Problem of evil

Based on Wikipedia: Problem of evil

The Question That Has Haunted Philosophers for Millennia

Here's a puzzle that has kept humanity's greatest thinkers awake at night: If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, why does a child get cancer? Why do tsunamis kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people? Why does suffering exist at all?

This is the problem of evil. And it might be the most devastating argument against the existence of God ever conceived.

The question isn't new. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, writing in the third century before the common era, put it with devastating simplicity: Is God willing to prevent evil but unable? Then he's not all-powerful. Is he able but unwilling? Then he's malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?

Twenty-three centuries later, we still don't have a universally satisfying answer.

What We Mean When We Talk About Evil

Before diving deeper, we need to get our terms straight. When philosophers discuss the problem of evil, they're using "evil" in a broader sense than you might expect. They don't just mean serial killers and genocides. They mean any bad state of affairs: a broken leg, a failed crop, a painful disease, loneliness, fear. The technical term encompasses wrongful actions, character flaws, and natural disasters alike.

Philosophers typically divide evil into two categories.

Moral evil comes from human choices. Murder. Theft. Cruelty. These evils arise because someone decided to harm another person.

Natural evil comes from the world itself, independent of human decisions. Earthquakes. Diseases. The suffering animals experience in the wild. A lion tearing apart a gazelle isn't making a moral choice, but the gazelle's terror and pain are undeniably real.

Both types pose problems for belief in a benevolent creator. But they require different explanations, which is part of what makes the problem so tricky.

The God Under Discussion

The problem of evil specifically targets a particular kind of deity, one with three essential characteristics. Understanding these matters because weakening any single attribute can dissolve the problem entirely.

Omniscience means God knows everything. More precisely, contemporary philosophers describe it as "maximal knowledge," meaning God knows everything that can be known. This distinction matters. Some theologians argue that the future choices of free beings cannot be known even by God, because those choices don't exist yet. This view, called freewill theism, offers one potential escape route from the problem.

Omnipotence means God can do anything. But again, philosophers are careful here. Most agree that omnipotence means the power to do anything logically possible. God cannot create a square circle or make two plus two equal five, not because of any limitation, but because these are meaningless combinations of words. Similarly, many argue God cannot force a genuinely free being to make a particular choice, because a forced choice isn't free.

Omnibenevolence means God is perfectly good and loving. If God exists and cares about creatures, surely God would want to prevent their suffering, just as any loving parent wants to prevent their child's pain.

The problem emerges from combining all three. A being who knows all suffering, can prevent all suffering, and wants to prevent all suffering seemingly cannot coexist with a world full of suffering. And yet, the world is full of suffering.

Two Versions of the Problem

Philosophers distinguish between the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil. The difference matters enormously.

The logical version claims that God and evil cannot possibly coexist. It's a strict logical impossibility, like a married bachelor. If you can demonstrate a genuine contradiction, the argument is ironclad. This version dominated philosophical discussion for centuries.

Here's the argument in its starkest form:

Premise one: If an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God exists, then evil does not exist.

Premise two: Evil exists.

Conclusion: Therefore, such a God does not exist.

The logic itself is valid. If the premises are true, the conclusion follows necessarily. So everything hinges on whether premise one is actually true. Must a perfect God eliminate all evil? Or could there be good reasons for allowing some evil to exist?

Most contemporary philosophers, including many atheists, now agree that the logical problem has been solved. The American philosopher Alvin Plantinga demonstrated that premise one isn't necessarily true. Perhaps God permits evil because it's the unavoidable price of free will. Perhaps preventing all evil would require eliminating human freedom entirely. We don't have to prove this is actually the case. We just have to show it's possibly the case, that there's no logical contradiction in God having morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil.

The evidential version is trickier. It doesn't claim that God and evil are logically incompatible. Instead, it argues that the amount and distribution of evil in our world makes God's existence improbable. Sure, God might have reasons for allowing some evil. But does God have reasons for allowing this much evil? For allowing children to die of bone cancer? For allowing centuries of animal suffering before humans even existed?

This version remains hotly debated among philosophers today.

The Free Will Defense

The most influential response to the problem of evil focuses on human freedom. The argument goes like this: A world with genuinely free creatures who can choose between good and evil is more valuable than a world of moral robots who can only do good because they're programmed to. God, being wise, created the more valuable world. Unfortunately, free creatures sometimes choose evil. That's the price of freedom.

Think about what the alternative would mean. Imagine a world where you physically cannot lie, where the words simply won't form in your mouth if they're false. Where you cannot strike another person because your arm freezes mid-swing. Where cruel thoughts are impossible because your brain is structured to prevent them.

Would the good actions in such a world be morally praiseworthy? If you help an old woman across the street because you literally cannot do otherwise, have you done something virtuous? Most people intuit that genuine moral goodness requires the possibility of its opposite. A universe of forced goodness wouldn't really be good at all.

This defense has real power against the logical problem of evil. It shows that God and moral evil can coexist without contradiction.

But it faces serious challenges.

First, what about natural evil? Earthquakes aren't caused by human free will. Neither is childhood leukemia. The free will defense at best explains moral evil; it says nothing about why the natural world contains so much suffering.

Second, does free will really require such horrendous possibilities? God could have created humans with freedom while limiting the scope of evil we can inflict. We cannot fly by flapping our arms; that limitation on our physical freedom doesn't seem to diminish our moral agency. Why couldn't God have made murder or torture similarly impossible while preserving meaningful choice in other domains?

Third, what about heaven? Christians traditionally believe heaven is a place of perfect goodness where no one sins. If free will can coexist with guaranteed good behavior in heaven, why couldn't it work the same way on Earth?

Soul-Making and the Value of Suffering

Another major response comes from the second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyon, developed in the twentieth century by the philosopher John Hick. This view treats the world as a "soul-making" environment designed to develop human character.

The core insight is that certain virtues cannot exist without the possibility of suffering. You cannot develop courage without facing danger. You cannot develop compassion without witnessing pain. You cannot develop perseverance without enduring hardship. A world designed purely for comfort would produce morally shallow creatures.

Imagine raising a child in a perfectly controlled environment where nothing ever goes wrong, where every desire is instantly satisfied, where no challenge is ever faced. Most parents intuitively recognize this would produce a stunted human being. Struggle, within limits, builds character.

Perhaps God, as the ultimate parent, designed a world where spiritual growth requires grappling with adversity.

This theodicy, a justification of God's ways, has appealing elements. It fits with common human experience that suffering often catalyzes growth. Many people report that their most painful experiences were also their most formative.

But the theodicy faces devastating objections.

What about suffering that doesn't build character? What about a baby who dies before developing any moral capacities? What about suffering so extreme it destroys rather than develops the sufferer? What about animal suffering, which cannot possibly serve soul-making purposes for the animals themselves?

The distribution of suffering also seems deeply unfair. Why should one person endure horrific abuse while another lives in comfort? If suffering is supposed to develop virtue, shouldn't it be distributed according to each soul's needs rather than falling randomly on the innocent and guilty alike?

The Greater Good

Many responses to the problem of evil appeal to unknown greater goods. Perhaps every evil, no matter how terrible, is necessary for some greater good that we cannot perceive from our limited human perspective. God, seeing all of history at once, permits suffering because it ultimately leads to outcomes that outweigh the suffering involved.

Consider a parent taking a screaming child to the doctor for a painful vaccination. From the child's perspective, this is inexplicable cruelty. The parent is allowing, even causing, pain. But the parent sees what the child cannot: the future illness that will be prevented, the life that will be protected. The short-term suffering serves a long-term good invisible to the sufferer.

Perhaps our relationship to God is similar. We see isolated evils and cannot understand why they're permitted. But God, with infinite knowledge and an eternal perspective, sees how each evil connects to goods we cannot imagine.

This response is sometimes called "skeptical theism" because it emphasizes the limits of human knowledge. We cannot see all the consequences of events. We cannot evaluate cosmic trade-offs. Our moral intuitions, shaped by limited experience, may not apply at the divine scale.

The response is logically powerful. It's very hard to prove that no possible good could justify any particular evil. We can always be told we're not seeing the full picture.

But this power is also its weakness. If we cannot trust our moral intuitions about obvious cases of unjustified suffering, what can we trust? The same skepticism that blocks the problem of evil also seems to block any moral knowledge whatsoever. If the torture of children might be justified by goods we cannot perceive, then moral reasoning becomes impossible.

When Animals Suffer

Charles Darwin struggled with the problem of evil throughout his life, and he posed a version that remains particularly difficult: the suffering of animals.

In a letter from 1856, Darwin wrote: "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!" Later, in his autobiography, he expanded on this thought, finding that he could not reconcile the suffering of millions of animals throughout evolutionary history with belief in a benevolent creator.

The animal suffering problem cuts against most standard theodicies.

Free will? Animals suffer through no fault of human choice. Lions killing gazelles predates humanity by millions of years.

Soul-making? Animals don't develop moral virtue through suffering. A rabbit killed by a hawk doesn't become a better rabbit.

Punishment for sin? Animals are incapable of sin. They're morally innocent by definition.

Greater goods? What possible good requires hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering before any human even existed to benefit from it?

Philosopher Michael Almeida called this "perhaps the most serious and difficult" version of the problem of evil. The sheer scale is staggering. Every day, billions of animals experience fear, pain, hunger, and violent death. This has been happening for approximately five hundred million years, since animals first evolved the capacity to suffer. The total quantity of animal suffering in Earth's history is literally incomprehensible.

If God designed this system, what does that say about God?

A Problem Beyond God

Interestingly, the problem of evil doesn't completely disappear even if you give up belief in God. The philosopher Peter Kivy argues there's a secular problem of evil: how can we make sense of human beings deliberately hurting other human beings for no reason?

We all agree, except perhaps the most extreme moral skeptics, that causing unnecessary suffering is wrong. Yet humans do it constantly. Not just when they might gain something from cruelty, but sometimes purely for the sake of cruelty itself. Torture, sadism, malicious pleasure in others' pain: these exist, and their existence is philosophically puzzling.

The psychological egoist, who believes all human action is ultimately self-interested, cannot explain genuine sadism. If people only act for their own benefit, why would anyone harm another with nothing to gain?

The pluralist, who acknowledges multiple human motivations including genuine malevolence, can acknowledge that cruelty exists but cannot explain why it exists. Where does the impulse to hurt for hurting's sake come from? Evolution seems to have no use for it. Reason certainly doesn't recommend it.

Various secular thinkers have tried to explain evil without reference to God. Michel de Montaigne and Voltaire suggested that human vices like cruelty and selfishness, while unfortunate, somehow serve the common good of society. Bernard de Mandeville went further, arguing that vices like greed and envy, properly regulated, are actually the engines of civilization, the forces that drive productivity and progress.

Sigmund Freud offered a different view. He saw humans as containing unconscious destructive drives that must be managed by civilization but can never be eliminated. We're not naturally good creatures who sometimes go wrong. We're naturally ambivalent creatures, containing both constructive and destructive impulses from the start.

None of these explanations is fully satisfying. The secular problem of evil remains, even in a godless universe.

Living with the Question

Philosophers distinguish between the theoretical problem of evil and the experiential problem. The theoretical problem is what we've been discussing: an intellectual puzzle about the compatibility of God and suffering. But the experiential problem is more personal and more urgent. It's what happens when you stand at your child's grave. When you watch a loved one waste away from disease. When you see footage of atrocities and wonder how human beings could do such things.

Intellectual arguments rarely touch experiential suffering. Telling a grieving parent about free will or soul-making rarely brings comfort. The experiential problem isn't really a philosophical puzzle at all. It's a crisis of meaning, a shattering of the assumption that the world makes sense and that life is fundamentally good.

Perhaps this is why the problem of evil has such enduring power. It's not just an argument against theism. It's an expression of humanity's deepest wound: our inability to reconcile our longing for a meaningful universe with the brute reality of suffering.

The Buddhist tradition, which predates much Western philosophy on this topic, addresses the problem directly. In the ancient Pali texts, the Buddha pointed out that if a god created sentient beings who experience such pain and suffering, that god would likely be evil. The Buddhist response isn't to defend God but to diagnose suffering itself, to understand its causes and to seek its cessation. The problem of evil becomes not a puzzle to solve but a condition to transcend.

For many thoughtful people throughout history, the problem of evil has been the primary obstacle to religious belief. It was the problem that haunted Darwin. It's the problem that animates much modern atheism. And it's a problem that believers continue to wrestle with, sometimes finding their faith deepened by the struggle, sometimes finding it shattered.

Whether God exists or not, suffering is real. That much everyone agrees on. What we do with that fact, how we make meaning from it or refuse to make meaning from it, shapes the deepest questions of human existence.

Where the Debate Stands

After two and a half millennia of philosophical discussion, where does the problem of evil stand today?

Most philosophers agree that the logical problem of evil has been adequately addressed. There's no strict logical contradiction between God's existence and the existence of evil. The free will defense and similar arguments have shown that it's at least possible for a perfect God to have morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil.

But the evidential problem remains very much alive. Even if God could have reasons for permitting evil, does God actually have reasons for permitting this particular world's evil? The amount, distribution, and types of suffering we observe still strike many philosophers as strong evidence against the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful deity.

Theists respond with various theodicies. They appeal to free will, soul-making, unknown greater goods, and the limitations of human knowledge. Some modify the traditional attributes of God, suggesting that omnipotence doesn't mean what we thought it did, or that God's goodness operates on principles different from human morality.

Atheists and skeptics remain unconvinced. They point to the scope of animal suffering, the distribution of human suffering among the innocent, the apparent gratuitousness of much evil, and the difficulty of reconciling any loving being with the world we actually observe.

Neither side has achieved a decisive victory. The problem of evil remains one of the most debated topics in philosophy of religion, as vibrant and contested today as when Epicurus first posed it in ancient Athens.

Perhaps that's appropriate. Questions this fundamental rarely get simple answers. The problem of evil touches on everything: metaphysics, ethics, theology, psychology, and the deepest questions about what kind of world we live in and what we can hope for within it. It would be strange if such a question had a tidy solution.

What we can say is that anyone who thinks seriously about God, meaning, and suffering will eventually confront this problem. How they respond, whether they adjust their theology, refine their arguments, or abandon belief altogether, says something profound about their character and their relationship with existence itself.

The question Epicurus asked still echoes across the centuries. And each generation must answer it anew.