Section 25 — The Problem of Evil — Addressed Fully

The Christian Statement

The logical problem of evil — formalized by philosophers as: (1) God is omnipotent; (2) God is omniscient; (3) God is omnibenevolent; (4) Evil exists; therefore God does not exist — was considered by Alvin Plantinga to be the strongest argument for atheism available. He also showed, in his "Free Will Defense," why it fails as a logical argument.

Plantinga's argument: God's power does not include the power to do the logically impossible. And it may not be logically possible for God to create people who are truly free and who always choose good. A world with genuinely free people who can love and choose and grow is more valuable than a world of determined beings who never sin but also never genuinely love. Creating people capable of real love logically allows for the possibility of evil. Not because God is indifferent to evil. Because freedom is the condition love requires.

This does not answer every version of the problem. Natural evil — earthquakes, disease, cancer — is not explained by the free will defense. But it breaks the logical argument that God and evil cannot coexist. Once that is established, the problem shifts from a logical argument (God and evil are logically incompatible) to an evidential one (the amount of evil makes God's existence unlikely). The evidential argument is weaker. It depends on whether the evidence against God outweighs the cumulative evidence for Him.

✖ Atheist: Even if God could permit evil in principle, there is just too much of it. A loving God would intervene more.

✔ How to respond: This argument requires you to know what a world with less suffering would look like. It also requires you to know that God could produce it without other costs you're not accounting for. Neither of us has that knowledge. We are finite beings examining a universe whose full complexity and purpose we cannot see. The "there is too much evil" argument requires a view of the total picture that no person possesses. What we do have is the testimony of people who have walked through the worst suffering imaginable and come out not with less faith but with a depth of trust in God that could not have been produced any other way. That is not a logical argument. But it is evidence of a kind.