The Problem of Evil & Suffering

If God is good and all-powerful, why is there evil at all?

“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” — the very existence of evil disproves an all-good, all-powerful God.

This is the logical problem of evil, and as a strict contradiction it has largely collapsed. A good God can permit evil if He has sufficient reason — and genuine freedom is one such reason: love that cannot be refused is not love. Alvin Plantinga’s free-will defense showed the theist’s beliefs are consistent, and the atheist philosopher who pressed the argument hardest, J. L. Mackie, conceded the point.

Attributed to Epicurus; framed by David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Preserved — and its attribution disputed — via Lactantius, De Ira Dei 13.“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”

philosopher · J. L. Mackie (atheist), The Miracle of Theism, Oxford University Press 1982, p. 154“we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another.”

philosopher · William L. Rowe (atheist), “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly (1979)“granted incompatibilism, there is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God.”

Even if God could exist, isn’t there simply too much pointless suffering?

Grant that evil and God aren’t a flat contradiction. Still, the sheer scale of seemingly gratuitous suffering — a fawn burning in a forest fire no one ever sees — makes a good God wildly improbable.

This evidential form is the harder, more honest version. But it rests on a hidden claim: that we could reliably tell a truly pointless evil from one whose purpose we simply can’t see from here. With a sliver of the picture, no one can cash that claim. Job ends not with an explanation but with God answering out of the whirlwind — relocating the question from God’s competence to the narrowness of ours.

Did God create evil, then?

If God made everything, and evil is something, then God made evil — so He is its author.

Evil isn’t a thing God manufactured alongside the good. Augustine’s classic answer is that evil is a privation — the corruption or absence of a good that ought to be there, the way a wound is the absence of health, not a substance in its own right. God made a good world and good creatures free to love; evil entered as that freedom was turned against the good. God permits it; He did not create it.

church father · Augustine, Enchiridion 11 (trans. Marcus Dods, 1876)“For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? … the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance — … privations of the good which we call health.”

What about earthquakes, cancer, disasters — evil no human chose?

Free will might explain murder, but not tsunamis, birth defects, or a child’s leukemia. Nature itself is cruel, and no one chose it.

Scripture never presents the world as it now runs as the world as God made it, or as it will be. Paul writes that the whole creation “groans and travails in pain” — subjected to futility, fractured, awaiting release. Natural evil belongs to a creation gone wrong, not to the blueprint; and the Christian hope is not a soul escaping the world but a creation healed.

Doesn’t the sheer cruelty of the world disprove a good God?

A world this cruel and unjust is exactly what we’d expect if there were no good God behind it. Evil is evidence against Him.

Press on the word “unjust.” To call the world cruel or unjust is to measure it against a standard of justice — but where does that standard come from? C. S. Lewis, once an atheist, found his own argument turning in his hand: real evil presupposes real good, an objective moral law, which is far easier to ground in a Maker than in a blind universe. The problem of evil quietly assumes the very thing it is used to deny.

writer · C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book II ch. 1 (1952)“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

Even granting an answer, God seems distant — untouched by our pain.

A God in heaven, immune to suffering, demanding worship from creatures who bleed, is either monstrous or absent. Where is He when it hurts?

Here Christianity parts sharply from a detached deity. The central image of the faith is God on a cross — not immune to pain but entering it: “a man of suffering,” weeping at a friend’s grave, crying “why have you forsaken me?” The theologian John Stott said he could not believe in a God untouched by pain; the only God he could worship is the One who hung there.

theologian · John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, IVP 1986, pp. 335–336“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. … In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?”

What good could possibly come out of suffering?

Telling sufferers their pain has a purpose is a cruel platitude. Pain is just pain.

Christianity never calls evil good — but it insists God can bring good out of evil without erasing its horror. Paul says suffering can work endurance, character, and hope; Joseph tells the brothers who sold him, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Lewis called pain “God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world” — not a denial that it hurts, but a claim that even this can be turned toward our waking and our good.

writer · C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, ch. 6 (1940)“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Where is God when I am the one suffering?

Arguments are cold comfort at 3 a.m. in a hospital. If God is real and good, why does He feel most absent exactly when I need Him most?

Scripture’s answer to the sufferer is less an argument than a presence. “Yahweh is near to those who have a broken heart.” Job’s comfort was not an explanation but meeting God himself: “now my eye sees you.” And the last word is a promise — that the God who entered our pain will one day end it, and “wipe away every tear from their eyes.”