Could God Permit Evil?

The Crucifixion at Golgotha

“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

This is the hardest question on this site, and the one page where a confident answer would be a warning sign. Most people who give up believing in God give it up here, and they do not give it up because an argument defeated them. They give it up standing in a hospital corridor.

So the page begins by conceding what has to be conceded. The suffering is real, there is an enormous amount of it, and much of it accomplishes nothing that anyone can identify. A fawn burns to death in a forest fire that nobody witnesses. A five-year-old girl is murdered by her mother’s boyfriend, and no good comes of it, and she is not improved by it, and she is dead. Any reply that hurries past these facts has changed the subject.

What is disputed is narrower than it first appears. Hume’s dilemma above states the objection in its logical form — the claim that God and evil are flatly contradictory — and in that form it has been abandoned by the philosophers who pressed it, which is worth knowing but settles very little. The argument that survives is about probability, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a reassuring one.

A theodicy is an attempt to say why a good God might permit evil. This page offers several partial answers and says plainly where each of them stops, because partial answers stacked on top of one another do not add up to a whole one. What Christianity finally offers is not an explanation at all, and that is the point of it.

Let’s take the objection at its full weight, and ask … If no reason we can think of would justify a particular horror, does it follow that there is no reason — or only that we could not have seen one? And if the tears of one tortured child cannot be paid for by any future harmony, is there anything a God could do about it except come and suffer too?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

The argument from evil is the one objection to belief in God that does not depend on philosophy for its force. It can be stated by anyone who has stood in a children’s ward, and skeptics observe that it is the objection over which people most often actually leave religion, whatever reasons they give afterward.

The oldest form is a dilemma. If God wants to prevent suffering and cannot, He is not omnipotent. If He can and will not, He is not good. The believer claims both, and the world contains cancer wards and famines and the whole history of what people have done to one another. Something in the set, the argument runs, has to go.1

The strict version claims a contradiction. J. L. Mackie argued in 1955 that a good being eliminates evil as far as it can, that an omnipotent being can do anything, and that the two together entail a world without evil. Since the world plainly has evil in it, the God described by classical theism does not exist.2

The version that survives is about evidence, not contradiction. Most philosophers now press the case in probabilistic form, and its most careful statement is William Rowe’s. There exist instances of intense suffering that an omnipotent and perfectly good being could have prevented without losing any greater good or permitting anything equally bad. Such a being would prevent any suffering it could, unless prevention cost it a greater good. Therefore no such being exists.3

Rowe does not claim to prove the first premise. He claims only that our experience of the world makes it reasonable to believe, in the way that a great many well-founded beliefs are reasonable without being demonstrable.

The examples are chosen to defeat the usual replies. A fawn is trapped in a forest fire, badly burned, and lies in pain for several days before it dies. No human freedom is involved, no observer is edified, and no one ever learns of it. Rowe later added a case that is not hypothetical: a five-year-old girl in Flint, Michigan, beaten, raped and strangled by her mother’s boyfriend on New Year’s Day, 1986.4

Neither case, Rowe argues, can be answered by saying that suffering builds character, since the victims did not survive to have any built.

Quantity is its own difficulty. A defender may propose that some suffering serves a purpose. But the world, the skeptic answers, does not present some suffering. It presents plagues that emptied continents, a century in which governments killed their own citizens by the tens of millions, and several hundred million years of animals eating one another alive before any human being existed to be improved by it.

And the moral objection is stronger than the statistical one. Dostoevsky gave it to Ivan Karamazov, who is not an atheist and who grants the whole scheme for the sake of argument. Suppose there is a final harmony in which every wrong is reconciled. Ivan refuses to accept it, because it is purchased with the tears of tortured children, and no future accounting can be worth that price.5

“It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

That is the objection at its full weight as the skeptic presses it. It does not deny that God exists, and it does not depend on any premise a believer would reject. It says that a world run on these terms is not one a decent person should agree to, and that an explanation, however ingenious, is the wrong kind of thing to offer.

The replies, the skeptic holds, have a poor record. Free will does not reach the fawn or the earthquake, since nobody chose either. Soul-making does not reach the infant who dies at four months. And an appeal to reasons beyond human comprehension, he argues, can be made on behalf of any deity whatever, and purchases God’s goodness by making the word unusable.6

The observed pattern fits indifference better. On the hypothesis that no one is in charge, the distribution of suffering is exactly what one would expect: falling on the innocent and the guilty alike, tracking geology and microbiology rather than desert, and heavier where medicine is scarce. Not proof, the skeptic grants — but evidence, and in his judgment it points one way.

Endnotes
  1. The dilemma is stated by Epicurus as reported by Lactantius, and given its familiar modern form by David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part X: “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent.” ↩
  2. J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64 (1955), 200–212. ↩
  3. William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979), 335–341. The three premises are paraphrased closely here; the essay for this page quotes them in full. ↩
  4. Rowe, “Evil and Theodicy,” Philosophical Topics 16 (1988), 119–132, where the two cases are labeled E1 and E2. ↩
  5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, ch. 4 (“Rebellion”), Constance Garnett translation. Ivan’s preceding sentence is that the higher harmony “is not worth the tears of that one tortured child.” ↩
  6. The objection that appeals to unknown reasons corrode ordinary moral judgment is pressed against skeptical theism by, among others, Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy, and is acknowledged as a genuine cost by several of its defenders. ↩

Christian View

This page does not solve the problem of evil, and no page does. What can be shown is narrower: that the strict version of the argument fails, that the surviving version proves less than it is taken to prove, and that Christianity says something about suffering which is not a theory and which no other account offers.

What Is Granted

The suffering is real, and it is not a shadow that makes the light visible. Children die of bone cancer. An earthquake kills tens of thousands in a night, none of them chosen. The quantity is a difficulty on its own, since a reply that accounts for some suffering has not accounted for this much of it. And a great deal of it accomplishes nothing observable, which is precisely the point of Rowe’s examples.

Christians have also made the difficulty worse. Telling a bereaved parent that God needed another angel, or that everything happens for a reason, has driven more people out of the faith than any argument ever has. Job’s comforters are preserved in Scripture as a warning, and they are still among us.

The Strict Argument Has Been Answered

Mackie’s claim was that God and evil are logically incompatible. The claim requires a hidden premise, that a good and omnipotent God could have no morally sufficient reason for permitting any evil whatever, and no one has been able to establish it. Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense showed that if such a reason is so much as possible, the alleged contradiction dissolves.1

The result should not be overstated, and believers regularly overstate it. Plantinga did not identify God’s reasons and did not offer a theodicy. He showed consistency, which is why Mackie himself later granted the point. Nobody who has watched a child die was ever troubled by a question about consistency.

How Far the Evidence Reaches

The serious argument is Rowe’s, and its weight rests on one step: from finding no good that would justify a particular horror, to concluding that there is none. Stephen Wykstra observed that such an inference works only where we could expect to detect the thing if it were present. A man with a heavy head cold who smells nothing has not established that the milk is fresh.2 This line of reply is called skeptical theism, and it is stronger than it first appears; its limits are admitted below.

So the question is whether human beings are the kind of creatures who would see the reasons of an omniscient God if there were any. Put that way, the confident answer looks odd. People routinely fail to see the point of what their own parents did until twenty years later.

This reply has a limit, and it must be stated rather than hidden. Pushed to its full extent it corrodes moral judgment generally: if we cannot tell whether a horror serves an unseen good, neither can we tell whether relieving it prevents one. A defense that rescues God’s goodness by making goodness unknowable has paid too much for the rescue. The honest position is that our failure to see a reason is real evidence and weaker evidence than it feels, which lowers the confidence Rowe’s argument carries without disposing of it.

The Fit Argument Cuts Its Own Sample

The skeptic’s third form is different from Mackie’s and Rowe’s and deserves its own answer: not that suffering disproves God, but that its pattern — tracking geology and microbiology rather than desert — fits indifference better than providence. Two replies. First, the pattern is the one Christianity itself predicts. It is the skeptic’s hypothesis, not the Christian one, that expects a world where rain checks the character of the fields it falls on: Christ said plainly that the Father makes His sun rise on the evil and the good (Matt. 5:45), and that the tower of Siloam did not fall on the worst eighteen men in Jerusalem (Luke 13:4–5). A creation of stable natural law, in which desert is settled at a judgment rather than by earthquakes, is what the doctrine describes; finding law-like suffering confirms both hypotheses equally, and evidence that fits both moves neither. Second, the fit argument weighs only the suffering. On indifference, the anomaly is everything else — that the byproducts of geology and microbiology include creatures who grieve over geology and microbiology, measure the world against a justice nothing in it taught them, and cannot stop asking this very question. Suffering distributed without desert fits both stories; mourners who mind that it is so fit only one.

Freedom Accounts for What We Do to Each Other

Most of the evil anyone actually meets is inflicted by other people. A world containing creatures who genuinely choose is a world in which they can choose wrongly, and the alternative is not a world of free creatures who always choose well but a world of creatures who cannot choose at all. Love that cannot be withheld is not love, and a God who wanted love had to make beings capable of refusing it.

The limit here is real too. The victim’s freedom was not enlarged by her attacker’s. What the argument establishes is that a world with genuine agency in it is worth the risk of agency misused, not that any particular abuse was worth what it cost. And it says nothing whatever about the fawn.

Law Accounts for a World Where Harm Is Possible

Natural evil is the harder half, and the place where defenses commonly overreach. A world of stable law is the precondition of nearly everything worth having, because agents can act only where things behave predictably. A world in which God suspended the regularities whenever they were about to hurt someone is a world in which no one could act at all, since nobody could know what anything would do.

The same tectonics that levels a city recycles carbon and keeps the planet habitable; the same cellular replication that permits growth permits cancer. These are one system seen at different moments. But the argument explains why a law-governed world contains hazards, not why this many, and the child in the collapsed building is not consoled by the carbon cycle. On natural evil the Christian answer is thinner than the Christian would like.

Suffering Makes Some People and Destroys Others

There is a long tradition of treating the world as a place where souls are made rather than kept comfortable, and it has genuine force. Courage and compassion are real goods, and neither can exist where nothing is ever wrong.3

The limit is plain and is where honest treatments stop. A great deal of suffering makes nobody better and leaves the survivors diminished, and it kills its victims before any growth is possible. That residue is exactly the suffering Rowe selected, and a theodicy claiming to have covered the whole field with this argument has stopped looking at the field.

The Objection to Theodicy Itself

A charge worth recording comes as often from believers as from atheists: that explaining from a desk what a murdered child’s suffering accomplished treats her as an instrument, and that there is something corrupt in the exercise however carefully it is conducted. The charge lands. Every general justification of suffering is offered by someone who is not the one paying, which is what Ivan Karamazov saw and why his refusal outweighs any calculation.

What Christianity Adds

Everything above could be said by any theist, and most of it has been said by philosophers with no religion at all. What Christianity adds is not a further argument but a claim about what God did.

He did not remain outside the suffering He permits. He entered it as a participant, was betrayed by a friend, tried by a court that knew better, tortured by professionals and executed in public, as one of us and not as a visitor. That explains nothing. Nothing in the Passion says why the fawn burned or why the child in Flint died.

What it does is answer one particular charge with great force: that God, if He exists, is a spectator of an agony He does not share, disposing of other people’s pain from a position of perfect safety. Whatever else is true, the sufferer who prays to the God of the Christians is not addressing someone who has never been where she is.

Dostoevsky understood this, and gave Ivan no philosophical reply. Alyosha answers him by kissing him, and the book answers him with the Passion. The tears are not explained away; they are said to have been atoned for, which is the one thing Ivan demanded and thought impossible. And the Christian hope is not that the suffering will be shown acceptable but that it will be undone, which is why the promise at the end of Scripture is not a ledger balanced but tears wiped from faces (Rev. 21:4).

Job, and an Answer That Explains Nothing

Scripture treats this question at length once, and does not do what either side expects. Job’s friends offer the standard theodicy of their day, that suffering is punishment and Job must have earned it. God condemns them for it, and vindicates Job, who had accused Him to His face.

What Job receives is not an explanation. He is never told about the wager in the prologue. He is given a tour of creation and, at the end of it, God Himself — and, as Chesterton saw, that is the answer: “The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” Two things follow: that Scripture treats the tidy answer as an offense, and that the biblical response to suffering is overwhelmingly protest rather than resignation. A third of the Psalms are complaints, and Christ died quoting one.4

A word to the reader who came here from the Watchtower pages. You were taught that suffering settles a court case: that God permits it to answer Satan’s challenge to His sovereignty, and that the verdict will be read at Armageddon. Nothing on this page depends on that account, and the difference is worth noticing. The Christian answer is not that God lets the trial run to its end for the sake of a legal point; it is that He entered the suffering Himself. Revelation 21:4, the verse you know as the promise of a paradise earth, is here a promise about a Person who wipes the tears away, and it is kept by the same hands that were pierced. And if an organization that promised you the verdict by a date has failed you, that is a fact about the organization, not about God.

The Reply in Brief

What remains is a question still open and a claim of a different kind: that the God accused of indifference submitted to the worst that the accusation describes, and that the tears Ivan refused to leave unatoned for were atoned for on a Friday afternoon outside a city wall.

This is the short answer. The full essay states Rowe’s argument in his own words, works through Wykstra and Alston on what we are in a position to see, sets out the Augustinian and Irenaean traditions against each other, takes up Job and the literature of lament, and documents everything asserted here. It is available as a Word document at the end of this page. The companion page on arguments for and against God weighs this objection against the case on the other side.

Endnotes
  1. Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), with the technical version in The Nature of Necessity (1974), ch. 9. Plantinga offers a defense rather than a theodicy: the aim is to show consistency, not to identify God’s actual reasons. Mackie’s concession is in The Miracle of Theism (1982), 154. ↩
  2. Stephen J. Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984), 73–93; and William P. Alston, “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991), 29–67. ↩
  3. The soul-making tradition is traced to Irenaeus and developed by John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (1966). C. S. Lewis puts the harder version in The Problem of Pain (1940), ch. 6; his A Grief Observed (1961), written after his wife’s death, is the necessary companion and much less confident. ↩
  4. Job 38–42, with the friends condemned at 42:7. On lament, see Psalms 6, 13, 22, 44 and 88, and the book of Lamentations; Christ quotes Psalm 22:1 from the cross (Matt. 27:46). On the Catholic teaching, Catechism of the Catholic Church §§309–314 and 324, with §385 on evil as the privation of a good. Chesterton’s sentences are from his “Introduction to the Book of Job” (1907), quoted exactly. ↩

Summary

The problem of evil is the strongest argument against belief in God, and the honest Christian answer is smaller than the question. What follows is what can be defended: not a solution, but a case that the objection is not decisive.

Concede first, and concede properly. The suffering is real and is not a shadow cast to show off the light. The quantity is a difficulty by itself, since accounting for some suffering is not accounting for this much. A great deal of it improves nobody. And the pious cruelties Christians offer the bereaved, that God needed another angel or that everything happens for a reason, have done more damage to faith than any philosopher.

The claim of outright contradiction has been given up. J. L. Mackie argued in 1955 that God and evil cannot both exist. The argument needs a hidden premise, that God could have no morally sufficient reason for permitting any evil at all, and nobody has been able to establish it. Alvin Plantinga showed that the bare possibility of such a reason dissolves the contradiction, and Mackie later granted the point. That is a modest result, and believers who treat it as a victory have misread what was won.

The surviving argument is about evidence. William Rowe put it carefully: there appear to be horrors an omnipotent and good being could have prevented at no cost, such a being would prevent what it could, so no such being exists. His examples defeat the easy replies. A fawn burns in a forest fire and dies over several days with nobody watching. A five-year-old girl in Flint, Michigan, was beaten, raped and strangled on New Year’s Day, 1986. Neither victim was improved by the experience, and neither death taught anyone anything.

The weight rests on one inference. Rowe moves from seeing no justifying reason to there being none. Stephen Wykstra pointed out that this works only where we could expect to see such a reason if it existed, and a man with a head cold who smells nothing has not shown the milk is fresh. The reply is called skeptical theism, and it has a cost that should be admitted: pressed to its limit it makes moral judgment generally unreliable. What it establishes is that our failure to see a reason is weaker evidence than it feels, which lowers Rowe’s confidence without answering him.

Freedom answers the evil we do to one another. A world of creatures who genuinely choose is one where they can choose wrongly, and love that cannot be withheld is not love. The limit is that the victim’s freedom was not enlarged by her attacker’s, and that none of it touches the fawn.

Stable law answers why harm is possible at all. Agents can act only in a world that behaves predictably, and the tectonics that levels a city is the tectonics that keeps the planet habitable. That explains hazard in general and not this much of it, and the child in the collapsed building is not consoled by the carbon cycle.

Suffering makes some people and destroys others. Courage and compassion cannot exist where nothing is ever wrong, which is true and covers part of the ground. It does not cover the infant who dies at four months, and that residue is precisely what Rowe selected.

What Christianity adds is not an argument. It is the claim that God did not stay outside the suffering He permits. He entered it, was betrayed and tortured and executed as one of us, and did so voluntarily. This explains nothing about the fawn. It answers a different charge, that God disposes of other people’s pain from perfect safety, and it answers it with an event rather than a theory. The sufferer who prays to the God of the Christians is not addressing someone who has never been where she is.

Ivan Karamazov, who grants the whole scheme and refuses it anyway, says he returns God the ticket, because a final harmony bought with the tears of tortured children is not worth the price. Dostoevsky gives him no philosophical reply, and the book answers him with the Passion. The tears are not explained away. They are said to have been atoned for, which is the one thing Ivan demanded and believed impossible.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Would a Good God Permit Evil and Suffering? (.docx) or (.pdf)

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