The Problem of Evil and Suffering (AQA A-Level Religious Studies): Revision Notes
The Problem of Evil and Suffering
Understanding evil and suffering
The problem of evil poses the single greatest challenge to faith in God. Some people's experience of evil is so profound that it destroys their belief in God entirely. Christian philosophy maintains that God has a sufficient reason for allowing evil to exist, and understanding this reason is central to this topic.
Moral evil
Definition: Acts committed by human beings, such as murder, theft and rape. It also includes evil that comes from human inaction, for example where someone fails to act to help another person in danger.
Moral evil arises from human choices and intentions. It encompasses both actions (things people do) and inactions (things people fail to do when they should act).
Moral evil uniquely involves human agency and responsibility. Unlike natural disasters, moral evil can be traced directly to human decisions, whether through active wrongdoing or passive failure to prevent harm.
Key examples:
- Individual acts: murder, adultery, theft, lying, cruelty, discrimination
- Collective acts: genocide, such as the Holocaust (1941-1945) where 6 million Jews and 3 million others were exterminated, or the Rwandan genocide (1994) where 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi were killed
The Holocaust provides a stark illustration of moral evil's depths. Survivors like Jack Adler repeatedly asked "Why?" when reflecting on the suffering inflicted at places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one in six Holocaust victims died.
Natural evil
Definition: What the world does to us through disease, starvation, storm, flood, earthquake and tsunami. Unlike moral evil, natural evil is produced by the chance operation of the laws of nature rather than by human intentions.
Natural evil occurs through natural processes rather than human agency. A flood does not 'intend' to drown people, but drowning becomes a likely consequence if someone is caught in flood water.
Key examples:
- Earthquakes: The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed approximately 70,000 people and left 5 million homeless
- Volcanic eruptions: The 1883 Krakatoa eruption killed around 36,000 people
- Mass extinctions: The Permian-Triassic extinction (251-252 million years ago) eliminated 90% of marine species and 79% of land species
Natural disasters pose particular difficulties for religious believers because, unlike moral evil, they cannot be attributed to human free will. The obvious source of blame is God, since an omnipotent being should be able to control the forces of nature.
Suffering
Definition: The mental or physical pain, hardship or distress brought about by both moral and natural evil.
Both types of evil lead to mental suffering, including misery, heartache, terror, panic and hopelessness. Natural evil causes physical suffering through injury, disease and death, which in turn causes mental anguish. Moral and natural evil often combine to produce suffering.
The Bible's perspectives on evil
This section provides background context for understanding Christian responses to evil.
Old Testament view
The Book of Genesis presents the story of Adam and Eve, showing how the first humans brought moral evil into the world by disobeying God. Their disobedience was punished by the Flood, a form of natural evil.
Many Christians do not interpret these stories literally. The creation and flood narratives were influenced by earlier Babylonian myths (such as the Epic of Gilgamesh). These accounts function as myths - not untrue stories, but explanations for what we observe in the world.
Biblical authors believed everything is under God's control, meaning God must create both evil and good (Isaiah 45:7). However, why evil strikes good people as well as bad remains mysterious (as explored in the Book of Job).
New Testament view
In the New Testament, St Paul argues that evil can be overcome through faith in Jesus. By having faith, God counts believers as righteous and members of God's Kingdom (Romans 3:21-31).
Jesus performs miracles that demonstrate control over natural evil:
- Healing diseases such as blindness and leprosy
- Calming wind and sea to save his disciples from drowning
- Raising Lazarus from death after four days in the tomb
- Conquering death through his own resurrection
In John 9:1-13, when disciples ask whether a blind man's suffering resulted from his own sin or his parents', Jesus shifts the question from cause to purpose: the man's condition provides an opportunity for God to act, and Jesus heals him.
This shift from "why did this happen?" to "what can God do through this?" represents a crucial perspective in Christian theodicy.
The role of Satan
The Bible partially explains evil through Satan's influence. 1 John 5:19 states: "We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one."
The Book of Revelation identifies Satan as the Serpent in Genesis 3 who tempts Eve. Christian writers explain that God allows the Devil to influence the world because creation has been given free will. Just as humans can cause evil through free choices, Satan used his free will to rebel against God and corrupt humans.
This concept of free choice between good and evil forms the heart of the Free Will Defence.
The logical problem of evil
The inconsistent triad
The logical problem arises from three statements that cannot all be true simultaneously:
The Inconsistent Triad:
- God is omnipotent (all-powerful)
- God is omnibenevolent (all-loving/all-good)
- Evil exists
These form an "inconsistent triad" - three statements containing a logical contradiction. An all-powerful God could remove evil, and an all-loving God would want to remove evil, yet evil exists.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) first identified this contradiction:
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 evil?
Solutions that deny one of the three statements
Solution 1: Denying God's omnipotence
If God lacks omnipotence, He cannot control evil and bears no blame for its continued existence. This is Process Theology's preferred solution - evil is a process within matter beyond God's direct control.
The difficulty: for most believers, a non-omnipotent God would not be worthy of worship. A God without omnipotence would not truly be 'God'. Additionally, no arguments prove God's omnipotence; it remains a matter of faith.
Solution 2: Denying God's omnibenevolence
For most Christians, this solution is unthinkable. Belief in God's goodness and love supports those experiencing evil and forms the basis for hope in heaven. Revelation 21:4 expresses this hope: "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more."
Freud might argue this represents wish-fulfilment - there is no all-loving God, only the desire for one. However, wishing something to be true does not make it false. Nevertheless, God's omnibenevolence cannot be proven any more than His omnipotence.
Solution 3: Denying that evil exists
Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) proposed that evil is privatio boni - a privation of good. Evil does not exist in its own right but represents an absence of good, just as darkness is absence of light and ignorance is absence of knowledge.
This appears promising initially. If evil merely represents the absence of good rather than having independent existence, there is no logical 'problem' to solve and God bears no blame.
However, denying evil's reality proves unacceptable to most people. Most have experienced evil's power to disrupt lives and perceive evil as real and tangible as good. Mothers who entered gas chambers with their babies would gain no consolation from being told evil has no reality.
Solutions arguing God has sufficient reason to allow evil
Rather than denying one element of the inconsistent triad, these solutions propose that God has a good reason for permitting evil to exist. The main Christian responses include:
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The Free Will Defence: God must allow evil to preserve free will. To enable the best goods (love, compassion), humans must be free to choose opposing vices (hatred, heartlessness). If God controlled evil, freedom would not exist. Humans bear moral responsibility for moral evil, not God.
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John Hick's eschatological solution: God has unlimited time to bring people to freely love the good, so eventually everyone will reach God's Kingdom (heaven). Evil forms a necessary part of the process making us fit for heaven.
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Process Theology: The extent of evil shows God cannot be omnipotent. God can persuade us to choose good but cannot compel us.
The evidential problem of evil
Understanding the evidential problem
The evidential problem extends beyond the logical problem by pointing to known facts about evil that count as evidence against God's existence. The problem focuses on two types of evil:
Two Types of Problematic Evil:
- Evil that is overwhelming in quantity and quality
- Evil that is pointless, serving no useful purpose
Evidence from overwhelming evil
Natural evil: The Permian-Triassic extinction
The 'Great Dying' occurred 251-252 million years ago, eliminating approximately 90% of marine species and 79% of land species through natural disasters including a massive asteroid strike. The NASA Science website describes this as "almost the perfect crime" - murder on an unequalled scale in world history.
This raises difficult questions. Evolution may be self-running, but as a natural process governed by laws of nature, why did God not program those laws to be less destructive or intervene to stop the extinction? If cruelty to humans is wrong, surely cruelty to other species is also wrong?
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 BCE, which obliterated Pompeii and killed approximately 1,500 people (based on bodies discovered), provides another example. These natural disasters challenge both belief in God's goodness and the Design Argument for God's existence.
Moral evil: Dostoyevsky's challenge in The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky's 1880 novel provides perhaps the most powerful argument against defending God's goodness. In the novel, Ivan tells his brother Alyosha (a novice monk) heartrending stories of cruelty to children:
Example from Dostoyevsky: The Suffering of an Innocent Child
One example describes a five-year-old girl hated by her parents. They beat her, thrashed her and kicked her until her body was covered in bruises. They locked her in the cold all night in a privy and smeared her face and mouth with excrement because she did not wake to ask to be taken up at night. Her own mother did this and could sleep whilst hearing the child's groans.
Ivan asks: Can you understand why this little creature should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold, weeping tears to 'dear, kind God' to protect her? Do you understand why this infamy must be permitted? Why should the child know good and evil when it costs so much? The whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to God.
Later, Ivan challenges Alyosha to imagine being God about to create the universe. If creating it meant torturing just one child - letting her beat her aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold, weeping tears to dear, kind God - would he build the universe? Alyosha says he would not.
Evidence from pointless evil
The American philosopher William Rowe (1931-2015) provides a well-known example. Suppose in a distant forest a lightning strike causes a forest fire. A fawn becomes trapped, horribly burned, and lies in agony for several days before death relieves its suffering.
Example: Rowe's Fawn
The fawn's agony appears pointless:
- It suffers and dies alone, so no human being knows about it
- No eventual good comes from it
- It neither preserves human free will nor builds human character by developing virtues like sympathy and compassion
This challenges the common theodicies that justify suffering as building character or preserving freedom, since this suffering achieves neither purpose.
The evidential problem and God's omniscience
The evidential problem requires adding one more statement to the inconsistent triad:
God is omniscient (all-knowing)
'Omniscient' means all events that will happen are known to God even before creating the universe.
An omniscient being would know at the point of creation that both overwhelming and pointless evils would occur:
- Mass extinctions during Earth's history
- Auschwitz-Birkenau
- Pointless evils like Rowe's fawn example
- The cruel treatment of innocent children described by Ivan
All these would be obvious to an all-knowing mind. Why, then, did God create the universe? Ivan's examples suggest the price of building a universe is too great in terms of its potential for overwhelming and pointless suffering.
Questions about suffering
Several difficult questions emerge:
Critical Questions for Theodicy:
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Animal suffering: How many theologians accept there is a place in heaven for all animals who suffer? If not, what does this say about the injustice and incalculable amount of animal suffering during 3.5 billion years of evolution? Where is God's love for all creation?
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Atonement for children's suffering: Is there any atonement that could be made for the sufferings of innocent children revealed by Ivan's accounts?
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The price of heaven: What parent would buy the future harmony of heaven at the price of watching their children thrown into fire pits and burned alive, as happened during the Holocaust?
Ivan concludes that God asks too high a price for heaven's future harmony. It exceeds our means to pay. This forms the essence of Ivan's 'rebellion' against God: he wants no part in heaven's joys, even if wrong about evil.
I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.
Rabbi Greenberg's test
Rabbi Irving Greenberg stated regarding the Holocaust:
No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.
The Credibility Test:
Any answer to why God allows evil can only be credible if it could be spoken whilst watching children die in agony in flames. Jack Adler, who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, asked "Why?" His question carries the same force - his family harmed no one, demonstrating that those who preach hate plant the seed of evil.
The relationship between evil and suffering
How evil causes suffering
Evil directly causes suffering, whether natural or moral in origin.
Natural evil causes physical suffering through:
- Cuts, bruises, burns, scalding
- Loss of limbs, blindness
- Exhaustion and disease
Physical suffering brings mental suffering:
- Sense of loss
- Misery and anguish
- Despair
Natural and moral evil can combine to produce suffering. Almost all suffering caused by nature can also be brought about by human agency:
- Weapons cut, bruise, blind and kill
- Fire burns
- Torture inflicts pain
When suffering can be good
Some suffering brings about good outcomes:
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Medical benefits: Parents allow children the pain of injections because immunisation prevents harmful diseases. People accept the pain of dental treatment or surgery to restore health and avoid greater future problems.
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Learning from mistakes: People learn from mistakes in business, social life and relationships. Some people discover unsuspected reserves of strength through suffering.
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Developing virtue: Suffering brings out compassion, sympathy and empathy. When someone suffers, others can feel compassion and empathy. Many countries respond to natural disasters or war by freely giving time and money to help victims.
A Key Question:
Would we want to live in a world without sympathy or compassion? These virtues often develop in response to witnessing or experiencing suffering, suggesting suffering may play a role in moral development.
Exam tip: When discussing the problem of evil, always distinguish clearly between the logical problem (the inconsistent triad) and the evidential problem (the overwhelming amount and pointless nature of evil). Consider how God's omniscience makes the evidential problem more acute.
Key Points to Remember:
- Moral evil results from human actions or inactions (murder, theft, failing to help others); natural evil results from natural processes (earthquakes, disease, floods)
- Suffering is the mental or physical pain caused by both types of evil
- The logical problem of evil arises from the inconsistent triad: God is omnipotent, God is omnibenevolent, yet evil exists
- The evidential problem of evil focuses on the overwhelming quantity and quality of evil, plus pointless evil that serves no purpose
- God's omniscience intensifies the problem - an all-knowing God would have foreseen all future evil before creating the universe
- Main Christian responses include the Free Will Defence (evil preserves freedom), John Hick's eschatological solution (everyone eventually reaches heaven), and Process Theology (God lacks omnipotence)