The problem of evil asks how a God who is all-powerful and all-loving can allow suffering. It is the single strongest argument against belief in such a God, and every major religion has developed answers to it. GCSE RE asks you to state the problem precisely, explain the main responses, and evaluate whether they succeed.
What exactly is the problem?
The problem only arises for a very particular idea of God — one who is omnipotent (all-powerful), omnibenevolent (all-loving) and omniscient (all-knowing). A God who was powerful but indifferent, or loving but limited, would face no difficulty here at all.
The classic statement is often called the inconsistent triad. Three claims are each highly plausible, but they cannot all be true together:
- God is omnipotent, so God could prevent suffering.
- God is omnibenevolent, so God would want to prevent suffering.
- Suffering exists.
If the first two are true, the third should be false. Since the third is obviously true, one of the first two must give way — either God is not able to stop suffering, or God is not entirely loving. That is the argument the whole topic is built around, and stating it this crisply in an exam is worth doing early.
A defence of God's goodness in the face of evil is called a theodicy.
Two kinds of evil
Examiners expect this distinction, and answers that miss it tend to stall.
- Moral evil is suffering caused by deliberate human choice — cruelty, war, theft, abuse, exploitation. It is what people do to one another.
- Natural evil is suffering caused by the way the world works, with no human decision behind it — earthquakes, tsunamis, disease, drought, birth defects.
The distinction matters because the strongest theodicy, the free will defence, explains moral evil far more convincingly than natural evil. An earthquake is nobody's free choice.
The free will defence
This is the response most closely associated with Augustine, and it is the one most believers reach for first.
God created human beings genuinely free, because love and goodness only mean anything if they are chosen. A world of beings programmed to be kind would contain no real virtue — only compliance. But genuine freedom must include the freedom to choose wrongly. Moral evil is therefore the unavoidable price of a good that could not exist any other way, and the fault lies with human misuse of freedom, not with God.
Augustine went further, arguing that suffering entered a perfect creation through human sin, and that the natural world was damaged as a consequence.
Strengths
- Freedom really does seem valuable, and forced goodness really does seem hollow.
- It shifts responsibility for moral evil where most people would put it anyway.
Weaknesses
- It struggles badly with natural evil. Nobody freely chose a tsunami.
- Freedom could arguably survive with less extreme consequences. Why does free choice have to include genocide?
- An omnipotent God, critics say, could have created beings who were free but always chose good — and if that is impossible, God is not omnipotent after all.
The soul-making defence
Irenaeus offered a different approach, developed in the twentieth century by the philosopher John Hick, who described the world as a "vale of soul-making".
On this view humans were not created perfect and then fallen; they were created immature, with the potential for goodness, and must grow into it. A world without difficulty could not produce courage, patience, compassion or generosity, because those qualities only exist as responses to hardship. Suffering is not a flaw in creation but a necessary condition of the kind of moral development God intends. Hick added that God must remain at an "epistemic distance" — not obviously present — or people would behave well out of fear rather than genuine choice.
Strengths
- It handles natural evil, which the free will defence cannot.
- It matches ordinary experience: people often do grow through difficulty.
Weaknesses
- Much suffering destroys rather than develops people, and the person who dies in the disaster grows into nothing.
- Suffering is distributed unfairly; some lives contain far more of it than others, with no visible reason.
- It appears to justify appalling suffering as a teaching method, which many find morally repellent.
How different religions respond
Answers that draw on more than one tradition tend to score well, provided the detail is accurate.
Christianity points to the Book of Job, where Job suffers terribly, receives no explanation, and is finally answered by God with a series of questions about the vastness of creation — the point being that humans are not in a position to judge. Christians also point to the crucifixion: whatever else it means, it means God is not distant from human suffering but has entered it. Many Christians accept they cannot fully explain evil and hold that trust in God does not require an explanation.
Islam teaches that this life is a test (akhirah frames the answer). Suffering may be a trial of patience — sabr — and the balance of justice is settled in the life to come rather than in this one. Human beings, given free will, are accountable for what they do with it.
Judaism contains a long tradition of arguing with God about injustice, beginning with Abraham bargaining over Sodom. After the Holocaust, Jewish thinkers responded in radically different ways — some abandoned belief in an intervening God, some insisted on faith precisely as an act of defiance, and some argued that the question must be kept open rather than resolved.
Hinduism and Buddhism approach the problem quite differently, because neither centres on an all-powerful creator in the same way. Suffering is explained through karma across many lifetimes; in Buddhism, dukkha — unsatisfactoriness — is simply the nature of existence, caused by craving, and the religious task is to end it rather than to explain who permitted it.
Where atheists take the argument
The atheist case is not that suffering is unpleasant but that it is evidence. If we assess God as a hypothesis explaining the world, the sheer quantity and randomness of suffering counts heavily against a loving, powerful designer.
The sharpest version focuses on suffering that appears to serve no purpose at all — an animal dying in a forest fire nobody witnesses, a child's illness that produces no growth in anyone. If even one instance of suffering is genuinely pointless, the theodicies fail, because each of them works by finding a purpose. Believers reply that we are in no position to know a purpose does not exist merely because we cannot see it — which is a real answer, though critics note it could excuse absolutely anything.
Frequently asked questions
Does the problem of evil disprove God?
It disproves a specific combination of claims rather than God in general. What it shows is that an all-powerful, all-loving God and unlimited suffering are extremely difficult to hold together without qualification. Some believers respond by qualifying omnipotence — arguing God cannot do the logically impossible, such as creating free beings who cannot choose wrongly. Others qualify our knowledge, arguing purposes exist that we cannot see. Others accept the tension and live with it. In an exam, treating this as a live argument with strong positions on both sides earns far more than treating it as settled either way.
Which response should I argue is strongest?
Either, provided you justify it. The free will defence is stronger on moral evil and weaker on natural evil; the soul-making defence is the reverse, covering natural evil but at a heavy moral cost. A very effective conclusion combines them and then acknowledges what still fails: that between them they cover most suffering, but that suffering which develops nobody and results from nobody's choice remains genuinely unexplained. Showing where your own chosen answer runs out is a mark of a top-band evaluation, not a weakness.
Do religious believers find these arguments convincing?
Many find them partially convincing and few find them complete. Surveys of religious life consistently suggest that suffering is one of the most common reasons people lose faith — and also, strikingly, one of the settings in which faith deepens. Believers who have lived through serious loss often say the philosophical answers felt beside the point, and that what mattered was the presence of a community or the sense that God shared the suffering rather than explaining it. Noting this gap between the philosophical problem and the lived one is a genuinely thoughtful thing to write.
Is there a difference between "explaining" and "justifying" suffering?
Yes, and it is a sharp one worth using. A theodicy attempts to justify — to show that God is right to permit suffering. Some theologians reject that project entirely, arguing that any argument successfully justifying the suffering of a child has proved something monstrous rather than something comforting. They prefer a "defence": a weaker claim that we cannot show God is unjustified, without claiming to know the justification. That distinction gives you a precise way to criticise Hick and Augustine without simply saying you disagree.
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