Evil and suffering disprove God

Philosophers distinguish two forms of the argument, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets them out.

The logical argument says that a perfectly good, all-powerful God and the existence of evil cannot both be true. The Australian philosopher J. L. Mackie defended this in the 1950s. In reply, Alvin Plantinga argued that there is no contradiction if God could have a good reason for permitting evil, such as a world of creatures who are free to love and therefore free to harm. Many philosophers, atheists among them, have since concluded that the strict logical version does not succeed.

The evidential argument is more modest and much stronger. It grants that God and some evil could coexist. It says that the evils we actually see, in their amount and their horror, make God unlikely. The philosopher William Rowe gave it its best-known form in 1979, using the example of a fawn burned in a forest fire that suffers for days and dies with no one ever knowing.

If the argument is evidential, it is a matter of weighing, and weighing means looking at all the evidence, not only this piece.

Rowe’s argument moves from “I can see no good reason for this suffering” to “there probably is no good reason.” Sometimes that kind of inference works. If you look around a room and see no elephant, there probably is no elephant, because an elephant is the kind of thing you would see.

It works less well when the thing you are looking for is the kind of thing you would not expect to see. A beginner watching a chess grandmaster sacrifice her queen sees no reason for the move. That tells you about the beginner. If a God exists who is wise enough to make a universe, his reasons might involve consequences spread across centuries and billions of lives, which no human could trace. On that assumption, our failure to see a reason is what we would expect whether or not one exists.

This reply, often called skeptical theism, has serious critics. Their best point is that if we cannot judge God’s reasons, it seems we cannot judge his goodness either, or know that he would not deceive us. Philosophers still argue about how far the reply reaches. The weight of suffering remains, but “I see no reason” is weaker evidence than it first appears.

The argument can be run as a purely internal test: Christians say God is good, so measure him by the Christians’ own standard and see if he passes. That test is legitimate, and nothing in this section answers it.

Most people who press the problem of evil mean more than that, though. They mean that torturing a child is really wrong, not merely something they dislike or that their culture forbids. If that is true, the world contains real moral facts, and those facts need something to make them true. A universe of matter and energy alone explains why we have moral feelings, but it struggles to explain why those feelings would be right. There are atheist accounts of objective morality, and they deserve a hearing; the moral argument sets them beside the theist one.

C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, describes this as the point where his own atheism came apart. His case against God rested on the cruelty and injustice of the world, and he came to ask where he had got his idea of justice from. You do not have to follow him. His case shows suffering as evidence that points two ways: against a good God, and toward a real moral order that a good God would explain.

Some religious answers say that people who suffer must have deserved it. Jesus rejected that. Asked about Galileans killed by Pilate’s soldiers and eighteen people crushed when a tower fell in Jerusalem, he asked whether they were worse than anyone else, and answered: “No, I tell you” (Luke 13:1-5).

Instead, Christianity makes a claim about who God is. Christians believe in the incarnation: that God became a human being in Jesus. If that is true, God did not stay outside suffering and comment on it. Jesus was betrayed, beaten, and executed by crucifixion, one of the cruelest deaths the Roman world devised. On the cross, according to Matthew’s Gospel, he cried out the opening line of a psalm of abandonment: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). Whatever the Christian God is, he is not a spectator.

Christianity also makes a claim about the end. Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning” (Romans 8:22), and the last book of the New Testament promises that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” and there will be “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4).

None of this makes a child’s death acceptable, and it is not meant to. If you are looking for a reason that would make it all right, Christianity does not offer one.

A promise that suffering will end is worth only as much as the one making it. Christians do not ask you to trust it on its own. They tie it to a single claim: that Jesus, after his execution, was raised from the dead. Paul states the stakes himself: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

That is a claim about a past event, and it can be investigated like one. The crucifixion of Jesus is accepted by historians of every persuasion. What happened next is where the argument lies, and whether you think it could have happened depends partly on whether you think miracles are possible at all.

Suffering is not the only evidence on the table. If there are good reasons to think God exists and that he raised Jesus, the problem of evil becomes a hard question about a God you have reason to trust. If there are no such reasons, suffering weighs heavily against him.