Christianity vs Islam on the problem of evil

The question, stated honestly

The problem of evil is the oldest and most persistent challenge to monotheism. In its logical form, first sharpened by Epicurus and refined by David Hume: if God is all-powerful, God can prevent suffering. If God is all-knowing, God is aware of it. If God is perfectly good, God wants to prevent it. And yet suffering — much of it apparently gratuitous, falling indiscriminately on the guilty and the innocent — is everywhere. One of the three traditional divine attributes has to give.

Christian and Islamic theologians have wrestled with this puzzle for two millennia between them. They started from different scriptural bases (the Bible and the Qur’an), different philosophical backgrounds (Greek and, eventually, Arab-Islamic Aristotelianism), and different institutional settings, but converged on a surprisingly similar short list of moves. The differences are instructive: they show where each tradition felt most pressure to protect a particular doctrine, and what they were willing to trade to protect it.

Both traditions also share a framing assumption the atheist does not grant: that an all-powerful, perfectly good, personal God exists, and the only real question is how to reconcile that fact with the observed shape of the world. For the atheist, the observation is evidence against the premise. For the theist on either side, the premise is a given and the observation is a puzzle requiring a solution. A lot hangs on that asymmetry before any argument starts.

Christian approaches

The free-will defense

The most widely cited Christian answer in contemporary philosophy of religion is the free-will defense, which owes its sharpest modern formulation to William Lane Craig’s predecessor Alvin Plantinga. The argument, compressed: a world containing beings with genuine moral freedom and the capacity to choose good or evil is more valuable than a world of predetermined puppets. But God cannot create beings who are both truly free and guaranteed to always choose rightly — freedom means freedom to fail. Therefore the existence of moral evil is the necessary cost of a greater good (free creaturely agency), and God’s permission of it is compatible with perfect goodness.

The free-will defense is widely considered to successfully deflect the logical problem of evil — the claim that God and evil are strictly incompatible. Even atheist philosophers like J.L. Mackie, who pioneered the modern logical version, eventually conceded that Plantinga’s response was effective on its own terms. What it does not do is address natural evil — earthquakes, childhood cancers, animal suffering in the deep past — which cannot plausibly be traced to any free creaturely choice. Christian theologians then reach for secondary moves: fallen nature, the cosmic significance of the original sin, or Satan as an intermediate cause of natural disorder.

Soul-making theodicy

The twentieth-century British theologian John Hick offered a different answer in his 1966 book Evil and the God of Love, drawing on the second-century church father Irenaeus. Hick argued that the purpose of human existence is not to begin in paradise and fall, but to be brought into moral maturity through struggle. A world where every virtue was effortless and every challenge automatically overcome would not produce the kind of beings God wants. Courage requires real danger; patience requires real trial; love requires the real possibility of loss. Suffering, on this picture, is not a bug in the system but a feature — the necessary context for the development of genuine moral character.

Soul-making is one of the more attractive theodicies because it takes suffering seriously as a real cost rather than dismissing it as illusion or privation. Its weakness is the same as the free-will defense’s: it struggles with cases where suffering does not plausibly build anyone’s character. The infant who dies of meningitis before forming memories, the child abused by a parent and broken rather than refined, the Holocaust — soul-making has to argue either that hidden future growth redeems these cases or that we are not in a position to judge. Neither is comfortable.

Augustinian privation

Augustine of Hippo, influenced by his Neoplatonic background, argued that evil has no positive existence. Evil is a privation: the absence or corruption of a good that should be present, the way blindness is not a substance but the lack of sight. Because evil is nothing — not a created thing but a deficiency — God is not the author of evil, and the existence of evil does not compromise the claim that God creates only good things.

The privation theory is elegant but does a lot less work than it first appears to do. Even granting the metaphysical point that evil is not a substance, the question remains: why are these particular goods missing from this particular corner of the universe, and why is God permitting the deficiency? The privation theory changes what evil is without changing why it is there. Contemporary theologians tend to use it as a framing device rather than a standalone theodicy. See the glossary entry on theodicy for more on how the moves fit together.

Calvinist sovereignty and mystery

Reformed theology, following John Calvin, takes a harder line. God is sovereign over all that happens, including human choices and natural disasters. Nothing occurs outside the divine will — either God’s active decree or God’s permissive allowance. Why does God permit the things God permits? The Reformed answer is that we are not in a position to know. The secret counsels of God are not ours to audit. Our job is to trust that the mystery is not arbitrary even when it looks that way from the inside.

This is the classical Christian version of what philosophers now call skeptical theism: the view that our cognitive capacities are too limited to judge whether any given evil is ultimately pointless, and so apparent pointlessness is not strong evidence against God’s goodness. It is the most honest move in some ways — it refuses to pretend we have answers we lack — and the most uncomfortable, because it purchases consistency at the price of rational closure.

Islamic approaches

Islamic theology developed its own vocabulary for the problem, and the center of gravity sits differently than in Christianity. The Qur’an is emphatic that God’s decree encompasses everything (qadar), that nothing happens without God’s will, and that human beings are to submit to that reality. This starting point pushes Islamic thought away from the free-will defense and toward a stronger emphasis on divine inscrutability. But Islamic philosophers did not simply punt the question — they produced some of the most sophisticated theodicies in the monotheistic tradition, and the internal debates are at least as rich as the Christian ones.

Al-Ash’ari and the compatibility of decree with justice

The dominant school of Sunni theology, Ash’arism, traces to Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari in the tenth century. Ash’ari initially trained in the rationalist Mu’tazilite tradition and broke from it over exactly this question. His mature position: God decrees every event, including human actions, but God’s justice is not subject to external standards. What God does is just because God does it, not because it conforms to some independent criterion of goodness that God is obligated to follow.

This is the Islamic version of what Christians call divine command theory (see the glossary on presuppositionalismfor a related Christian move). The advantage is that it makes the problem of evil dissolve rather than resolve: there is no external standard against which God’s permission of suffering could be judged, and so no contradiction to resolve. The disadvantage is the Euthyphro-style objection — if what makes an act good is just that God wills it, then goodness has been redefined into compliance, and the claim “God is good” loses substantive content.

Mu’tazilite rationalism

The Mu’tazilites, who dominated early Abbasid theology before losing influence to the Ash’arites, defended a more familiar position. They held that good and evil are objective facts about actions, discoverable by reason, and that God is necessarily bound by them because God is necessarily just. This forced them into a free-will-and-genuine-responsibility framework very close to Plantinga’s: human beings must be the true authors of their evil actions because otherwise God would be the author, and God cannot be the author of injustice.

The Mu’tazilite position was eventually marginalized — partly because it looked to many readers like it limited divine omnipotence in unacceptable ways, and partly because political shifts under the Abbasid caliphate favored Ash’ari orthodoxy. But it left a permanent mark on Islamic intellectual history, and its concerns resurface in modern Muslim philosophers who want to preserve robust human moral agency without abandoning divine omnipotence.

Ibn Sina and metaphysical evil

Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) was one of the great Islamic Neoplatonists, and his treatment of evil drew heavily on the same privation tradition Augustine was working in, though they arrived at it independently through shared Greek sources. For Ibn Sina, evil is never part of the essence of anything; it is always a relative lack, a failure of a thing to achieve its proper nature. The material world inevitably produces some privation because matter is inherently resistant to pure form — but the good in the world vastly outweighs the evil, and a world with some material evil is better than no material world at all.

Ibn Sina’s move is a fascinating instance of parallel evolution — two medieval traditions, working from partly overlapping philosophical sources (Plotinus in particular), independently arriving at privation theory as the most defensible way to reconcile divine goodness with observed evil. The fact that both traditions reached for the same tool suggests how constrained the available moves actually are: any monotheism with a perfectly good God has only so many ways to answer this question, and most of them have already been tried.

Where the two traditions agree

Christian and Islamic responses to the problem of evil share more than they differ on, at least in broad outline. Both preserve divine omnipotence and perfect goodness as non-negotiable — no Christian or Muslim tradition seriously considers solving the problem by downgrading God’s power or weakening God’s goodness. Both rely on eschatological justice: whatever appears unjust in this life will be set right in the next, and the balance of goods and evils can only be properly weighed from the vantage point of eternity. Both distinguish moral evil (caused by creatures) from natural evil (earthquakes, disease) and handle them with somewhat different tools. And both, ultimately, reach a point where the explanation runs out and the response becomes trust: tawakkul in Islam, faith-in-mystery in Christianity.

Where they diverge

The sharpest divergence is on free will. Mainstream Christian theodicy leans heavily on libertarian free will as the price of moral evil. Mainstream Ash’ari Islam does not — it emphasizes divine decree and treats the appearance of creaturely freedom as compatible with exhaustive divine causation. The Mu’tazilite minority tradition in Islam sits closer to Christian practice, and modern Muslim philosophers frequently revisit Mu’tazilite arguments, but in the dominant tradition the center of gravity is different.

The second divergence is on the theological weight given to Satan or Iblis. Christian theology has traditionally assigned Satan a large role as an intermediate cause of natural evil and as the primary adversary in a cosmic drama. Islamic theology acknowledges Iblis but generally keeps him subordinate to the divine decree — Iblis operates within God’s permission, not outside it, and this limits how much theological work he can do in explaining suffering.

The third divergence is structural. Christianity has had to do theology in the shadow of the crucifixion — a story in which God himself, in Christ, enters into creaturely suffering. This has made certain moves available (the suffering God, participation in divine pathos) that Islamic theology — which rejects the incarnation — cannot use. In the other direction, Islam’s unqualified insistence on divine transcendence makes it more comfortable with appeals to divine inscrutability, because the gap between creator and creature is more firmly established doctrinally.

What atheists make of both

Atheist philosophers of religion generally grant that both traditions successfully deflect the logicalproblem of evil — the strong claim that an all-powerful, all-good God is strictly incompatible with any evil whatsoever. Plantinga’s free-will defense and the various Islamic decree-and-inscrutability moves both block that inference.

The live argument today is the evidentialproblem, formulated most sharply by William Rowe in a 1979 paper and refined since. Rowe’s version: there appear to be instances of suffering that produce no outweighing good, such as a fawn that dies slowly in a forest fire before any human ever knows about it. We cannot be certain these are gratuitous, but we also cannot reasonably expect that every one of the apparently gratuitous cases is secretly justified. The sheer quantity and distribution of suffering, with no visible connection to any outweighing good, looks like evidence — not proof, but evidence — against a perfectly good omnipotent God. See the problem of evil page for the full treatment.

The standard response on both the Christian and Islamic sides is skeptical theism: we are not in a position to judge whether any given evil is really gratuitous, because God’s cognitive capacities exceed ours, and God may have reasons we cannot grasp. The atheist counter is that this response is a double-edged sword. If our moral judgments about suffering are unreliable because we cannot see God’s reasons, then our moral judgments in general are unreliable for the same reason — which would make it impossible to trust the theologian’s confident positive claims about God either. You cannot selectively apply skeptical theism only when convenient.

Why the comparison matters

Readers who grew up inside one tradition often do not realize how much the comparison clarifies. A Christian who finds the free-will defense persuasive may be surprised to learn that the dominant Islamic tradition rejects it and still manages to protect divine goodness. A Muslim raised on Ash’ari assumptions may be surprised to see Plantinga doing the work of the Mu’tazilites in a very different cultural register. And both may be surprised to see how much of the dispute turns on a small number of moves — free will, privation, soul-making, sovereignty, inscrutability — that every monotheism eventually reaches for.

From a secular vantage point, the comparison is instructive in a different way. If every monotheism ends up pulling from the same toolkit, it suggests that the constraints of the problem itself do the shaping, not the specific revelation each tradition works from. The philosophical moves are not downstream of the Qur’an or the New Testament — they are downstream of the logical structure of the problem, which is what you would expect if the answers are being worked out rather than being revealed from the outside. That is not proof of anything, but it is a data point worth noticing.

Where to go next

For the fuller philosophical treatment independent of any tradition, see the problem of evil page. For definitional entries on the technical terms used here, see theodicy and skeptical theism. For the parallel treatments of the two traditions in their own right, see the site pages on Christianity and Islam. And for the people who have worked this particular seam, Sam Harris, Alex O'Connor, and Christopher Hitchenshave all pressed the problem of evil in public debate; on the theist side, William Lane Craig and Plantinga are the usual Christian references and modern Muslim philosophers like Hamza Andreas Tzortzis have given contemporary Ash’ari answers.