Why does a good God allow suffering?

Writing early in the fourth century, the Christian author Lactantius quotes it in order to answer it, and attributes it to Epicurus, who died more than five centuries before him. "God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able."

He then works through each branch: unable is feeble, unwilling is envious, neither is both, and if God is both willing and able, "from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?"

Lactantius records that many of the philosophers who defended providence were troubled by the argument, and almost driven against their will to admit that God takes no interest in anything. Its form has since changed. In 1955 J. L. Mackie argued that God and evil are logically inconsistent; after Alvin Plantinga’s reply, Mackie conceded in 1982 that the argument does not show that, and discussion moved to evidential versions, which argue that the evils there are make God unlikely.

Job is a book about exactly this, and it is remarkable for what it refuses to do. Job’s friends offer the standard explanations, that he must have deserved it, that suffering instructs, and at the end God tells the first of them “my wrath is kindled against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has”.

When God finally speaks, out of a whirlwind, the reply is not an explanation. It is a series of questions: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?", and then the sea, the stars, the wild animals, none of which Job made or understands.

The reader has been told one thing Job never is: in the opening chapters his suffering begins as a test, allowed in order to show whether he fears God “for nothing”. God does not mention it from the whirlwind.

A theodicy is an argument that squares suffering with a good God. Job’s reply at the end does not supply one: “I have uttered that which I didn’t understand, things too wonderful for me, which I didn’t know.”

The free will defence, in Alvin Plantinga’s form, holds that a world containing genuine choice must permit its misuse, and that the good of freedom outweighs it. It speaks to cruelty, though critics ask why freedom should rule out ever stepping in, and it reaches earthquakes only through a suggestion Plantinga and C. S. Lewis both made, that free creatures other than us might be behind them.

Soul-making, the theodicy John Hick developed from Irenaeus, holds that a world with real stakes is the only kind in which anything is grown or earned. It is weakest in the cases where a person is destroyed rather than formed, and in the cases of animals and infants, where no soul is being made.

Skeptical theism, argued by Stephen Wykstra among others, holds that a finite mind is not in a position to rule out reasons it cannot see, which is close to what the whirlwind says. Its critics reply that the modesty cuts both ways: if we cannot judge what God would allow, we cannot judge what God would do either.

None of these is a proof, and the serious versions of each concede what they do not reach.

The problem is sometimes presented as a reason to drop the question, on the grounds that suffering in a universe with no intentions behind it requires no explanation. That is true, and it is a real difference: nothing has to be reconciled.

What it does not do is make the suffering smaller. It resolves an argument about consistency and leaves the thing the argument was about exactly where it was. Both positions have to live in the same world afterwards.

Evidential arguments, William Rowe’s among the most influential, hold that the evils anyone can see make it unlikely that hidden reasons lie behind them. Skeptical theists answer that a reason of the kind being proposed is just the kind a person in the middle of the suffering could not expect to see. That is not a temporary limit awaiting better instruments: the disagreement is over what can be inferred from what is seen, and nothing still to be found would settle it.

So the honest position is that no finding will decide this, and the confident answers on both sides are doing something other than reporting one.

Christian teaching does offer explanations, Lactantius’ among them. The Catholic Catechism names freedom, a creation still “in a state of journeying”, and good brought out of evil, and then says that “no quick answer will suffice” and that “only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer”. The whole it means includes “the goodness of creation”, “the redemptive Incarnation of his Son” and “the power of the sacraments”. Within it is the claim that God entered the suffering: a crucifixion, which many Christians read as God’s own answer to the question of where God is when it hurts.

Whether that is an answer depends entirely on whether it is true, which is a different question. As a response to the problem it is a strange one, because it does not reduce the amount of suffering in the account by anything at all. It adds to it.

In practice believing does not wait on a theodicy. What the Bible gives believers for this is closer to Job’s complaint than to Lactantius’ rebuttal: a relationship in which the question stays open. The Psalms are full of people asking how long: one of them asks it four times in two verses.

And people have left over it, having found the answers inadequate. Those are not two kinds of people who failed to think it through. They are two things a person can do with a question that has no demonstration on either side.