We are all well aware of the suffering and evil in the world: horrific suffering,
unthinkable evil. How then can anyone believe in the existence of an
all-loving, all-powerful God? And if God does exist, why would anyone want to
worship Him? Epicurus framed the logical problem of suffering and evil like this:
if God is willing to prevent evil but not able, then he's not all-powerful. If
he is able to prevent evil but not willing, he is not good. But if he is both
willing and able, how can evil exist? And if he is neither
able nor willing, then why call him God? In other words, it's logically impossible
for God and suffering to both exist, but we know full well that suffering exists.
Therefore, God does not. Is this a good argument? Let's look at it more closely.
Are these two statements logically inconsistent? No; here is an example of
two logically inconsistent statements. David can't be both married and a
bachelor, but there is no explicit contradiction between these two
statements, so there must be hidden assumptions behind this argument that
would bring out the alleged contradiction. Here they are. If God is
all-powerful, he can create any world he wants, and if God is all-loving, he prefers
a world without suffering. So if an all-powerful,
all-loving God exists, it follows that suffering does not exist. Since suffering
obviously does exist, the atheist concludes that God must not exist. But
are the atheist's two hidden assumptions necessarily true? Consider the first
assumption. Can God create any world he wants? What if he want a world
populated by people who have free will? It's logically impossible for God to force
someone to freely choose to do good. Forcing free choices is like making a
square circle; it's not logically possible. It's not that God lacks the
power to perform the task; it is that the supposed task itself is just nonsense. So
it may not be feasible to create a world populated by people who always freely
choose to do what is morally good, so the first assumption is not necessarily true.
Therefore, the argument fails, and what about the second assumption? Is it
necessarily true that God would prefer a world without suffering? How could we
possibly know this? We all know of cases where we permit suffering in order to
bring about a greater good. If it's even possible that God allows suffering in
order to achieve a greater good, then we cannot say this assumption is
necessarily true. For the logical problem of suffering to succeed, the atheist
would have to show that it's logically impossible that free will exists, and
that it's logically impossible that God has good reasons for permitting
suffering. This burden of proof is too heavy to bear. It's quite possible that
God and suffering both exist. This is why philosophers, even atheist philosophers,
have given up on the logical problem of evil.
We can concede that the problem of evil does not after all show that the central
doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another. Some
philosophers have contended that the existence of evil is logically
inconsistent with the existence of a theistic God. No one I think has
succeeded in establishing such an extravagant claim. It's now acknowledged
on almost all sides that the logical argument is bankrupt.
But this is hardly the end of the discussion.
We still need to explore the probability version of the problem of evil.