The Problem of Evil: Why Does a Good God Allow Suffering?
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.Job 42:5-6 · World English Bible
Original Language & Text
Isaiah 45:7 is one of the most argued-about single verses on this whole topic: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things.” The Hebrew word translated “calamity” (or, in the King James Version, “evil”) is a word with a wide range of meanings — moral wrongdoing is just one possible sense, alongside “harm,” “disaster,” or “misfortune.” The verse itself pairs this word with its opposite, “peace,” not with “righteousness,” which is a big reason most modern translations use words like “disaster” or “calamity” instead of “evil.” This isn't a case of a newer translation softening an uncomfortable idea — both translation choices are legitimate given how the word actually works in Hebrew, and the surrounding context is really about God's control over world events (specifically, a foreign king's rise to power), not a statement about where moral evil comes from. When God finally speaks to Job “out of the storm,” his answer isn't actually an explanation for Job's suffering at all — it's a long string of unanswerable questions about how the universe was made. In the New Testament, one Greek word covers both “trial” (a test that builds character, as in James 1:2-3) and “temptation” (an enticement toward sin, as in James 1:12-13, where the text specifically says God isn't the source) — the same word, with the meaning shifting based on context.
Key Terms in the Original Language
“evil, harm, calamity” (Isa. 45:7)
A wide-ranging Hebrew word covering moral wrongdoing, misfortune, and disaster alike; its pairing with “peace” rather than “righteousness” in Isaiah 45:7 supports reading it as “calamity” there rather than moral evil.
“out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1)
God's answer to Job comes from a storm and consists of unanswerable questions about creation, not an explanation of Job's suffering.
“trial” / “temptation” (James 1:2-3, 12-13)
A single Greek word covering both a character-building “test” and an enticement to sin, with James distinguishing the two senses within the same chapter.
“justice of God”
Not a biblical term; coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710 from Greek theos ("god") and dike ("justice") for the philosophical project of defending God's goodness given the existence of evil.
History & Authorship
The Book of Job is written in an unusual way compared to most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible: a short story at the beginning and end wraps around a very long poem in the middle, where Job's three friends keep suggesting, in different ways, that Job must be suffering because he did something wrong — an idea the story itself rejects right from the start, and that God himself criticizes by the end. Most scholars agree Job is a work of wisdom literature written to deliberately stage this debate, rather than a simple historical report, though nobody agrees on exactly when it was written — guesses range from very early, matching its ancient-feeling setting, to much later, based on its language and ideas. The classic philosophical version of this whole problem is often credited to the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who supposedly said: if God wants to stop evil but can't, he's not all-powerful; if he can stop it but won't, he's not good; and if he's both willing and able, why does evil still exist? It turns out this famous quote probably wasn't actually said by Epicurus at all — the oldest place it shows up is in the writing of a Christian author named Lactantius, around 318 CE, almost six hundred years after Epicurus died, and a modern scholar who carefully studied the wording in 1988 found that it actually sounds more like the style of a different Greek philosopher entirely. The actual word “theodicy” (meaning a defense of God's goodness in the face of evil) wasn't even invented until much later, by a philosopher named Leibniz in 1710 — the same book where he also made his famous, often-mocked claim that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”
How This Debate Developed
-
Wisdom-literature era (disputed date)
Book of Job stages the debate
Job's frame narrative explicitly rejects the friends' assumption that suffering is always direct punishment for sin; God rebukes that assumption at the book's end (42:7).
-
c. 318 CE
Trilemma attributed to Epicurus
Christian writer Lactantius records the willing/able trilemma and attributes it to Epicurus -- the earliest surviving source, nearly six centuries after Epicurus's death, and an attribution later philological study found doubtful.
-
c. 397-400 CE
Augustine's privation theodicy
Confessions develops evil as privation (absence of good) rather than a positive substance, paired with a free-will account of its origin.
-
1710
Leibniz coins “theodicy”
Essais de Théodicée introduces the term and argues this is “the best of all possible worlds.”
-
1955
Mackie formalizes the logical problem
J. L. Mackie's “Evil and Omnipotence” (Mind) argues omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence are logically incompatible with evil's existence.
-
1966-1979
Hick, Plantinga, and Rowe
Hick's Irenaean soul-making theodicy (1966) and Plantinga's free will defense (1974) respond to the logical problem; Rowe's evidential argument (1979) reframes the debate around apparently gratuitous suffering.
The Popular / Mainstream View
Historically, the most influential Christian answer to this problem comes from Augustine: evil isn't really a “thing” God created, but rather the absence or corruption of something good, and it ultimately comes from creatures misusing the real freedom God gave them. A more modern, philosophical version of this same basic idea comes from Alvin Plantinga, whose 1974 book is widely seen, even by people who don't believe in God, as having successfully shown that it's at least logically possible for a good, all-powerful God to exist alongside a world that includes some evil — since a world where people can genuinely choose between right and wrong might be better overall than a world where nobody has real freedom to choose at all.
Minority & Alternative Views
The “soul-making” view
Named after a very early church leader named Irenaeus and developed further by a 20th-century philosopher named John Hick, this view says humans were created immature, not perfect, and that a world with real challenges and difficulties is actually necessary for people to grow into fully mature, good people. In other words, suffering isn't just something that happens alongside free will — it actually serves the positive purpose of building character. Critics point out that this doesn't explain suffering that seems to destroy people rather than build them up, like the death of a young child.
Suffering that seems pointless
A philosopher named William Rowe wrote an influential paper in 1979 that shifted the conversation: instead of trying to prove God's existence is logically impossible given evil, he argued that some suffering — like a wild animal dying slowly and painfully in a forest fire, with no one around to see it or benefit from it in any way — looks completely pointless, and that this counts as real evidence against an all-good, all-powerful God, even if it doesn't prove such a God can't exist. Most philosophical discussion about this topic today focuses on this version of the argument rather than the older, stricter logical version.
Open theism and process theology
A smaller but serious group of theologians believe that God doesn't actually know every single choice a free person will make ahead of time — the future is genuinely open, even to God — which changes how you'd think about God's responsibility for evil, since God would be taking real risks rather than knowingly allowing every specific bad thing that happens. An even more different view, called process theology, goes further and says God's power works only through gentle influence, never force, meaning God literally cannot override anyone's freedom or the laws of nature to stop evil from happening. Most traditional Christian churches consider this last view to fall outside normal Christian belief, since it changes what “all-powerful” actually means rather than just explaining how God uses that power.
What Scholars Say
It helps to be clear about what each of these answers actually claims to prove. Plantinga's argument only tries to show that a flat-out logical contradiction can't be proven — it doesn't try to explain why any specific bad thing actually happened — and most philosophers today, whether or not they believe in God, agree that this narrower, stricter version of the argument against God has been successfully answered. The much harder question — why suffering in the real world seems to happen in the amounts, and in the seemingly pointless ways, that it does — is still genuinely debated, with some arguing that humans simply aren't in a position to judge whether suffering that looks pointless to us really is pointless from God's much bigger perspective, and others finding that response unsatisfying when facing real suffering. It's worth noticing that the Book of Job itself never actually explains Job's suffering to Job — he's never told about the bet made in heaven at the start of the story, and God's response to him is just a long series of questions about the universe, not a direct answer — which a lot of readers take as the book intentionally refusing to offer a neat, tidy explanation. See the Afterlife topic for the related question of how ultimate justice and suffering get resolved beyond this life.
Sources & Further Reading
- Augustine, Confessions, Book VII (c. 397-400 CE)
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée (1710)
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940)
- John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (1966)
- Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (1974)
- William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979)
Find More Books on This
Search Google Books' full catalog — print and ebook alike — for more on The Problem of Evil: Why Does a Good God Allow Suffering?, beyond Berea's curated source list above.
Study & Discussion Questions
- Augustine held that evil has no independent existence, only ever being a corruption or privation of a good that God did create. Does understanding evil as “absence” rather than a “thing” change how you think about its origin or its solution?
- The book of Job never actually explains to Job why he suffered -- he's never told about the wager in heaven, and God's answer is a series of questions about creation rather than a direct justification. What do you make of a book about suffering that refuses to resolve the reader's (or the sufferer's) actual question?
- Rowe's evidential argument focuses on suffering that appears to serve no discernible greater purpose at all -- a fawn dying alone in a forest fire, unseen and unremembered. Does the free will defense, which explains moral evil through human choices, have anything to say about this kind of apparently pointless natural suffering?
- The Irenaean “soul-making” theodicy holds that struggle and difficulty are necessary for genuine moral and spiritual growth. Where do you think this explanation holds up best, and where does it seem to strain against the actual severity of some suffering?
- Isaiah 45:7 has been translated both “I create evil” and “I create calamity” for the same Hebrew word. Does the choice between these translations change what the verse is actually claiming about God's relationship to evil?
Dig Deeper
Have a more specific question about The Problem of Evil: Why Does a Good God Allow Suffering?? Ask it below — Berea will look into it live and note where views differ, the same way it does everywhere else.
Answers here are generated live by AI and are not independently vetted.