Dr Paul Allen

If God is good, why is there so much suffering? Most of us have probably sought explanations for suffering in light of our faith in God, or else evil may have contributed to our doubts about God’s existence. If you have spent any extended amount of time thinking about these questions, you are exploring the problem of evil, a term that refers to analyzing challenges that the existence of evil causes for various religions. What is the problem of evil? Technically, we would do well to speak of multiple problems of evil. Each religion may face unique challenges (is karmic suffering really just, as Hinduism suggests? Is evil an illusion, as some Buddhists claim?), but this article will consider the problem of evil in Christianity in three forms.  The logical problem of evil is a philosophical attempt to argue that a theistic God cannot exist if evil exists. The evidential problem of evil argues that a specific kind or example of evil makes God’s existence improbable. The existential pr...

What philosophers call “the problem of evil” is a family of arguments from the existence or nature of evil to the conclusion that God does not or probably does not exist. The oldest form of the argument is that the mere existence of evil is logically incompatible with God’s existence. If God exists , evil could not, and if evil exists, God could not. I call this argument the “charge of contradiction.” The claim is that there is a logical contradiction in asserting that God is all-powerful, God is all-loving, and that evil exists.  Wouldn’t this kind of God eliminate all evil? The existence of God, in this view, is on a par with a square circle. Given the existence of evil, it is impossible for God to exist. The challenge is to show that theism is logically consistent. Few today, including atheists, think this argument succeeds. If God might have a good reason to allow evil, then it is possible that both God and evil exist. We need not know what God’s actual reasons are, but i...