If God Is Good, Why Do Terrible Things Happen?
A Fawn in Flames, a Child in Pain
Imagine a young deer caught in a forest fire. No one saves it, and it dies in terrible pain. Now picture a ten‑year‑old girl slowly dying of cancer. Many people believe in a God who is omnipotent (all‑powerful), omniscient (all‑knowing), and perfectly good. If such a God exists, why does the deer suffer? Why does the child suffer? This is the problem of evil: the challenge of explaining how evil and a perfect God can exist together.
For centuries, philosophers have used this problem to argue that God does not exist. Others have built careful answers, or theodicies, to show that God might have good reasons to allow suffering. The debate is not just about abstract ideas — it is about the most painful realities of our world.
The Knockdown Argument: If God, Then No Evil?
Some thinkers, like John L. Mackie (1917–1981), put the problem as a strict, logical challenge. They say that the following five statements cannot all be true at the same time:
- God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.
- An omnipotent being can stop any evil.
- An omniscient being knows about every evil.
- A perfectly good being wants to eliminate every evil.
- Evil exists.
If God is perfectly good, he would want no evil. If he is all‑powerful, he could prevent it. So if evil remains, God cannot have all three properties. Therefore, such a God does not exist — so the argument goes.
However, a famous reply comes from Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932). He points out that statement 4 may be too strong. Perhaps some evils are logically necessary for a greater good. For example, Plantinga appeals to libertarian free will — the idea that you are truly free only if nothing, not even God, completely determines your choices. A world with free people is a great good. But if those free people sometimes choose evil, then even an all‑powerful God could not guarantee that everyone does right. The possibility of moral evil is woven into the possibility of free will.
Plantinga’s defense shows that the bare existence of some evil is not logically impossible in a world created by an all‑powerful, all‑good God. But many people find this reply unsatisfying. It explains why evil is possible, not why there is so much of it, or why innocent children suffer.
When Evil Looks Pointless: The Evidential Chunk
In the 1970s and 1980s, philosopher William Rowe (1931–2015) shifted the debate. Instead of asking whether God and evil are logically incompatible, he asked whether certain evils make God’s existence unlikely. This is called the evidential argument from evil.
Rowe focused on concrete, gut‑wrenching cases: a fawn dying slowly from burns in a forest fire, and a young girl brutally beaten, raped, and murdered. He reasoned like this: we examine these events carefully, and we see no morally sufficient reason for an all‑powerful, all‑good being to permit them. From this, we can infer that no such reason exists. And if there really is a pointless, gratuitous evil, then a perfectly good God cannot exist.
The crucial move is an inductive step: from “no good reason is known to us” to “probably no good reason exists.” Rowe himself compared it to ordinary science, saying that if you examine many swans and they are all white, you are justified in believing all swans are white — until you meet a black one. In the same way, if every attempt to find a justifying reason for these horrifying evils fails, we should conclude there probably is none.
This argument does not claim logical certainty. It says only that, given the evidence, it is more reasonable to believe that a perfect God does not exist. And for many people, that makes the problem of evil much harder to dismiss than the purely logical version.
Beyond Free Will: Theodicies That Try to Explain
Many theists have not given up. They have offered theodicies — attempts to spell out what God’s morally sufficient reasons might be. The free will defense is one of them, but it mainly covers moral evil, not natural evils like earthquakes and disease. So what about the fawn and the sick child?
One of the most influential theodicies comes from John Hick (1922–2012). His soul‑making theodicy suggests that the world is designed as a place where people can grow spiritually through facing challenges, pain, and temptation. A person who overcomes hardship is more richly good than someone who was simply created perfect. Suffering, on this view, acts like a forge for the soul.
Hick’s story is touching, but it faces strong objections. First, it does not explain why innocent children die before they have any chance to grow, nor why animals suffer. Second, it seems unjust that some lives are filled with crushing agony while others sail by in comfort — the “school for souls” is wildly unequal. Third, even if some suffering builds character, does every instance of terrible pain really make the world better? Many philosophers think the soul‑making theodicy, in the end, asks us to accept more misery than any good could possibly justify.
Another more recent response, described by Peter van Inwagen (b. 1942), suggests that God might have a reason not to prevent this particular evil, not because the evil itself has a hidden good, but because preventing it would upset a broader, global balance of goods. For example, there might be an important, invisible property of the whole world — a certain amount of struggle — that is worth having, and God allows individual horrors only to preserve that global good. Critics reply that we have no reason to believe in such shadowy, global properties, and that the argument feels like a guess without evidence.
What If We Just Can’t Know God’s Reasons?
A very common religious response is to appeal to human cognitive limitations. The idea is simple: God’s mind is infinitely vaster than ours. Just as a dog cannot understand why its owner takes it to the vet, we cannot grasp why God permits certain evils. Therefore, the fact that we see no justifying reason is no proof that none exists.
Is this enough to block the evidential argument? Most philosophers answer no. The problem is that the evidential argument is built on our best look at the world. If we find, after careful examination, that an event appears pointlessly bad, that still counts as evidence that it is pointlessly bad — even if we might be mistaken. To reject all such reasoning would mean giving up on discovering truths through our senses altogether. The possibility of hidden reasons does not, by itself, erase the weight of what we actually see.
Some theists, like Richard Swinburne (b. 1934), have argued that if we could show that many evils do have good reasons, we might then trust that other evils also have reasons, even when we cannot name them. But so far, no theodicy has convinced a wide range of people that the most horrific evils in our world are morally justified.
Why the Problem Won’t Go Away
The problem of evil is not just a puzzle for philosophy class. It lives in the hospital room, in the news of a natural disaster, and in the quiet question a child asks after a tragedy. It forces us to think about what kind of universe we live in. If the world is full of pointless suffering, it is hard to believe in a loving, all‑powerful creator. But if we do believe in such a God, we must wrestle with the possibility that our idea of “perfect goodness” might be different from what we expected — perhaps a goodness that sometimes allows terrible things for reasons we cannot see.
This debate has changed the way many people think about God. It has pushed some to become atheists, and it has pushed others to develop more modest conceptions of the divine — a God who is not all‑powerful, or a God who is not wholly good in a simple human sense. The problem of evil remains one of the deepest reasons why philosophers and ordinary people alike keep asking, “If there is a God, why is there so much pain?”
Think about it
- If you had the power to stop all suffering forever, would you do it? What might you lose?
- Can you think of a situation where a terrible event brought about something truly valuable — and does that value make the event right?
- Which seems more honest to you: to believe in a perfect God whose ways are beyond our understanding, or to believe the universe has no loving ruler at all?
