Lutheran Thoughts on the Problem of Evil
Introduction
The history of natural theology shows many ways in which reason points to God’s reality. In light of the arguments developed on the basis of general revelation, it is perfectly reasonable to believe in a divine mind who is the ultimate source and explanation of the universe. But of course there exists what many people regard as counterevidence to God’s existence. Most important and influential is the existence of evil. Along with objections to or doubts about what is taught in the Scriptures, the existence of evil is the reason most often given for why people have left Christianity behind. As a practical matter, evil makes belief difficult. Evil that is particularly horrific or that strikes close to home can weaken the faith of nearly anyone. From a theoretical standpoint, evil can also be used to make a philosophical argument for the conclusion that God does not exist, or that his existence is highly doubtful.
In this article, I hope to make it clear that as troubling and confounding as the existence of evil can be, it is not a good or sufficient reason to doubt the reality or love of God. This will involve explicating how evil can be employed in arguments against theism and indicating where such arguments are flawed.
Before we begin examining these arguments, we must note some important preliminary considerations. One is that for the sake of this discussion, it makes sense to define evil broadly. When people complain about the evil in the world, they generally mean the apparent unjust suffering that they witness and the events that cause it. Evil events are often placed in two categories. Natural evils are instances of suffering that arise from natural disasters and diseases. They are not caused by human agents, at least not directly. Moral evils are those that arise from crimes and immoral acts. They are caused by human decisions and the misuse of our will. A good response to the problem of evil will have to confront both kinds of evils.
It is also important to note at the outset a truth that is often overlooked in discussions of the problem. This is that from a Christian standpoint, all human beings are sinners and therefore contribute to the evil that exists in the world. An individual’s contribution may not be particularly conspicuous in the eyes of other human beings, but all think and do things that in some way make the world an unjust place, and in God’s sight these shortcomings are all notable. God declares in Scripture that this universal sinfulness is sufficiently egregious to warrant eternal punishment. Now if all people deserve eternal punishment, it seems reasonable to hold that they are also deserving of an unlimited number of temporal or earthly punishments. This means that although the suffering that fallen human beings experience in this world might seem undeserved from a human standpoint, it would not make sense to say it is undeserved from a divine standpoint. This is important to keep in mind, since people tend to be far too quick to overlook this fact and claim that God is unjust in what he ordains or permits. The Christian answer to the question why do bad things happen to good people is that there are no good people, at least if by good people we mean people who are innocent of wrongdoing in the eyes of God.
This consideration, however, is not a silver bullet that instantaneously takes care of the problem that evil creates for theistic belief. For it can still be asked why God allows anyone to do evil if he hates it, and why God permits repentant people to suffer and sometimes experience even more evils than the unrepentant. Thus there is more work to be done and more needs to be said.
The Traditional Problem of Evil
In contemporary discussions, the problem of evil comes in at least two major forms. The first is called the traditional or logical problem of evil. The second is called the evidential problem of evil. I will examine each in turn. The traditional problem argues that God’s existence and the existence of evil are logically incompatible, so if one of them exists, the other cannot.
We can formulate this version of the problem in the following way:
Premise 1: If God were wholly good and omnipotent, evil would not exist, since he would be powerful enough to prevent it, and good enough to want to prevent it.
Premise 2: But evil does exist.
Conclusion: Therefore a God who is both wholly good and omnipotent does not exist.
How can the Christian respond to this argument? Some people have sought to dissolve the problem by accepting the conclusion and affirming that God is not omnipotent. Ancient forms of polytheism denied that the gods were all-powerful. Process theology, a type of modern liberal theology, has affirmed the reality of one God but has also claimed that he lacks any ability to exercise coercive power. He can only try to persuade or invite his creatures to do good. But this flies in the face of the testimony of the Bible. Scripture clearly teaches that God is almighty. Moreover, saying that God lacks coercive power robs us of any real grounds for hope about the future, for an impotent God cannot guarantee any outcome. Therefore, the idea of a God without coercive power generally holds little interest even for people who don’t regard the Bible as authoritative.
One could also accept the conclusion and deny that God is wholly good, but this would once again rob us of any grounds for hope and would give us a being unworthy of worship. An evil being cannot be perfect, and an imperfect being cannot be God. This response therefore also holds no interest.
It’s clear, then, that the conclusion that an almighty and wholly good God does not exist is completely unacceptable for orthodox Christians. To overturn this conclusion, we will have to challenge the reasoning in the argument or the truth of the premises. Here the reasoning appears valid—if the premises were true, the conclusion would logically follow. Therefore we must examine the premises to see if they can be justified.
The theist who is an orthodox Christian will not want to call into question the premise that evil exists by claiming it is an illusion or merely subjective. There are religions that do this, such as Christian Science and some forms of pantheism, but it is obviously completely out of step with common sense and Scripture. All experience testifies to the reality of sin. We are taught by Scripture that evil is precisely what makes redemption in Christ necessary. So accepting this view is not a possibility for us.
We thus are left with the first premise, that God’s existence is incompatible with evil. It is on refuting this premise that all orthodox responses to the problem of evil focus. How do we refute it? What the Christian must do is rather simple. He only has to show that it is possible that there is a reason for why an almighty and wholly good God would allow evil. This will remove the alleged incompatibility between God and evil. Thankfully, finding a reason is not hard to do, so the traditional problem as we just formulated it is not regarded today as a serious problem for theism, even by philosophers who are atheists.
Offering a reason for why God allows evil is often called providing a defense. The reason doesn’t even have to be the right one, it just has to show that there is no incompatibility. There are more robust responses to the problem of evil, however, that attempt to argue that some particular reason is the true reason that God permits evil. These are often called theodicies. A theodicy, however, is not necessary to defuse the traditional problem of evil; a defense is sufficient.
Responses to the Traditional Problem of Evil
There are four common reasons given for why God permits evil that I believe merit consideration. Philosophers and theologians often have different ideas about which reasons are most satisfying or biblical. What follows is a Lutheran evaluation of them.
Free-Will Response
The first is one of the most popular reasons given for why God permits evil. This is to appeal to free will. This response has a long history in the church. Perhaps the most famous early expression of it is found in St. Augustine’s book On Free Choice of the Will. The relevant assertion here is that God wanted us to have the ability to make genuine choices, and this freedom came with the possibility that people would choose the wrong things. Many Christians find this response adequate and easy to understand. If you were to ask a random sample of Christians from across denominational boundaries why God allows the evil in the world, a significant number would doubtless say something about the value or importance of free will. But is this an option for Lutherans? After all, one of the most famous theological works in our tradition is called The Bondage of the Will.
Contrary to some popular misconceptions, Lutherans do not deny the existence of free will entirely. We say that Adam was free to sin or not to sin, that unbelievers have freedom to choose how they will sin (they can choose to avoid outward sins), and that believers also have freedom to sin or not to sin. In fact, we have to say that human beings have free will in some sense, because we refuse to say that God is the author of sin or that he is responsible for who is condemned. How God’s providence can be compatible with our use of freedom is no doubt somewhat mysterious, but there’s no good reason to believe we can see things clearly enough to know that they are in fact incompatible. Lutheranism, in short, has a nuanced view of free will.
This being so, it may seem that free will can do the job we need it to. There are some problems with the free-will response, however, that ought to be noted. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to account directly for natural evils. If we tell a skeptic that evil exists because of free will, they will be very likely to ask us how free will accounts for tornadoes and cancer. This is not an unsolvable difficulty, however, because Christians believe that natural evils are ultimately the result of Adam’s sin and the curse that was placed upon creation. It’s also possible that at least some natural evils are caused by the actions of evil spirits. So on the assumption that Christianity is true, natural evils can be accounted for by appealing to moral evils or bad deeds. That said, since skeptics are generally unwilling to accept theological beliefs, they will probably find these explanations farfetched. Even so, they at least show that a response to the problem of evil based on free will is more defensible than it might appear.
It seems, then, that free will can provide an adequate defense against the traditional problem of evil. It can show that there is no incompatibility between the existence of God and the existence of evil. That being said, I still don’t think this is the best way of responding to the problem of evil. For one thing, it seems debatable that human freedom is such a great good that it justifies permitting evil. Many people of course think it does. Some will claim that the goal of Christianity is for people to love God and that true love requires freedom. If we didn’t have freedom, we couldn’t really love God. Paul Herrick, a Christian philosopher, writes the following: “God allows suffering caused by the creaturely misuse of free will because the gift of free will is a necessary condition for God’s ultimate goal, which, Scripture assures us, is that human beings will one day freely enter into an eternal and loving relationship with their Creator in the next life, in heaven. Without free will, a loving response to God would be impossible, for creatures would be robots incapable of real love.”[i]
This may sound plausible, but I think Herrick is mistaken here. Obviously—at least for Lutherans—people do not have the freedom to be spiritually reborn or to choose to place their trust in Christ, and there will be no freedom to do evil in heaven. So the claim that the freedom to choose God or turn from him is something we would be much worse off without is not self-evidently true. The idea that love requires an ability to freely choose the beloved is also an assumption that is far from obviously right. Does the Son have or need the freedom to abstain from loving the Father?
More importantly, the free-will response seems, contra Herrick, to lack biblical support. One never sees Scripture saying that God permits evil because he values human freedom. Scripture says that God created and governs the world for his own glory, not for the sake of something in man. The free-will response therefore appears too anthropocentric to be squared with a scriptural perspective. As far as us being robots goes, God can be glorified by any of his creatures. Stars and sunsets glorify him. He doesn’t need us to freely choose to have a relationship with him in order to be glorified by what we are and what we say and do. So if glory is his principal end, free will will probably not be the primary reason why he permits evils, for glory does not require freedom. Given these considerations, I think it is best to examine other possibilities.
Soul-Making Response
The second common reason I want to discuss is often called the soul-making response. This response affirms that God allows suffering because it makes possible the growth and development of certain admirable character traits that could not exist in a world completely devoid of suffering, such as courage, compassion, patience, generosity, etc. I believe this response has some value, in that it appears true that certain goods could not naturally arise without the experience of adversity. Scripture also explicitly tells us that trials are for the good of believers. Paul writes in Romans 5:3-4 that “we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” However, I don’t think this response necessarily works well as an adequate explanation for why God allows evil in general.
For one thing, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why virtues could not be supernaturally created by God if he wanted to cause them in this way. One can be patient and have courage without actually needing to be in situations where these virtues are exercised or tested. Presumably, in heaven many people will possess virtues that they never had on earth and that they don’t have any opportunity to exercise in heaven because there will be no evil, suffering, or temptation. Another issue is that this explanation again appears anthropocentric. Scripture provides no basis for thinking that God permits evil chiefly so that man can acquire some quality. For these reasons I think we should continue looking for a better option.
Glorification Response
The third reason is what I will call the glorification response. This affirms that God allows evil so that his wisdom, goodness, and power will be glorified and made manifest by how he uses and overcomes evil. Scripture teaches that God acts for his glory (Ps. 106:8, Isa. 60:21, Rom. 9, Eph. 1), and it seems to me that anything that glorifies God or contributes to glorifying God is justifiable. If God is able to use evil to bring glory to himself, then his permitting evil is justified.
The glorification response seems to be supported by several events in Scripture. One of these is the story of Joseph and his brothers. In Genesis 50:20 we read: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Joseph’s suffering enabled God to save many people and display his wisdom and foresight. Another is the raising of Lazarus. In John 11:4 we find it written that “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Verses 14-15 says: “Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’” Lazarus is allowed to die so that many would believe in Jesus through witnessing the miracle of Lazarus being raised.
Another event is the crucifixion itself. In Acts 2:23-24, Peter says, “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” The death of Jesus means life for the whole world. The suffering of Christ ensures the greatest of victories. The shame of the cross brings the highest glory to God. Another insight comes from Romans 11:32. Paul writes, “For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” This suggests the Fall was permitted precisely so that through his great work of redemption God would make his love, mercy, and goodness clear.
In my view the glorification response has much to recommend it because it appears scriptural and is a theocentric as opposed to an anthropocentric response. God permits evil so that he is recognized and revered as God. It’s true of course that many things happen that we can’t see a good reason for, and it’s not obvious how God is or could be glorified by them. We live in a broken and heartbreaking world in many respects, and it may seem that allowing such a world to exist and drag on is a strange way for God to bring glory to himself. If glory is his aim, then God’s government of history may seem self-defeating.
We need to realize, however, that it is the end of any story that is the most important part. The ending decides the true meaning of everything that came before. And if Christianity is true, then the ending is going to feature a dramatic and unprecedented reversal of what came before. The broken and heartbreaking world that we are all familiar with is going to become a place of everlasting peace and joy due to the wondrous work of the cross. It’s hard to imagine a better ending to what had been a sad story, or a more dramatic coda to a world in which, as some people have said, “all things continue as they have from the beginning” (2 Pet. 3:4). It’s hard to imagine anything that could bring more glory to God that this kind of resolution.
It's also true that when it comes to how particular events serve God’s glory, we must recognize our limitations as knowers. We have a very narrow perspective on the universe and human history. We often can’t know how the things that happen today will affect events a year or a century from now, let alone how things will stand on the last day. It seems certain that we won’t see or understand how God is glorified by many things until we are in heaven. But if Scripture is true, then it seems clear that in some way or other all things must do this, for Paul says in Romans 8:28, that “all things work together for good to those who love God.” Everything that works good for his people certainly will bring him glory.
Inscrutability Response
Related to this last point is the fourth response I want to discuss. This response claims that we don’t need to know the reason why God permits evils, because no one can prove that there isn’t a reason, and we shouldn’t expect to understand God’s mind, plan, or motives. In contemporary philosophical literature, this type of response is often referred to as skeptical theism. I would prefer to call it the inscrutability response. We could also call it the Job response, since God does not give Job a reason for his sufferings and makes it clear that Job is out of line for even thinking that God owes him an explanation. Given how biblical this response is, and how fitting it is given God’s transcendence and incomprehensibility, I think this is a good way to address the problem of evil.
Unbelievers may think it is merely a way of ignoring or bypassing the problem rather than addressing it; they may see this as a very glib way of replying to their complaints. However, this response seems perfectly reasonable to me. If a young child doesn’t understand his parents actions, and in response to his questions they tell him that he’s too young to understand, it would probably make sense for him to assume that they have good reasons for what they are doing. He would not be foolish to take them at their word. In the same way, we are not foolish for taking God at his word. We are not foolish for concluding with Job that we don’t need to understand God’s reasons for everything. I agree with Christian philosophers Peter Kreeft and Robert Tacelli, who write “if there is a God, his wisdom must be infinitely superior to ours, and we will not understand all his ways. This is the only answer Job got, and Job was satisfied, for he was a good philosopher. This posture is not blind fideism but eminent reasonableness. Who are we, the players on the stage, to tell off the author of the play? How pitiful the sight of the pot trying to lecture the potter. We cannot explain the particular evils we see, but we can explain why we cannot explain them.”[ii]
Let’s take stock of what we have discussed so far. It seems to me that most if not all of these responses are sufficient to show that the traditional problem of evil is unsound. The mere existence of evil therefore cannot be an argument for the impossibility of God’s existence. There simply is no good reason to doubt that these or other unknown considerations might give God sufficient reason to permit evil.
I especially prefer the last two responses—the glorification and inscrutability responses. The first because it makes God’s glory his motive for allowing evil. This motive, in my opinion, is superior to the freedom of creatures or the development of human virtue. The second because it reminds us of the need for humility in the face of God’s infinite wisdom. I believe that a theocentric motive is always preferable to an anthropocentric motive because God should make himself the ultimate end of all of his acts. If we believe we should always put God above creatures, and greater goods above lesser goods, then it would make sense for God to do the same and act for his own glory.[iii]
The Evidential Problem of Evil
I believe we have adequately addressed the traditional problem of evil. Not the practical difficulties evil raises, of course, but the theoretical ones. That said, we still have to discuss one more formulation of how evil is a problem for theism. This is the evidential problem of evil. Whereas the traditional problem has a long history going back to the ancient world, the evidential problem is a modern development. Essentially what it claims is not that the existence of God is absolutely incompatible with evil, but that the existence of God is unlikely given the kinds and amount of evil that we actually experience here on earth. The objector or skeptic might concede that the possibility of evil might be needed to ensure freedom, build character, or display God’s glory. He may agree that it is impossible to demonstrate by means of a deductive argument from the mere existence of evil that God certainly does not exist. But this does not mean, in his view, that it is reasonable to think that God is justified in permitting genocides, horrific cases of abuse, or terrible deformities. There is no plausible reason for allowing these horrendous evils and unspeakable sufferings, and therefore it is unreasonable to believe that God exists. In other words, permitting a little evil may be justifiable, but not a lot.
Another way to make this point is to say that if God exists, he would not permit gratuitous evils. A gratuitous evil is one that serves no point or purpose. The atheist philosopher William Rowe provides the following example: “suppose in some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire, a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering. So far as we can see, the fawn’s intense suffering is pointless, for there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn’s suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse.” Rowe realizes that it is virtually impossible to prove that any evil is truly gratuitous. He notes that we “are often surprised by how things we thought to be unconnected are actually intimately connected.”[iv] However, he affirms that so many evils do appear gratuitous that it is highly plausible to believe that at least some of them are as they appear. And this means it is unreasonable to believe in God. So what should we say in response?
One problem with this argument is that it overlooks the aforementioned issue of human sin and its consequences. As terrible as many of the things are in our world, it is not clear that those which impact humans any worse than what the Christian faith holds that people deserve. If we do deserve terrible punishments for our sin, then the degree of suffering we see in the world is not really a reason to think God is absent or uninvolved. God may be punishing sin. He may be allowing the world to reap the consequences of its evil ways with the goal of turning wayward sinners back to him.
With respect to animal suffering, it is indeed tragic that animals must face the effects of our fallen world. We look at them, and they obviously are not sinners and yet they face the consequences of sin every day. Does this make God unjust? Is he failing to give these creatures what they deserve? The problem is determining what if anything an irrational and amoral creature deserves. There are those who insist that animals have rights in much the same way that humans do. I don’t intend to get too deeply into this issue, because it is complex and tends to revolve around our intuitions. No one can deny it is a troubling problem. However, it seems reasonable to hold that rights are always related to duties, and since animals do not have duties, they do not have rights either. On this construal, human mistreatment of animals is wrong not because animals are such that they inherently deserve a certain form of treatment, but because intentionally hurting an animal without a sufficient justifying reason is irrational, and human beings have a duty to be reasonable. In allowing animal suffering due to things like disasters, disease, and predation, God is not acting to hurt animals, and therefore he cannot be said to be doing something irrational or unjust.
Animal suffering aside, the most significant issue with the evidential problem is that it rests on assumptions that seem impossible to establish. It assumes that human beings are in a position to make correct judgments about what should and should not count as a gratuitous evil. But to know this, we would have to be in a position to know all of the relationships between all events and all goods, and this would require us to be omniscient. This objection to theism also assumes that God could prevent all apparently gratuitous evils and still attain whatever his ends are. But this is not clear at all. We don’t know all of God’s ends or maybe even most of them, so how can we know what might contribute in some way to their fulfillment? Rowe claims that there are so many apparently gratuitous evils that some of them probably are such, but how could he really know that this conclusion is probable? Christian philosophers C. Stephen Evans and R. Zachary Manis write the following: “Given that God is both omniscient and transcendent, there is every reason to believe that God is privy to a vast amount of knowledge about the relations between good and evil of which we are ignorant. We have every reason to believe, then, that for any allegedly pointless evil, if there were some justifying reason that God had for allowing it, we very likely would not be in a position to perceive it. If God exists, it is virtually certain that many of his reasons are inscrutable to us.”[v]
So what should we say to the evidential problem? In my view the only proper response is to emphasize the need for humility. We need to remind ourselves of God’s transcendence. We need to adopt the posture of Job before God after God appears to him in the whirlwind. We have no good reason to think that we know enough to be confident that the world contains even one instance of pointless evil. The inscrutability response is therefore a fitting and adequate rejoinder to this version of the problem of evil, too.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the problem of evil in any form cannot be regarded as a sufficient or conclusive objection to theism. As difficult and trying as evil can be to experience, it simply can’t do the work that the atheist seeking to cast doubt on God’s existence wants it to do. By itself, it is inconclusive. One might assert that evil counts against theism, but this is only true if an argument from evil can be formulated that is sound, and this has not been done. Given the many streams of evidence that support the conclusion that God exists, including sound arguments, the reasonable thing to do is affirm God’s reality.
In the end, evil should not be cause for us to doubt God’s reality, but to look to Christ. For as bad as the evil in the world can be, the most pressing evil for all of us to address is the evil that dwells in each of our hearts. This is the evil that makes it impossible for us to do right, to have a relationship with God, and to fulfill our purpose. Much more than a response to the philosophical problem of evil, we need a solution to this indwelling evil that is making us individually guilty and accountable to God. In other words, like Job and every other human being, what we most need is not an explanation but mercy, not a justification of God’s mysterious ways but a justifier who can make up for our own lack of righteousness. Evil is indeed terrible, but the answer to it that we most require is not a philosophical defense or theodicy. What we most need is the Gospel.
[i] Paul Herrick, Christian Apologetics and Philosophy: An Introduction (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), 104.
[ii] Peter J. Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Catholic Apologetics: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith (Ignatius Press, 2009), 131.
[iii] It is true that God’s love for his creatures is often given as a reason for his actions in Scripture, such as in John 3:16. However, I believe his glory is and ought to be his ultimate motive, and that he demonstrates love or goodwill towards his creatures for the sake of his glory. In any case, love as a motive, as important as it is, does not by itself seem to shed much light on why God permits evil.
[iv] William Rowe, quoted in Herrick, 111.
[v] C. Stephen Evans and R. Zachary Manis, quoted in Herrick, 113.
Nathan Greeley is the managing editor of The Conservative Reformer.