HistoricalChristian.Faith

The problem of evil (theodicy)

It is the oldest objection to belief in God: if God is perfectly good and all-powerful, why is there evil? The pagan schools sharpened it into an inconsistent triad — God is good, God is omnipotent, evil exists — and pressed that no two of the three seem to leave room for the last. This page traces how the church answered across time, earliest witness first. The answers fall into a few enduring lines, and it helps to keep two distinctions in view throughout. The first is between moral evil (the wrong that wills do) and natural evil (the suffering that merely befalls — disease, disaster, death). The second is between a defense — showing only that the triad is not self-contradictory, that a good omnipotent God could have a sufficient reason — and a theodicy — offering the positive reason itself.

Four replies recur and are already present in the Fathers below: that moral evil is the unavoidable price of a genuinely free will (a will that could not refuse God could not love Him); that a world containing evil can be schooled toward a greater good than a world without it (Irenaeus's growth-through-experience, Lactantius's “no wisdom without evils to overcome,” Augustine's better “to bring good out of evil”); that evil is no substance God made but the privation or corruption of a good (Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine); and — running deeper than human choice — that the disorder began in a rebellion in the unseen realm, the free fall of angels. This wiki does not treat “that answer requires the supernatural” as a refutation: the cosmic-fall and free-will-of-spirits readings are weighed on their evidence, not dismissed in advance.

Closely bound to this question are the timelines on original sin and the Fall (how evil entered and spreads), predestination, grace and free will (how God's sovereignty and the free will meet), universal restoration (the maximal answer — that evil is finally undone in all), and the divine council reading of a rebel cosmos. The theodicy device also surfaces on the Flood and other pages; here the problem itself is the subject.

Timeline

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 180)

Irenaeus gives the earliest sustained Christian answer, and it is a “soul-making” answer before the name. Against the Gnostics, who blamed a defective creator, he lodges moral evil in the free creature: God “made man a free [agent] from the beginning… to obey the behests of God voluntarily, and not by compulsion… for there is no coercion with God.”¹ And he answers the objection “why not make man unfallable?” developmentally: God “could have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this, being as yet an infant,”² and one cannot knowingly choose the good without knowing its contrary — experience yields “a surer and an undoubted comprehension” than mere opinion.³ Evil is thus the cost of freedom and the schooling of a race made to grow.

Origen of Alexandria (c. 248)

Origen builds the first complete Christian theodicy, and every later Greek move is already in it. Moral evil lodges wholly in the free rational creature: to blame outward things is to say “we are like pieces of wood, or stones, which have no motion in themselves,” whereas reason assents or refuses, so the blame “wholly lies” on us.⁴ His distinctive contribution is to answer the inequality objection — why are creatures so unequally placed, if one just God made them all? — as God's justice: the “diversity among rational creatures” derives “not from the will or judgment of the Creator, but from the freedom of the individual will,” the just wage of the creatures' own prior choices, so the Creator is in no way “unjust in distributing… to every one according to his merits.”⁵ (That defence rests on the soul's pre-existence and pre-natal fall — the premise later condemned.) And evil is no substance God made: “wickedness, and the actions which proceed from it, were not created by God,” but arise as an unwilled residue of His good works, “as there follow from the chief works of the carpenter such things as spiral shavings and sawdust.”⁶ Governing all is a providence whose punishments are remedial — the thread that runs on into his restoration of all things.

Lactantius (c. 313)

Lactantius, the “Christian Cicero,” preserves the sharpest ancient statement of the problem — the fourfold dilemma he ascribes to Epicurus: God “either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able… from what source then are evils?”⁷ He answers by breaking the last horn: God is able to remove evils but does not, “because He at the same time gives wisdom… unless we first know evil, we shall be unable to know good… no traces of virtue remain in man, the nature of which consists in enduring and overcoming the bitterness of evils.”⁸ A painless world would be a virtueless one; the permission of evil is the price of wisdom and courage.

Basil of Caesarea (c. 378)

Basil the Great supplies the two moves that organize the classical answer. First, evil is no thing: “it is equally impious to say that evil has its origin from God… Evil is not a living animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed… on account of their falling away from good.”⁹ Second, moral evil is self-authored: “do not… imagine that there is an original nature of wickedness. Each of us… is the first author of his own vice… evil… has no other origin than our voluntary falls.”¹⁰ With no evil substance to blame and a free will to bear it, God is in no sense evil's author — the Greek form of the privation-plus-freedom answer.

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 380)

Basil's younger brother carries the same two moves and adds a third. Evil is no substance but a defect: “there is no evil other than wickedness… all wickedness has its form and character in the deprivation of the good; it exists not by itself… it is the non-existence of the good that is so denominated.”¹¹ It arises not in God but in the free creature: “No growth of evil had its beginning in the Divine will… it is not God Who is the author of the present evils, seeing that He has ordered your nature so as to be its own master and free.”¹² Gregory's own contribution answers the Manichee's harder question — why make man at all, foreseeing the fall? — from providence: God “knew what was going to be… As, then, He had in sight the perversion, so He devised man's recall to good,”¹³ a remedial ordering that runs on into his teaching on the final restoration of all.

John Chrysostom (c. 400)

Between the Cappadocians and Augustine stands the greatest preacher of the age, whose answer is pastoral rather than metaphysical: he asks not what evil is but what it can do to a soul. In the homily That Demons Do Not Govern the World he insists that God's very chastisements are no argument against providence but its highest expression — “not only when he confers benefits but even when he chastises God is good and loving… his chastisements and his punishments are… the greatest form of his providence,” a physician's bitter medicine.¹⁴ He resolves Amos 3:6 and Isaiah 45:7 by dividing evil in two: the “really evil” — sin, which God does not author — and what “is not evil, but is called so, famine, pestilence, death, disease,” sent as remedy and so “not evil” in truth.¹⁵ The prosperity of the wicked and the affliction of the just he defers to a coming requital that “persuade[s] thee, that there is a Resurrection.” And in the exile treatise That No One Can Harm the Man Who Does Not Injure Himself he presses the consolation to its edge: a person's one true good is the virtue of the soul, which lies in the will, so that no loss, sickness, slander, or death can reach it — “no one of those who are wronged is wronged by another, but experiences this injury at his own hands.”¹⁶

Augustine of Hippo (c. 420)

Augustine, a former Manichee who had once made evil a rival dark substance, gives the Latin West its enduring synthesis. Evil is no nature but the corruption of one: it is “nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature… when incorrupt it is good; but even when corrupt, so far as it is nature it is good.”¹⁷ That answers what evil is; the why is providential greater good: God “judged it better to bring good out of evil, than not to permit any evil to exist.”¹⁸ Moral evil itself he traces to the created will and nowhere higher: its cause is “not efficient, but deficient… the will itself is not an effecting of something, but a defect,” so that “nothing is the efficient cause of the bad will” — God is not its author, yet the creature is justly answerable.¹⁹ Natural evil — death and its train — he frames as the penal consequence of the fall, inherited by Adam's stock.²⁰ Privation joined to greater good — evil real but parasitic, permitted only because omnipotent goodness can redeem it — became the standard Western frame, the seed of the later felix culpa and the ground Aquinas built on.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500)

The anonymous Christian Neoplatonist writing under the name of Paul's Athenian convert gives the privation answer its most rigorous ancient form. Evil is nothing positive: “The Evil is not from the Good, and if it is from the Good, it is not the Evil” — a cause makes only what is like itself, as fire cannot make cold, so there are not two warring first principles.²¹ Evil “has not a subsistence, but a parasitical subsistence, coming into being for the sake of the Good, and not of itself”; it is “privation and failure, and want of strength… and being itself nothing in any manner of way whatever.”²² And it never escapes providence, which “uses even evils which happen for the benefit… and provides for the free, as free.”²³ This is the text Aquinas would build the scholastic doctrine of privatio boni upon.

Boethius (c. 524)

Boethius, a Roman senator awaiting execution on a false charge, wrote the most-read theodicy of the Latin Middle Ages. Lady Philosophy answers the complaint that the wicked flourish along two joined lines. Metaphysically: because the omnipotent God can do no evil, “evil is nothing,”²⁴ and the wicked, forsaking the good that is the end of all things, forfeit real being — “that only is which maintains its place and keeps its nature”²⁵ — so their apparent triumph is in truth “the indubitable weakness of the bad.”²⁶ Providentially: what looks like the rule of chance is the unfolding in time (Fate) of one changeless divine reason (Providence), “seated in the Supreme Being, which disposes all things.”²⁷ Nothing falls outside God's good government, and the free will is spared by a foreknowledge that does not compel.

John of Damascus (c. 743)

The last of the Greek fathers gathered the settled Eastern answer into a textbook. All three moves appear in crisp formulae. Evil is no substance but “absence of goodness, just as darkness also is absence of light”;²⁸ moral evil is self-authored — the devil, “made good by the Creator, became of his own free-will the inventor of evil”;²⁹ and providence governs all “partly according to good-will… and partly according to permission,”³⁰ so that God positively wills the good and merely permits the evil He bends to remedial ends. Death itself is no work of God but of the fall: “God did not create death… its origin is in Adam's transgression.”³¹ His definitions became the fixed reference of Eastern theology and, in Latin translation, fed the Western schoolmen.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1274)

Aquinas locks the whole inherited answer into one system — the reference statement Leibniz and the moderns would argue with. Evil is no nature but a defect: “it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good” — and, sharpening the fathers, not every absence but only the privation of a good due to a thing (blindness is evil in an animal, not a stone).³² Because a privation is nothing positive, it has “no formal cause… neither… a final cause” and only an accidental agent-cause: good is the cause of evil merely by a defect, in the moral case a will that fails to hold to its rule.³³ So everything real in a sin traces to God, first cause of all being, but its defect does not: “God is the author of the evil which is penalty, but not of the evil which is fault” — the scholastic distinction of malum poenae from malum culpae.³⁴ And He permits the evils He could prevent because His omnipotent goodness draws greater goods from them: “This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.”³⁵ Privation, the deficient will, providence and secondary causes, the greater good — the fathers' pieces, now one architecture.

John Calvin (c. 1559)

Calvin closes the long gap between the schoolmen and the moderns, and he does it by hardening the one seam the fathers had left soft — the line between what God wills and what He merely permits. His doctrine of universal providence denies that God ever idly allows: God “holds the helms and overrules all events,” so that “nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed,” and “fortune and chance are heathen terms.”³⁶ To answer only that God permits evil is, he says, “the merest trifling” — yet God, employing even the deeds of the wicked and of Satan, “contracts no taint from their impurity,” because in one act done by many the reasons differ and the guilt lodges in the creature's motive alone.³⁷ On the origin of sin he is unflinching: Adam fell “divine providence so ordaining, but he falls by his own fault,” and of reprobation Calvin makes his most-quoted confession — “the decree, I admit, is dreadful.” The Reformed confessions fix the balance as doctrine: providence orders even the Fall “not by a bare permission,” yet “the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature.”³⁸ It is the sternest form the greater-good-under-sovereign-providence answer takes, and it runs straight into the timeline on predestination, grace and free will.

Pierre Bayle (c. 1697)

Between the confessional age and the Enlightenment stands the skeptic who set the modern problem its terms. Bayle, a Huguenot refugee in Holland, argued in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) — in the articles “Manichéens,” “Pauliciens,” and “Rorarius” — that the problem of evil simply defeats reason. Monotheism is the simpler and more elegant hypothesis a priori; but faced with the world’s actual mixture of good and evil, “the manner in which evil was introduced under the empire of a sovereign being, infinitely good, infinitely holy, and infinitely powerful” is found “not only inexplicable, but even incomprehensible,” and every objection to God’s permitting it “is more agreeable to the natural light and to the ideas of order than these reasons are.”³⁹ Reason can raise the difficulty but cannot answer it; the honest end, Bayle held, is to fall silent and submit to revelation by faith — the fideist conclusion that made him the most-cited skeptic of the age (readers still dispute whether the piety was sincere). It was largely to rebut Bayle’s articles by name that Leibniz composed the Théodicée of 1710.⁴⁰

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (c. 1710)

Leibniz gives the constructive tradition its most confident modern form — and its name: his 1710 Essais de Théodicée coin the word “theodicy” (a “justification of God”) for the whole enterprise.⁴¹ God, surveying every possible world His wisdom could conceive, freely actualized the best of all possible worlds: “if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any,” and its evils are the unavoidable price of the greatest attainable good — “a lesser good is a kind of evil if it stands in the way of a greater good.”⁴² He sorts evil into three kinds — metaphysical (the mere imperfection of any finite creature), physical (suffering), and moral (sin), the last two rooted in the first.⁴³ It is the greater-good answer of Lactantius and Augustine pressed to its optimistic limit — the statement Voltaire would satirize in Candide and the moderns would argue with.

Voltaire (c. 1759)

The optimism drew its most famous assault not from a philosopher but from a satirist. Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759) follows the endlessly-battered Dr Pangloss — teacher of “metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology” — as he insists through plague, war, and earthquake that “there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles”; the maimed Candide can only ask, “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”⁴⁴ Behind the comedy lay a real argument, made already in the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) — subtitled An Inquiry into the Maxim, “Whatever Is, Is Right” — which Voltaire wrote after the Lisbon earthquake of All Saints’ Day 1755 buried tens of thousands at Mass: to tell the crushed and the orphaned that “All now is well” is “an illusion vain,” and the optimist who “with faltering voice” cries “What is, is right” only mocks their agony.⁴⁵ Voltaire offers no theodicy of his own — Candide ends by turning from system to labour, “we must cultivate our garden” — but his achievement is to fix natural evil, the suffering no human will chose, as the hardest form of the problem, and to hand it, with Bayle’s skepticism, on to Hume.

The modern debate — Hume and the analytic reply (from 1779)

After Leibniz the initiative passes to the critics. Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) revive the Epicurean trilemma in its sharpest modern form — “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent… Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” — as the standing objection to natural religion.⁴⁶ In the twentieth century the debate splits. The logical problem (J. L. Mackie, 1955) charges that God and evil are outright contradictory;⁴⁷ Alvin Plantinga’s free-will defense (1974) — the modern, modal form of the fathers’ free-will answer — is widely held to have shown the triad at least consistent.⁴⁸ John Hick’s Irenaean soul-making theodicy (1966) revives Irenaeus’s growth-through-hardship answer by name.⁴⁹ Attention then shifts to the evidential problem (William Rowe, 1979), whose fawn dying unseen in a forest fire presses that apparently pointless suffering makes God’s non-existence probable;⁵⁰ the reply of skeptical theism (Wykstra, Bergmann) denies we could ever judge such suffering truly pointless.⁵¹ And a protest strand, sharpened after the Holocaust, refuses theodicy altogether — with Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov it would “return the ticket” rather than justify a world bought at the price of innocent suffering — an honest witness that some hold the problem unanswered.⁵²

Arguments

Off-timeline sub-claims about the problem of evil — the positions the timeline records, weighed on their own merits — are added here as they are researched.

Related arguments — the modern analytic problem of evil

The twentieth-century debate runs as a sequence, and the three pages below read best as a set. The logical problem charges that God and evil are flatly contradictory and is widely conceded answered by the free-will defense; the initiative then passes to the evidential problem, which grants consistency and argues from apparently gratuitous suffering to God’s improbability; and skeptical theism replies that a finite mind cannot judge an evil to be gratuitous in the first place. The last two are the live centre of the current dispute, and each is rated contested because neither has carried the field against the other.

The logical problem of evil and the free-will defense — does it answer Mackie? — sound

The logical problem (Mackie, 1955) charges that “God is omnipotent, God is wholly good, evil exists” are jointly self-contradictory. Plantinga’s free-will defense (1974) answers it by showing the triad is merely consistent: it need only be possible that God could not actualize a world of moral good without moral evil (the “transworld depravity” possibility), and a bare possibility is enough to break an inconsistency charge — a defense, not a theodicy, since it gives no actual reason. Against the logical problem it holds up by near-consensus: even Mackie (1982) and Rowe (1979) conceded the point, and the dispute moved to evidential ground. Sound — but tightly scoped: it answers only the logical, not the evidential, problem; it reaches natural evil only through the far weaker (though, for a defense, logically sufficient) conjecture of fallen non-human agency; and it clears the ground for a theodicy without being one. It is the modern modal form of the free-will answer of Irenaeus, Basil, and Augustine.

The evidential problem of evil — does gratuitous suffering make God improbable? — contested

Where the logical problem is conceded answered, William Rowe’s evidential argument (1979) is the live one. It grants that God and evil are consistent and mounts a probabilistic case instead: the variety and apparent pointlessness of suffering — his fawn burned in a forest fire, unseen, bettering no one — is evidence that no omnipotent, wholly good God exists. The logic is valid and the data real; the fawn is chosen to slip past every free-will or soul-making theodicy. But the whole weight rests on one inductive step — from “we see no God-justifying reason” to “there is none” — which skeptical theism contests, which the “G. E. Moore shift” lets the theist run in reverse, and which Rowe himself conceded needed reworking. Contested — the strongest form of the problem, genuinely unresolved.

Skeptical theism — can we judge an evil to be gratuitous? — contested

The leading reply to Rowe grants his logic and denies only his inductive step. On Wykstra’s CORNEA principle (1984) a “we-don’t-see-it, so it isn’t-there” inference works only where we could reasonably expect to see the thing — and (ST1–ST3, Bergmann) a finite mind has no reason to think its grasp of the possible goods, evils, and their connections is representative of the whole. The core epistemic point is strong, and it is what theism itself predicts. But the standing objection is that the skepticism “proves too much”: applied consistently it appears to corrode ordinary moral obligation, the discernment of divine commands, and the believer’s own grasp of God’s goodness. The attempts to quarantine it are serious but unsettled. Contested — strong as an epistemic corrective, costly as a global posture. It is the modern form of the fathers’ appeal to a providence we cannot survey.

Related arguments — natural evil

Natural evil — animal predation, parasitism, disease, disaster — is the case every theodicy of the will strains to reach: it predates and outstrips any human choice, a creation “red in tooth and claw” for ages before there were human wills to blame. Three rival Christian readings answer it over the same shelf of evidence — above all the antiquity of death and predation in the fossil record — and are best read as a set. One extends the free-will answer upward to rebel spirits; one takes the Darwinian order as intrinsic to any creative world; one pins it backward on the human Fall. The first two are contested, each strong in one register and strained in another; the third is weak as a theodicy of the whole predatory order.

Natural evil and the fallen-powers (cosmic-fall) reading — is nature’s disorder the work of rebel spirits? — contested

One genuinely-advocated move extends the free-will answer upward, to the prior rebellion of non-human free agents: Plantinga floats it as a bare possibility; C. S. Lewis supposes “some mighty created power” corrupted the animal creation before man; Gregory Boyd builds it into a full “warfare theodicy” on which there are, strictly, no natural evils, only the residue of a cosmos at war. As a bare possibility serving a defense it is logically sufficient, and this wiki does not discount it for invoking the supernatural. As a positive theodicy it is contested: unrivalled at giving natural evil an author other than God and coherent with the divine council reading the wiki weighs elsewhere, but it must posit a pre-human angelic corruption of the whole biosphere on no attestation beyond the doctrine of fallen powers itself, and it runs against the “only way” rival below.

The “only way” (evolutionary) theodicy — is Darwinian suffering the necessary price of creaturely life? — contested

The mainstream theistic-evolution answer makes neither the upward nor the backward move: it grants the Darwinian picture in full and argues that predation, death, and extinction are not a corruption of creation but the constitutive cost of the only process that can yield free, conscious, valuing creatures — a price God shares (Rolston’s “cruciform nature”) rather than merely imposes. Advanced by Christopher Southgate (The Groaning of Creation, 2008), Holmes Rolston III, and, in “free-process” form, Polkinghorne and Peacocke. In its modest form — suffering as the necessary trade-off for a creative, law-governed world — it is plausible, and it meets the antiquity of natural evil where every rival strains. But the strong claim its name asserts — that evolution was the only way, that omnipotence could not have done otherwise — is contested: Southgate concedes the premise is “unprovable,” and the omnipotence objection (Wahlberg: God could create the same creatures directly; a redeemed heaven already holds them suffering-free) is live and unrefuted.

Natural evil as the penalty of the human Fall — did death and predation enter through Adam’s sin? — weak

The oldest Christian answer pins death, decay, and the predatory order on the human Fall: creation as God made it was “very good” and deathless, and natural evil entered as the penal consequence of Adam’s sin (Augustine, John of Damascus; in modern “no death before the Fall” form, young-earth creationism). It has the plainest proof-texts of the three (Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22) and keeps God clear of designing predation. But as a theodicy of the whole natural order it is weak: predation and death are attested for ages before any human, so a human sin cannot be their cause — unless the conventional dating is overturned for a young-earth chronology this wiki rates weak. Restrict the penalty to human death (the stronger reading of Romans 5) and it no longer answers natural evil at all; extend it to all creation and it must deny the record.

Related arguments — the greater good

The most pervasive constructive answer on the timeline is that God permits an evil only because His omnipotent goodness can draw from it a good greater than a world without that evil — the move the privation and soul-making pages both hand the why-question off to, and the one the felix culpa of the Easter liturgy presses to its Christian limit. The two pages below are a set: the first states the general principle and rates it; the second weighs Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds, the strongest and riskiest species of the same move. The general framework is plausible; the best-world thesis, staking everything on a uniquely-optimal world it cannot establish, is weak.

The greater-good theodicy (and the felix culpa) — does God permit evil to draw a greater good? — plausible

The master principle of the constructive tradition, stated by Lactantius, Augustine (“better to bring good out of evil than to permit no evil to exist”), and Aquinas (“part of the infinite goodness of God… to allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good”), and crystallized in the Exsultet’s “O happy fault, that merited so great a Redeemer.” As a defense (God could have such reasons) it is as secure as the free-will defense, and it is arguably the correct logical form of any theodicy: every answer names the good for whose sake the evil is permitted. It has real content, not merely form — the felix culpa makes the redemption the good drawn from the Fall, and second-order goods (courage, mercy) genuinely presuppose the evils they answer. Plausible, not sound: its substantive premise — that each actual evil is necessary to an outweighing good — is what the “why not the same good with less evil?” objection and the evidential problem hold open, so it must be cashed out by a specific mechanism (soul-making, free will) or retreat to goods beyond our sight (skeptical theism). The keystone of the arch, but a keystone that needs the other stones to bear.

Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds — is this the optimal world, and was God bound to create it? — weak

Leibniz (1710) presses the greater-good answer to its limit: among all worlds God could conceive there is a uniquely best, a perfect God was bound to actualize it, so this is that best world and its every evil a necessary thread of the optimal whole. The added strength is precisely what fails. The keystone premise — that a best world exists — is unproven and probably incoherent (for any world a better is conceivable, as for any number a greater), and is denied by the tradition’s own greater-good champion Aquinas (“God can make something else better than each thing made by Him”); the necessity half is contested by Robert Adams (a good God may graciously create a good-enough world, not the best) and strains divine and creaturely freedom; and the claim that this is the best world is what Voltaire answered with the Lisbon dead. Weak — but its failure leaves the general greater-good move standing: one can hold God permits each evil for an outweighing good without holding the result is the uniquely optimal world.

Related arguments — the sufferer’s own good

The greater-good and soul-making traditions justify an evil by a good enjoyed somewhere — by the world, by others, by a completed cosmos. A powerful late-modern line objects that this is the wrong address: the good that justifies a person’s suffering must be a good to that person, one she could own, or the theodicy merely instrumentalizes her. The two pages below are the leading constructive answers built to that demand, and read best as a set: the first states the critique that reset the terms and offers a Christological cure; the second is the most fully worked-out positive theodicy to satisfy the constraint. The first is plausible (a near-decisive diagnosis carrying a hopeful, less-established cure); the second is contested (strong within a scope it deliberately bounds).

Horrendous evils and the goodness of God — can only God defeat the worst evils? — plausible

Marilyn McCord Adams (1989, 1999) distinguishes horrendous evils — those giving the participant prima facie reason to doubt her life could be a great good to her on the whole — and argues that the generic, “religion-neutral” goods of the greater-good and soul-making theodicies are the wrong size to defeat them (in Chisholm’s sense, as against merely balancing them off). Only an incommensurate good can: the beatific, face-to-face intimacy with God that, taking up even the horror into the sufferer’s own redeemed life, can “engulf” it. Rate the halves apart. The diagnostic — that horrors resist generic goods and that any answer must be person-centred and defeating — is near-sound and is now common ground (it is the sharpest defeater on the soul-making page). The constructive cure is coherent and deeply Christian but short of consensus: it asserts the engulfing more than it shows it and leans toward a universal completion to secure its guarantee. Plausible — a decisive critique carrying a hopeful cure.

Stump’s narrative (Thomistic) theodicy — is suffering the means to the sufferer’s own union with God? — contested

Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness (2010) reconstructs Aquinas’s theodicy and meets the person-centred demand head-on: God is justified in permitting an adult’s suffering when it is the best available means to that same person’s greatest good — union of love with God — by averting the worst (self-willed separation from God) or leading to the best (a will healed of its fragmentation), defended by close reading of the narratives of Job, Samson, Abraham, and Mary of Bethany rather than by abstract proof. It satisfies Adams’s constraint and rests on a real Thomistic value-theory. But it is genuinely disputed on three fronts: its scope is by design restricted to mentally functional adults, leaving the hardest distribution cases (infants, the impaired, animals) untouched; the defeating benefit is, on Stump’s own account, opaque and hard to verify; and its “best available means” premise strains against omnipotence. Contested — a strong, honest, person-centred theodicy for the cases it takes on, not a general solution.

Evil as privation of good (privatio boni) — does it hold? — contested

The dominant patristic–scholastic metaphysics of evil — Basil, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas — holds that evil is no substance God made but the privation or corruption of a due good, with no positive being and no cause of its own; so God can author all being without authoring evil. As metaphysics it is coherent and still standard, and it does real work against dualism. But two things keep it contested. The “positive-evil” objection — that pain and cruelty present as vividly real qualia, not mere absences — is live and unresolved (defended by the sensory/affective split, pressed by those who abandon it for a “corruption of the good” account): strong by metaphysics’ lights, weak by the phenomenology of suffering’s. And decisively for this timeline, it answers what evil is, not why God permits it — a piece of a theodicy, not a theodicy. Defensible as metaphysics; incomplete, by itself, as an answer to the problem of evil.

The soul-making (Irenaean) theodicy — does suffering make souls? — contested

John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love (1966) revives the Irenaean answer as a positive theodicy (not a mere defense): humanity was made not perfect-then-fallen but immature, set at an “epistemic distance” from God in a world of real hardship — a “vale of soul-making” — because the greatest goods (courage, compassion, a freely-won love of God) can only be grown, never issued ready-made; a frictionless paradise would be a virtueless one. Its core is sound and ancient, and it answers natural evil head-on where the free-will defense strains. But three defeaters keep it contested as a complete answer: the distribution objection (suffering falls where it schools no soul — infants, animals, the crushed), the horrendous evils that destroy the self rather than build it (Marilyn McCord Adams — generic goods are “the wrong size” to defeat them), and the charge that it instrumentalizes one person’s agony for another’s growth. Hick answers by extending soul-making beyond death to a universal completion — a coherent repair, but one that rests the theodicy on the further contested doctrine of apokatastasis. Strong as a component and for natural evil; contested as a finished theodicy.

Protest and anti-theodicy — is refusing to justify God a defensible stance? — contested

The one position on this page that declines to answer the problem: that a believer may (or must) refuse theodicy altogether — lamenting, or even arraigning, God rather than acquitting Him. Its literary archetype is Ivan Karamazov “returning the ticket”; after the Holocaust it hardened into theology — Richard Rubenstein’s death of the God of history, Elie Wiesel’s God “hanging… on this gallows,” and John K. Roth’s explicit “theodicy of protest,” which convicts an “everlastingly guilty” God — joined by the philosophers’ anti-theodicy (Surin, Tilley, Phillips), which rejects the whole enterprise on moral grounds: a theodicy that explains a child’s agony as the necessary cost of a greater good silences the victim and can “add to the world’s evils.” In its modest form — the recovery of the biblical lament tradition (Job, whose God rebukes the friends’ tidy defenses and answers from the whirlwind with no reason; the psalms; Lamentations) and the moral warning against victim-silencing, evil-explaining theodicy — it is coherent, deeply scriptural, and a needed corrective. In its strong forms — Roth’s guilty God, and the blanket ban on all theodicy — it is unstable: protest presupposes the very goodness it withholds, a total refusal to answer is itself a covert theology, and its sharpest versions either revise the classical God into a morally ambivalent one or slide toward the death-of-God that leaves theism behind. Contested — strong as a pastoral and biblical corrective, contested as a self-standing systematic stance.

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