If God is all-powerful and all-good, there would be no gratuitous suffering.
This is the most serious objection to theism, and any Christian response that fails to feel its weight is inadequate. Cancer in children. The Holocaust. Natural disasters that kill hundreds of thousands. Animals suffering for millions of years before humans existed. The sheer quantity of pain - not just moral evil but the grinding machinery of parasitism, predation, disease, and decay - seems disproportionate to any conceivable soul-making benefit. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov returns his ticket: even if heaven redeems it all, the torture of one innocent child was not worth it. The logical form (Mackie 1955): (1) If God is omnipotent, he can prevent evil; (2) if omniscient, he knows of it; (3) if perfectly good, he wants to; (4) evil exists; therefore one of (1)-(3) is false. The evidential form (Rowe 1979, Tooley) is subtler: the quantity and distribution of suffering make theism less probable than atheism, even if not impossible.
The logical problem is widely considered answered; the evidential problem is live and serious, but answerable. (1) Logical: Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974) is accepted across the philosophical spectrum - even by atheists like J.L. Mackie - as demonstrating that "God exists" and "evil exists" are logically compatible. It is possible that any world containing the goods of free moral agents unavoidably permits the possibility of evil. Since possibility is all the logical argument requires to rebut, the logical problem is defeated. (2) Evidential: no human, theist or atheist, is in a position to judge that a given instance of suffering is gratuitous - that it serves no purpose any omniscient being could reach. Stephen Wykstra's CORNEA principle and William Alston's "noseeum" critique formalize this. (3) Theological: Christianity does not offer God as a removed observer; it offers a God who enters the suffering - Gethsemane, the cross, the cry of dereliction. Whatever else the resurrection means, it means that suffering is not the last word. (4) Soul-making: John Hick (Evil and the God of Love, 1966) and Eleonore Stump (Wandering in Darkness, 2010) develop the view that certain goods - courage, compassion, self-giving love, intimate relationship with God after having been broken - are only accessible through a world in which suffering is possible. (5) Practical: the very objection presupposes a standard of the way things "ought to be" - but atheistic naturalism has trouble grounding any such "ought." Evil is a problem for theism; but the reality of objective moral outrage is itself a problem for naturalism.
The Christian does not "solve" evil; Christianity claims Jesus has entered it, and will one day undo it. The honest posture is lament, not glib answer. But the logical argument fails, and the evidential one depends on a confidence (that we can see the whole board) that no one - theist or atheist - actually has.
Sources & citations
- God, Freedom, and Evil — Alvin Plantinga (1974)scholarlyFind on Amazon
- The Problem of Pain — C.S. Lewis (1940)popularFind on Amazon
- Reasonable Faith — William Lane Craig (2008 (3rd ed.))scholarlyFind on Amazon