Defenses and Theodicies

If the problem of evil is the strongest case against God, the theodicies and defenses are theism's reply: the attempts to show either that God and evil are logically compatible (a defense) or that there are good reasons a perfectly good, omnipotent God would permit the evils we observe (a theodicy, from Greek theos + dikē, the "justification of God" — Leibniz's coinage). The task is set by the inconsistent triad: the theist must identify a candidate good (or a limit on what even omnipotence can do) such that permitting evil is the price of securing it, or else block the inference from observed to gratuitous evil.

This page surveys the major responses — the free-will defense, soul-making, the Augustinian/privation view, natural-law and greater-good theodicies, skeptical theism, the process and open-theist replies, and the appeal to mystery — and weighs each against the evidential and especially the natural-evil and horrendous-evil challenges. The companion divine hiddenness page handles the parallel problem of God's silence.

Defense vs. theodicy

The single most important methodological point (introduced on the problem-of-evil page) governs how to read everything below:

• A defense aims only to rebut a charge of inconsistency or improbability — it offers a possible reason God might have for permitting evil, without asserting it is the actual one. It is enough that the story be logically possible (against the logical problem) or not improbable (against the evidential problem).
• A theodicy is more ambitious: it offers the actual reasons a good God does permit evil — a positive justification of God's governance.

The distinction sets the bar. Against the logical problem, a bare defense suffices and (most agree) succeeds. Against the evidential problem, the theist needs more — either a credible theodicy, or a defense strong enough (e.g. skeptical theism) to neutralise the inference to gratuitous evil. Many theists deliberately retreat to defense, holding that we need not know God's reasons to be rational in believing he has them.

The free-will defense

The most important response, Alvin Plantinga's, was introduced on the problem-of-evil page as the refutation of the logical problem; here is its full shape as a theodicy of moral evil:

• The good of free will. A world containing creatures who freely choose the good — who love, and do right, of their own accord — is more valuable than a world of automata caused to behave well. This great good requires freedom in a robust, libertarian sense.
• The cost of freedom. Genuine freedom to choose the good entails the real possibility of choosing evil. Not even an omnipotent God can make a creature freely do right — that is logically impossible, like a married bachelor. So a God who wants the good of free creatures must accept the risk of moral evil.
• Transworld depravity. Plantinga argues it is possible that every free creature God could have created would have gone wrong in some circumstance ("transworld depravity"), so that there may be no feasible world with free creatures and no moral evil. If so, God's failure to actualise a sinless free world is no mark against his power or goodness.

The defense is widely granted to dispatch the logical problem of moral evil. Its limits, much debated:

• Natural evil. Earthquakes, disease, and animal suffering are not obviously the result of anyone's free choice. Plantinga gestures at the bare possibility that natural evil is the work of free non-human agents (fallen angels) — adequate as a defense (it need only be possible) but incredible as a theodicy. Other responses fold natural evil into the natural-law or soul-making accounts.
• Quantity and distribution. Even granting freedom requires some permitted evil, why so much, and why visited so heavily on the innocent? The free-will defense explains the possibility of moral evil, not its observed scale — which is the evidential pressure.
• The compatibilist objection. If compatibilism about free will is true, then God could have created free creatures who always freely choose the good (Mackie's point: if freely-doing-right is compatible with being determined, an omnipotent God could determine it). The defense thus presupposes libertarian free will — tying the problem of evil directly to the free-will debate and inheriting its difficulties (the luck objection).

Soul-making theodicy

Where the free-will defense is Augustinian in spirit (evil as the privation consequent on a fall from an original perfection), the soul-making theodicy is Irenaean, developed by John Hick (Evil and the God of Love, 1966). Its claim: God did not create a finished paradise but a world fit for growth — an environment in which immature creatures, made "in the image" of God, can develop into his "likeness" through struggle, choice, and the meeting of real difficulty.

• A world without hardship, danger, or suffering — a hedonic playpen — could not produce courage, compassion, patience, self-sacrifice, or mature moral character; these second-order goods logically require the first-order evils they respond to. There is no courage without danger, no compassion without suffering, no forgiveness without wrong.
• "Epistemic distance." God remains hidden (cf. divine hiddenness) and the world is religiously ambiguous so that our coming to God and goodness is a free, uncoerced development rather than a forced response to an overwhelming divine presence.
• Because soul-making is often incomplete at death, Hick's theodicy requires an afterlife in which the process continues to a good end — and Hick embraces universal salvation, since a soul-making God who failed with even one soul would not have justified its suffering.

Objections: the theodicy seems to justify — even require — suffering, which can read as morally complacent; much suffering is soul-destroying rather than soul-making (it brutalises and crushes rather than ennobles); the distribution is grotesquely uneven (some are pampered, others tortured from birth); animal suffering and the suffering of those who die before any character can form fit poorly; and the appeal to a universalist afterlife is a large further commitment. Still, soul-making addresses natural evil more naturally than the free-will defense and captures the genuine thought that some goods are only available through adversity.

The Augustinian and privation views

Augustine's classical theodicy has two pillars:

• Evil as privation (privatio boni). Evil is not a positive thing God created but a lack or corruption of a good that should be present — blindness is the absence of sight, vice the absence of virtue, as cold is the absence of heat and darkness the absence of light. God made everything good; evil entered as the spoiling of good things, not as a created reality. This answers the Manichaean worry ("did God create evil?") — God created no evil stuff — and preserves divine goodness, but it is widely felt to be a metaphysical reclassification that does not lessen the experienced reality of agony; calling a child's cancer a "privation" does not make it hurt less or explain why God permits the corruption.
• The Fall. Both moral and natural evil are traced to the misuse of free will — angelic and human — in a primordial Fall, which disordered creation. As a historical claim this sits uneasily with evolutionary biology (predation and animal suffering long predate humanity), so modern defenders tend to take it symbolically or combine it with other strategies.

Natural-law and greater-good theodicies

A family of responses argues that certain evils are the necessary by-products of goods that could not exist without them:

• Natural-law theodicy. A world of free, embodied, rational agents who can act, plan, and learn requires a stable, law-governed environment — regular, predictable natural laws. But the very regularities that make agency and science possible (gravity, plate tectonics, the transmissibility of energy and pathogens) will inevitably produce harm in particular circumstances: the gravity that lets us walk also lets us fall, the fire that warms also burns. God could prevent each harm only by constant ad hoc miracle, which would destroy the lawlike order on which rational agency depends. So natural evil is the price of a world fit for free agents. (Swinburne adds that natural evil also supplies the knowledge of how to harm and help — and so the scope for significant free choice.)
• Greater-good theodicy (general form): every evil God permits is necessary to a greater good (or to preventing a worse evil), so there is no gratuitous evil — directly denying premise 1 of Rowe's argument. The difficulty is the evidential one: the goods are often invisible, and asserting that every horror secretly serves a greater good strains credibility and risks the morally corrosive conclusion that we should not prevent evils (if they are all necessary to greater goods) — the "too much" objection.

Skeptical theism

Rather than offer a positive theodicy, skeptical theism (Stephen Wykstra, William Alston, Michael Bergmann) attacks the evidential argument's crucial inference — the "noseeum" move from "we see no justifying good for this evil" to "there is none." The skeptical theist argues:

• Given the immense gap between divine and human cognition, we have no good reason to expect that we could discern God's reasons for permitting a given evil even if such reasons exist. The goods served may lie far downstream in history, or in the lives of others, or in categories of value we cannot conceive — as a young child cannot grasp why a loving parent permits a painful medical procedure.
• Wykstra's CORNEA principle formalises this: "I see no $X$" supports "there is no $X$" only when, were there an $X$, I would likely perceive it. For God's reasons, that condition fails. So our inability to see a justifying good is not evidence that there is none, and Rowe's premise 1 is unsupported.

This is a defense, not a theodicy — it claims not to know why God permits evil, only that our ignorance is exactly what theism should predict, so the evidential argument cannot get traction. Its much-pressed cost: the same skepticism, applied consistently, seems to undercut other inferences theism needs — if we cannot judge that an evil is probably gratuitous, can we judge that the world is probably good, that God is probably trustworthy, that our moral perceptions track real value? The worry is that skeptical theism purchases immunity from the problem of evil at the price of a corrosive general skepticism about value and about God's goodness itself.

Process and open-theist replies

Two responses dissolve the problem by revising the concept of God (see the concept of God):

• Process theodicy (Whitehead, Hartshorne, Griffin): God is not omnipotent in the classical sense. On process metaphysics God persuades but cannot coerce; every actual entity has its own self-determining power that God cannot override. God does the utmost a persuasive power can do, luring the world toward greater value, but cannot unilaterally prevent evil. The problem of evil simply lapses, because premise 1 of the triad (unlimited power) is denied. The cost is steep: a God who cannot guarantee the final triumph of good, and who falls short of the being of classical theism — to many, a "solution" that concedes what was to be defended.
• Open theism revises omniscience rather than omnipotence: God does not foreknow free future choices (there being, it claims, no truths yet to know), and so takes genuine risks in creating free creatures, responding to evils as they arise rather than ordaining or foreseeing them. This softens the foreknowledge edge of the problem (God did not knowingly create this sufferer for this fate) but leaves the power question largely intact, so it is usually combined with a free-will theodicy.

The appeal to mystery and the antitheodicy

Finally, two responses that decline the theodicy project itself:

• The appeal to mystery. Perhaps the most ancient response — the voice from the whirlwind in Job ("Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?") offers Job no explanation, only an encounter. The believer may rationally trust that God has reasons while disclaiming any ability to state them — a posture close to skeptical theism but devotional rather than argumentative. Critics call this an evasion; defenders call it honesty about the limits of finite understanding.
• Antitheodicy (D.Z. Phillips, Kenneth Surin, after Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov): the very project of theodicy is morally objectionable. To explain why the torture of a single child is "necessary to a greater good" is to justify the unjustifiable, to adopt the detached calculus of a bookkeeper toward horrors that demand refusal, not rationalisation. Ivan does not deny God; he "returns the ticket" — rejects a harmony bought at the price of a child's tears. The proper response to horrendous evil, on this view, is lament, protest, and solidarity, not explanation. Marilyn McCord Adams's treatment of horrendous evils is sympathetic: general greater-good theodicies cannot address evils that destroy the sufferer's very capacity to find life worth living; only God's intimate defeat of such evils within the victim's own life — through relationship with God valued as incommensurably good — could answer them, and that is consolation and redemption, not theodicy.

Where the theodicies sit

The defenses and theodicies form a layered reply to the problem of evil. Against the logical problem, the free-will defense is decisive — bare possibility is all that is needed, and it is supplied (presupposing, however, libertarian free will). Against the far harder evidential problem, no single response commands assent: the free-will and soul-making theodicies explain much moral and characterforming evil but strain against the scale, the distribution, natural evil, and horrendous evil; natural-law theodicy addresses natural evil but at the cost of seeming to subordinate persons to a system; skeptical theism blocks the atheist's inference but courts a corrosive general skepticism; the process and open replies dissolve the problem only by revising God into something less than the classical being; and the antitheodicy tradition rejects the whole enterprise as a moral mistake. The honest summary is that theism has a strong defense (evil is not a disproof of God) and a contested theodicy (no fully convincing account of why there is this much evil) — which is why the problem of evil remains the heaviest weight on the atheist side of the cumulative case, and why its near-relative, divine hiddenness, presses the same structure through God's silence rather than the world's suffering.