The problem Griffin addresses

The problem of evil presses on a familiar set of claims about God:

If all three claims are held in a traditional way, evil seems difficult to explain. A common theodicy tries to show why God could allow evil without losing goodness, knowledge, or power. Griffin's process theodicy takes a more radical route: it argues that the problem has been made harder by an incorrect idea of divine power.

For Griffin, the key mistake is to assume that omnipotence means total unilateral control. He rejects the picture of God as a cosmic ruler who could simply force any logically possible state of affairs into existence. The process question is not, "Why does God refuse to use coercive power?" It is, "What if divine power is not coercive power in the first place?"

This matters because Griffin does not deny that evil is real. He denies that God's goodness is defeated by evil, because God cannot unilaterally prevent every evil event.

The process starting point

Process thought begins from becoming rather than static being. Reality is not best imagined as a finished object made once and then observed from outside. It is an ongoing network of events, choices, relations, and developments.

That starting point changes how God is understood. In classical theism, God is often described as wholly transcendent, unchanging, and able to create out of nothing by absolute command. Griffin's process view rejects that model. God is deeply related to the world and works with creatures and natural processes that have their own real power.

Two distinctions are essential.

This does not mean that God is absent. Griffin's God is active at every moment, but the action is persuasive. God works by attracting, guiding, and offering possibilities for richer value. A person can ignore that divine lure. Natural processes can also unfold in ways that frustrate value and produce suffering.

The important exam distinction is this: Griffin is not saying God has full coercive power but nobly chooses restraint. He is saying coercive control over every event is not a possible divine power.

Griffin's scholar card

Griffin's argument is sometimes linked with the "omnipotence fallacy": the mistaken move from "this state of affairs is logically describable" to "God must be able to bring it about unilaterally." Some goods cannot be forced into existence. A coerced friendship is not a friendship. A programmed moral agent is not morally free. A complex living world without risk may not be a real process world at all.

This gives Griffin a distinctive response to the problem of evil:

1. God is perfectly good and always works for richer forms of value.
2. God does not possess coercive omnipotence.
3. Creatures and natural processes have real self-determining power.
4. Evil occurs when reality fails to respond to the best possibilities God offers.
5. Therefore, evil does not show that God is wicked, careless, or non-existent.

The result is a theodicy because it defends God's goodness. But it does so by revising what "power" means when applied to God.

Moral evil in process theodicy

Moral evil is suffering caused by the choices or negligence of moral agents. Griffin can use freedom here, but not in exactly the same way as the standard free will defence.

The free will defence usually says that God gave humans freedom because free love and moral responsibility are valuable. Griffin goes deeper: on his process view, self-determination is not an optional extra that God adds to creatures. Some real power belongs to finite beings because reality itself is process-like. God can call a person toward the better option, but God cannot replace that person's decision with a guaranteed divine choice.

An argument chain for moral evil looks like this.

Griffin still accepts a kind of divine responsibility. God encourages the development of creatures with high freedom because they can realise high values such as love, creativity, courage, and moral relationship. That makes serious evil possible. Griffin's defence is that the risk is inseparable from those positive values.

This is a subtle point. Griffin is not saying evil is good. He is saying that a world with high-value finite beings necessarily carries the possibility of serious misuse of finite power.

Natural evil in process theodicy

Natural evil is suffering not directly caused by human moral choice: disease, earthquakes, animal suffering, genetic disorder, and natural disaster. This is where Griffin's process view is especially different from a simple free will defence.

In process thought, the natural world is not a passive machine controlled at every point by God. Natural processes have their own patterns, spontaneity, and limited self-direction. This does not mean that storms or viruses are morally responsible. It means the world is not wholly determined by divine command.

The process account of natural evil can be expressed like this:

This gives Griffin an answer to the common question, "Why does God not intervene?" The process answer is not that God has a secret reason for refusing to intervene. It is that God cannot occasionally interrupt the normal causal pattern of the world by sheer force.

AO1 to AO2 bridge

A strong answer on Griffin needs to move from accurate knowledge to judgement. The key is not to say vaguely that process theodicy is "strong" or "weak"; it is to identify what the theory gains and what it costs.

The most focused evaluation is this: Griffin's theodicy is powerful if the traditional concept of omnipotence is negotiable. It is much less persuasive if omnipotence, creation out of nothing, and decisive divine intervention are treated as essential to belief in God.

Using Griffin in a paragraph

A paragraph on Griffin should make the power shift explicit. Do not reduce process theodicy to "God is weak" or "God allows free will." The sharper explanation is that Griffin redefines divine power around persuasion within an unfinished process world.

A basic paragraph might say:

Griffin says God cannot stop evil because God is not omnipotent. This solves evil because God is good but cannot prevent suffering.

That is partly accurate, but too thin. It misses the process reason why God lacks coercive power and it sounds as if Griffin simply removes one divine attribute.

A stronger paragraph would say:

Griffin's process theodicy argues that the problem of evil depends on a mistaken model of divine power. God is not a coercive ruler who can unilaterally determine every event; God works persuasively within a world of finite beings and natural processes that have real self-determining power. This means moral evil arises when agents resist the divine lure toward the good, while natural evil arises because a complex process world cannot be perfectly controlled. The view is persuasive because it gives a direct reason why a good God does not prevent all suffering, but it is costly because many believers would see the loss of coercive omnipotence as a major departure from classical theism.

Why this improves:

Synoptic link: this lesson will later connect most naturally with Hick's soul-making theodicy, the free will defence, and the separate AQA point on the strengths and weaknesses of each response. Griffin can also be used in broader philosophy essays about whether the problem of evil succeeds against every concept of God, or only against classical theism.