Responses to Problem of Evil — I can evaluate common responses to the problem of evil (free will defense, soul-making) at my level.

Historical Context & Motivation

The tension between the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God and the reality of suffering has occupied philosophers and theologians for millennia. Known formally as the problem of evil, this challenge constitutes one of the most persistent objections to theistic belief in the Western philosophical tradition. The problem can be stated succinctly: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, why does evil exist? Either God cannot prevent evil, in which case God is not omnipotent; or God does not wish to prevent evil, in which case God is not omnibenevolent; or God does not know about evil, in which case God is not omniscient. Each horn of this trilemma threatens a central attribute of classical theism, making the problem philosophically potent and existentially urgent.

Responses to the problem of evil—collectively known as theodicies and defenses—have a rich intellectual lineage. A theodicy, from the Greek theos (God) and dikē (justice), attempts to provide a positive justification for why God permits evil. A defense, by contrast, merely aims to show that the existence of God and evil are logically compatible without claiming to identify God's actual reasons. Understanding this distinction is essential for evaluating the arguments that follow.

The historical arc reveals a progression from ancient formulations of the challenge to increasingly sophisticated responses. Yet the core question remains: can the theist provide a coherent account of why a perfect God permits the depth and distribution of suffering we observe? The responses examined in this lesson—the free will defense and the soul-making theodicy—represent two of the most influential and widely discussed strategies in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Core Principles & Definitions

Before evaluating specific responses, it is important to establish the conceptual vocabulary and foundational distinctions that structure the debate. The problem of evil comes in two primary forms: the logical problem, which claims that God and evil are strictly incompatible, and the evidential problem, which concedes logical compatibility but argues that the sheer amount and distribution of suffering make God's existence improbable. Each response targets one or both of these formulations, and the standards of success differ accordingly.

Visual Explanation — Mapping the Responses

The following diagram maps the logical structure of the problem of evil and illustrates how the free will defense and soul-making theodicy each intervene at different points in the argument. The problem begins with three classical divine attributes and asks how they can be reconciled with the existence of evil. Each response targets a specific premise or inference in the atheological argument.

Notice that the two responses operate at different levels of the argument. Plantinga's defense is primarily logical and modal: it aims to show mere possibility, thereby blocking the deductive move from divine attributes to the absence of evil. Hick's theodicy is more substantive and explanatory: it offers a positive account of God's purposes that reframes evil as instrumentally valuable. This structural difference explains why Plantinga's defense is widely accepted as successful against the logical problem, while Hick's theodicy remains more controversial because it makes stronger empirical and theological claims.

Deep Dive — How Each Response Works

Plantinga's Free Will Defense: The Logical Architecture

Plantinga's defense can be reconstructed in several steps. First, he distinguishes between logically possible worlds (any consistently describable state of affairs) and feasible worlds (worlds that God can actually bring about given the free choices of creatures). Even an omnipotent being cannot actualize a world where a free agent freely chooses X if, in the relevant counterfactual circumstances, that agent would freely choose not-X. This is not a limitation on God's power but a logical truth about what it means for a choice to be free.

The pivotal concept is transworld depravity. A person P suffers from transworld depravity if, in every feasible world where P is significantly free with respect to at least one morally significant action, P goes wrong with respect to at least one such action. If every possible free creature suffers from transworld depravity, then any feasible world containing significant freedom will also contain moral evil. God, confronted with this situation, faces a genuine dilemma: create a world with free creatures and the attendant risk of evil, or create a world of morally inert automata. Plantinga contends that the former is more valuable, and that the possibility of universal transworld depravity is sufficient to defeat the logical problem.

Hick's Soul-Making Theodicy: The Developmental Framework

John Hick draws on the theology of Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–202 CE), who distinguished between being made in the image of God (possessing rationality, moral capacity) and growing into the likeness of God (achieving moral and spiritual maturity). On this view, humans are created as morally and spiritually immature beings who must undergo a process of development. This process requires a world that is not a hedonistic paradise but an environment of challenge—what Hick calls a vale of soul-making.

Hick introduces the concept of epistemic distance: God remains partially hidden so that humans can develop genuine faith, moral courage, and compassion rather than merely complying with an overwhelmingly evident deity. If God's existence were as obvious as the noon sun, moral choice would be coerced by certainty rather than freely undertaken in conditions of ambiguity. The world must therefore contain genuine hardship, uncertainty, and even tragedy to function as an arena for the development of virtues such as courage, patience, empathy, and self-sacrifice. Importantly, Hick extends this framework to include natural evil—earthquakes and disease are not punishments but features of an environment designed to elicit growth.

Hick's account also incorporates a commitment to universal salvation: the process of soul-making continues beyond earthly life, and ultimately all persons are brought to fulfillment. This eschatological dimension is essential to the theodicy's coherence, since without it, the suffering of those who die in infancy or under conditions of extreme deprivation appears pointless and unjustified.

Classifying Evil and the Scope of Each Response

Evaluating these responses requires a clear taxonomy of the kinds of evil each addresses. The following diagram classifies types of evil and maps them to the responses best suited to address each. This analysis reveals that neither response alone covers the full terrain—an observation that motivates combining or supplementing these strategies.

An important subtlety arises with dysteleological suffering—suffering that appears to serve no purpose whatsoever, such as the slow death of a fawn in a forest fire unobserved by any human being (an example made famous by William Rowe). The soul-making theodicy struggles to explain how such suffering contributes to anyone's moral development, since no agent is in a position to learn from it. This type of case has been central to the evidential problem of evil, which Plantinga's defense was not designed to address and which Hick's theodicy confronts only partially.

Worked Example — Evaluating a Response

To illustrate how one evaluates a response to the problem of evil in philosophical analysis, consider the following prompt: Does Plantinga's free will defense successfully resolve the logical problem of evil? Construct and then assess the strongest objection. The worked example below models the kind of structured reasoning expected in a college-level philosophy paper.

Strengths, Limitations, and Comparisons

Any serious evaluation of these responses requires an honest reckoning with both their philosophical achievements and their vulnerabilities. The following comparison highlights the distinct strengths and limitations of each approach, as well as the major objections they face.

Connections to Advanced Theory

The responses examined in this lesson connect to several advanced topics in contemporary philosophy of religion. Understanding how these introductory strategies relate to more sophisticated frameworks is essential for situating oneself in the ongoing scholarly conversation.

One particularly important development is the emergence of skeptical theism, which argues that human cognitive limitations prevent us from reliably judging that any particular instance of suffering is truly gratuitous. If we cannot rule out that God has morally sufficient reasons beyond our comprehension, then the evidential problem loses its force. However, critics of skeptical theism—including some theists—worry that this strategy undermines moral reasoning itself: if we cannot trust our judgments about whether suffering serves a purpose, how can we make any moral evaluations at all? Another significant direction is anti-theodicy, championed by philosophers like D.Z. Phillips, who argue that the attempt to justify suffering is itself morally repugnant—that genuine compassion demands acknowledging the horror of evil rather than rationalizing it. These developments show that the debate about evil in philosophy of religion remains vibrant, contested, and far from settled.

Practice Problems

Lesson Summary