Theodicy

Based on Wikipedia: Theodicy

If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does a child get cancer? Why do earthquakes swallow cities? Why does cruelty flourish while kindness goes unrewarded? This question has haunted humanity for millennia, and it has a name: the problem of evil.

The attempt to answer it also has a name. Theodicy—from the Greek words for "god" and "justice"—means, quite literally, putting God on trial.

The Puzzle That Won't Go Away

Here's the logical trap that makes theodicy so difficult. Most believers in a single, supreme God hold three things to be true simultaneously: God is all-powerful (omnipotent), God is perfectly good (omnibenevolent), and evil exists in the world. The problem is that these three claims seem to contradict each other.

If God is all-powerful, he could eliminate evil. If God is perfectly good, he would want to eliminate evil. Yet evil persists. Something doesn't add up.

Philosophers distinguish between two different approaches to this puzzle. A "defense" merely tries to show that God and evil can logically coexist—that there's no outright contradiction. A theodicy goes further. It doesn't just say the contradiction is apparent rather than real; it offers a positive explanation for why a good God would permit evil to exist.

Think of it this way: a defense is like a lawyer arguing "my client could be innocent." A theodicy is like that lawyer explaining exactly where the client was and what he was doing at the time of the crime.

Leibniz Names the Problem

The word "theodicy" was coined in 1710 by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician who also invented calculus (simultaneously with Isaac Newton, sparking one of history's bitterest intellectual feuds). Leibniz published a book with the delightfully long title Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil.

Leibniz was responding to a challenge from Pierre Bayle, a skeptical French philosopher who had argued that reason simply cannot solve the problem of evil. Bayle's position was essentially: look, the Bible says God exists and evil exists, so we just have to accept the contradiction and move on. Leibniz refused to accept this intellectual surrender.

His solution? This is "the best of all possible worlds." Not the best imaginable world—that would be heaven—but the best world that could actually exist with the laws of nature and free will intact. Evil, in this view, is the unavoidable cost of creating something genuinely good. Voltaire would later savage this idea in Candide, with the absurdly optimistic Dr. Pangloss insisting everything is for the best while disasters pile up around him.

But Leibniz's term stuck. After his book, philosophers started calling their own attempts to justify God's ways "theodicies," and an entire branch of philosophical theology was born.

What Exactly Is Evil?

Before you can explain why God permits evil, you need to know what evil actually is. This turns out to be surprisingly complicated.

The oldest Christian and Neoplatonist answer is that evil isn't really a thing at all. It's an absence—a hole in the fabric of goodness, like darkness is the absence of light or cold is the absence of heat. Saint Augustine, the enormously influential fifth-century theologian, held this view. So did Thomas Aquinas, the medieval philosopher whose work became the intellectual foundation of Catholic theology. Aquinas wrote that "a man is called bad insofar as he lacks a virtue, and an eye is called bad insofar as it lacks the power of sight."

This might sound like philosophical hair-splitting, but it has real implications. If evil is merely the absence of good—a privation, in the technical language—then God never created evil. He created only good things, and evil arises when those things fall short of their proper nature.

Other thinkers define evil by its effects. The Marxist tradition, drawing on the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, focuses on the harm that evil causes. The philosopher John Kekes argues that evil must involve "actual harm that interferes with the functioning of a person as a full-fledged agent." Hindu philosophy takes this further, teaching that the evils people suffer in this life are effects of wrongs committed in previous lives—a cosmic accounting system of cause and consequence.

Then there's Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher who revolutionized Western thought. Kant offered the first purely secular theory of evil, locating its source not in effects but in intention—specifically, in having a will that is not fully good. This focus on inner motivation rather than outer consequences would profoundly influence later thinkers like Hannah Arendt, who used Kant's concept of "radical evil" to grapple with the Holocaust.

Two Kinds of Evil

Philosophers typically divide evil into two categories, and understanding this distinction is crucial for theodicy.

Moral evil results from the choices of beings with free will. Murder, theft, cruelty, deception—these are moral evils because someone chose to do them. A person could have acted otherwise but didn't.

Natural evil, by contrast, has no moral agent behind it. Earthquakes, diseases, hurricanes, droughts—these cause immense suffering, but no one chose for them to happen. The tsunami doesn't intend to drown anyone; the cancer cell has no malice.

This distinction matters because different theodicies work better for different types of evil. Explaining moral evil is relatively straightforward: God gave humans free will, and free will makes moral evil possible. You can't have creatures capable of genuine love and virtue if they can't also choose hatred and vice. Explaining natural evil is harder. Why would a good God design a world with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, tectonic plates that crush cities, and genetic mutations that cause childhood leukemia?

The Ancient World's Approach

The problem of evil isn't new. Scholars have found theodicy-like discussions in texts from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, dating to roughly 2000 to 1700 B.C.E. Ancient Mesopotamian literature wrestled with similar questions.

But polytheistic cultures had an easier time with the problem. If you believe in many gods, each with distinct personalities and domains, you don't need to explain why the divine allows evil. Some gods are simply inclined toward mischief or malice. If your crops failed, perhaps you had offended the fertility goddess. If your ship sank, the sea god was angry. The good gods could be petitioned for help against the bad ones. No single deity bore responsibility for everything.

This changed with monotheism. When you believe in one God who created everything and controls everything, you can no longer blame evil on rival deities. The buck stops with the Almighty.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus, around 300 B.C.E., formulated what's now called the Epicurean paradox, though we know of it primarily through the Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing in 1779. The argument runs like this: Is God willing to prevent evil but unable? Then he's not omnipotent. Is he able but unwilling? Then he's not good. Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?

It's a devastatingly simple argument, and every theodicy is essentially an attempt to escape its logic.

The Augustinian Solution

For over a thousand years, Western Christianity was dominated by what scholars call the Augustinian theodicy, named after Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine's approach has several components. First, as mentioned, evil is a privation—an absence of good rather than a created thing. Second, evil entered the world through the misuse of free will. God created angels and humans with the freedom to choose, and some of them (starting with Lucifer, then Adam and Eve) chose wrongly. Third, the suffering we see in the world is a just punishment for original sin—the cosmic consequences of humanity's first disobedience rippling through all of creation.

This theodicy places the blame squarely on creatures rather than the Creator. God made everything good; we ruined it. Natural evils like disease and death are part of the curse that followed the Fall.

The Augustinian view has enormous explanatory power within its framework, but it faces serious challenges. Modern science makes the literal Fall narrative difficult to maintain. Evolution tells us that death, predation, and suffering existed for billions of years before humans appeared. Genetic evidence suggests humanity never descended from a single pair. And even if we accept the Fall, is it just for billions of people to suffer for the sin of two ancestors they never met?

The Irenaean Alternative

A different approach comes from Irenaeus, a second-century Church Father from the Eastern Christian tradition. The British philosopher John Hick revived and developed this "Irenaean theodicy" in his influential 1966 book Evil and the God of Love.

Where Augustine sees humans as created perfect and then fallen, Irenaeus sees humans as created immature and meant to grow. In this view, God didn't make us morally complete; he made us with the potential for moral and spiritual development. And that development requires struggle.

Think of it this way: you can't develop courage without facing danger, or compassion without encountering suffering, or perseverance without meeting obstacles. A world without evil would be a world without the possibility of genuine moral growth. It would be like trying to build muscles without any resistance, or developing wisdom without any difficult decisions to make.

The philosopher Richard Swinburne, a contemporary defender of this approach, writes that "the good of individual humans consists in their having free will, the ability to develop character, to show courage and loyalty, to love, to be of use, to contemplate beauty and discover truth. All that good cannot be achieved without suffering along the way."

This theodicy has the advantage of not requiring a literal Fall. It's compatible with evolution—indeed, the whole sweep of life developing from simple to complex forms fits naturally into a picture of creation-in-progress. But it faces its own challenges. Is the suffering we see proportionate to the growth it enables? Does childhood leukemia really build character? And what about those who die before they have any chance to develop?

Free Will and Its Price

Almost every theodicy involves free will in some way. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga developed what's called the "free will defense," arguing that a world with free creatures who sometimes choose evil is more valuable than a world of robots programmed to always do good.

But Raymond Smullyan, the mathematician and philosopher, pushed this further in a fascinating 1977 dialogue called "Is God a Taoist?" Smullyan argued that it's not just that God chose to create free beings; it's that free will is logically inseparable from sentience itself. You can't have a being capable of feeling, truly feeling, without giving that being some form of choice. And choice makes evil possible, just as necessarily as Euclidean triangles have angles adding up to 180 degrees.

In other words, even God cannot create sentient beings incapable of evil. It's not a limitation on God's power; it's a logical impossibility, like creating a married bachelor or a square circle. The capacity for evil is built into the very structure of consciousness.

The Mystery Remains

No theodicy has achieved universal acceptance, and many thoughtful believers have concluded that the problem of evil has no fully satisfying rational solution. The Book of Job, often considered the Hebrew Bible's most sustained meditation on suffering, doesn't really offer an explanation. When Job demands to know why he, a righteous man, has lost everything, God's response is essentially: who are you to question the architect of the cosmos? The answer isn't an argument but an overwhelming display of divine power and mystery.

Some thinkers find this unsatisfying—a refusal to engage with the question. Others find it profound—an acknowledgment that finite minds cannot fully grasp infinite purposes.

The theologian Andrew Loke suggests that theodicies might serve a therapeutic purpose for some people, offering hope that evils can ultimately be defeated or redeemed. But he's careful to note that their main purpose is providing intellectually sound arguments, not psychological comfort. Cold comfort, perhaps, but honest.

Beyond Theodicy

There are related concepts worth knowing. A "cosmodicy" attempts to justify the fundamental goodness of the universe itself, apart from any divine creator. An "anthropodicy" tries to justify human nature—to explain why beings capable of such evil are nonetheless worthwhile or even noble.

And there's an opposite response to the problem of evil: to conclude that no satisfactory theodicy exists, and therefore no such God exists. The problem of evil is probably the most powerful intellectual argument for atheism. Many have found that when they genuinely try to imagine a good God permitting Auschwitz, or the Black Death, or the slow death of a child from bone cancer, their belief collapses under the weight of the imagining.

But belief persists. For many, the existence of goodness is as mysterious as the existence of evil—perhaps more so. If the universe is ultimately meaningless, where does our sense of meaning come from? If morality is an illusion, why does cruelty feel so wrong? The argument from evil cuts both ways: it challenges theism, but it also challenges any worldview that denies moral reality.

The Question That Defines Us

Theodicy is more than an abstract philosophical puzzle. How we answer the question of evil shapes how we live.

If evil is merely the absence of good, we should focus on building up the good rather than fighting the bad. If evil results from free will, we should cherish freedom even when it's abused. If suffering enables growth, we should look for meaning in our struggles rather than simply trying to escape them. If evil is ultimately mysterious, we should hold our answers humbly and leave room for faith.

And if no theodicy works—if God and evil truly cannot be reconciled—then either God or evil must go. That choice, too, shapes a life.

The problem of evil refuses to stay in philosophy seminars. It breaks into hospital rooms and war zones, into courtrooms and funerals. It's the question every grieving person asks and every tyrant ignores. It's as old as human consciousness and as fresh as today's headlines.

Theodicy is humanity's attempt to answer it—or at least to keep faith while living with the question.