The Problem of Evil: Eduqas A* grade notes

Eduqas
Philosophy

For AO1 you need to know:

Moral & Natural evil
The logical problem of evil; Epicurus’ classical version & Mackie’s modern development
The evidential problem of evil: Rowe & G. S. Paul
Augustine’s theodicy
Irenaean type theodicy

For AO2 you need to be able to debate:

The extent to which the classical form of the problem of evil is a problem
The degree to which modern problem of evil arguments are effective in proving God’s non-existence.
Whether Augustinian type theodicies are relevant in the 21st century
The extent to which Augustine’s theodicy succeeds as a defence of the God of classical theism
Whether Irenaean type theodicies are relevant in the 21st century
The extent to which Irenaeus’stheodicy succeeds as a defence of the God of classical theism

AO1: Natural & moral evil

Natural evil is suffering caused by the workings of the natural world.
Examples focus on cases that are purposeless, intense, widespread, and avoidable if the world were different.
God is supposedly the designer of the natural world and could have made it differently or intervened to prevent suffering.
This is argued to make God responsible for natural evil, posing a problem for belief in God.
Hume points to:
Animals routinely endure hunger, injury, disease, fear, and death, with pain as the primary motivator for survival, though gentler signals might suffice.
Creatures have weak, vulnerable bodies.
Nature subjects them to harsh extremes such as scarcity, climate fluctuations, disease, and disasters like earthquakes, floods, and storms, causing widespread harm.
Rowe gives the example of a fawn dying in a forest fire, which seems entirely pointless.
The fawn suffers intensely for days before dying, with no moral development or greater good arising from it.
This highlights how natural evil often involves prolonged, non-human suffering that serves no clear purpose.
Such cases make natural evil appear especially difficult to justify.
Gregory S. Paul’s essay “Theodicy’s Problem: A Statistical Look at the Holocaust of the Children” (2009) and related writings.
Paul focuses on forms of suffering built into the biological and physical structure of the world.
The world is structured so that huge numbers of children die before they can develop morally, and
This has been true for tens of thousands of years of human evolution.
This creates what he calls “the Holocaust of the Children”.
He highlights that:
Historically, 40–60% of all children died before age 5.
In some societies, half of all pregnancies ended in miscarriage, stillbirth, or early infant death.
These deaths occurred (and still occur) by:
Disease, infection, malnutrition, congenital defects, natural hazards.
These forces operate independently of human moral choice, making them examples of natural evil.
Moral evil is suffering caused by human actions, seen in wars and the Holocaust.
This is argued to challenge belief in God, since God could intervene to prevent such actions.
While some argue this would conflict with free will, it is unclear why preventing extreme evils would undermine freedom generally.
For example, stopping the 9/11 hijackers would not seem to destroy human free will.
Thus, it appears God could do more to prevent moral evil, and its existence is taken as evidence against God.
Some cases blur the distinction, such as natural disasters partly worsened by human-driven climate change.

AO1: the logical problem of evil

The logical problem of evil aims to show that the co-existence of evil and God is logically inconsistent.
Epicurus was an early developer of the argument.
He was not attacking the later Christian concept of an omnipotent creator, but showing that any god both good and involved in the world would be incompatible with evil, leading him to reject divine intervention.
Epicurus presents the problem as a dilemma rather than a formal deductive argument.
A dilemma sets up limited options, each leading to an unacceptable conclusion:
“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 cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
The final horn (“why call him God?”) challenges whether a being lacking power and goodness counts as divine, supporting his rejection of an interventionist God.
However, Epicurus does not make explicit his assumptions, e.g., that a good being would eliminate evil wherever possible and that no sufficient reasons could justify it.
Mackie develops this into a more rigorous analytic form, making these assumptions explicit and presenting the problem as a formal inconsistency.
He aims to show not just tension, but a strict logical contradiction between the existence of evil and God’s attributes of omnipotence and omnibenevolence.
His argument is deductive, meaning if its premises are true its conclusion must be true.
This aims to show that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of the God of classical theism.
Mackie’s 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 that 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 as a premise 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 the way our bodies and environment are structured.
The evidential problem accepts the logical possibility that God and evil co-exist.
Hume argues that we cannot justifiably infer a perfect God from an imperfect world, even if such a being is possible.
The force of the argument is that evil is evidence against that possibility.
Hume’s version draws on empiricism:
P1. We are only justified in believing what the evidence suggests (empiricism).
P2. We only have evidence of imperfection (a world with 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.
It is unempirical to infer perfection from imperfection.
So, assuming empiricism, belief in God is unjustified due to evil.
However, Hume’s argument leaves open that theism could still be rationally justified on other grounds, such as religious experience or cosmological arguments, as seen in Swinburne’s cumulative case.
Modern atheist philosophers therefore aim to go further, arguing that evil does not merely fail to support belief in God but positively counts against it.
Influenced by 20th-century scientific and Bayesian approaches, they treat belief as weighing competing hypotheses according to how well they explain the evidence.
Rowe applies this by asking whether theism or naturalism better explains the amount, distribution, and apparently pointless nature of some suffering.
E.g., a fawn dying slowly in a forest fire illustrates suffering with no apparent benefit or purpose.
Rowe argues that if we cannot see any justifying reason for such suffering, it is reasonable to infer that none exists.
This is an inductive inference based on our experience and judgement.
He concludes that gratuitous evil makes God’s existence unlikely.
Thus, while God and evil may logically co-exist, the scale and kinds of suffering we observe count as strong evidence against an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God.

AO1: Augustinian theodicy

Evil exists because of human misuse of free will and is justly punished.
Augustine says “Evil is either sin or punishment for sin”.
Adam and Eve were created with original perfection. God told them to ‘go forth and multiply’, implying sexual reproduction, but Augustine held their desires were fully ordered under reason, without lust.
This allowed perfect rational control.
This prelapsarian ‘concordia’ was ruined by their disobedience when eating from the tree of knowledge.
Augustine believed in the homunculus theory of reproduction, so all future humans were ‘seminally present’ in Adam. When Adam sinned, all humans were ‘vitiated’ by it.
Augustine argued this caused a corruption in human nature called original sin.
This gives us a strong inclination to sin.
A defining feature is concupiscence, where bodily desires overwhelm reason.
Augustine thought we were so fallen and depraved that he refers to humanity as the ‘massa damnata’ – the mass of the damned.
This explains moral evil – it is our fault because we do it to each other.
The garden of Eden was a perfect place with no natural evil, but Genesis says that as punishment for their disobedience, Adam and Eve would live in a harsher environment, where Adam would ‘toil’ and Eve experience pain in childbirth.
They were forced to live in a fallen world full of evil as punishment.
They chose to create children, leading to us, and we are born with original sin into a fallen world, which explains natural evil.
Augustine also draws on the principle of plenitude, the idea that a perfect creation contains the fullest range of beings arranged in a hierarchy of value.
A world with such diversity is more perfect than a uniform one, and what appears as evil in isolation may contribute to the harmony of the whole, like shadows in a painting.
Augustine further thought that natural evil could be caused by satanic forces. Fallen angels abused their free will and became demons who can cause natural evil.
So, evil exists because of human sin and is just punishment, not God’s fault.
In fact, it is consistent with God’s divine justice to allow evil as punishment for our sinful ways.
Evil is ‘privatio boni’, an absence of good.
Augustine says it is like blindness, not a thing in itself, just the absence of sight.
It thus has no ‘positive’ existence.
Evil is the result of our falling away from God’s goodness.

AO2: Augustine vs the scientific evidence

Evidence contradicts key premises of Augustine’s theodicy.
Science points to evolution rather than the fall.
Genetic diversity means it’s impossible for humanity to have come from just two people.
Even if Adam and Eve existed, the idea that sins could be passed on is a discredited theory called Lamarckism.

Counter

However, original sin is defended even without a literal fall.
Niebuhr argues that original sin is the one empirically verifiable christian doctrine. C K Chesterton agrees, arguing you can see it ‘in the street’.
Human immorality, e.g. Nazism, shows original sin.
Augustine illustrates this. In his teens, he roamed around with a gang stealing pears.
Not because he was hungry, but because our twisted nature actually enjoys sinning.

Evaluation

However, we can undermine this defence with Pinker’s sociological evidence that violence has declined in modern society.
Such improvement would be impossible if the sinful temptations of graceless humans were really irresistible.
Immorality is better explained by social conditioning, which Pelagius called being ‘educated in evil’.
Pelagius travelled from Ireland to Rome and noticed that people there were more sinful.
This illustrates how culture causes sinful behaviour.
Freud could explain Augustine’s ‘pear’ story as the enjoyment of rebelling against frustrating social norms that repress our instincts.
Any selfishness or violence in human nature is more simply and scientifically explained by evolutionary instincts.
Such traits helped survival in the state of nature, but are now maladaptive.
Still, the effectiveness of socialisation shows such traits cannot be described as original sin.

Even if we grant that moral improvement is due to better policing, not inner moral improvement, original sin is still undermined.
Since, It would mean humans are capable of regulating and restraining asocial impulses in response to external conditions.
This discredits Augustine’s claim that graceless humans are unable to avoid sin in any meaningful sense.

AO2: Original sin vs moral responsibility

Pelagius argued that Augustinian original sin conflicts with omnibenevolence and justice.
A loving just God would not hold us guilty for our ancestor’s actions.
Kant identified autonomous choice as a necessary condition of responsibility.
This influenced Hannah Arendt, who argued the holocaust illustrated the problem of attributing guilt collectively, concluding guilt is “strictly personal”.

Counter:

However, original guilt relies on a contested translation of Romans 5:12 as saying “in Adam all sinned”.
Theologians often retain a softened version of original sin without original guilt.
E.g., Barth reinterprets the fall as a description of humanity’s existential condition, not a literal event.
He argues the ‘responsibility’ critique assumes a Western individualist anthropology.
Yet scripture presents humans as communal and relational beings, to God and one’s neighbour.
It portrays humanity as a corporate body, not individualised moral atoms.
So, humanity participates in Adam’s story as it symbolises our shared condition of alienation from God.

Evaluation

However, even Barth’s charitable reconstruction cannot salvage original sin’s incoherent relation to suffering.
E.g., a child who dies from cancer.
Barth claims children are born into a world whose structure reflects this alienation.
But this does not explain God’s inaction; why God permits a world structured in such a way that innocent beings suffer before any free confirmation of sin.
Barth captures biblical anthropology, but that just raises doubts about whether scriptural collective responsibility reflects genuine revelation.
Scripture here more plausibly reflects ancient social conditions.
Collective responsibility in families and tribes functioned as deterrence or vengeance in pre-modern societies.
The shift toward individual responsibility reflects the development of stable social and legal institutions, not merely Western bias.

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 we are made 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 they are necessary for salvation.
Irenaeus points to the story of Jonah, whose disobedience prompted God to send a storm and a great fish to swallow him for three days, after which he obeyed God.
Natural evil can lead to moral improvement and spiritual growth.
John Hick develops this idea by rejecting original perfection and a literal Fall, which came with ethical issues.
Rejecting original sin allows him to reject the predestinationist soteriology Augustine thought followed from it.
This secures Hick’s premise that salvation requires moral goodness.
Hick combines this with Aristotelian ethics, which claims virtue has necessary conditions:
1. Virtue is forged through developing the right habits in an arena of good and evil choices.
Some virtues logically require evil to exist, e.g. compassion requires suffering and courage requires danger.
2. Virtue results only from free choice, so it is logically impossible even for God to have created us fully virtuous.
3. Free choices must be authentic, not influenced by fear, self-interest or obedience.
Hick thinks this requires an epistemic distance between us and God.
If God’s existence were certain, humans would be motivated by the carrot of heaven or the stick of hell, rather than genuinely choosing the good.
Maintaining epistemic distance constrains the nature and distribution of evil in the world.
The world must be religiously ambiguous: interpretable as evidence for God or as purely natural.
The randomness of suffering contributes to this ambiguity, preserving genuine moral freedom.
So, the best possible world is one where we are created immature and given a world with apparently random evil. Only in such a world could we develop the virtue required for salvation.
Hick develops the theodicy further through universal salvation.
To defend omnibenevolence, God must secure the salvation of all.
All humans will eventually achieve the development required, even if this requires development after death.
This provides an eschatological justification for evil.
Some evils play no direct or indirect role in soul-making, such as apparently purposeless innocent or animal suffering.
Nonetheless, they are justified at a higher-order level as conditions required for epistemic distance.
All evil is ultimately eschatologically redeemed in the final state.

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.

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.