Why Is There So Much Suffering?

Around 300 BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus is said to have posed a question so precise that it’s shaped theology ever since. The version most people know goes like this:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

One honest note before we start: this exact wording isn’t in any surviving text by Epicurus. The argument was preserved centuries later by the Christian writer Lactantius, who attributed it to Epicurus, and the familiar English phrasing was popularized by David Hume in the 1700s. Some scholars think the formulation may come from a later Greek skeptic. None of that changes the argument itself, and the argument is what matters here.

Notice how it’s built. It’s not an emotional outburst, it’s a logical map. Three things are on the table: unlimited power, unlimited goodness, and the reality of suffering. The question is whether all three can be true at once.

The Trilemma

Most theologians define God with three core attributes:

  • Omnipotence: the power to prevent any suffering
  • Omniscience: full knowledge that the suffering will occur
  • Omnibenevolence: perfect goodness, which would want to prevent it

Hold all three together and the pressure is obvious: a being who knows about every instance of suffering, has the power to stop it, and wants to stop it, yet doesn’t. Philosophers call this the problem of evil, and it’s the most discussed argument in the philosophy of religion. The responses to it deserve a fair hearing, so let’s give them one.

The Free Will Defense

The most influential response says God permits moral evil because preventing it would mean removing human choice. A world of beings who freely choose, even sometimes cruelly, might be more valuable than a world of puppets who can only do good. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga developed the modern version, and most philosophers agree it succeeds at what it attempts: it shows there’s no strict logical contradiction between God and the mere existence of some evil.

That’s a real achievement, and it’s worth crediting. But look at what it covers: the harm humans choose to cause. Now look at what it doesn’t.

Natural Evil: Where the Question Sharpens

Childhood leukemia isn’t a choice. Spina bifida isn’t a choice. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed roughly 228,000 people, wasn’t a choice. Malaria, which still kills hundreds of thousands of children a year, isn’t a choice. Philosophers call this natural evil: suffering that happens with no human decision anywhere in the chain.

Free will can’t explain any of it. An all-powerful being could have made biology without childhood cancer, geology without earthquakes, and parasites that don’t infect children, all without restricting a single human choice. The freedom of every person on Earth would be exactly what it is now. So the free will defense, even granting it everything it asks, leaves the largest category of suffering untouched.

Philosopher William Rowe made the point with a famous example: a fawn burned in a forest fire started by lightning, dying slowly over days, seen by no one. No free will is protected by that suffering. No lesson is learned from it. It simply happens, constantly, throughout the natural world and throughout the hundreds of millions of years before humans existed.

The “Greater Plan” Defense

When free will runs out, the next response goes deeper: God permits suffering for reasons we can’t see, reasons that ultimately make things better. Philosophers call this skeptical theism, and it’s held by serious, thoughtful people. It deserves two honest observations.

First, it can’t be tested, even in principle. If a tragedy occurs, the hidden plan explains it. If a rescue occurs, the hidden plan explains that too. An explanation that fits every possible outcome equally well doesn’t actually predict anything, and that puts it in a different category from every other kind of explanation we trust.

Second, consider what it asks of us. A parent watches their five-year-old die of cancer, and the answer offered is: this serves a purpose beyond your understanding, and it’s ultimately good. If a human parent had the power to save that child and chose not to, for the sake of some distant goal they declined to explain, we’d have a word for that, and it wouldn’t be “good.” The defense asks us to accept that the same behavior means something different when the parent is God. Maybe it does. But that’s a very large thing to accept on trust.

How Different Traditions Handle the Problem

This isn’t just a Christian puzzle. Every tradition that describes ultimate reality has had to face suffering, and their answers differ in revealing ways:

Christian thinkers built the deepest body of work on this problem, called theodicy. Augustine proposed that evil isn’t a thing at all, just the absence of good, the way darkness is the absence of light. It’s an elegant idea, but pain doesn’t feel like an absence; a migraine or a burn is as vividly real as anything we experience. Leibniz argued this is “the best of all possible worlds,” which raises its own question: if the best possible world contains childhood leukemia and genocide, what is the word “best” doing? These are serious attempts by brilliant people, and the fact that the problem outlasted all of them is part of the story.

Islam teaches qadar: everything that happens, happens by God’s decree. Many Muslims find deep comfort in that. But it creates a puzzle Islamic scholars have worked on for over a thousand years: if God decreed your actions, how can you be judged for them on the Day of Judgment? The classical answer, called kasb or “acquisition,” says God creates each action and the human acquires it. It’s an ingenious formulation, and the fact that the tradition needed it shows the scholars saw the problem clearly. Whether acquiring an action God created is enough to make you responsible for it is a question each reader can weigh.

Hindu philosophy offers karma: suffering in this life results from actions in past lives, so a child born with a severe disability is working through consequences carried over from before. The system is internally coherent, and it does something the Western answers don’t: it explains why suffering lands on specific people. But notice the cost. You can’t remember the past life or the actions being answered for, so nothing can be learned from the punishment. And the deeper question stands: why would a divine order be built on suffering as its teaching mechanism at all, when a being with unlimited options could have chosen growth through anything else?

Buddhism takes the most striking path: it doesn’t explain suffering away, it starts with it. The First Noble Truth is that existence involves dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness, and the whole tradition is a practical program for dealing with that fact. Because Buddhism doesn’t claim an all-powerful, all-good creator designed the world, it doesn’t face the trilemma at all. That’s worth pausing on: the one major tradition that avoids the problem of evil avoids it by not making the claims that create it.

The ancient Greeks avoided the problem a different way. Zeus and the Olympians were powerful, but nobody claimed they were perfectly good; they were petty, generous, vengeful, and inconsistent, so their causing suffering was just gods being gods. The contradiction only appears when a tradition claims its god is both all-powerful and all-good. The problem of evil isn’t a problem with gods in general. It’s a problem with one specific description of God.

What Would We Expect to See?

Try the question from both directions. If the universe were run by a being of unlimited power and perfect goodness, we’d expect suffering to be rare, purposeful, and clearly connected to something it protects, like freedom. Instead we find suffering that’s abundant, random, and mostly disconnected from any choice: diseases that target infants, disasters that ignore virtue, and an animal kingdom that ran on predation and pain for hundreds of millions of years before anyone was around to learn from it.

If, on the other hand, the universe simply doesn’t have anyone in charge of preventing suffering, we’d expect exactly what we see. That’s the quiet force of this argument: no explanation is needed, because there’s nothing surprising to explain.

None of this means the people offering theodicies are foolish. Many are brilliant, and the responses in this article are their best work across two thousand years. The point is narrower and gentler: after all that work, the gap between the world we’d expect and the world we have is still there. You’re allowed to notice it.

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