The Problem of Evil: Christian Responses

The logical problem claims theism is internally contradictory: an all-powerful, all-good God and any evil at all cannot both exist. J. L. Mackie put it in "Evil and Omnipotence," Mind 64:200-212 (1955).

Alvin Plantinga's free will defence (God, Freedom, and Evil, Eerdmans, 1974; formally in The Nature of Necessity, Oxford, 1974, ch. 9) does not attempt to say why God permits evil. It only needs to show a possible state of affairs in which God and evil coexist — because the charge is contradiction, and one consistent story defeats a charge of contradiction.

The story: creatures with libertarian freedom may be such that in any world where God creates them free, they go wrong at least once. Plantinga calls this transworld depravity. If it is even possible, then it is possible that God could not create a world of free creatures containing no moral evil.

In The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982) Mackie granted that the defence is formally possible and that the problem of evil does not, after all, show the central doctrines of theism to be logically inconsistent with one another. Rowe himself wrote that some philosophers have concluded the logical argument is bankrupt. Concessions of that clarity are rare in philosophy.

Rowe's example is a fawn burned in a lightning-started forest fire, dying alone over several days, its suffering witnessed by no one. It looks pointless. From that he argues: probably it is.

Stephen Wykstra's reply — "The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16:73-93 (1984) — introduced the condition of reasonable epistemic access, or CORNEA. The inference from "I see no reason" to "there is no reason" is only valid if you would expect to see the reason if it existed. A one-month-old cannot assess a parent's reasons; the gap in cognitive power is decisive.

Isaiah 55:8-9 states exactly this asymmetry, in terms of the distance between heaven and earth. This position is called skeptical theism, and it is the majority theist reply in the professional literature.

Soul-making. John Hick's Evil and the God of Love (Macmillan, 1966) revived the Irenaean idea that this world is a vale of soul-making, not a hedonic optimum: courage, compassion and endurance are not possible in a world without cost. Romans 5:3-5 and James 1:2-4 make the same move.

Free will. Love that cannot be refused is not love. A world of creatures who cannot rebel is a world without moral agents.

Job asks for reasons through thirty-seven chapters and never receives them. What he receives is God — and he says it is enough (Job 42:5).

Habakkuk opens with an unanswered complaint about violence and injustice and ends by choosing to rejoice while the fig tree does not blossom (Habakkuk 3:17-19). The complaint is not resolved; the prophet is.

And the distinctive Christian claim is that God did not answer suffering from outside it. Isaiah 53:3 calls the Messiah a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Whatever else the cross is, it is God's refusal to remain a spectator.

That is not a proof. It is the reason the argument has never emptied the churches.

The logical problem is largely retired. The live disputes are the cost of skeptical theism — Michael Bergmann against Paul Draper on whether it corrodes ordinary moral reasoning — and the force of horrendous evils, argued most searchingly by Marilyn McCord Adams in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell, 1999), who is herself a Christian philosopher and does not think the standard theodicies suffice.

Job 42:5 — I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee — presence instead of explanation.

Habakkuk 1:2-4 — The complaint stated at full strength, inside Scripture itself.

Habakkuk 3:17-19 — Yet will I rejoice — resolution without an answer.

Isaiah 55:8-9 — The cognitive gap that skeptical theism formalizes.

Isaiah 53:3 — A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief — God inside the suffering.

Romans 5:3-5 — Tribulation works patience; the soul-making claim in Paul's words.

James 1:2-4 — The trying of your faith works patience.

Revelation 21:4 — The promise that the condition is temporary, not permanent.