MANNAFEST

The Evidence Room · The Hard Room

If God is good, why is there so much suffering?

There are real answers to the logical version of this question, and they are widely accepted even by philosophers who are not believers — and none of them explains any particular child's cancer, which the Bible itself declines to explain.

This is the hardest question in the building, and it is not primarily an argument. For most people who ask it, it is a wound.

So this page will not tie a bow on it. If you came here after a funeral, the honest thing to tell you is that nothing below will be adequate, and that the Bible seems to know it.

What the page will do is take the question seriously as a question, because it is also that — the most serious challenge to belief in a good God, pressed for twenty-three centuries, and it deserves a real reply rather than a deflection.

It will also mark clearly where the reply stops working. That boundary is the most important thing here.

Walking it through

  1. Say it as hard as it can be said

    The classic form is usually credited to Epicurus, though it comes to us through a Christian writer, Lactantius, quoting him centuries later — so the attribution is uncertain and worth flagging.

    The shape is this. Is God willing to prevent evil but unable? Then he is not all-powerful. Is he able but not willing? Then he is not good. Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from? Is he neither? Then why call him God?

    That is the argument, and it is not a trick. Every serious defense of Christian belief has had to answer it, and the ones that answer it quickly are the ones not worth reading.

    And the abstract version understates it. The real force is not a puzzle about premises. It is a specific child, in a specific bed, and a specific parent asking a specific question.

  2. Two different questions wearing the same clothes

    Philosophers distinguish two things here, and the distinction is genuinely useful rather than a dodge.

    The first is the logical problem: whether the statements God is all-powerful, God is good, and evil exists actually contradict each other, the way a square circle contradicts itself.

    The second is the emotional problem — sometimes called the existential one: whether a person who has watched a child die can go on trusting such a God. That is not a question about consistency. It is a question about whether a relationship survives.

    These need different treatments, and the great failure of apologetics is answering the second with the first. A grieving person handed a syllogism has been insulted, whether or not the syllogism is sound.

    The next two steps address the logical problem. Everything after that concerns the other one, which is the one most people are actually asking.

  3. The logical version has an answer most philosophers now accept

    For much of the twentieth century, the charge was that belief in a good all-powerful God is not merely improbable given evil but strictly self-contradictory. J.L. Mackie argued this forcefully.

    Alvin Plantinga's reply, worked out in the 1960s and 70s, is called the free will defense. Its structure is modest and that is its strength: it does not claim to say why God permits evil. It claims only that there is a possible reason, and a possible reason is all that is needed to break a charge of contradiction.

    The reason offered is that genuinely free creatures are a great good, that a creature who cannot choose wrongly is not choosing at all, and that not even omnipotence can make a free creature who is guaranteed never to sin — because a guaranteed choice is not free.

    Here is the part worth being clear about, and it is a concession the other direction. This is very widely regarded as successful, including by philosophers who remain atheists; Mackie himself acknowledged that Plantinga's argument did what it set out to do. The logical problem is not where the live debate is anymore.

    But read what was actually won. The claim of contradiction is defeated. Nothing has been explained.

  4. Soul-making, and where it runs out

    A second answer goes further and tries to say what suffering is for. The world is not a resort; it is a place where persons are formed. Courage cannot be created ready-made — it grows in danger. Compassion grows near pain. Patience grows in delay.

    This is often called the soul-making view, associated with John Hick, and older versions of it run back through the church fathers. There is real observation behind it. Many people say the hardest thing that ever happened to them made them who they are, and they are not lying.

    Then it runs out, and it should be said plainly where. It runs out at suffering that forms nobody: an infant who dies before consciousness, a person destroyed rather than deepened by what happened, an animal burning in a forest with no witness.

    It also runs out at proportion. If a certain amount of hardship builds character, it is not obvious why this amount, or why it falls where it does — heaviest, very often, on people who already had the least.

  5. What none of it touches

    Here is the honest center of this page.

    Every answer above works at the level of categories. Why is there suffering in general? Because freedom is real, because a stable world with laws will sometimes crush what it holds, because persons are formed rather than manufactured.

    Not one of them explains a particular case. They do not tell a mother why her child. They do not tell a village why the wave came in the morning.

    A person can accept every argument on this page and still be standing in a hospital corridor with nothing.

    Any presentation that hides that is not defending Christianity; it is defending a version of it that nobody can live in. The Bible, remarkably, does not hide it.

  6. Job: the book that refuses to give the answer

    The Bible has a whole book about this, and the astonishing thing is what it does not do.

    The reader is told at the start why Job is suffering. Job is never told. Then three friends arrive with theology — good, orthodox, tidy theology — and spend chapters explaining that suffering must be punishment, so Job must have sinned.

    At the end God speaks, and does two things nobody expects. He rejects the friends' explanations outright, saying they have not spoken rightly of him. And he never explains anything to Job.

    Instead he asks questions. Dozens of them, for four chapters. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you bind the Pleiades? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?

    It looks at first like evasion. Read again and it is something else: an invitation to consider how much of the world runs on a scale a person cannot see the edges of — and Job's reply is not that he has been answered but that he has been met. I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.

    Whatever else that is, it is not a tidy answer, and the Bible had every chance to give one and did not.

  7. The one thing Christianity says that the other answers do not

    Every philosophy has to say something about suffering. What Christianity says that is genuinely its own is not an explanation at all. It is a location.

    The claim is that God did not remain outside this. He entered it — was betrayed, tortured, and executed, and cried out on a cross in the words of a psalm of abandonment: my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.

    That does not answer the question. A parent in a hospital corridor is not looking for an argument. What the claim offers is that the God being asked is not a spectator, and that the question is being put to someone who has been where it is asked from.

    And there is a second thing, quieter and easily missed. Scripture does not require the sufferer to be polite. Complaint is one of the largest kinds of psalm there is — how long, O Lord; why standest thou afar off; one psalm ends in the dark with no resolution at all. These were Israel's songbook, sung in worship.

    Which means that if you are angry at God, the Bible has already written your lines and put them in the hymnal. That is a strange thing for a religion to do, and it is worth noticing.

    This page ends without resolving anything, on purpose. The question stays open here because it stays open in Scripture.

The objections, at full strength

Each objection below is stated the way the people who hold it state it. If you hold one of these and think it is put unfairly here, that is a failure on our part — tell us.

Free will explains murder. It does not explain earthquakes

The objection

The free will defense covers evil that people do. It says nothing about the enormous share of suffering nobody chose: tsunamis, birth defects, childhood leukemia, famine, a bacterium that eats a face. No human freedom is protected by a fault line. If God set up the physical world, then the physical world's cruelty is his design decision, and the most emotionally devastating suffering in human history falls entirely outside the answer that is supposed to cover it.

The response

This is the strongest single objection on the page, and no reply to it is comfortable. Three are usually offered and each is partial. The first is that a world with stable laws is a precondition for any free action at all — you cannot make a promise or build a house in a world where physical regularities bend to keep everyone safe — and stable laws that make agriculture possible are the same laws that make earthquakes. That has force, and it does not explain why these particular laws, with these particular casualties. The second is theological rather than philosophical: Scripture treats the whole created order as damaged rather than as functioning correctly, groaning is Paul's word, so natural disaster is presented as part of the wreck rather than part of the design. Whether a reader finds that persuasive depends on much else. The third is simply that we may not know, and that not knowing is a real position rather than a defeat. Where this lands: the free will defense does not cover natural evil, this page does not pretend it does, and the remaining answers are weaker than the one it replaced.

The sheer amount of it is the problem

The objection

William Rowe framed this precisely (“The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1979) and the framing has never been bettered. Imagine a fawn trapped in a forest fire, burned, dying slowly over days, unseen by any person. What soul is made? What freedom is protected? Rowe's argument does not claim to prove such suffering is pointless — it claims that we have excellent reason to believe some suffering is pointless, and that a good God would prevent pointless suffering. Multiply that fawn by the whole history of animal life on this planet, most of it before humans existed. Even if some suffering serves a purpose, the quantity is wildly beyond anything a purpose seems to require.

The response

This is where the debate actually is, and it should be conceded that it is a live and difficult one. The standard reply is that we are poorly placed to judge whether a given instance is pointless: our position with respect to the whole causal order is limited, and inferring no reason from we can see no reason is an inference that works only if we would expect to see the reason. That reply is honest but thin, and it is thin exactly when it is needed most — a parent does not want an epistemology lecture. It is also worth saying that Rowe himself was a careful and gracious philosopher who called his position friendly atheism, holding that a Christian could be entirely rational in disagreeing with him. This page will not claim more certainty than he did in the other direction. The amount is a real problem, and no answer here dissolves it.

If heaven has free creatures who never sin, God could have made this world that way

The objection

The free will defense rests on the claim that God cannot guarantee free creatures who never sin. But Christian teaching says that in the world to come there will be free people who do not sin, forever. Either those people are free — in which case guaranteed freedom is possible after all, and the defense collapses — or they are not free, in which case the great good the defense was protecting is missing from the very state Christianity calls perfect. Either way the argument has a hole in it, and the hole is at the center.

The response

This is a sharp objection and it is not often answered well. The usual reply distinguishes two kinds of freedom: the freedom to establish a character through choices, and the settled freedom of someone whose character is formed and who now acts consistently from it. A person of long-tested integrity who could not now be bribed is not thought to be unfree; they are thought to be good. On that reading the world to come is populated by people who chose, and whose choosing is finished. Whether that distinction holds is genuinely contested among philosophers. It is not a knock-down reply, and a reader who finds it convenient rather than convincing is entitled to that reaction.

Hundreds of millions of years of animals eating each other, before anyone was watching

The objection

This objection lands especially hard on any account tying suffering to human sin. Whatever a reader concludes about the age of the earth, the fossil record contains predation, disease, and parasitism, and the fossilized evidence of animals killing and being killed is abundant. On a long-ages reading, that is an enormous quantity of pain preceding any human choice and serving no soul-making purpose, since the creatures involved have no souls to make on the standard account. Darwin himself said this was what he could not reconcile, pointing to parasitic wasps that feed inside living caterpillars.

The response

This site holds a young-earth position, which changes the timescale but does not remove the question, and it should not be used as a way of not answering. Even on the shortest chronology there is predation, disease, and animal death, and the honest form of the question is why a good God's world contains creatures built to be eaten alive. Christian responses run in a few directions: that Scripture presents creation as subjected to futility and awaiting release rather than as currently normal; that animal experience of pain may differ in kind from human suffering, an argument that is real but easy to abuse and should be made carefully or not at all; and that the future the prophets describe includes the healing of exactly this — the wolf dwelling with the lamb. What no honest reply can do is say the problem is only apparent. It is not.

The cross does not fix anything

The objection

Grant the whole Christian story. God became human and suffered. So what? A doctor who catches the disease has not cured a single patient. If God has the power to prevent a child's agony and instead chooses to experience agony himself, the child is still in agony, and the permission is still his. Sharing in suffering you could have prevented is not a moral achievement — under any other circumstances we would call it something else. At best the cross shows solidarity, and solidarity from someone holding the remedy is a strange comfort.

The response

The logical force of this is real and should not be dulled. The cross does not answer the philosophical question, and this page said so above rather than waiting to be caught. What it changes is the character of the person being asked, and that turns out to matter to almost everyone in practice even when it should not matter in logic. There is a difference between being told your pain has a purpose by someone who has never had any, and being told it by someone bearing the marks. The Christian claim also goes further than solidarity, though this response will not lean on what it cannot argue here: it claims the suffering was undergone to end suffering, and that the ending is real but not yet complete. A reader is entitled to find that an unsatisfying answer to a present grief. Many believers find it unsatisfying too, and keep holding on to it anyway, which is closer to what faith looks like in a hospital than any argument on this page.

Go further

Job 38 — read God's answer for yourself→

If there's no God, is anything really wrong?→

How do we know God exists?→

Did Jesus rise from the dead?→

The apologetics room→

Every source we cite→

Sources: Lactantius, On the Anger of God, ch. 13 (early 4th century), trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers — public domain; the source through which the Epicurean formulation reaches us, and the reason its attribution is uncertain. · J.L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64 (1955) — cite-only; the logical problem of evil at its strongest. · Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Harper & Row, 1974) — cite-only; the free will defense. · William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979) — cite-only; the fawn in the forest fire, and the author's own “friendly atheism.” · John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (Macmillan, 1966) — cite-only; the soul-making theodicy. · C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Geoffrey Bles, 1940) and A Grief Observed (Faber, 1961) — cite-only; the argument, and the same author's account of what happened to the argument when his wife died. · Charles H. Spurgeon, sermons on Psalm 88 and “The Christian's Heaviness and Rejoicing,” Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit — public domain; a preacher who wrote about his own depression from the pulpit. · A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (Harper & Row, 1961) — cite-only; on the character of God as the ground of trust when explanations fail. · The Book of Job — the Bible's own refusal to give a tidy answer, and the text this page defers to. Every cited work — the sources registry →