Suppose a four-year-old child is dying of an incurable cancer. Her pain will end her life before it can teach her anything or prepare her for some later test. Anyone who calls that agony part of a perfect plan carries a brutal burden: explain why a being with unlimited power needed this method.
That burden comes from the claim itself. The familiar definition gives God unlimited power, total knowledge, and perfect goodness. Such a being could prevent the suffering, knows it is happening, and should want it stopped. The child still suffers.
This is the problem of evil. Its force comes from paying attention to the world and then taking the usual definition of God seriously.
The setup
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lays out the tension in a concise argument. If God exists, God has the power, knowledge, and moral desire to eliminate evil. Evil exists. Something in that set of claims has to give, unless God has a morally sufficient reason to permit the evil.
J. L. Mackie argued that the central claims of theism were logically inconsistent once their ordinary implications were made explicit. Alvin Plantinga answered with a possible reason, the value of morally significant freedom. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy records that Mackie eventually conceded that Plantinga had shown God and evil could coexist as a matter of formal logic.
Plantinga defeated the narrow claim of contradiction. He never made his possible explanation plausible or showed that it fit the suffering we actually see. Contemporary debate therefore focuses more often on the evidential problem: whether the kinds, amounts, and distribution of suffering make a perfectly good ruler of the universe improbable.
Free will reaches only so far
Plantinga’s defense starts with a serious idea. Love and moral courage would mean little if creatures were programmed to choose them. On a libertarian account of freedom, even God cannot guarantee every free choice without turning freedom into control. Human beings can use that freedom to torture or exploit other people. The free will defense gives a coherent reason why God might permit those choices.
Natural suffering exposes the gap. Cancer does not choose its victim. Earthquakes have no moral agency. The freedom to love another person would survive the disappearance of childhood leukemia.
Plantinga tried to extend his defense by suggesting that the free choices of nonhuman spirits might cause natural evil. The point was possibility rather than evidence. A logically possible demon can block a formal contradiction. It gives us no reason to believe a demon caused a tumor or moved a fault line. The defense preserves consistency by adding an invisible culprit, and the world remains unexplained.
Soul-making turns victims into instruments
John Hick developed a more ambitious reply from an idea associated with Irenaeus. His soul-making theodicy argues that struggle creates the conditions for courage and compassion. A world without danger would deny us the chance to develop those qualities freely.
Some adversity does change people for the better. That limited truth cannot justify every agony as moral education. The child in the opening dies before any such education can occur. If the lesson belongs to her parents or the people watching, her suffering has been turned into someone else’s curriculum.
The fuller theodicy answers that victims may be redeemed in heaven and that witnesses can grow through what they see. Compensation still does not establish necessity. Giving someone eternal comfort after preventable agony would not show that the agony had to happen. An all-powerful teacher has more than one lesson plan.
Scale makes the excuse harder to sustain. On December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake produced an Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, according to NOAA. A theory that calls every death necessary for freedom or moral development owes an account of why fewer deaths would have been insufficient. Theodicy usually supplies another possibility instead.
Mystery consumes the claim it protects
Skeptical theism retreats from explanation. Stephen Wykstra’s CORNEA critique says our inability to see a good reason for suffering does not entitle us to conclude that no such reason exists. Compared with an omniscient God, we are like an infant who cannot grasp a parent’s purpose.
As a warning about human knowledge, that argument has force. Ignorance should make us cautious. It cannot count as evidence for the hidden reason it leaves open. A perfect justification may exist beyond our understanding, and so may nothing at all.
The parent analogy also creates a moral expectation that skeptical theism struggles to meet. William Rowe pointed out that a loving God would have a reason to help sufferers understand, or at least assure them that a reason exists. Parents explain pain when they can because explanation helps a child endure it. Divine silence is part of the evidence under dispute.
If human moral understanding is too limited to recognize apparently gratuitous suffering, our confidence that God is good should weaken too. The word “good” has to connect with something we can recognize, including care for conscious beings and opposition to needless agony. Sever that connection and the claim that God is good loses its content.
“Mysterious ways” concedes that the explanation is unavailable. Reverence cannot turn that absence into an answer.
Pain demands a response
A secular account begins with the suffering itself. Pain matters because a conscious being endures it. Lost life matters because someone loses a future. No hidden author has to assign either one a cosmic role.
That view gives us less consolation and more responsibility. We treat disease because the patient’s pain is reason enough. We build warning systems and send disaster aid because lives can still be saved. We oppose cruelty because the person being hurt is real, even when the universe offers no promise that justice will arrive on its own.
Theodicy asks us to treat unexplained suffering as part of a plan we cannot inspect. I see no moral reason to grant that exemption. A four-year-old dying of cancer is a child in pain. Turning her into a lesson adds insult to agony.
Calling suffering a plan protects the belief while offering nothing to the sufferer. The pain is real. Our obligation is to stop what we can.