We are all well aware of the suffering and evil in the world: horrific suffering, unthinkable evil. How then can anyone believe in the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful God? In addition, if God does exist, why would anyone want to worship Him? Epicurus framed the logical problem of suffering and evil like this: if God is willing to prevent evil but not able, then he is not all-powerful. If he is able to prevent evil but not willing, he is not good. However, if he is both willing and able, how can evil exist? In addition, if he is neither able nor willing, then why call him God? In other words, it is logically impossible for God and suffering to both exist, but we know that suffering exists. Therefore, God does not exist. Is this a good argument?

Let us look at it more closely. Are these two statements logically inconsistent? No, here is an example of two logically inconsistent statements. David cannot be both married and a bachelor. However, there is no explicit contradiction between these two statements, thus there must be hidden assumptions behind this argument that would bring out the alleged contradiction. Here they are. If God is all-powerful, he can create any world he wants, and if God is all-loving, he prefers a world without suffering. Therefore, if an all-powerful, all-loving God exists, it follows that suffering does not exist. Since suffering obviously does exist, the atheist concludes that God must not exist.

However, are the atheist’s two hidden assumptions necessarily true? Consider the first assumption. Can God create any world he wants? What if he wants a world populated by people who have free will. It is logically impossible for God to force someone to freely choose right over wrong. Forcing free choices is like making a square circle; it is not logically possible. It is not that God lacks the power to perform the task; it is that the supposed task itself is just nonsense. Therefore, it may not be feasible to create a world populated by people who always freely choose to do what is morally good, thus the first assumption is not necessarily true.

Therefore, the argument fails, and what about the second assumption? Is it necessarily true that God would prefer a world without suffering? How could we possibly know this? We all know of cases where we permit suffering in order to bring about a greater good. If it is even possible that God allows suffering in order to achieve a greater good, then we cannot say this assumption is

Necessarily true. For the logical problem of suffering to succeed, the atheist would have to show that it’s logically impossible that free will exists, and that it’s logically impossible that God has good reasons for permitting suffering. This burden of proof is too heavy to bear. It is quite possible that God and suffering both exist. This is why secular philosophers and atheist philosophers have all given up on the logical problem of evil. We can concede that the problem of evil do

es not after all show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another. Some philosophers have contended that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of a theistic God. No person has succeeded in establishing such an extravagant claim. Many now acknowledged on almost all sides that the logical argument is bankrupt. However, this is hardly the end of the discussion. We still need to explore the probability version of the problem of evil.

PRIMARY SOURCES: Dr. William Lane Craig Videos on the Problem of Evil