Sitting here in Michigan, watching my six-year-old Goldendoodle sleep completely undisturbed on the rug, it is sometimes easy to forget the sheer volume of chaos happening outside the walls of this room. Life, for a dog in a quiet house, is remarkably insulated. Life for the rest of us is deeply, undeniably fractured.
Whenever I find myself diving deep into theology and philosophy, I inevitably hit the same wall. It is the oldest, most formidable fortress in the landscape of human thought: The Problem of Evil.
If there is a grand designer—a creator who is wholly good, all-knowing, and all-powerful—why is the architecture of our universe built on a foundation that allows for so much suffering?
This isn’t just an abstract logic puzzle meant for university debate halls. It is a profoundly human question. Everyone, at some point, has to reconcile the concept of a benevolent universe with the reality of grief, disease, and cruelty. In this corner of the digital garden, I want to unpack how philosophers have attempted to untangle this over the centuries, where their arguments hold weight, and where they seem to snap under pressure.
The Epicurean Paradox: Setting the Stage
To understand the modern debate, we have to go back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus (though the paradox is often attributed to him, it was popularized later by David Hume). The formulation is devastatingly simple, creating a logical trilemma:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
For centuries, this logical formulation was the ultimate “checkmate” against classical theism. If God has the power to stop a tragedy and knows the tragedy is about to happen, but chooses to do nothing, how can we call that God good? If a human being stood by and watched a crime happen when they had the power to stop it, we would arrest them for negligence. Why does the creator of the cosmos get a pass?
This is known as the Logical Problem of Evil. It asserts that the existence of God and the existence of evil are logically incompatible. They cannot exist in the same room.
However, in the mid-20th century, the landscape of this debate shifted dramatically.
Alvin Plantinga and The Free Will Defense
In 1977, philosopher Alvin Plantinga published God, Freedom, and Evil, a book that effectively dismantled the Logical Problem of Evil. Plantinga didn’t prove that God exists; he simply proved that it is logically possible for an omnipotent, wholly good God to exist alongside evil.
His argument rests on the concept of Libertarian Free Will.
Imagine you are programming a video game (or, perhaps more accurately, writing code for a massive, interactive web application). You want the characters in your simulation to experience genuine love, compassion, and moral goodness.
Can you force them to be good?
If you hardcode a character to always say “I love you” and always do the right thing, they aren’t actually moral. They are just an automaton executing a script. For moral goodness to be mathematically and logically real, the entity must have the choice to do otherwise.
Plantinga argued that even an omnipotent God cannot create a world containing free creatures who are forced to only do good. That is a logical contradiction, like drawing a square circle. If you grant creatures genuine free will, you open the door to the possibility that they will choose wrong.
“A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.” — Alvin Plantinga
To eliminate evil, the creator would have to eliminate free will. And a universe of programmable robots is inherently less valuable, and less beautiful, than a universe of free agents capable of genuine love—even if those free agents sometimes choose cruelty.
The Stumbling Block of Natural Evil
Plantinga’s Free Will Defense is brilliant. It elegantly answers why human beings hurt each other. But it leaves a massive, gaping hole in the theology: Natural Evil.
If free will explains war, theft, and cruelty, what explains earthquakes, tsunamis, pediatric cancer, and parasitic diseases? The tectonic plates shifting beneath the ocean do not possess free will. A virus replicating in a host does not have moral agency.
Philosopher William Rowe formulated the Evidential Problem of Evil to address this. Rowe asked us to imagine a fawn trapped in a forest fire caused by a lightning strike. The fawn suffers terribly for days before dying, completely isolated. No human caused this. No human witnessed it to learn a moral lesson from it. It is entirely gratuitous suffering.
If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why build a physical universe with tectonic plates that crush cities? Why design biology in a way that allows cells to mutate into cancer?
Some theists attempt to answer this by pointing back to human action (e.g., the concept of original sin fracturing the physical world), but to many modern thinkers, attributing a tsunami to ancient human disobedience feels philosophically inadequate.
To tackle the problem of natural evil, we have to look toward a different kind of theodicy.
John Hick and the Soul-Making Theodicy
Enter Irenaeus, an early philosopher whose ideas were expanded upon in the 20th century by John Hick. Hick proposed the Soul-Making Theodicy.
The core idea here completely flips our assumption about the purpose of the universe.
When Epicurus formulated his paradox, the hidden assumption was that the purpose of a good God is to create a comfortable, painless environment for humans. Like a cosmic zookeeper, God’s job is to keep the cages clean and the animals happy.
But what if the universe was never meant to be a hedonistic paradise? What if it was designed as an environment for moral and spiritual maturation?
Hick argues that humans were not created as finished, perfected beings. We were created in a state of spiritual infancy. To grow into beings capable of profound empathy, courage, and self-sacrifice, we need an environment that provides friction.
“We are not the pets of a cosmic zookeeper… we are children in a family, and the world is a place of soul-making.” — John Hick
Think about it:
- How can you develop courage in a world where there is no danger?
- How can you develop compassion in a world where no one is ever in pain?
- How can you practice forgiveness in a world where no one can ever wrong you?
Under the Soul-Making Theodicy, natural evils (the harshness of the physical environment, the fragility of our biology) are not glitches in the system. They are the system. They provide the necessary friction required for human beings to evolve from self-centered animals into morally robust, spiritually mature entities.
My Synthesis in the Garden
Where does that leave us?
The intellect can assemble these arguments like LEGO bricks. We can use Plantinga to explain moral evil and Hick to explain natural evil. We can draw neat philosophical borders around suffering.
But the reality of suffering rarely cares about our logic. When you are sitting in a hospital waiting room, or watching a loved one grieve, reciting the “Soul-Making Theodicy” feels hollow, if not outright offensive.
I think this is where philosophy has to step back and allow theology to take over. The most compelling aspect of Christian theology, for instance, isn’t that it provides a neat mathematical answer to the Problem of Evil. It’s that it presents a God who actually steps into the simulation. A creator who doesn’t just watch the suffering from a safe, transcendent distance, but physically enters the timeline, experiences betrayal, physical agony, and death.
It doesn’t answer why the fawn has to burn in the forest fire. But it suggests that whatever the ultimate reason for the architecture of suffering is, the architect was willing to subject himself to it alongside us.
As I continue to build out this digital garden, I realize that some seeds might never fully grow into complete, finalized answers. The Problem of Evil is one of them. We are finite creatures trying to reverse-engineer the blueprints of an infinite reality.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to solve the paradox, but to figure out how to live well within it. To take the friction of the world and actually use it for what Hick suggested: to let it make our souls a little bit larger.
📚 Further Exploration
If this seed sparked your curiosity, here are the resources I highly recommend diving into to see these arguments fully fleshed out:
Books:
- “The Problem of Pain” by C.S. Lewis - An incredibly accessible, deeply human look at why a good God allows suffering. Lewis writes not just as a philosopher, but as someone who experienced profound personal loss.
- “God, Freedom, and Evil” by Alvin Plantinga - This is a dense, academic read. If you want to see the exact modal logic Plantinga used to defeat the Logical Problem of Evil, this is the gold standard.
- “Evil and the God of Love” by John Hick - The definitive text on the Irenaean / Soul-Making theodicy.
Sources & Citations:
- Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom, and Evil. Eerdmans, 1977.
- Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Palgrave Macmillan, 1966.
- Rowe, William L. “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, 1979, pp. 335–341.
- Epicurus, as cited by David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779.