God, Evil, and the Uncomfortable Questions We Pretend Not to Ask

By Agneya Dhingra 22nd April 2025

If God exists and is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good… why do babies die in earthquakes?

It’s a question that doesn’t go away — and shouldn’t. The Problem of Evil isn’t just a clever puzzle; it’s philosophy’s way of expressing what poets, refugees, and mourners have felt for millennia: there’s something cruel about the world. And if there is a God behind it, that cruelty demands explanation.

This is where theodicy enters — the attempt to defend God in the face of suffering. But as we’ll see, sometimes these defenses feel more disturbing than the evil they try to explain.

The Basic Problem: Three Claims That Can’t Coexist

The philosopher Epicurus posed it centuries ago:

God is all-powerful

God is all-good

Evil exists

Pick two.

If He’s all-powerful, He could stop suffering. If He’s all-good, He would want to. So why doesn’t He?

The Classic Defenses (and Why They’re Not So Simple)

1. Augustine’s Free Will Defense

The early Christian thinker St. Augustine argued that evil isn’t created by God — it’s the result of human free will. God gave us freedom, and we used it to sin. Suffering, then, is punishment and correction.

But here’s the counter: What about natural evil — tsunamis, cancer, famine? These aren’t moral failures. They just happen. Why build a universe where children die screaming and call that freedom?

2. Leibniz and “The Best of All Possible Worlds”

The Enlightenment optimist Gottfried Leibniz claimed that this world, despite appearances, is the best God could have made — once you balance free will, moral growth, and order. Suffering, in this view, is part of a greater harmony we just can’t see.

This is the view Voltaire mocked in Candide, where every horror is brushed off as "for the best" by smug philosophers. And it’s the view that Dostoevsky utterly rejected in The Brothers Karamazov, when Ivan says:

"I most respectfully return the ticket."

A world where a single child is tortured, he argues, isn’t worth any grand cosmic harmony.

3. Soul-Making Theodicy (John Hick)

Modern philosopher John Hick argued that suffering exists to shape us — to build virtue, courage, compassion. Earth is a "vale of soul-making," not a paradise. Without trials, we’d be shallow.

But then again — why must the trials be so unequal? Why do some souls face unbearable grief while others float through comfort? At what point does soul-making start to look like cruelty?

Hume’s Razor-Sharp Skepticism

David Hume, as always, didn’t bother with consolation. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he mocked the whole idea of divine design:

"Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent."

To Hume, the messy, painful world looked more like the product of chance — or an indifferent deity — than any benevolent architect.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Some retreat to mystery: “God’s ways are not our ways.” Some reject God altogether — swapping theology for probability. Others, like Simone Weil or Elie Wiesel, stay in tension — holding onto faith through silence, protest, or grief.

Maybe the most honest theodicy isn’t a defense at all. Maybe, as Camus suggested, the only intellectually honest response to suffering is rebellion — not against God, but against easy answers.

Final Thought

The Problem of Evil won’t be solved in an essay — or a lifetime. But that’s precisely its value. It’s philosophy not as resolution, but as moral refusal: a refusal to call horror good, or to let comfort dull our sense of injustice.

And maybe in that refusal, something sacred begins.