What the evidence shows
This one isn’t settled in a lab; it’s settled by consistency. And the standard answers don’t hold: free will can’t explain a child’s cancer or an earthquake, animals suffered for hundreds of millions of years before any human sinned, and “a reason we can’t see” is just a way to make the claim unable to lose.
What the church teachesthe claim under examination
God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly loving. The suffering in the world comes from human free will and the Fall, or serves a greater purpose we can’t see, and none of it counts against him.
The oldest version of the question
It was put plainly more than two thousand years ago. Is God willing to prevent suffering but not able? Then he is not all-powerful. Is he able but not willing? Then he is not good. Is he both able and willing? Then where does all this come from? The dilemma has never needed updating, which for a two-thousand-year-old argument is a remarkable maintenance record. Everything since has been an attempt to find a fourth door out of a room that has three.
Free will doesn’t reach the worst of it
The most common answer is free will: suffering is the cost of our freedom to choose. Grant it. It still only covers the harm people do to one another. It says nothing about the earthquake that buries a village, the child born with a brain tumor, the famine, the drought, the disease. No one chose those. A world could have free will and no bone cancer; the two have nothing to do with each other, and no one has ever explained whose freedom the malaria parasite is protecting. The cruelty that no human hand caused is left completely unexplained.
Suffering older than sin
The Fall is supposed to be the origin of death and pain, suffering as the wages of human disobedience. But the planet’s own record breaks that story. For hundreds of millions of years before any human existed, animals were starving, being eaten alive, dying of disease, and going extinct by the billions. There were predators and parasites and agony on this earth long before there was anyone available to disobey anything. Whatever explains that suffering, it cannot be a human act that hadn’t happened yet. Punishment does not normally run three hundred million years ahead of the crime.
The answer built so it can’t lose
When those fail, the last answer is: God has reasons we cannot comprehend. Maybe. But notice what that move does. It makes the claim impossible to test and impossible to disprove, which is also exactly what you would say if there were no reasons at all. “A hidden good purpose” explains a rescued child and a dead one equally well, which means it explains neither. It is the one answer on the board that would sound identical in every possible world, and an answer that fits every outcome was never about this one.
What the suffering actually looks like
Step back and ask what the pattern resembles. Suffering falls on the innocent and the guilty alike, on animals with no theology, in amounts and places that track geology and biology (fault lines, food supply, the range of a mosquito) and not justice. That is precisely what you would expect from a universe running on blind, indifferent processes. It is precisely not what you would expect from a world watched over by someone both willing and able to help. The distribution map of suffering looks like a geology textbook. It does not look like a verdict.
The standard replies (a test, a mystery, a consequence of free choice) each require suffering to fall in a pattern other than the one it measurably falls in. It tracks fault lines, food supply, and the range of a mosquito. It does not track desert, prayer, or belief.
The standard replies
Each one is answered on its own terms, and tagged with the technique it relies on. The technique is the part worth keeping.
IncompleteEvil is the price of free will. A world of free creatures who can choose good is worth more than a world of puppets, and free creatures sometimes choose to do harm.
Why it doesn’t hold
Grant it, and notice how little it buys. As a piece of logic it shows only that God and some evil could coexist; it was built to answer whether they flatly contradict, not whether the suffering we actually see fits a loving God. That narrow technical point is all it wins. It says nothing about the sheer scale and senselessness of real suffering, and it doesn’t reach natural evil at all: the earthquake, the childhood cancer, the animal dying in a fire chose nothing. No one’s freedom required any of it.
The techniqueIncomplete explanation An account covers part of what needs explaining and is presented as covering all of it. The remainder is not addressed, only left unmentioned.
Check it yourselfRead the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the problem of evil. It traces the move: the free will defense answers the “logical” problem, while the harder version, raised here, is the evidential one.
IncompleteSuffering is how souls grow. Courage, compassion, and patience can’t exist in a frictionless paradise, so a world that builds character is worth its hardships.
Why it doesn’t hold
Some hardship does build character, but the amount and the kind on offer wildly overshoot anything that could. A child dying slowly of bone cancer is not being improved, and neither was anyone in a death camp. Suffering breaks people at least as often as it deepens them. And it falls heaviest on those who can gain nothing from the lesson: infants who die at birth, animals that suffered for a few hundred million years before there was anyone around to learn anything. A curriculum that predates its own students is not a curriculum.
The techniqueIncomplete explanation An account covers part of what needs explaining and is presented as covering all of it. The remainder is not addressed, only left unmentioned.
UnfalsifiableJust because we can’t see a reason for some horror doesn’t mean there isn’t one. God’s mind is beyond ours, so our failure to find a justifying reason is no evidence there isn’t a hidden one.
Why it doesn’t hold
This is the careful form of “God has reasons we can’t see,” and the standard objection to it is that it proves far too much. If you can never tell whether an apparently pointless horror really is pointless, then you also can’t tell that any horror in front of you isn’t secretly being permitted for some hidden good, in which case why interfere with the plan by helping anyone? Carried through, it dissolves the very moral judgment it was recruited to defend. It also works against every possible piece of evidence at once, which is the giveaway: a claim that cannot lose to anything is telling you nothing about the world.
The techniqueUnfalsifiable retreat Under pressure a specific claim is revised into a version that forbids nothing. It is now compatible with every possible observation, which is presented as strength.
Check it yourselfLook up “skeptical theism”: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out the standard reply, that taken seriously it spreads into a corrosive moral skepticism.
Red herringHowever terrible, earthly suffering is finite and brief against an eternity of bliss. From heaven’s side, the redeemed will see their pain outweighed.
Why it doesn’t hold
Compensation is not justification. Paying someone afterward, even infinitely, does not make it right to have let them be tortured first; the question was never “will it be made up to them?” but “why was it allowed at all?” An all-powerful God could presumably grant the bliss without the agony that came before, which leaves the suffering on the books as a cost that bought nothing. And the settlement still skips everyone outside the bargain: the animals, and on most accounts the damned, who are owed nothing, and in the second case considerably worse than nothing.
The techniqueRed herring The question is quietly replaced with a different, easier one, and the answer to the substitute is offered as the answer to the original.
Watch
Stephen Fry on God (Stephen Fry, asked what he would say at the gates, answering with the bone cancer in children (The Meaning of Life, RTÉ One))
Where that leaves it
This one isn’t settled in a lab; it’s settled by consistency. And the standard answers don’t hold: free will can’t explain a child’s cancer or an earthquake, animals suffered for hundreds of millions of years before any human sinned, and “a reason we can’t see” is just a way to make the claim unable to lose.
Sources · 5
- Epicurus, as preserved in Lactantius, De Ira Dei (c. 4th century) (the classic statement of the dilemma)
- David Hume (1779), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (the problem of suffering set against the argument from design)
- William L. Rowe (1979), “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16(4): 335–341 (the modern evidential argument from gratuitous suffering)
- Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray (22 May 1860) (on being unable to square a benevolent God with parasites that feed inside living hosts)
- Video: Stephen Fry on God (Stephen Fry, asked what he would say at the gates, answering with the bone cancer in children (The Meaning of Life, RTÉ One))