God and the Weight of Suffering

The previous essay argued that incarnation is the most philosophically coherent method for a rational God to communicate with rational beings. That argument assumes God — assumes there’s something to communicate from.

This essay needs to deal with the hardest objection to that premise. Not the empirical objections, not the historical ones, but the philosophical one that’s been waiting since the series began:

If God is real, good, and powerful, why is there so much suffering?

This is the problem of evil. It’s not a rhetorical flourish — it’s one of the strongest arguments in philosophy of religion. Before extending the God argument any further, it deserves honest engagement.

The Objection Stated Fairly

The problem comes in two versions, and they need to be distinguished.

The logical problem: God’s existence is logically incompatible with the existence of evil. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, evil could not exist. Since evil exists, God does not. This version was once thought decisive. It’s now largely regarded as failed, for reasons I’ll get to.

The evidential problem: Evil doesn’t logically rule out God, but the sheer amount and distribution of suffering makes God’s existence improbable. A child dying of cancer, gratuitous animal suffering over millions of years of evolution, atrocities without redemptive purpose — these are evidence against the God hypothesis, even if not conclusive refutation of it. This version is harder and remains a live debate.

Both deserve engagement. I’ll take them in order.

The Logical Problem and the Free Will Defense

Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense is the standard response to the logical problem, and it’s compelling. The key move: a world containing genuinely free creatures who sometimes do good is more valuable than a world of automata who cannot choose otherwise. If God wanted the kind of relationship that has value — one involving free rational agents making genuine choices — then the possibility of evil comes with the territory.

The argument isn’t that evil is good. It’s that the elimination of evil by divine fiat would require eliminating freedom, and a world without freedom is worse, not better, than a world with freedom and its attendant risks.

This matters for the argument I’ve been building. The rational ground I argued for in essay23 isn’t just a cosmic mathematician — it’s the kind of thing that grounds rational beings capable of genuine agency. Genuine agency requires real choice. Real choice includes the possibility of choosing badly. The logical problem doesn’t touch a God who values freedom over compulsion.

Most philosophers — including those skeptical of theism — now concede the logical problem is solved. The evidential problem is where the real work is.

The Evidential Problem: Where It Bites

Even if evil and God are logically compatible, the quantity and nature of suffering in the world seems like evidence against a good God. William Rowe’s classic version: there appear to be instances of intense suffering that serve no greater good. A fawn dying slowly in a forest fire, suffering that no one witnesses and that helps no one. If God exists, why would such suffering be permitted?

The evidential problem is harder because it doesn’t require logical impossibility — only improbability. And the distribution of suffering in the world does seem, at first pass, like what you’d expect from a universe without a caring God rather than one with one.

Two responses are worth taking seriously:

The soul-making response (developed by John Hick): The world isn’t designed for comfort — it’s designed for the formation of moral beings. Pain carries information. Adversity builds character in ways that painless existence cannot. A world without suffering would be a developmental dead end — entities with no need for courage, compassion, or resilience. The soul-making theodicy says the world is calibrated for growth, not pleasure, and that this is actually what you’d expect from a God who cares about what rational beings become rather than just how comfortable they are.

This is more persuasive for moral evil than for natural evil. A child’s suffering at the hands of another person at least connects to the landscape of freedom and its costs. A child’s suffering from disease is harder to fold into a freedom narrative.

Skeptical theism: The evidential argument assumes we could reasonably expect to recognize all morally sufficient reasons for God to permit suffering. But our epistemic position is limited. We’re working with finite cognitive resources, limited temporal perspective, and no access to whatever larger purposes might be in play. The inference from “I can’t see a good reason for this suffering” to “there is no good reason” is too fast. The goods achievable by an omniscient being may be beyond our current ability to identify — not as a cheat, but as a genuine epistemic acknowledgment of our position.

I want to be careful here. Skeptical theism can slide into a God-of-the-gaps move — “we just don’t know” as a dodge rather than a genuine philosophical point. The honest use of it is narrower: we should resist confident inference from our inability to see a justifying reason to the conclusion that no such reason exists. The uncertainty is real; it doesn’t vindicate God, but it does prevent the evidential problem from being as decisive as it first appears.

The Connection to Incarnation

There’s a link between the problem of evil and essay24’s argument that I didn’t make explicit then.

The incarnation, if the argument holds, is God entering human suffering rather than eliminating it. Not removing the condition from outside but operating from within it — under constraint, under pressure, absorbing rather than destroying what opposes goodness.

If the soul-making response has any force, the incarnation pattern is coherent with it: the rational ground shows what engaged goodness looks like under conditions of suffering and opposition, rather than demonstrating a divine removal of those conditions. The response to evil isn’t magic — it’s character displayed in the midst of it.

That doesn’t solve the problem of evil. But it does mean the God the argument points toward is not the sort of God who would obviously eliminate all suffering. A God who enters the worst of human conditions in order to show what goodness looks like there is not a God for whom suffering is a simple puzzle to be solved from outside.

What I’m Left With

The logical problem is addressed — the free will defense succeeds in showing that omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, and evil are logically compatible. The evidential problem is harder, and I don’t think it dissolves.

What I can say is:

1. The evidential problem doesn’t settle the question. It’s real evidence, but evidence is rarely conclusive on either side of contested philosophical debates. The same world that contains gratuitous-seeming suffering also contains the rational ground problem that naturalism can’t solve, the hard problem that materialism can’t close, and the normative authority that constructivism can’t ultimately ground.

2. The soul-making response has genuine philosophical force for a subset of suffering. It’s incomplete for natural evil, but it’s not nothing.

3. Skeptical theism licenses genuine uncertainty about whether suffering we can’t explain has no justifying reason. The inference from unexplained to unjustified is too fast.

4. The pattern of the God the argument points toward — rational, communicating from within rather than from outside, showing character under pressure — is actually consistent with a world containing suffering. Not comfortable with it, but consistent.

What the problem of evil does establish is that the God the argument points toward is not a cosmic problem-eliminator. If this God is real, the response to suffering isn’t exemption from it. That’s a hard conclusion. But it’s consistent with the argument, not a refutation of it.

The series has now built the positive case and engaged the strongest objection. What remains: the question of what the rational ground argument means for how rational beings should live in a world that contains both a rational source and real suffering. But that’s for another essay.