The Problem of Evil

It is generally supposed that the fact that the world contains a vast amount of suffering much of it truly horrible suffering confronts those who believe in an all-powerful and benevolent Creator with a serious problem: to explain why such a Creator would permit this. Many reflective people are convinced that the problem the problem of evil is insoluble. The reasons that underlie this conviction can be formulated as a powerful argument for the non-existence of God the so-called argument from evil: If there were a God he would not permit the existence of vast amounts of truly horrible suffering; since such suffering exists there is no God. Peter van Inwagen examines this argument which he regards as a paradigmatically philosophical argument. His conclusion is that (like most philosophical arguments) it is a failure. He seeks to demonstrate not that God exists but the fact that the world contains a vast amount of suffering does not show that God does not exist.Along the way he discusses a wide range of topics of interest to philosophers and theologians such as: the concept of God; what might be meant by describing a philosophical argument as a failure; the distinction between versions of the argument from evil that depend on the vast amount of evil in the world and versions of the argument that depend on a particular evil such as the Lisbon earthquake or the death of a fawn in a forest fire; the free-will defense; animal suffering; and the problem of the hiddenness of God.