Evil & suffering: AQA A* grade notes

AQA RS
Philosophy

AO1: Natural & moral evil

Natural evil is suffering caused by the natural world.
It typically involves suffering that is intense, widespread, and seemingly purposeless.
Since God is believed to have designed the natural world, it is argued that God could have created it differently or intervened to prevent such suffering.
This raises the problem that God appears responsible for natural evil.
David Hume highlights how nature is structured in ways that generate suffering.
Animals endure hunger, disease, fear, and death, with pain acting as the main driver of survival, even though less severe mechanisms seem possible.
Living beings are physically fragile, and the environment exposes them to scarcity, disease, and natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods.
This suggests suffering is built into the natural order.
William Rowe illustrates this with a fawn trapped in a forest fire.
It suffers intensely for days before dying, with no apparent benefit or purpose.
This highlights how natural evil often involves prolonged, non-human suffering that serves no clear good.
Gregory S. Paul argues that suffering is embedded in the structure of life itself.
For most of human history, large numbers of children died before developing morally, due to disease, malnutrition, and natural hazards.
These deaths occur independently of human choice, making them clear examples of natural evil.
Moral evil, by contrast, is suffering caused by human actions, such as war and genocide.
It is argued that God could intervene to prevent extreme cases without removing free will entirely.
Some cases blur the distinction, such as natural disasters intensified by human-driven climate change.

AO1: the logical problem of evil

The logical problem of evil is a deductive argument, meaning if its premises are true its conclusion must be true.
It aims to show that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of the God of classical theism (defined as omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient).
The classical logical problem of evil goes back to Epicurus, who pointed out that God is either unable or unwilling to prevent evil, in which case he either doesn’t exist or isn’t God.
Mackie puts it into a modern form of the inconsistent triad:
P1. An omnipotent God has the power to eliminate evil.
P2. An omnibenevolent God has the motivation to eliminate evil.
C1. Evil, omnipotence and omnibenevolence thus form an inconsistent triad such that God (as classically defined) and evil cannot possibly co-exist.
The argument is a priori in this form, since it doesn’t reference experience.
It is based purely on anl analysis of logical implications of the meaning of the concepts ‘omnipotent’, ‘omnibenevolent’ and ‘evil’.
It is logically impossible for something to exist if there is a being with the power and motivation to eliminate it.
So if evil exists, it is impossible that God exists.
Arguing for the impossible co-existence of two things is a bold claim. It requires that their co-existence be necessarily contradictory.
So that, there is no conceivable counter-example of some logically possible state of affairs or reason where a perfect God could allow evil.

AO1: the evidential problem of evil

The evidential problem of evil claims evil makes belief in God unjustified.
It is a posteriori, based on our experience of evil in the world.
It is inductive, using this experience to support the conclusion that there is no God.
E.g., Hume points to animal and human suffering caused by natural disasters, and the difficulty of survival due to our bodily and environmental limitations.
Hume accepts that it’s logically possible that a perfect God exists and has reasons for allowing evil consistent with their perfection.
What the evidential problem denies is that the evidence justifies believing that is actually the case.
Hume’s version draws on empiricism:
P1. We are only justified in believing what the evidence suggests.
P2. We only have evidence of imperfection (a mixture of good and evil).
C1. So, we are only justified in believing that imperfection exists.
C2. So, belief in a perfectly powerful and good being is not justified.
We cannot infer a perfect God from an imperfect world, so the evidence is insufficient to justify belief.
More modern versions like Rowe argue further that especially pointless evil counts against God.
E.g., a fawn dying slowly in a forest fire shows suffering with no apparent purpose.
P1. There appear to be cases of gratuitous evil
P2. If something appears gratuitous, it is reasonable to think it is
P3. Therefore, probably, there is gratuitous evil
C1. Therefore, God is unlikely
Rowe’s conclusion claims evil is evidence against God, rather than merely blocking the inference to God

AO1: Soul-making theodicy (Irenaeus & Hick)

Soul-making theodicy claims God allows evil because it is necessary for moral development.
Irenaeus interprets Genesis as meaning humans are created morally immature in God’s image and must develop into his likeness.
The best kind of world God can create for this purpose is one containing challenges and suffering, since these are necessary for salvation.
John Hick develops this by rejecting original perfection and a literal Fall.
Humans were always imperfect, and salvation depends on developing moral goodness rather than recovering a lost state.
Hick draws on Aristotle, arguing virtue is formed through habituation in a context of real alternatives.
Some virtues logically require evil, such as compassion needing suffering and courage needing danger.
Virtue must also be freely chosen.
Therefore, even an omnipotent God could not create fully virtuous beings, since virtue must be developed through experience rather than implanted.
Authentic moral choice also requires epistemic distance: if God’s existence were certain, humans would act from fear or self-interest rather than genuinely choosing the good.
This requires a religiously ambiguous, law-governed world, where events follow consistent natural processes rather than constant divine intervention.
The apparent randomness and uneven distribution of suffering help preserve this ambiguity and maintain the epistemic distance necessary for genuine moral freedom.
Hick also argues that all will ultimately reach moral perfection, even if that requires a post-mortem continued development.
So even apparently purposeless suffering can be redeemed in the final state, providing an eschatological justification for evil.

AO1: Soul-making theodicy strengths & weaknesses

Weakness: The existence of apparently pointless suffering, such as the death of children or animal suffering, undermines the claim that all evil contributes to soul-making.
Strength: The presence of seemingly random evil can be defended as necessary for maintaining epistemic distance, which allows genuine moral development.
Weakness: Soul-making appears morally unacceptable if it requires the suffering of innocents as the cost of developing virtue in others.
Strength: There appears no alternative for God than to create a world where evil risks falling on innocents, making this the best world God could create.
Strength: Soul-making explains evil as a necessary condition for free moral growth, preserving the coherence of divine goodness.
Weakness: The defence depends on libertarian free will, which may be incoherent, weakening the claim that evil is necessary for genuine freedom.

AO2: Purposeless evil (soul making vs logical & evidential)

Evidence for soul-making is that struggle and suffering can cultivate virtues like compassion.
However, evidence also counts against it.
E.g., a child who dies of cancer is too young to learn anything.
Animal suffering is similar.
The holocaust was dysteleological, soul-breaking and disproportionate to soul-making requirements.
D Z Phillips concluded no one in their “right mind” could think the holocaust was justified because a few survivors were strengthened by it.

Counter

Hick objects that this criticism misunderstands his theodicy.
Without epistemic distance, we would obey God out of obedience, which fails to develop virtue.
If every case of evil was perfectly aligned with the soul-making needs of those who suffered, we would know God was controlling the process.
This would break epistemic distance and ruin soul-making.
So, to enable it, God must create a world where evil appears random.
Hick is not claiming each evil serves a purpose, but that living in such a world makes soul-making possible.
So God creates a world with random evil, giving us the opportunity to grow, though it is not all designed for our development.

Evaluation

This undermines Mackie’s premise that an all-loving God must eliminate evil.
It is logically possible that random evil is necessary for soul-making.
However, Hick is claiming the evidence against soul-making (of purposeless evil) is actually how evil would appear even if soul-making were true (since the epistemic distance requires purposeless evil).
That might be logically coherent, defeating the logical problem.
But by definition, the evidence cannot support it.
It means soul-making is unfalsifiable.
There would be no observable difference between a world where God allows random evil to exist for soul-making, and a world where there is random evil because there is no God.
So, Hick fails to solve the evidential problem of evil.

AO2: Dostoyevsky’s ‘Ivan’ vs soul-making

Dostoyevsky’s character ‘Ivan’ attacks the coherence of soul-making theodicy.
He argues the whole process is immoral.
Hick says we cannot develop compassion without suffering.
But if the suffering of an innocent child was the price of soul-making, Ivan argues this is indecent.
Building heaven on a foundation of children suffering is not what Hick’s supposed ‘God of love’ would accept.
So soul-making cannot reconcile God with evil.

Counter

However, a strength of soul-making is that God had no better option in creating us.
A fully developed soul is one which has chosen good over evil.
It is logically impossible for God to create us good, since free choice is necessary for genuine virtue.
So, the best a perfect God can do is create us undeveloped with free will and a world containing evil, hoping we choose good.

Evaluation

However, this only pushes the problem of evil to a different level.
Hick may be right that soul-making is the only way to bring humans to heaven.
But the question then becomes what justifies God in creating us at all.
We can extend Ivan’s critique to defeat Hick’s standard defense.
Hick does not claim every evil has its own benefit, but that epistemic distance requires a world of random evil.
This risks the suffering of innocents.
If that is necessary for our salvation, then it would be immoral to create us at all.
Ivan’s own moral virtue compels him to reject the whole system as immoral. It doesn’t seem right to accept salvation if the price is innocents suffering.
So, if the only logically possible way to bring humans to heaven once created was soul-making, a truly loving God would not have created humans at all.
Hick explains evil given creation, but not creation given evil.
So our own existence becomes a problem for God’s existence.

AO1: The Free will defence

Plantinga offers a ‘defence’, meaning a response to the logical problem of evil.
He aims to show the co-existence of God and evil is logically possible.
Plantinga develops Augustine’s approach, but removes unnecessary and problematic concepts like original guilt and evil as punishment.
It is logically possible that all evil is the result of free will.
Moral evil clearly results from our abuse of free will.
Natural evil possibly results from the abuse of free will of demons/satan and Adam and Eve causing a fallen world.
In that case, God could not remove evil without removing free will.
Plantinga then argues free will is essential for our lives to have moral significance.
God could have made us robots who always did good, but then there would be no moral value in those actions.
God could intervene to stop every act of evil, but then we would have free will in name only, not ‘significant’ free will.

So, God can’t remove evil without destroying the moral significance of human existence.
This attacks Mackie’s premise that an all-loving God would be motivated to remove evil.
Since that is the better action, an all-loving God would do it.

AO1: Free will defence strengths & weaknesses

Strength: The Free Will Defence argues that moral evil results from human freedom, which is necessary for meaningful moral responsibility and makes a world with freedom more valuable.
Weakness: The defence depends on libertarian free will, which may be incoherent, undermining the claim that evil is a necessary condition of genuine freedom.
Strength: The Free Will Defence explains evil without claiming it is optimal, presenting it as a regrettable but necessary risk of creating free agents.
Weakness: The defence struggles to account for the scale and intensity of suffering, which can appear excessive relative to the value of free will.
Weakness: Natural evil does not appear to result from human free will, making it difficult to explain within the Free Will Defence.
Strength: The defence can appeal to far-fetched but still logical possibilities that natural evil results from the free will of non-human agents such as demons or the fall of Adam and Eve.

AO2: The problem of evil & the issue of free will

Omnipotence-preserving Theodicies function by arguing it’s not logically possible for God to remove evil without some violation or greater cost, e.g.:
To our deserved punishment (Augustine)
To our free will, since moral evil results from our misuse of free will, and natural evil results from the free will of Adam and Eve and the devil. A lack of free will would make our lives pointless (Plantinga & Augustine)
To our opportunities for soul-making as a result from freely choosing good over evil
They conclude a perfect God would allow evil as the technically better choice..

Counter:

Mackie responds that a world where free creatures always choose good is logically possible, so a perfect God would have created it.
Mackie assumes a compatibilist view of free will: we are free when our actions are determined by our character.
This is close to Augustine’s view.
Plantinga argues responding to Mackie requires the libertarian free will view, which is the ability to have done otherwise than what we did.
So, Plantinga can deny that Mackie’s possible world is feasible.
It’s logically possible we have libertarian free will.
In which case, even God cannot create a world where free creatures only choose good, since that would force and thus undermine their choice.

Evaluation:

However, Mackie counters that libertarian free will is actually incoherent and thus impossible.
Our choices must have a cause, which could be randomness, external causes or our character.
We only talk of ‘responsibility’ for our actions that come from our character.
Our character was itself determined by prior choices.
So, libertarian free will isn’t coherent or thus logically possible as Plantinga supposed.
Compatibilism explains how a world where free creatures only choose good is feasible.
If a perfect God existed, they would have created such a world.
So, a perfect God does not exist.

AO2: Leibniz vs Hick & Plantinga

A strength of Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds theodicy is that it anticipates and integrates insights which later theodicies develop separately.
He recognises that certain goods logically require the possibility of evil.
Virtues such as compassion and courage require suffering and danger.
Hick took up this insight in his soul-making theodicy.
Leibniz also recognises that a world containing genuinely free agents is more valuable than one of determined beings, even though freedom allows wrongdoing.
Plantinga took up this insight in his Free Will Defence.
Leibniz therefore appears to offer a unified theodicy drawing these themes together.

Counter:

However, Leibniz’ employment of virtue-development and free will as local explanations of some evil seems to leave him without an account for the supposed optimisation of evil globally.
He ends up appealing to the claim that whatever happens must be ‘best’, which conflicts with the scale and intensity of suffering observed in the world.

Evaluation:

Hick and Plantinga do better on these fronts.
They realise responding to the problem of evil only requires showing that risking some evil is necessary, not that the existing scale of evil is the ‘best’.
They focus on different ingredients from Leibniz, Hick on moral development, Plantinga on free will.
They argue these are worth creating even though they risk evil, without claiming that whatever evil results is ‘best’.
This explains how evil can be genuinely regrettable and tragic, rather than optimal.
Crucially, Hick explains apparently random evil is necessary for epistemic distance, while Plantinga explains evil as possibly the result of free will without which our lives would be valueless.
These responses explain evil without appeal to mystery.
Although Leibniz anticipates later approaches, his attempt to justify all evil as ‘optimal’ lacks moral credibility and relies on an unconvincing appeal to mystery.

AO1: Process theodicy

Whitehead developed a new understanding of God to try and solve the problem of evil within the framework of a rational and scientifically informed worldview.
Traditional theism understands omnipotence as the power to create any logically possible state of affairs.
This view is grounded in creatio ex nihilo, supported by Genesis 1:1–3, which appears to describe God creating the universe from nothing.
If God created everything from nothing, then God seems to possess total power.
Griffin contests this with an alternative translation of Genesis: “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth, the earth being without form and void.”
This suggests not a beginning of matter itself, but the beginning of God’s ordering activity.
Matter may have existed eternally in a chaotic state, and God’s creative act was to give it form and direction, not to create it from nothing.
God’s power is therefore persuasive rather than coercive.
God cannot force outcomes but seeks to influence the universe toward greater complexity and goodness over time.
Evolution is part of this process, enabling conscious beings capable of good experiences, but also making suffering possible.
Process theologians are panentheists. The universe exists within God, so God suffers alongside creation.
Natural evil arises because low-grade material entities lack the capacity to respond fully to divine persuasion, limiting God’s ability to prevent suffering directly.

AO1: Process theodicy strengths & weaknesses

Strength: Denying omnipotence may be the best way to explain why God allows evil, given the scale and purposeless of innocent and animal suffering.
Weakness: Process theodicy gives up so much when there might be other ways of preserving God’s goodness, e.g., emphasising his suffering with us.
Weakness: A God who cannot prevent evil may seem unworthy of worship, since such a being lacks the power to save humanity from suffering.
Strength: A God defined by perfect love and moral integrity rather than coercive power can be seen as more worthy of worship than one who allows evil despite having the power to stop it.
Weakness: Process theology appears to redefine omnipotence as weakness, conflicting with biblical depictions of God acting through coercive power and miracles.
Strength: Persuasive power can be understood as a higher form of strength, exemplified by figures like Jesus, where love transforms without coercion.

AO2: Moltmann vs process theology on fully addressing evil

Process theologians agree with Moltmann’s view that God’s suffering addresses the problem of evil.
Moltmann illustrates with a child hanging on the gallows in Auschwitz, saying God was hanging beside.
This illustrates God’s connection to our suffering, avoiding an aloof disconnected God.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t explain why God doesn’t prevent events like the holocaust.
Process theologians conclude their radical reinterpreting of omnipotence is philosophically required, so that God is unable to unilaterally prevent evil.

Counter

However, Moltmann’s project is to make theological sense of evil for Christians.
He argues the hope of the resurrection is inseparable from the suffering of the cross.
God’s solidarity and love is shown by suffering for us in a plan to overcome suffering and death.
Mackie & Hume would question why God doesn’t just eliminate all evil and suffering.
But that misunderstands the Christian worldview.
Suffering can’t be explained away, but met with hope that virtue and solidarity through agape will bring God’s kingdom to earth and redeem us.

Evaluation

However, theological coherence aside, Moltmann is not philosophically convincing.
God co-suffering in his project of redeeming humanity can’t justify God’s allowing of evil.
We still fall back on innocent suffering being justified by membership in sinful humanity, as Augustine claims.
Or, that it serves as a means to moral growth towards the kingdom of God, as Hick suggests.
Both are morally problematic; Augustine denying innocence, Hick failing to treat innocents as ends.
A radical move like that of process theodicy seems the only way.

AO2: Whether the God of process theology is worthy of worship

Roth argued that a God who lacked the ability to stop the genocide at Auschwitz would not be worthy of worship because there is no point worshiping a being who cannot save us from terrible situations.
Roth claims that, for Griffin’s view of God, “the best that God could possibly do was to permit 10,000 Jews a day to go up in smoke”.

Counter

Griffin responds that it is better to worship a God who lacked the power to prevent the holocaust than to worship one who had the power but didn’t.
This highlights a fundamental difference in what people find worthy of worship: for Roth, it is brute power, whereas for Griffin it is perfect love and moral integrity.
Griffin connects this view to the example of Jesus’ sacrificial love on the cross, arguing that true divinity lies not in domination but in compassionate persuasion.
We could illustrate that God wanted to destroy Jesus’ killers, and in fact was about to do so, before Jesus asked for their forgiveness.
This shows how persuasive power is the highest expression of love.
Griffin concludes “Roth finds my God too small to evoke worship; I find his too gross”.

Evaluation

Roth’s criticism is unsuccessful in the face of Griffin’s dilemma regarding stopping terrible events.
Either God could’ve but didn’t or a God who would’ve but couldn’t.
Evil forces a choice between classical omnipotence and divine benevolence.
This shows how process theologians can turn the problem of evil against their Christian critics.
Process theodicy provides a realistic approach to the problem of evil.
If God is simply unable to prevent evil, then that does quite clearly explain its existence.
Classical responses seem inadequate in the face of the horrific extent of evil that exists.

AO2: Whether process theology is true to omnipotence

The process view of omnipotence sounds more like impotence.
God is simply unable to do certain things, implying God is less powerful, not all-powerful.
The whole point of Jesus’ sacrifice was to save us from our sins which required God to use coercive power to save us by defeating the devil’s hold over our souls.
God is further presented as having coercive power in the Bible. God does miracles. God even interferes with free will, such as the Pharaoh of Egypt who was going to let the Jews go but God ‘hardened his heart’. This directly contests the process argument that free will implies persuasive rather than coercive omnipotence.

Counter:

However, the strength of the process view is its resonance with the example of Jesus, who was never coercive and was willing to die rather than use violence.
C. Mesle argues that the greatest strength possible is to endure evil and suffering without giving in to hate, as exemplified by M.L King, Gandhi and Jesus.
We should reassess what strength means. It does not involve coercive power but the willingness to suffer in pursuit of love and peace.
Process theologians reinterpret the atonement as the revelation of God’s persuasive, non-coercive love, in which Jesus’ self-giving life and death transform humanity not by satisfying divine wrath, but by drawing the world freely into deeper communion with God’s ongoing, healing purpose.

Evaluation:

Mesle’s argument is successful because the temptation when faced with evil is to give in to fighting it coercively. Yet, this often perpetuates evil or corrupts ourselves. This is why Jesus preached turning the other cheek.
M. L. King changed the world through persuading people to be better, which takes more restraint and therefore strength than using coercive force.
So, the strongest (most omnipotent) form God can take is one who persuades rather than using coercive force.