3.3.2 - The problem of evil

The Triad Under Pressure

The problem of evil begins with a simple human protest: terrible things happen. People betray, torture, neglect and kill. Diseases destroy lives. Earthquakes and floods can kill people who did nothing to deserve them. If the world is governed by a perfectly good, all-powerful and all-knowing God, why is there any evil at all?

The philosophical problem is sharper than the emotional question. It asks whether a certain concept of God can be reconciled with the existence, amount, kinds and distribution of evil.

The tension can be stated as a triad:

1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omniscient.
3. God is omnibenevolent.
4. Evil exists.

Question: Can all four be true together?

The problem is aimed at classical theism: belief in a God who is not merely powerful, knowledgeable and good to some degree, but maximally so. A finite god, an ignorant god, or a morally mixed god would not face the same problem in the same way. But those moves also give up central divine attributes.

This lesson teaches the objection before the official responses. That matters. A response is only philosophically useful if it answers the precise form of the problem being raised.

Moral And Natural Evil

AQA requires the distinction between moral evil and natural evil. The distinction is not just vocabulary; it changes which explanation is being tested.

Murder, cruelty, torture, oppression, betrayal, exploitation and deliberate deception are standard examples.

Earthquakes, cancers, genetic diseases, animal suffering in the wild and some natural disasters are standard examples.

Mixed cases matter because careless classification can make an argument look easier than it is. If a famine is caused partly by drought and partly by corrupt distribution of food, it is not enough to say simply that nature caused it. Equally, if a disease is not anyone's fault, it is not enough to treat it as if it were a misuse of human freedom.

The distinction creates different pressures:

That second pressure is often harder for free-will-style responses, which is why AQA separates this lesson from the next one on Plantinga and Hick.

Midgley And Responsibility

Mary Midgley's Wickedness is an AQA set text for this topic, especially chapters 1 and 5. Midgley is useful here because she shifts the discussion away from treating evil only as an abstract problem about God's courtroom defence. She asks us to look at the sources of wickedness in human life.

This does not mean the traditional problem of evil disappears. The theist can still be asked why God made or permits a world containing moral agents who do terrible things. But Midgley helps to stop a different mistake: talking about evil as if it were always alien, irrational, monstrous or completely outside ordinary human motivation.

Her emphasis can be taught in three connected claims:

The point here is limited. We are not yet using Midgley as a full answer to the problem of evil. Instead, her work sharpens what counts as moral evil and why it is too quick to evade responsibility by saying that wrongdoing was caused by biology, society, fate or pressure.

Here is a Midgley-informed reconstruction of the responsibility issue:

Claim at issue: Moral evil can be made unintelligible or excused too quickly.

1. P1: Some explanations of wrongdoing treat the wrongdoer as if they were merely the passive result of fate, causes or social forces.
2. P2: If wrongdoing is treated only as passive causation, responsibility becomes difficult to locate.
3. P3: But moral evil involves agents whose motives and choices still need moral assessment.
4. Therefore, C: Explaining the sources of moral evil should not automatically remove responsibility for it.

Hidden assumption: A responsible action can have causes without being reduced to a non-responsible event.
Inference type: conceptual and evaluative.
Main pressure point: How to explain human wrongdoing without either demonising people as monsters or excusing them as helpless products of causes.

This matters for the problem of evil because moral evil is not just a puzzle about why God allows bad events. It is also a puzzle about why God allows responsible agents to become sources of harm in the first place.

The Logical Problem

The logical problem of evil claims that the existence of God and the existence of evil are not just in tension but logically incompatible. If the argument works, classical theism is internally inconsistent.

A standard reconstruction is:

Claim at issue: An omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God cannot coexist with evil.

1. P1: If God is omniscient, God knows about every evil and knows how it could be prevented.
2. P2: If God is omnipotent, God can prevent every evil that it is logically possible to prevent.
3. P3: If God is omnibenevolent, God wants to prevent every evil.
4. P4: If a being knows about every evil, can prevent every evil, and wants to prevent every evil, then no evil exists.
5. P5: Evil exists.
6. Therefore, C: An omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God does not exist.

Hidden assumption: A perfectly good being would prevent all evil it could prevent.
Inference type: Deductive, if P1-P5 are granted.
Main pressure point: P3/P4 and the hidden assumption, because a defender may say a good being can permit some evil for a morally sufficient reason.