The Problem of Evil as Evidence for God: Does the Reality of Evil Point to the Good?

Let it be said plainly, before any argument is offered: no argument removes the pain. Suffering is the hardest objection to belief in God, and it deserves to be felt, not explained away. The reality of cancer wards, of genocide, of the loss of a child is a genuine mystery, and no tidy theodicy can fully account for it. What follows is not a substitute for grief, or for sitting with someone in the dark; if you are in that darkness now, the loving thing is not an argument but a person beside you. This essay makes a narrower observation, and it leaves the weight of suffering exactly where it is.

The problem of evil is nearly always pressed as an objection to God. David Hume gave it its classic form, attributing it to Epicurus: is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.¹ That challenge is serious, and it has a companion essay to this one that faces it head-on—the free-will defense, the evidential problem, the cross as presence rather than explanation.² This essay takes up something different: a second, quieter observation that lives inside the objection, and that the objector, pressing hard, may not have noticed he was making.

Lewis and the Crooked Line

C. S. Lewis noticed it in his own atheist days. His case against God, he recalled in Mere Christianity, was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But the recollection turned on him: “How had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”³ The outrage that fuels the problem of evil is not a shrug of distaste. It is a protest that something is really wrong—that it ought not to be. And a protest of that kind appeals, whether it means to or not, to a real standard of good that the world has fallen short of.

Stated carefully, the observation runs in three steps. First, we recognise certain things as objectively, genuinely evil—not merely events we happen to dislike, but acts that ought not to be, such as torturing a child for amusement. Second, objective evil presupposes an objective standard of good that such acts fall short of: “evil” is a normative notion, not a merely descriptive one, and a thing can only be a shortfall if there is a mark it fails to hit. Third, an objective standard of good of that kind points more naturally toward God—a personal source of the Good—than toward brute, impersonal fact. So the very reality of evil, pressed hard enough, points back toward the God it was raised against.

This is a cousin of the moral argument, run from the single, searing case of evil; its distinctive feature is that it begins from the sceptic’s own premise. It is not an attempt to make suffering palatable. It is the observation that the moral outrage driving the objection is itself a datum—and a datum that sits uneasily in a godless universe.

Evil as a Privation of the Good

The intuition has deep roots. Augustine came to it the hard way. For years he had been a Manichee, holding that evil was a rival substance—a dark power at war with the light, possessed of its own independent existence. What broke that spell, he recounts in the Confessions, was seeing that a thing wholly and only evil could not exist at all, since to exist is already to be, in some degree, good; evil is therefore not a competing stuff but a privation—a corruption or lack of a good that ought to be whole.⁴ This is easily misheard as a dodge, as if calling evil “nothing” made it harmless. It does the opposite. A privation can be devastating: blindness is a real lack of sight, and no less terrible for being a lack. Augustine’s point is metaphysical, not consoling—evil is parasitic on good, a wreckage of something that was supposed to be whole. And that “supposed to be” is exactly the standard the argument is pointing at. You cannot have a corruption without an original to be corrupted, or a shortfall without a mark.

Why does the standard point toward God rather than toward nothing in particular? Because an objective ought—a way things are supposed to be, binding on us whether we like it or not—is the kind of thing that fits a personal, purposive source far better than it fits indifferent matter. A universe of particles in motion has no way things are supposed to be; it simply is what it is. On that picture, the Holocaust is an arrangement of atoms some other arrangements of atoms disapprove of—which is not yet evil, only disliked. The conviction that it is genuinely evil, that the victims were truly wronged, reaches for a standard above the flux, and a standard of good is most at home in a source that is itself good.

This is the old gap between is and ought. From a complete inventory of what the universe is—every particle, every force, every firing neuron—no statement of what ought to be follows by logic alone. You can describe a murder in exhaustive physical detail and never, from the description, extract the verdict this was wrong; that verdict is laid over the facts from somewhere else. The naturalist is free to say there is no such standard, only our reactions—but then he must give up calling anything really evil, and with it the very outrage that made the problem of evil feel so forceful. He cannot keep the outrage and quietly discard its ground. That is the vice the turnabout gently squeezes: a naturalism that reduces evil to our reactions borrows a moral reality it cannot, on those terms, pay for.

Why the Argument Has Force

Its strength is that it starts where the objector already stands. Our response to the Holocaust, to torture, to cruelty presents itself—from the inside—as a response to something really wrong, not merely a preference we happen to hold. If evil were mere preference, moral protest would be incoherent: we would be, at most, announcing our tastes loudly. Yet almost no one can treat atrocity that way. The popular form of the problem of evil presses, insistently, the reality of evil—and that very insistence assumes an objective wrong, not a matter of taste.

Notice, too, the peculiar authority of the experience. Ordinary preferences do not present themselves as binding on anyone else: I may like strong coffee and think you perfectly reasonable to prefer tea. Moral conviction is different in kind. When we say the torture of a child is wrong, we do not mean merely ‘I would rather it not happen’; we mean it must not, that anyone who shrugs at it has failed to see something real, that the wrong would stand even if every society on earth came to approve it. That felt authority—the sense of being answerable to a measure we did not invent and cannot repeal—is just what a purely subjective account cannot capture, and it is the thing the argument asks the objector to explain. Even the committed relativist tends to reach for it the moment he is genuinely wronged—not that protesting a wrong is inconsistent with holding a theory, but that the authority he feels in that moment is exactly what wants explaining.

Here a distinction matters, because a sharper sceptic can sidestep the turnabout. One can press the problem of evil as a purely internal critique: “Granting, for argument’s sake, your God and your standard of good, the evil we actually see is hard to square with him.” That version does not claim evil is objectively real; it borrows the theist’s own commitments and looks for a tension within them. It is a legitimate move, and it does not walk into the turnabout—but it also forfeits the rhetorical force of righteous outrage, and it earns the direct replies of the companion essay, not this one. The argument here engages the far more common objector: the one who is genuinely, morally angry, and who means it.

The Objections, at Full Strength

Several objections deserve their best form, not a straw version.

First, and hardest: the evidential problem. A critic may grant every step and still say the argument changes nothing, because the weight of suffering is itself powerful evidence against God. William Rowe gave this its most careful statement: not a claim that God and evil are logically contradictory, but that the sheer quantity of apparently gratuitous suffering—a fawn burning to death unseen in a forest fire—makes it unlikely that a good, omnipotent God exists.⁵ This is the genuinely hard one, and honesty requires conceding its force. The classical responses—free will, soul-making, and Alvin Plantinga’s free-will defense—do real but limited work. Plantinga’s defense is widely regarded, even by atheist philosophers, as having answered the logical version; it claims only that God and evil are not contradictory, not that we know God’s reasons.⁶ The evidential version remains live and unresolved by either side—defenders answer that a finite mind is in no position to be sure a given evil is truly gratuitous rather than serving some greater good it cannot see, while critics reply that such “skeptical theism” carries a steep cost of its own; the companion essay follows that exchange at length.² But notice that the turnabout and the evidential problem are about different things, and both can stand. The evidential problem asks whether this much suffering is what we would expect if God exists. The turnabout asks what it even means to call that suffering evil in the first place—and the answer, that it falls short of a real standard of good, is not cancelled by the suffering’s weight. So the two coexist: evil is a hard problem for faith, and the reality of objective evil is at least a datum that a godless universe must find some way to account for.

Second: evil is just harm or suffering. Define evil naturally, the critic says—as harm, as pain, as suffering—and no transcendent standard is needed. But harm and suffering are descriptive; calling them evil—something that ought not to be, that demands a response—is normative. Why should a configuration of matter that causes pain be wrong, rather than simply unwelcome? Naturalism can describe suffering in exhaustive detail and still not reach the ought-not-ness that makes it evil rather than merely unpleasant. The gap between “this hurts” and “this is wrong” is the whole question.

Third: evil is just an evolved aversion. Our sense of evil, the critic continues, is an evolved reaction to things that harmed our ancestors—nothing more. Grant the evolutionary history freely; it is very likely true. But it explains the feeling of revulsion, not the fact that genocide is truly wrong. If evil is only an aversion, then the torturer is not mistaken, merely differently wired—and almost no one believes that about real atrocities. We do not think the Nazi doctor had an unusual taste; we think he was wrong. Debunking the feeling leaves the objective wrongness we actually affirm standing: a genealogy of how we came to sense a fact is not yet a disproof of the fact.

Fourth: deny objective evil altogether. The most consistent reply is to bite the bullet—there is no objective evil; it is all preference. This is at least coherent, but almost no one can live it. The person who says nothing is really evil still protests their own betrayal, still cries out at injustice done to them, still expects others to keep faith. More pointedly, a thoughtful critic need not choose nihilism: a secular moral realist can affirm objective evil without God. Erik Wielenberg has defended exactly this—objective moral facts as brute, necessary features of reality, needing no divine ground.⁷ This is a serious position, and it shows the argument is not a proof: one can keep objective evil and decline God. The theist’s claim is the more modest one the moral argument makes—that an objective standard of good is better explained by, and more at home with, a personal source of the Good than with brute, unexplained moral facts floating free in a godless world.⁸ That is a dispute about the best explanation, not a knock-down proof, and honest people land on both sides.

It is worth saying plainly what this dispute is not about: it is not a charge that the unbeliever cannot be good. He plainly can—morally serious, morally wise, often putting believers to shame—and nothing here suggests otherwise. The question is strictly what grounds the good he already sees and honours. The theist’s worry about the brute-fact view is that it leaves a great deal merely stipulated: why these moral facts and not others, why they should have authority over us at all, and why creatures thrown up by a blind, survival-driven process should reliably come to know them. A personal source of the Good answers those three together, where free-floating necessities must each be posited and left unexplained. Wielenberg replies that God is himself no less a brute posit, and that his own account is the more economical; the exchange is genuinely live.⁸ The fair verdict is that this is a weighing of explanations, not a demonstration—but a weighing in which the theist has a real case, not a desperate one.

Fifth: this dodges the real suffering. Turning evil into an argument for God, a critic may say, sidesteps the real pain and the real challenge. This is a fair caution, and it must be taken seriously rather than waved away—which is why this essay opened where it did. The argument is not a pastoral answer to suffering, and it does not dismiss the force of the problem of evil. It is a narrower logical observation: that the reality of objective evil sits uneasily in a godless universe. To someone in grief, the right response is presence, not this paragraph. The two live on different levels and need not compete.

The Honest State of the Question

Where does this leave us? The logical problem of evil—the claim that God and evil are strictly contradictory—is now widely regarded as answered, Mackie himself conceding that the free-will defense may show theism is not logically inconsistent.⁶ The evidential problem is a different matter: it remains a live, serious, and unsettled debate, with careful work on both sides, and no honest version of this argument pretends otherwise. Secular moral realism of Wielenberg’s kind is a reputable position, not a desperate one. So the turnabout is not a proof that forces the sceptic’s hand; it is a consideration—one that asks the morally outraged objector to notice what his own outrage assumes.

It helps to be clear about the shape of the disagreement. The conditional at the heart of this argument—if there is no God, there is no objective moral law—is accepted by many, though by no means all, on both sides of the question. Secular moral realists reject it outright, holding the moral law real and its ground unnecessary (the fourth objection). Among those who do accept it, what divides them is which way to run it: the believer reasons from the reality of the moral law to its ground; the consistent atheist can run it the other way, from the absence of the ground to the unreality of the law. Both roads are genuinely open. What the argument from evil adds is only this: it presses how hard the second road is to walk while standing in real moral outrage—insisting, with one’s whole being, that a true wrong has been done, and not merely that one strongly disapproves.

What it establishes is modest and, perhaps, more disarming than a proof. It does not solve suffering or lessen its weight by a single ounce. It does not, on its own, deliver the God of any particular creed: at most it points toward a transcendent, personal source of the Good—not yet the Father of Jesus Christ, not yet the Trinity. That this source is the God who, in Christ, entered the very suffering in question rather than explaining it away is not something the argument yields; it rests on revelation and on the historical case for the resurrection.

What the argument does, at its best, is turn a weapon in the sceptic’s hand into a question in his heart. The outrage is right. Cruelty is wrong—really, objectively, bindingly wrong. The argument simply asks where that straight line came from, by which we are so sure the world’s cruelty is crooked. It will not compel. But it can make the problem of evil, for a moment, cut the other way.