There Isn't Just One Problem of Evil

In the first couple of months of my Substack, I wrote a piece titled “How to Solve the Problem of Evil.” Probably due to its provocative name, it was one of my more popular pieces at the time. In it, I distinguish between two different forms of the problem of evil: the logical and evidential problems of evil. As I pointed out back then, the different forms needed, or at least allowed for, different ways to respond to it, and knowing which form you are discussing is important when you are providing an answer as a theistic philosopher.

But I have since discovered (or been reminded of) of a few other ways of differentiating the different “problems of evil,” and they are all important for considering exactly how theists should think about the best argument against the existence of God. In the same spirit of that original article, I thought it would be helpful to work through some of the other broad distinctions found in the problem of evil.

There are, broadly construed, two categories of really serious evil in the world: moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is what you get when some person makes a morally evil choice.1 So stealing, lying,2 murder, and adultery are instances of moral evil. More specifically, moral evil is especially relevant to the problem of evil when someone’s morally evil act results in the great suffering of someone else. Few people are worried about whether the suffering caused by imprisonment due to thievery is consistent with God’s nature, though I suppose a few might be. But it is much more concerning when someone innocently loses their life savings due to theft, or is brutally murdered in front of their family. The sheer amount of malice, suffering and perversion possible in human behavior is what is most striking in cases like these. Why would a good God allow that?

Natural evil, on the other hand, involves any great suffering that comes from natural processes playing out. And, tragically, there is a lot of this. Parents and children die of cancer. Earthquakes topple cities to the deaths of millions. Plagues destroy up to two thirds of a civilization. These cases are striking because they seem to constitute creation, in some manner, as the Creator configured it. But why would God create a world with cancer in it? To put it another way: if you had to create a world and you wanted what was best for the children who lived in it, would you make it possible for them to die painful deaths just from the way the world worked, without anybody even choosing it?

Which of these two formulations seems more striking will depend on who you are and, probably, which form of evil you have endured more poignantly in your own life. I have personally heard people say that moral evil was a serious problem, but not natural evil, and vice versa.

Philosophers have frequently sought to explain these different forms of evil differently. Many think that moral evil, for example, is explainable largely through free will and the possibility of virtue: God wished to create a moral universe where virtue, especially heroic virtue, could be lived out. But if there were no possibility to choose other than virtue, the virtue itself loses much of its value. So he created a world where free will was possible, which makes it possible that some would misuse that free will. Obviously, many people have.

For natural evil, philosophers have often sought to show that the natural world has a consistent order that, if every possible evil thing were removed, the whole would actually be worse off. Others have appealed to the Christian idea that our natural world is not as it should be. It is also possible to reconcile these ideas into a kind of harmony.

At least one philosopher I know of, Alvin Plantinga, tried to explain both moral and natural evil both by free will, attributing natural evil to demonic activity. His point was that it could not be ruled out by those seeking to make a logical argument against God’s existence, but I have seen few take up that line of argumentation after him as a generalized account.

However, this is not the only distinction between different forms of the problem of evil. And the next one is arguably more troubling than any I have mentioned so far…

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