God vs. the Problem of Evil
10/08/25
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A WEATHERED ANGEL STATUE, IMAGE: YAO HU
The issue of the problem of evil is undoubtedly the ultimate hurdle to any belief in the Christian God. When the central tenet of your belief system is that your God loves you very much, so much so that He sent His only son down to be crucified for you, what are you supposed to think when confronted with the endless suffering in the world? It doesn’t make sense. Earthquakes kill thousands, children die of cancer, and innocent people are subjected to unthinkable cruelty. Where is God in all of this? If He is truly all-loving and all-powerful, why doesn’t He stop it? These questions lie at the heart of the problem of evil, a dilemma that continues to trouble theologians, philosophers, and believers alike.
One popular defence of God in the face of this accusation of extreme, existential cruelty is the soul-making theodicy. This argues that suffering exists to help us grow morally and spiritually, which requires us to confront real moral choices; character can’t be given straight out of the box. Life becomes a test, full of challenges and obstacles to push us to grow. This idea goes back to theologians such as Irenaeus, who believed humans were made imperfect to grow into God’s likeness, rather than directly inheriting said likeness. John Hick takes this further through his ‘epistemic distance’, arguing that the Fall of Man separated us spiritually from God and that we can only return to Him through this process of ‘soul-making’. Hick even flirts with universalism, arguing eventually everyone will be reconciled with God, however long it takes (yes, that includes Hitler, before you ask).
One issue with this that apologists frequently make, one that perturbs me to no end, is their tendency to blur the lines between Natural Evil and Moral Evil. Natural Evil is suffering caused by nature: earthquakes, disease, etc. Moral Evil, on the other hand, is suffering caused by human action: murder, theft, etc. The soul-making argument tries to use free will to explain both, but that only really makes sense in the case of Moral Evil. A lion mauling a gazelle doesn’t have free will. A three-year-old dying of leukaemia didn’t choose anything. Furthermore, that three-year-old never had time to grow his soul. What was the point of his suffering? People often say it was a lesson for the parents, a way to help their souls grow. But isn’t that so much worse? Does that not seem entirely unnecessary and needlessly cruel? Who is growing from this? It feels like utter intellectual gymnastics.
The problems of universalism aside, the soul-making theodicy is by no means a perfect defence. For one, the sheer intensity and apparent randomness of suffering in the world appears often more destructive than constructive. Not all pain builds character. Whenever I hear this argument, I just think, “Well, I’d like to see you explain to a mother who’s just lost her son that now she’ll appreciate the good times more”. It’s a deeply privileged argument, often made by those who haven’t experienced such loss. Also, one has to consider why God would set the whole system up like this in the first place. It seems rather cruel.
CREATION OF ADAM, IMAGE: MICHELANGELO
Stephen Fry put it perfectly in an interview with Gay Byrne. When asked what he would say to God upon entering heaven, Fry replied, “Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right, it’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?” This resulted in the head of the Irish Presbyterian Church, Ian McNie, accusing him of being ‘spiritually blind’. But this begs the question: what does McNie see spiritually, if Fry’s display of basic human empathy counts as ignorance? This is a vision of morality that I certainly wouldn’t want to share.
Some argue that suffering is simply a ‘privatio boni’ or privation of good. Very much the argument along the lines of ‘you can’t appreciate the good without experiencing the bad’, which seems as trite as it is inappropriate given the scale of suffering we witness. Moreover, if God is omnipotent, why couldn't He create a world where goodness exists without the necessity of evil? J.L. Mackie challenged the free will defence by questioning why an all-powerful God would choose to create a world where good and evil are not mutually exclusive. He argues that it's logically possible for God to create beings with free will who always choose good, thus eliminating the need for evil altogether.
In a sort of antithesis to this thinking, St. Augustine once famously declared that “all evil is either sin or punishment for sin”. Placing the origin of evil and suffering at The Fall of Man in Genesis, he concluded that as we fell away from God, we fell away from his goodness and his light, resulting in this privation of goodness that we mistake for evil. The issue with this is that it explains away Moral Evil through sin (fair enough), and Natural Evil through… sin? Or ‘satanic energies’, it’s not exactly clear. Why should animals have to pay the price for human wrongdoing? Plantinga tries to rectify this, though arguably not satisfactorily. Plantinga argues that evil exists in the world as a byproduct of God giving us free will (a problematic statement in and of itself). Yet, he provides two options for explaining Natural Evil: it is either the result of the free will of Satan, or the result of Adam & Eve letting evil into the world as a result of the Fall.
I hope I don’t need to even bother refuting why the former explanation is insane, considering, as of writing this, Alvin Plantinga is alive in this century. As for the latter, the idea that the Fall corrupted the world with Natural Evil is inherited from Augustine, and thus has a very medieval feel to it. Dawkins actually devotes some time to this as an issue with Christian theology as a whole in The God Delusion, writing that the idea of human sacrifice to cleanse inherited sin is barbaric and reflects ancient ideas of how the world worked, but that’s neither here nor there.
A CROSS ATOP A CHURCH, IMAGE: ERIC MCLEAN
William Rowe scored perhaps the ultimate goal against God with his ‘burning fawn’ analogy. His argument, which sits at the heart of the evidential problem of evil, doesn’t say that God and evil are logically incompatible, just that certain types of suffering make His existence wildly improbable. The idea is that if there’s a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then we shouldn’t expect to see instances of gratuitous suffering (that serves no good and could have been prevented without causing something worse). Yet, Rowe points out that the world is full of precisely this.
His analogy goes as follows: a fawn is caught in a forest fire started by lightning. It is trapped by a branch, lying there horribly burned, in agony for days before eventually dying. It is alone, no one witnesses its death, yet it happens all the same. What possible purpose could this serve? Why would God ordain such a thing? What was the reason? Rowe’s ‘noseeum inference’ argues that if we can’t see a reason, that is probably because there isn’t one.
The theist counter to this goes by the name ‘sceptical theism’, essentially arguing that ‘God works in mysterious ways, and just because you can’t think of a reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one. You’re not God. Bog off’. This is a slippery slope into moral paralysis, though, as if we say we’re too cognitively limited to understand why God allows a child to die in agony, then how can we make any moral judgment at all? Suppose literally any suffering might have some secret divine justification. In that case, we lose our ability to call anything evil, even torture or genocide, because who knows, maybe it’s all part of some higher plan. And speaking of genocide: if you take sceptical theism seriously, you’re forced to consider that even God’s command to annihilate the Canaanites in Deuteronomy 20:16-17: “Do not let anything that breathes remain alive”, might somehow be an act of benevolence. Rough.
Paul Draper goes even further, arguing that random suffering makes way more sense under his hypothesis of indifference, that the universe just does not care. If the world seems indifferent to human suffering, maybe that’s because it is. David Hume argued that, based on the empirical evidence we currently have, there is no reason to believe in God, as we only have evidence against His existence. Frankly, Draper’s hypothesis of indifference explanation fits the evidence a lot better than a loving God who burns fawns alive in the woods.
Ultimately, the question of evil still does not have a satisfactory answer from the theists. If God exists, and is truly good and all-powerful, then the scale of and nature of suffering in the world doesn’t make sense. The explanations offered, from soul-making to the Fall to the ineffability of a mischievous, hidden demiurge figure, simply do not hold up to the light of scrutiny. I honestly think no one and nothing apart from absolute, indifferent randomness can explain the extent of suffering in our world, for any attempt to anthropomorphise it or map a plan onto it makes you sound like a deranged, out-of-touch sociopath.
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