The problem of evil in Christianity
Christian theology answers the problem of evil primarily through the free-will defense, soul-making theodicy, and the Augustinian view of evil as privation.
No tradition has wrestled with the problem of evil more systematically than Christianity. From Augustine in the fourth century to Alvin Plantinga in the twentieth, Christian theologians have produced a vast literature defending the claim that an all-powerful, perfectly good God can coexist with gratuitous suffering. Three strategies dominate: the free-will defense, soul-making theodicy, and the privation theory of evil.
The free-will defense, most rigorously formalized by Plantinga, argues that moral evil is the unavoidable cost of creaturely freedom. God could have made beings who could not sin, but such beings would be automata, not moral agents. On this account, genuine love, courage, and virtue require the real possibility of their opposites. Critics note that the defense explains human-caused evil but leaves natural evil — childhood cancers, earthquakes, predation — largely untouched.
Soul-making theodicy, associated with Irenaeus and revived by John Hick, answers this gap. Suffering, on this view, is the furnace in which souls grow toward God. The world is not meant to be a hedonic paradise but a vale of soul-making. Augustinian Christianity adds a metaphysical wrinkle: evil is not a positive thing God created, but a privation — the absence of a good that should be present, like darkness is the absence of light. These answers have sustained the faithful for sixteen centuries, but for atheist critics from Hume to Rowe, they remain reframings rather than resolutions.
- Augustine of Hippo— Privation theory of evil; original sin
- Irenaeus of Lyon— Soul-making theodicy
- Thomas Aquinas— Evil as lack of being; providence
- Alvin Plantinga— Free-will defense (modern formalization)
- John Hick— Evil and the God of Love (1966)
“For Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee.”
“A world without problems or suffering, however desirable it might seem at first, would in fact not be a fit environment for the moral and spiritual growth of persons.”