I’m setting out here to write the most concise description of the problem of evil and its solutions I can muster. This is still rather long, but probably not bad, considering there are thousands of books written on this topic. Brevity, however, does prevent me from fully developing any of these ideas in great detail, so my goal is to summarize and describe rather than to assert and defend.

The three horns of our dilemma are:

1. If God is all powerful, he can prevent evil.
2. If God is all good, he should desire to prevent evil.
3. There is evil, so God does not exist, is not good, or…

We can extend this basic “logical problem of evil” in two ways:

4. If God existed, there would be much less evil.
5. If God existed, this particular evil would not have happened to me (or them).

Christians—and Jews—have been dogged by this problem from the beginning. There are really only two broad classes of solutions to these various problems of evil:

1. God causes every particular evil to result in a corresponding particular good
2. God is seeking—or maximizing—some good he considers greater than an evil-free world

Particular Good for Particular Evil

The term particular in this context means an individual thing. Much like weighing the value of two pieces of fruit, this class of solutions argues that God can, and does, replace every lost orange (for instance) with an apple, or every lost apple with an orange. This class of solutions is intuitively attractive, but it requires:

• The particular goods are not always visible.[1]
• Every evil and every good are, in fact, particular
  • There are no “general” evils
  • There is no “gratuitous” evil, or some evil that has no good final outcome
• There is a way to “weigh” some evil against some good
• There is some way to “balance” particular evils and goods for each individual person in creation, such as:
  • If a particular evil is committed against person A, and person A is not saved, it is just and right for the resulting particular good to accrue to person B
  • People who are not saved are annihilated rather than eternally separated from God (and life), negating the required balance between good and evil in their individual lives
  • Everyone is saved

Some objections to this class of solutions include:

• If not all corresponding goods are not visible, what proof do we have they exist?
• Not every evil nor every good seems to be particular. There seem to be general evils like earthquakes and tsunamis that impact millions, and it’s hard to see either how to make these into particular evils or how particular goods could counter these general evils.
• Gratuitous evils seem to exist.
• There doesn’t seem to be any way to “measure” a particular evil against a particular good and determine if they are “equal enough to count as justice.”
• Noe of the solutions for balancing good and evil for individuals seem very convincing.

Finally—and most importantly—there is no good Scriptural warrant for holding:

• Every good and evil are particular
• Every particular evil is offset by some particular evil

While some Christians find solace in this class of solution, I find them unconvincing on the Scriptural evidence alone. Pursuing this path to solve the problem of evil also seems to result in unacceptably long leaps of logic.

Maximizing Tradeoff

This leads us to the second class of solutions: God is maximizing some general good he considers greater than an evil-free world. Perhaps an example would go some way towards explaining the concept.

Suppose you go out to dinner with your family, which includes a young child. As a parent, you have two competing goals:

• Having a peaceful meal
• Only feeding your child healthy food

However, you also know that if your child becomes hungry, they will also become cranky—and cranky means crying or acting out in some way. In the event, the restaurant is taking a long time to deliver your food order, long enough that your child is obviously hungry, and starting to cry.

Do you give your child an easily accessible piece of unhealthy candy in this situation? Do you choose to allow the (potentially minor) evil against the child’s health, or lose the good of peace and quiet? Since the peace and quiet impacts everyone in the restaurant, it is a general rather than particular good, so you are deciding: do I trade this particular evil against a general good?

This explanation of particular and general immediately raises the first objection to such views: why should we think God should ever face this kind of decision? If God’s omnipotence is unlimited, shouldn’t it be that God can prevent the particular evil while also creating the general good? Can’t God just “make the child not hungry?”

This is initially very attractive—we intuitively want to “maximize” God’s power in this way. As Alvin Plantinga has shown with modal logic however, this entails God being able to accomplish the logically impossible.[2]

The reply to this objection, then, depends on whether God’s power is limited by logic.

• If you hold God created the three logical laws so they only apply to humans, you should accept the entailments of this position, such as God’s inability to lie resting in his standing above the concept of lying, rather than in his trustworthy character, and that when God speaks his words can mean something completely different than what we hear. While many hold to this view of God, it is not the God the Scriptures describe.
• If you the three logical laws are a part of God’s character, then God cannot do the irrational, and the objection fails. In this case, we should see God reasoning with humans about the righteousness of his actions and appealing to a human sense of good and evil to convince or condemn. This is the way God is described in the Scriptures.

Assuming God cannot do the logically impossible, we can examine the second class of solutions.[3]

Before doing so, we should state that we cannot determine whether God is righteous in seeking this greater good or that God has chosen the “correct” balance—we cannot judge God. We can, however, ask: “What is this greater good?” Let’s consider three possibilities.

God is Maximizing His Glory.

There are many ways to phrase this, such as:

• God ordained evil to show the fullness of his attributes
• The Father ordained evil to glorify the Son
• God ordained evil to increase his glory

This position is often held by those who want to maximize God’s power or omnipotence; power is God’s “preeminent” attribute. Nonetheless, all of these imply God’s power is limited in this way: God must “ordain” or “cause” evil to fully increase or show his glory.

This solution is largely tied to Thomistic and Calvinistic thought. Some objections to this solution include:

• There is no Scriptural basis for claiming God’s only goal is his own glory, that God’s love only exists to increase his glory, etc.
• It puts God in the position of “ordaining” evil for his own glory, which is impossible to square with the moral and ethical standards to which God holds humans. In other words, this view seems to entail that the word “good” means something different to God than it means to humans.

God is Maximizing Perfected Souls.

In this solution, God is maximizing the number of mature, or perfect, souls across time. Perfecting a soul, however, requires the experience of pain, so God must allow evil into the world to create these perfect souls.

This solution is also called “the soul building theodicy,” and it is most often associated with various forms of Arminianism and open theology.

Some objections to this view include:

• It’s widespread connection to open theology.
• There seems to be little direct Biblical evidence that God’s goal in creation is building souls.

God is Maximizing Relationship (or Love).

To understand this solution, we must begin with the nature of relationships.

1. Relationships are based on love, and love, in turn, on faith. The modern world has so distorted the meaning of the word “love” that we struggle to understand the meaning of the word, but according to the Scriptures love is the desire for the good of the other. Hence, love is related to the idea of virtue in classical Greek thought.
2. Faith and love must be given freely. According to the Scriptures, if love is not freely given it is definitionally not love.
3. To love, then, requires that humans have at least some limited form of free will—at the minimum, the freedom to choose to love.

So—God is constrained by the nature of relationships to allow at least some form of free will. That God cannot create a world with free will, and without the possibility of evil, can be shown through modal logic (often expressed as possible worlds).

Given the free will to choose love or not, at least some of God’s created beings will choose not to love, so there will be evil in any possible world God can create with free will. This is what Plantinga calls “Transworld depravity.” Hence:

God created this world in spite of the evil he knew would exist in order to create the real possibility of loving relationships.

This solution is closely tied to Molinism and other mediating positions between Thomism/Calvinism and open theology. These positions do not hold that God creates without knowing the amount of love and evil, but that God chooses to create because he judges the relationships (love) enabled by limited free will to be a greater good than the evil. Unlike open theism, then, this view does not modify a traditional understanding of omniscience. This view does, however, cannot be reconciled with a Thomistic/Calvinistic view of divine simplicity.

Some objections to this view include:

• Some object to love requiring a free choice—they hold a person can rightly be made to love against their will.
• It seems to constrain God’s power.

While these objections do tell against this solution, they are answered by supporters in a variety of ways, including:

• If love is not a free choice, humans have no (even limited) free will. Humans are not, in this case, creatures made in the image of God, but rather extensions of God himself.
• God’s power is not decreased by limited forms of human free will, but rather increased. A God who can convince millions to freely love him is infinitely more powerful than a God who must force people to love him via an ontological change against their will.
• Further, except for universalism, God’s power is constrained in every case; there is no more constraint in God maximizing love and relationship than there is in God maximizing his glory. The only difference is which general good God values above the existence of an evil-free world.

Summary

There are four basic positions:

• Every particular evil is offset by a particular good.
• God can only do the logically possible, and:
  • God ordains (or must ordain) evil to maximize his glory.
  • God allows (or must allow) evil to create mature and/or perfected souls.
  • God allows (or must allow) evil to enable free will, which is necessary for true I/thou (loving) relationships.

All other solutions are variations of these.

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[1] This is sometimes called the “noseeum defense.”

[2] Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, Kindle ed (Eerdmans, 1989).

[3] There are versions of High Calvinism that hold God created logic, and therefore is “above” logic. To counter the problem of the unintelligibility of God resulting from practical nominalism, these versions of High Calvinism further hold God “repairs” his elect enough to experience something of God—ironically using a practical Gnosticism to counter practical nominalism.