Significant freedom includes the possibility of wrongdoing.
Preventing every harmful choice might remove a valuable form of agency, but does not directly explain natural suffering.
Philosophy of religion
Why would a good God allow evil?
The problem in miniature
Two kinds of suffering
A community suffers after a deliberate act of cruelty. Responsibility appears to begin with the person who chose it, and freedom might explain why a good God did not prevent the choice. Elsewhere, an earthquake causes suffering that no human decision produced. The same appeal to free will no longer seems sufficient. A defender of belief in God may argue that a law-governed world, human development or goods unavailable in a risk-free world justify divine permission. A critic can still ask whether those goods require this amount and distribution of suffering.
Why this is difficult
The pressure comes from more than one direction.
Difficulty can make courage, compassion and growth possible.
Some suffering may contribute to development, though extreme or hidden suffering remains hard to justify.
Apparently pointless suffering is evidence against perfect goodness.
Even without a strict contradiction, the world's pattern of suffering may lower the probability of such a God.
Philosophers in the conversation
Different routes through the same problem.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine treats evil not as a substance created by God but as a privation or corruption of good. Moral evil enters through created wills turning away from proper order. The account protects divine creation while raising further questions about foreknowledge, inherited disorder and natural suffering.
Irenaeus and John Hick
The soul-making tradition sees an unfinished, challenging world as an environment in which mature virtues and freely formed relationships can develop. If humans were created in immediate perfection, some valuable growth would be impossible. Critics ask whether the process requires extreme or unequal suffering.
J. L. Mackie
Mackie argues that the traditional divine attributes appear inconsistent with evil unless additional beliefs explain why a good, powerful God permits it. He challenges easy free-will replies, especially where divine power seems capable of creating free agents who consistently choose good.
Alvin Plantinga
Plantinga's free-will defence aims to defeat the claim of logical inconsistency. It need not explain the actual reason for every evil; it proposes a possible reason why even an omnipotent God could not guarantee significant freedom and guarantee that creatures never misuse it.
Key ideas
Language for thinking more precisely.
- Moral evil
- Suffering or wrongdoing arising from the choices and actions of moral agents.
- Natural evil
- Suffering associated with disease, disaster or nature rather than deliberate human choice.
- Theodicy
- An attempt to explain why a good and powerful God permits evil.
- Free-will defence
- The claim that significant creaturely freedom can justify God's permission of wrongdoing.
- Soul-making
- The view that challenge and suffering can provide conditions for moral and spiritual growth.
- Gratuitous evil
- Suffering that appears unnecessary for any greater good or prevention of worse harm.
Follow the question through the curriculum
Continue with a unit or lesson.
Reconsider your answer
The opening question has changed.
A defence can show that God and evil are logically compatible without showing that the actual amount, intensity and apparent randomness of suffering should be expected.
Even if evil is compatible with God, does the pattern of suffering remain strong evidence against belief?