Any casual observer can easily notice that our world contains disproportionate amounts of evil and suffering. Morally upstanding people are not always protected and disturbingly immoral people are not always caught or punished. Likewise, not all religious believers are blessed and sometimes non-religious individuals are happier and healthier in their lives. The problem of evil deals with the age old question of why bad things happen to good people and why good things happen to bad people. Many religions, especially monotheisms, suggest that God is both good and loving, and that he bestows blessings upon those who believe in him. Understandably, the suggestion leads many to ponder why a good and loving god would allow so much evil in the world, evil that often seems quite cruel and senseless.

An entire branch of theology known as theodicy evolved with the intent of reconciling the problem of evil. Although people of different beliefs and persuasions may have different definitions of evil, most of us apparently agree that such a thing (in its most basic, non-religious context) does exist. Rape, murder, genocide, pedophilia, spousal abuse - these are things that most of us recognize as detrimental to others and to our species as a whole in the long run. Theodicy attempts to explain why a loving and moral god would permit such acts. Throughout history, many different solutions to the problem have been proposed, but as we will see, all of them contain very suspicious and counter-intuitive implications.

I. God's Attributes and Motives

With this paradox, Epicurus formulated one of the strongest arguments against the Judeo-Christian god, and there are also other challenges that can emerge from its line of thinking. The Judeo-Christian god is called omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), benevolent (loving) and moral by its followers, among many other things. Yet if this is true, why did God, with his foresight and goodness, not prevent Satan from becoming the embodiment of evil to begin with? Why did God also wait several thousand years to send the messiah, if he knew people would struggle to keep his laws and that countless deaths and sufferings would transpire in the meantime? The idea of an all-knowing and all-powerful god, whose loving and moral nature includes not a shred of evil or tolerance for evil (Job 34:10, Psalm 5:4, James 1:13), is a problematic idea indeed.

Most of the arguments formed around the problem of evil dispute the compatibility of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and moral god with the evil that exists and seems to thrive in our world. If the god in question is missing one or more of these aspects, then the problem of evil may not apply, as we can find in Epicurus' paradox. If God is not omnipotent, he may just be unable to prevent evil. If God is not benevolent or moral, he may not want to eliminate evil, as it might be part of his 'personality'. If God is not omniscient, then he may be unaware of the extent of evil. For reasons like these, deism, pantheism, and polytheism are not the primary focus of the problem of evil. Monotheism, unless it adopts a dualistic view of God, is where the contradictions are to be found.

II. Job's Problem

One of the best and probably most widely-known examples of the problem of evil comes from the biblical book of Job. As the story goes, Job was a faithful and righteous man, so much so that God decided to participate in a little bet with Satan. God allowed Satan to ruin Job's life, predicting that Job would still remain faithful even in the face of great pain and adversity (Job 1: 6-12). Job's oxen and donkeys were killed and stolen from him (1:14), his sheep and servants were burned up by fire from the sky (1:16), his camels and other servants were slaughtered (1:17), and his own sons and daughters were crushed by the house collapsing on them (1:18-19). Even after all this, Job did not renounce his faith, so Satan afflicted him with painful sores all over his body (2:7-8).

After a while of suffering, cursing his own existence, and praying for God to reveal his plan behind the torture, Job is finally answered by God, who rebukes him for not being as powerful and mighty as he is. During the whole ordeal, Job never denied God, and for it he is rewarded with twice as much wealth as he had before (42:10)... so what did Job do wrong that made God scold him? The interesting observation is that God never answers Job or tells him about the bet he had with Satan. Instead, he belittles him, effectually communicating that, 'I'm God, I can do whatever I want and I don't have to answer to you'. In this scenario, there is no grand purpose or philosophy behind evil or suffering, and we are simply taught to accept whatever comes our way, knowing that God is in control.

III. Answering the Problem

A. Just Trust God

Taking a cue from the Job story, many Christians assert that because God's ways are higher than our ways, humankind cannot sit in judgment over the motives or decisions of God. Something may appear evil to us, but we are limited in our understanding, and imagining that we can tell God what is appropriate is sheer arrogance. However, this response assumes several things about the nature of God, when most individuals who propose the problem of evil do not believe God exists in the first place. The problem of evil simply takes the statements made by religion and critiques them in light of morality. It may be mere human morality, but claiming that we cannot judge God assumes that said god exists and that it is actually beyond our moral comprehension, when obviously nothing of the sort has been conclusively determined. The response does not really answer the problem either, and it is far from a satisfactory reply - the divine equivalent of answering a question: 'because I said so'.

B. The Absent Argument

In the same vein, other apologists and believers may address the problem of evil by claiming that evil is only the absence of good (or of God), not a thing in itself. This might seem to solve the problem to many Christians, but in reality it still suffers the same question: why would God, who supposedly created everything, allow such absences of good (or of himself) among his creation? Furthermore, imagine how one would apply this reasoning to real world situations. If a woman is raped and killed in an alley, is it because the rapist or the victim had an absence of God? Some Christians might say that no honest Christian is capable of killing a person, but this commits the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy (2).

C. Free Will

Another popular answer is that God's gift of free will unfortunately means that some of us choose evil, and not wanting to take away our choice, God lets the two co-exist. Yet this implies that greater good exists in allowing free will than in eliminating evil, a concept that is demanding but lacking in evidence. It is also fairly sketchy to pretend that an omnipotent god could not provide us free will in an evil-free environment. To act as though evil is just an unfortunate consequence of free will that God cannot help... that makes God limited and thus not omnipotent. A person might not be able to fathom how free will could exist without the choice to do evil, but our own lack of imagination cannot disqualify the objection. Remember, God is allegedly beyond our knowledge, all-powerful and capable of making the impossible possible (Luke 1:37).

What if God actually prefers evil and allows for free will as the consequence? The bible lends credence to this suggestion in many passages, as does our own history on Earth [see "The Goodness of God" and "God Doesn't Care for Humanity"]. Yes, the bible also talks of God's distaste for evil and how he will destroy it in the endtimes, but what if the bible is written/inspired by an evil god masquerading as a benevolent deity? Holy books are supposedly written by process of revelation, revelation being a method of knowing God that originates only in God, as he chooses what to reveal and how to reveal it. So if there is an evil god who revealed himself through the bible, who controls the extent of our possible knowledge of him, and who has set out to deceive us into believing he is a merciful, loving deity with a plan of salvation for all of us... how would any of us ever find out the truth?

The point is that there is no more certainty in claiming evil as a consequence of free will than there is in stating that free will is a consequence of evil.

D. See No Evil

Some religious believers, including Christian Scientists, deny the existence of evil altogether, explaining it away as an illusion (3). While this does, of course, do away with the problem of evil, it also raises a lot of other problems and questions. Tell a rape victim that the evil they experienced was merely an illusion. Should her rapist even be tried and punished if his act of evil was not real? The bible is also rife with tales of God punishing people who commit evil, giving rules and laws for his followers to abstain from evil, and his very purpose and mission for Jesus Christ was that he would become a solution to sin, which might as well be another word for evil. Even if evil is something we just imagine, the pain felt from it and the illusion itself are still evils.

IV. Too Many Ideals

It is interesting to contemplate the history and evolution of religion, as well as the concept of God. Pre-monotheistic beliefs were often extensions of the culture and explanations for the inexplicable natural phenomena of the region. Pantheism and polytheism are not susceptible to the problem of evil, because they are open-ended faiths, which typically even give evil its place as one of many deities or forces. With the emergence of monotheism, however, and the unification of tribes and peoples under 'one true god', religions mixed and synergized so that contradictions were to be inevitable. The separate gods of chaos and order, light and darkness, heaven and hell, came together into one being of dualistic nature.

But with the growing influence of our strong human desires for love, certainty and goodness, God became a new being in denial of his dualistic nature. An ultimate expression of all that our race has struggled for in the past, the deity was designated as a male and transformed in omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and (according to some) omnibenevolence. This schizophrenic entity was given Satan as his puppet, to blame for the evil, hatred and suffering in the world that could not logically come from a good, loving god. In Satan, we see a pale vestige of the dualistic origin, the separation of good and evil, light and darkness as two distinct beings - but it is corrupted by God's responsibility in creating the devil, curiously empowering his 'inferior' enemy to work against him.

Thus we subjected God to contradiction and corruption, as we exchanged the natural and cultural elements for the unnatural and 'universal' elements that we longed to possess, for our own sense of security, safety and comfort. The problem of evil cannot be resolved for such a lofty conception of God, because it has been - and can only be - laid on a foundation of sand.

1. Hume, D. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved Jan. 20, 2009.
2. Anonymous. No true Scotsman. Wikipedia. Retrieved Jan. 20, 2009.
3. MacDonald, T., Pickup, J. & Mehlenbacher, E. Why is there an illusion called evil?. Retrieved Jan. 20, 2009.