The problem of evil and suffering

An old question

The question is first heard inside the Bible. "How long, O LORD, must I call for help" (Habakkuk 1:2), asks the prophet, and Job demands an answer from God. Philosophers have sharpened it. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, through his sceptic Philo, revived the old questions of Epicurus: "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?" Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part 10 Thomas Aquinas, before arguing that God exists, set the same question down as the first objection Summa Theologiae I.2.3.

The question has three faces: the logical problem, that God and evil cannot both exist; the evidential problem, that the world's evil is evidence that there is probably no God; and the emotional problem, the cry of someone in pain who asks God why. The Bible's answer is set out in Why does a good God allow evil?; this lesson looks at how the questions and answers are built.

The logical problem and the free-will defence

In 1955 the Australian philosopher J. L. Mackie put it in terms of logic. God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; yet evil exists. If a good being removes evil as far as it can, and an omnipotent being can do anything, the three cannot all be true: belief in God is not merely without support but inconsistent with itself. He answered the appeal to freedom in advance: could God not have made people who always freely choose the good? J. L. Mackie, Evil and Omnipotence

In God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga replied with the free-will defence. Whether truly free creatures choose good or evil is up to them, not to God; so it is possible that even an almighty God could not create a world in which free people always do right. And a world with creatures who freely do good may be worth more than one without them. If so, God may have a good reason to permit evil, and the three statements are consistent Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil. Even the atheist William Rowe granted that no one had shown the contradiction, and many philosophers now judge that the logical form of the argument fails.

Plantinga called his answer a defence. A defence does not claim to know God's actual reasons; it shows only that there could be one, which is enough to remove the contradiction. A theodicy, from the Greek for God and justice, tries to say what God's reasons actually are.

The evidential problem and three replies

In 1979 Rowe asked another way. Lightning sets a distant forest alight, and a fawn caught in the fire is badly burned and suffers for days before it dies. So far as we can see, its suffering serves no good. A being almighty, all-knowing and wholly good would prevent any intense suffering it could, unless preventing it meant losing some greater good or allowing some evil as bad or worse; so suffering like this is evidence that there probably is no God. Yet Rowe called his position ‘friendly atheism’, granting that a believer may be rational in believing William Rowe, The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.

Christians have replied in three ways, which complement one another. The first is that if God exists, we should not expect to see all his reasons. This is called sceptical theism: not scepticism about God, but humility about our power to discern his purposes. An infant cannot follow all its parents' reasons, and the distance between infinite wisdom and ours is greater still. God answered Job not with reasons but with questions:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: … Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding.

Job 38:1-4

Critics ask whether this unsettles our moral judgments too; its holders reply that our duty rests on what God has revealed, not on his hidden reasons (Deuteronomy 29:29).

The second is the soul-making theodicy. In 1966 the British philosopher of religion John Hick, following Irenaeus in the second century, held that God made human beings not finished but to grow. In a world without pain or danger there could be no courage, patience, compassion or self-sacrifice; this world is a place where souls are made John Hick, Evil and the God of Love. Critics point to suffering that crushes rather than builds, and Hick answered that the making goes on beyond death.

The third appeals to greater goods. Some goods exist only where evil does: forgiveness needs a wrong, comfort a grief. Augustine taught that evil is not a thing God made but a lack of good, "For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?", and that God, being almighty and good, permits evil because he can bring good even out of it Augustine, Enchiridion 11. Aquinas answers his first objection by quoting this passage of Augustine, and adds: "This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good" Summa Theologiae I.2.3. C. S. Lewis argued that free beings can share a life only in a world with a fixed natural order, which lets them hurt as well as help one another. Critics answer, with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, that no good could be worth one child's tears (Why do children suffer?).

Pain is a ‘problem’ at all, Lewis observed, only because, beside our experience of a painful world, we have reason to think that what lies behind the world is just and good C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. Here the problem turns a question back on unbelief: if there is no God, by what standard do we call something not merely unwelcome but evil, a thing that ought not to be? Naturalist philosophers, who hold that nature is all there is, answer that moral standards can be found without God, in human flourishing, for example. The Christian invites them to ask together whether such a standard can bear the weight of our protest (see The moral and ontological arguments).

Lament and the cross

Some pain no argument reaches. A suffering person needs first not an explanation but someone beside them, and a prayer poured out before God. Scripture keeps such prayers, the laments:

How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? … But I have trusted in Your loving devotion; my heart will rejoice in Your salvation.

Psalm 13:1-5

Lament is not faith collapsing; it is faith carrying its pain to God. Matthew Henry writes on this psalm: "The bread of sorrows is sometimes the saint's daily bread; our Master himself was a man of sorrows" Matthew Henry.

God's deepest answer is not an argument but Christ, who suffered. "He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24): he did not watch evil from far off but took it into his body. "Because He Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted" (Hebrews 2:18). Paul writes, "I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18), and "God works all things together for the good of those who love Him" (Romans 8:28). On the last day "there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain" (Revelation 21:4).

In conversation this means listening first. Job's friends sat on the ground with him for seven days without a word (Job 2:13); but when they spoke as if they knew why he suffered, God said they had not spoken of him rightly (Job 42:7). "Weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15). With a friend who asks from the mind, weigh the defence and the theodicies together, and say plainly what you do not know. See also Through temptation and trouble in the New Believers course and Providence in the doctrine course. The next lesson, Science and faith, asks whether science and faith are at war.

Practice