed from the far side.

Often "the problem of evil" is not a syllogism; it is a wound — a specific loss, and the sense that God was absent for it. Arguing with a grieving person is a category error. But there is something to say about where Christianity stands:

God is not a spectator. The central Christian claim is that God did not stay outside the suffering and issue explanations. He entered it. The cross is God, in the person of the Son, undergoing betrayal, torture, injustice, and death. Whatever else this means, it means the Christian God is not the detached deity of the philosophy problem.

Job gets no answer — he gets a presence. The one book of the Bible built entirely around undeserved suffering never gives Job the reason. God's reply is not an argument; it is his showing up. The book's verdict is that the reason was withheld and the relationship was not.

The resurrection is the claim that evil does not get the last word. Christianity does not say suffering is good, or illusory, or balanced by a ledger. It says it is real, it is an enemy, and it has been defeated in principle and will be defeated in fact — "he will wipe away every tear" (Revelation 21:4). That is a hope, not a proof. But it is a different thing from a God who has no answer.

The honest bottom line: the evidential problem of evil has real weight, and thoughtful people lose their faith over it. Christianity's response is not a theodicy that closes every gap. It is the claim that God has acted against evil at the greatest possible cost to himself, and that the story is not over.

• Does God Exist? — The Case for a Creator — the positive arguments this objection is weighed against.
• Is the Cross "Cosmic Child Abuse"? — the justice of the atonement.
• The Resurrection — the ground of the claim that evil is defeated.
• The Problem of Evil in Islam — how the same problem lands differently without the cross.