Theodicy

The word was coined by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710 (Théodicée, from the Greek theos, god, and dikē, justice) to name the project of justifying the ways of God in the face of the world's suffering. The question it tries to answer is the problem of evil: if God can prevent suffering, knows about it, and is good, why does it exist?

Classical theodicies fall into a few families. The free-will defense argues that moral evil is the necessary price of genuine creaturely freedom. The soul-making theodicy (associated with John Hick) argues that suffering is instrumentally valuable for the development of virtue and character. Skeptical theism holds that we are simply not in a position to judge whether any given evil is pointless, because God may have reasons beyond our grasp. Each answers the logical problem of evil differently, and none commands universal agreement among theists.

Critics respond that these defenses either fail to explain gratuitous suffering (suffering that produces no soul-making benefit and no free-will expression) or succeed only at the cost of making God look remote, calculating, or indifferent. The evidential problem of evil, formulated most sharply by William Rowe, argues that the sheer quantity and distribution of seemingly pointless suffering — animal suffering, disease in infants, natural disasters — is strong evidence against a perfectly good and all-powerful deity, even if the logical problem can be deflected.

Theodicy remains one of the most active areas of contemporary philosophy of religion and one of the most common reasons people cite for leaving faith.