Why No Answer to Suffering Is Fully Satisfying

If there is a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, why is there so much suffering in the world? Why do children get cancer? Why do earthquakes kill hundreds of thousands of people who did nothing to deserve it? Why does the history of humanity include so much cruelty, so much preventable death, so much pain that seems to serve no purpose?

This is the problem of evil, and it is the oldest and most persistent challenge to theistic belief. It predates Christianity. Epicurus formulated a version of it in ancient Greece. It has been debated seriously by the most rigorous thinkers in the Western tradition for two thousand years, and it has not been resolved. That is not an argument against engaging with it. It is a reason to take it seriously.

The Logical Version

There are two main versions of the problem. The logical version, associated most closely with the philosopher J.L. Mackie, argues that the existence of God and the existence of evil are logically incompatible. If God is omnipotent, he can prevent evil. If he is omniscient, he knows about evil. If he is perfectly good, he wants to prevent evil. Evil exists. Therefore God does not exist.

This argument is deceptively clean. The standard response to it is the free will defense, developed most carefully by the philosopher Alvin Plantinga. The argument goes like this: a world containing creatures who freely choose good is more valuable than a world containing creatures who are simply programmed to do good. To create beings capable of genuine freedom, God had to create beings capable of choosing evil. The existence of moral evil, the evil that humans do to each other, is therefore not a failure of God's goodness but an inevitable consequence of the good of freedom.

Plantinga's version of this argument is technically sophisticated and has been largely accepted even by critics as defeating the logical version of the problem. It is very difficult to prove a strict logical contradiction between God's existence and the existence of moral evil if free will requires the possibility of evil choices.

But the free will defense has obvious limits. It addresses moral evil, the suffering caused by human choices. It does not obviously address natural evil: earthquakes, tsunamis, childhood cancer, genetic disease. These are not the result of human free will. A world without them seems possible, and a perfectly good God seems like he would have created it.

The Evidential Version

The more challenging form of the argument today is the evidential problem of evil, associated with philosophers like William Rowe. This version doesn't claim that God's existence and evil are strictly logically incompatible. It claims that the amount and distribution of suffering in the world constitutes strong evidence against the existence of a perfectly good God.

The argument turns on what philosophers call gratuitous evil: suffering that serves no purpose, that is not necessary for any greater good. Rowe's famous example is a fawn burned in a forest fire, suffering for days with no one present, serving no apparent purpose. If God exists, why would he permit this? What greater good requires the prolonged suffering of an animal in a burning forest?

The theist response is generally to invoke what philosophers call skeptical theism: the idea that we are not in a position to judge whether suffering is truly gratuitous, because we cannot see the full picture of how God's purposes work across time and across the entirety of creation. Our inability to identify the greater good served by a particular instance of suffering doesn't mean no greater good exists. God's reasons may be beyond our comprehension.

This is a serious response. It has the advantage of intellectual humility, of acknowledging the limits of human perspective. But it has a cost. If we accept that God's purposes are systematically beyond our understanding, it becomes difficult to argue that God is good in any sense we can recognize or relate to. The God who permits the suffering of a dying child for reasons we cannot comprehend is not obviously the God most believers actually believe in.

Dostoevsky's Version

The most powerful statement of the problem of evil I know of is not in a philosophy paper but in a novel. In The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan Karamazov presents to his brother Alyosha a collection of accounts of children being tortured and killed. He presents them methodically, building a case not through abstract argument but through accumulation of specifics.

Then he makes his argument. Even if the universe eventually arrives at some cosmic harmony, even if all suffering is redeemed in the end, he cannot accept a world whose final balance requires the tears of a single tortured child. The mathematics don't work for him. He returns his ticket to the cosmic order.

What makes this passage devastating is that Ivan is not arguing that God doesn't exist. He's arguing that even if God exists, the terms are unacceptable. This is a different move from the logical or evidential problem. It's not an argument about probability or logical consistency. It's a moral refusal. And it has a different kind of force.

What Philosophy Can and Cannot Do

The problem of evil has generated responses that are sometimes technically impressive. Philosophers have constructed theodicies, accounts of why an all-good God might permit evil, that are more or less coherent. The soul-making theodicy, associated with the philosopher John Hick, argues that a world without suffering would be a world without the possibility of developing virtues like courage, compassion, and resilience. Suffering is the condition for moral development.

There is something to this. But it faces the same problem as the free will defense: it struggles with the distribution and scale of actual suffering. The child who dies at three years old has not had time to develop virtues. The person destroyed by grief is often not ennobled by it. The actual suffering in the world fits badly with any account that treats it as primarily educational.

What I think philosophy can honestly offer here is not a resolution but a clearer view of what the options are. You can maintain belief in God while accepting that the problem of evil is genuinely hard and that no existing theodicy fully resolves it. You can conclude that the suffering in the world is evidence against theism that you find decisive. You can take Ivan Karamazov's position: that even if the God of theology exists, the moral terms are unacceptable.

None of these positions is unreasonable. The problem of evil is hard because it sits at the intersection of logic, evidence, and the deepest moral intuitions we have. It has not been solved because it may not be solvable, at least not by argument alone.

What it does is force clarity. If you believe in a God who is all-powerful and all-good, the existence of suffering is not a minor puzzle to be waved away. It requires a real account. The philosophers and theologians who have tried hardest to provide one have mostly ended up showing how difficult the problem is, which is itself a kind of progress.