All Saints' Day, the churches full, and the safest open ground was the waterfront.
The problem of evil
That the suffering in the world is hard to reconcile with a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good.
- Theme
- Cosmos, the sacred and ultimate reality
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- c. 400
In plain terms
The problem is a set of claims that are individually plausible and jointly awkward. God is all-powerful. God is all-knowing. God is perfectly good. There is a great deal of suffering.
Any three sit comfortably together. Adding the fourth is where the work begins.
The classical responses take a shape. Free will explains suffering caused by people and not by disease or geology. Soul-making explains suffering that develops character and not suffering that destroys it. And a hidden greater good explains anything at all, which is its weakness - an answer compatible with any amount of horror has stopped being an explanation.
What has changed in modern discussion is the form of the argument. Few now claim a strict contradiction. The claim is evidential: that the amount and distribution of suffering is evidence against.
As a philosopher would put it
The logical problem claims the propositions are inconsistent. Plantinga's free will defence is generally taken to have answered it: it is possible that a world containing free creatures who sometimes choose wrongly is better than one without, and possibility is all the logical version requires.
The evidential problem is the live one. Rowe's formulation points to instances of intense suffering that an omnipotent being could have prevented without losing a greater good or permitting a worse evil - his example is a fawn dying slowly in a forest fire, unwitnessed - and argues that such instances are probably gratuitous.
The standard reply is sceptical theism: we are not positioned to judge whether apparent gratuitousness is real, since our grasp of the goods available is limited. The cost is corrosive - the same reasoning undercuts confidence in any moral judgement about what God would permit.
Hick's soul-making theodicy and the free will defence both leave natural evil largely unaddressed, which is where the argument now concentrates.
Where you meet it
On the morning of 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, an earthquake estimated at magnitude 8.5 or above struck Lisbon while the churches were full.
The shaking brought down much of the city, a tsunami followed within an hour, and fires burned for days. Estimates of the dead run from around ten thousand to over thirty thousand in Lisbon alone. Survivors who fled to open ground at the waterfront were caught by the wave. The churches, being large stone buildings full of candles, were among the worst places to be.
Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne appeared the following year, attacking the optimism that this is the best of all possible worlds; Rousseau replied that the deaths owed something to seven-storey buildings and to people running back for their possessions. Kant wrote three essays on the seismology.
The event did not create the problem. It made it a public argument conducted in print, and the optimism did not recover.
What is actually disputed
Whether the evidential argument succeeds.
Its strength is that it needs no claim of contradiction: it argues that gratuitous suffering is probable given what we observe, and that this is evidence against theism as any evidence counts against any hypothesis.
Sceptical theism's reply is that inferring from we see no justifying good to there is none requires that we would probably see one if it existed, and that this is exactly what a finite mind cannot assume.
The reply works and is expensive. If our grasp of goods and evils is that limited, then we are equally unable to judge that anything is good, that God is trustworthy, or that any moral appearance is reliable - which is a high price for a defence.
Meanwhile the practical form of the problem is untouched by any of this. Theodicies address the argument; whether any of them should be offered to someone suffering is a separate question, and most theologians say no.
Commonly confused with
- the existence of evil The problem is not that evil exists but that its amount and distribution are hard to reconcile with the attributes. Small quantities would raise no difficulty.
- why bad things happen to good people That is one form. The sharpest versions concern suffering with no moral dimension at all, including animal suffering before humans existed.
Defined against
- God The strongest argument against the classical concept is not that no such being could exist but that this world is evidence against one
Philosophers
- Augustine of Hippo Evil as privation rather than a positive thing
- Thomas Aquinas The systematic treatment within natural theology
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Theodicy, and the best of all possible worlds
- David Hume The Epicurean questions restated and pressed
- Al-Ghazali Divine will beyond the reach of human justification
- Plotinus Evil as the absence of form
Works
- Confessions Evil examined from inside a conversion
- Summa Theologiae Evil as privation, systematised
- Enneads Evil as absence in the Neoplatonic scheme
- Critique of Pure Reason The limits of speculative theology
- The Incoherence of the Philosophers Divine will against necessity
- Pensées The hiddenness of God as a fact to be reckoned with
Schools
- Augustinianism Where evil is privation
- Thomism Where the account is systematised
- Neoplatonism Where evil is absence of form
- Ash’arism Where divine will is not answerable to human standards
- British Empiricism Where the argument is pressed hardest
Related concepts
God c. 1270 · Suffering c. 450 BC · Arguments for God 1078 · Faith c. 1270 · Moral law c. 1270
Epicurus is credited with the earliest formulation, transmitted through Lactantius; Leibniz coined theodicy in 1710 for the enterprise of justifying God's ways, and Hume's Dialogues gave the argument its modern form.