Why Is There Suffering?

The Question and Its Force

The question "Why is there suffering?" is not just a philosophical puzzle. It is the question that, more than any other, has driven people away from belief in God. If God is all-powerful, God can prevent suffering. If God is perfectly good, God wants to prevent suffering. But suffering is everywhere — in the child with cancer, in the earthquake that buries a city, in the slow cruelty of dementia. How can a being with all the attributes of God — omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness — coexist with a world like this?

The question has two forms, and they need to be kept apart. The logical problem of evil argues that the existence of God and the existence of evil are logically incompatible — that a perfectly good, omnipotent being would prevent all evil, and since evil exists, such a being does not. The evidential problem of evil is more modest: it does not claim that God and evil are logically incompatible, but that the amount and distribution of suffering makes God's existence improbable. The logical problem has been largely answered. The evidential problem remains the strongest argument for atheism.

The Logical Problem: Mackie's Challenge

J. L. Mackie, in his 1955 paper "Evil and Omnipotence," gave the logical problem its sharpest formulation. He argued that the following claims are logically inconsistent: God is omnipotent, God is perfectly good, and evil exists. An omnipotent being can prevent any evil it wants to. A perfectly good being wants to prevent evil. Therefore, if both are true, there should be no evil. But there is evil. Therefore, the premises cannot all be true — and since the first two are constitutive of theism, theism is logically inconsistent.

Mackie anticipated the standard defenses and tried to preempt them. To the claim that evil is a necessary means to a greater good, he responded that an omnipotent being could produce the greater good without the evil. To the claim that evil results from free will, he responded that an omnipotent being could make free creatures who always choose good — freedom and goodness are not logically incompatible. The argument was a serious one, and for a time it dominated the philosophical landscape.

The Free Will Defense: Plantinga's Answer

The response that defeated the logical problem came from Alvin Plantinga, in a series of papers and books in the 1960s and 1970s. Plantinga's free will defense is a technical achievement, but its core idea can be stated simply. Mackie claimed that an omnipotent being could create free creatures who always choose good. Plantinga showed that this claim is not obviously true — that there is a possible world in which a free creature always does wrong, and that if God were to prevent the wrong, the creature would not be free. Freedom, on the libertarian conception, requires the genuine ability to choose otherwise. And if a creature is genuinely free, then it is within its power to do wrong, and not even an omnipotent being can guarantee that it will always choose right — not without taking away its freedom, which would defeat the purpose.

Plantinga's argument was not that this is how things actually are. It was that the logical inconsistency Mackie claimed is not established. To show inconsistency, Mackie would need to show that there is no possible world in which God and evil coexist. Plantinga showed that there is at least one possible world — a world in which free creatures misuse their freedom — in which God and evil coexist. Therefore, the existence of evil is logically compatible with the existence of God. The logical problem was dissolved. This is now the consensus among philosophers of religion. Mackie himself, in later work, conceded that the free will defense addresses the logical problem.

The Evidential Problem: Rowe's Challenge

The dissolution of the logical problem did not settle the question. It cleared the ground for the evidential problem, which is harder. William Rowe, in a series of influential papers, argued that even if God and evil are logically compatible, the actual amount and distribution of suffering in the world makes God's existence unlikely. Rowe's key example was a fawn burned in a forest fire, suffering for days before dying alone. The suffering serves no apparent purpose — no human freedom is at stake, no soul is being made, no greater good is served by the prolonged agony of an animal. If God exists, God has a reason for permitting this suffering. But we can see no reason, and the most plausible explanation is that there is no reason, because there is no God.

The evidential argument is not a proof. It is a probabilistic inference: given the suffering we observe, is it more likely that God exists or that God does not? Rowe argued that the balance of probability favors atheism. The challenge is real, and it has not been decisively answered.

The Theodicies: Giving Reasons

A theodicy is different from a defense. A defense shows that the existence of God and evil are compatible. A theodicy tries to say why God actually permits evil — to give the reasons. The main theodicies in the tradition are three.

The Augustinian theodicy. Augustine, in The City of God and elsewhere, argued that evil is not a positive reality but a privation — a lack of good, a corruption of what is good. God created everything good, and evil entered through the free misuse of created wills. The angels who fell, the humans who sinned — each chose to turn from the good, and evil is the result of that turning. The Augustinian theodicy handles moral evil well: it traces it to free will, which is a good thing. It handles natural evil (earthquakes, disease) less well, since natural evil does not seem to result from human free will. Augustine sometimes extended the account to include the consequences of the Fall — the idea that nature itself was disordered by human sin — but this raises as many questions as it answers.

The soul-making theodicy. John Hick, drawing on Irenaeus and Kant, argued that the world is not designed to be a pleasure palace. It is designed to be a place where free creatures develop moral and spiritual character — a "vale of soul-making." Suffering, on this account, is necessary for the development of virtues that cannot be developed any other way. Courage requires danger. Compassion requires suffering. Forgiveness requires being wronged. A world without any of these would be a world without moral growth, and a world without moral growth would not be the world God intended. The soul-making theodicy handles both moral and natural evil, because both contribute to character formation. Its weakness is that some suffering — the fawn in the fire, the child with Tay-Sachs — seems too extreme and too disconnected from any soul's making to serve the purpose.

Skeptical theism. The most recent response is not a theodicy but a refusal to theodictize. Skeptical theists argue that we are not in a position to judge whether God has sufficient reasons for permitting evil. The gap between divine knowledge and human knowledge is so vast that our inability to see a reason does not mean there is no reason. A child cannot understand why a parent allows a painful vaccination; we cannot understand why God allows an earthquake. The skeptical theist does not claim to know God's reasons. They claim that our ignorance of God's reasons does not establish that there are none.

The strength of skeptical theism is that it blocks the evidential argument: if we cannot know whether God has reasons, we cannot infer from our ignorance that God does not exist. The weakness is that it risks collapsing into a general epistemic paralysis — if we cannot know God's reasons for anything, we cannot make any inferences from the world to God at all, including the inferences that support theism. The debate over skeptical theism is one of the liveliest in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Hume and the Deeper Question

Hume, in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, raised the problem before Mackie, and he raised it in a way that goes deeper than the logical formulation. Hume's character Philo asks: is the world what we would expect from an infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely good being? The answer, looking around, is no. The world contains beauty, but also waste. It contains love, but also cruelty. It contains order, but also chaos. The mixed character of the world is more compatible with a limited deity, or a committee of deities, or a deity that is indifferent, than with the God of classical theism.

Hume's point is not that the world proves God does not exist. It is that the world, taken as evidence, does not support the specific God the theist posits. The evidence is ambiguous — it supports some kind of designer, perhaps, but not necessarily a perfectly good one. The evidential problem, in Hume's hands, is not just about the quantity of evil but about the mixed signals the world sends about its maker. This is a harder challenge to meet than the logical one, because it does not require a logical inconsistency. It just requires that the world look less like theism predicts than the theist claims.

Does Any Answer Suffice?

The honest answer is that the question has not been settled, and it may not be settleable by argument alone. The free will defense has answered the logical problem. The theodicies offer partial explanations for some suffering. Skeptical theism blocks the inference from our ignorance to God's nonexistence. But the evidential problem — the sheer weight of the suffering we observe — remains a live challenge to theism, and it is the reason many people find belief in God morally and intellectually impossible.

The theist's best response is not a single argument but a cumulative picture: a world with free will, with soul-making, with the possibility of redemption, is a world that may require suffering as the cost of goods that could not be achieved any other way. Whether that cost is acceptable, and whether the goods are worth it, is a judgment that each person has to make for themselves. Philosophy can clarify the options. It cannot make the suffering go away, and it cannot make the question easy.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Problem of Evil" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Problem of Evil" — https://iep.utm.edu/evil/
• Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (c. 426 CE; trans. Marcus Dods, Modern Library, 1950).

Related Topics

• What Is Omnipotence? — the attribute the problem of evil targets.
• What Are the Attributes of God? — the cluster the problem destabilizes.
• Theism vs Atheism — where the problem of evil fits in the larger debate.
• Faith vs Reason — whether the problem is a defeater for properly basic belief.
• Philosophy of Evil — the broader inquiry.