Theodicy

Introduction

Theodicy is the branch of philosophical theology that attempts to justify belief in a good and all-powerful God in the face of evil and suffering. The term was coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Essais de Théodicée (1710), combining the Greek theos (God) and dikē (justice). The project is distinct from the problem of evil in the way the defense is distinct from the attack: the problem of evil is the argument that the existence of evil is incompatible or evidentially inconsistent with the existence of God; theodicy is the constructive theistic response that attempts to show how God's existence and goodness can be reconciled with the world's suffering.

The discipline has organized substantial portions of philosophical theology from Augustine through Leibniz through contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. It has also been the site of strenuous rejections of the theistic project, both from atheist critics who hold that no theodicy succeeds and from theists who hold that the theodicy enterprise itself is theologically illegitimate.

The problem it answers

Theodicy answers the demand for an account of how a being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good can permit the kinds and quantities of evil observed in the world: natural suffering on a vast scale (disease, disaster, predation), moral evil committed by free agents, the suffering of innocents, and the apparent purposelessness of much suffering. The demand is both intellectual and existential. Intellectually, it asks whether theism is consistent with the world we observe. Existentially, it asks whether the theist's God can be trusted, worshiped, or loved given the suffering God permits.

The discipline thus operates in three registers: as logical analysis (is theism consistent?), as evidential argument (is theism more probable than its denial given the evidence of evil?), and as pastoral or existential response (can a person who has suffered terribly find God's permission of that suffering intelligible?).

Core claim and a key distinction

Theodicy's core claim is that the existence of God can be reconciled with the existence of evil through the identification of morally sufficient reasons for which God permits the evils that occur. The reasons proposed vary across theodicies, but the structure is shared: God permits evil for the sake of some greater good that could not be obtained without it, or in order to avoid some greater evil that could not be avoided otherwise.

A standard distinction is drawn between theodicy in the strict sense and defense. A theodicy in the strict sense proposes the actual reasons for which God permits evil — it offers a positive account of God's purposes. A defense, by contrast, merely proposes possible reasons that, if true, would justify God's permission — it aims to defeat the claim of inconsistency without claiming to know God's actual reasons. Alvin Plantinga's influential treatment in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) is a defense, not a theodicy. The distinction matters: a defense need only establish logical possibility; a theodicy must offer something the believer can affirm as the actual structure of providence.

History in one paragraph

Theodicy is older than its name. Job (probably sixth or fifth century BCE) is the canonical pre-philosophical engagement. Lamentations and the laments in the Psalms offer one mode of theodical response — protest within faith. Greek philosophical theodicy begins with Plato's discussion in Republic II–III and the Timaeus, where evil is attributed to recalcitrant matter rather than to the demiurge. The Stoics held that apparent evils contribute to the good of the cosmic whole — a position preserved in Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero. Plotinus developed the privation account in Enneads I.8. Augustine (354–430) gave Christian theodicy its first systematic form in De Libero Arbitrio (388–95), the Confessions (397–400), and De Civitate Dei (413–26), combining the privation account with a free-will theodicy. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (524) gave the project a Stoic-Platonic dialogue form. Thomas Aquinas integrated the Augustinian framework with Aristotelian metaphysics in Summa Theologiae Ia qq.48–49 (c. 1265). Leibniz's Théodicée (1710) gave the discipline its name and the canonical optimistic formulation — the world that exists is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire's Candide (1759) made the Leibnizian theodicy the target of the most famous attack in modern letters. Immanuel Kant in "On the Failure of All Philosophical Attempts at Theodicy" (1791) gave the Enlightenment refusal. Twentieth-century revival began with John Hick's Evil and the God of Love (1966), continued through Plantinga's free-will defense in The Nature of Necessity (1974) and God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), and continues in the analytic philosophy of religion through Marilyn McCord Adams, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, William Hasker, and Michael Bergmann.

Augustinian theodicy

The Augustinian theodicy, dominant in Western Christianity for over a thousand years, combines three claims. First, evil is privation (privatio boni) — not a positive substance but the absence or deficiency of a good that should be present. Augustine inherits this from Plotinus and develops it across De Libero Arbitrio and the Confessions. Second, moral evil enters the world through the misuse of free will by creatures (angels and humans) created good. The fall of Adam introduces both moral and natural evil into a creation originally without either. Third, the universe as a whole, including its evils, exhibits a beauty and order that requires the contrast and the consequences of those evils. The picture is a felix culpa aesthetic: the fall and its remedy together make a world more glorious than an unfallen world would have been.

The Augustinian theodicy was given its scholastic refinement by Aquinas, who treats evil as privation in Summa Theologiae Ia q.48, and its Reformation continuations through Calvin, who pairs it with strict double predestination. It remains the operative theodicy of much contemporary Catholic theology, with influential recent treatments by Eleonore Stump (Wandering in Darkness, 2010) and Brian Davies (The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil, 2006).

Leibnizian theodicy

The Leibnizian theodicy, advanced in the Théodicée (1710), holds that this world is the best of all possible worlds — not because it lacks evil but because the combination of goods and evils it contains achieves a maximum of overall perfection that no other possible world achieves. Leibniz distinguishes metaphysical evil (the finitude of creatures as such), physical evil (suffering), and moral evil (sin). Metaphysical evil is necessary in any created world; physical and moral evil are permitted by God for the sake of greater goods that could not be obtained without them.

The Leibnizian theodicy depends on three metaphysical commitments: the principle of sufficient reason (every fact has an explanation), the principle of the best (God chooses the optimal among possible worlds), and the doctrine of compossibility (not all goods can be combined in a single world). Voltaire's Candide attacked the position by showing that the actual sufferings of the world — the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Seven Years' War, slavery — strain any claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. The attack was so effective that the optimistic Leibnizian project has had few unembarrassed defenders since, though Robert Adams in Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (1994) has argued that the position is more philosophically defensible than Voltaire's caricature suggests.

The free-will defense

The free-will defense, given its canonical contemporary formulation by Plantinga in The Nature of Necessity (1974) and God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), holds that God's creation of free creatures necessarily involves the possibility of those creatures' choosing evil. A world containing free creatures who freely choose the good is a better world than a world with no free creatures at all, but God cannot guarantee free choice of the good without removing the freedom that makes the choice valuable.

Plantinga's distinctive contribution is the introduction of transworld depravity: the thesis that, in every possible world God could actualize containing free creatures, at least some of those creatures freely choose evil at least sometimes. If transworld depravity is even possibly true, then it is possible that God could not have actualized a morally better world than the actual world. This is sufficient to defeat the logical problem of evil — the claim that theism is inconsistent with the existence of any evil.

The free-will defense has been criticized on several grounds. It addresses only moral evil, leaving natural evil (disease, disaster, animal suffering) unexplained — though Plantinga has proposed that natural evil might be attributed to the free actions of fallen angels, a move many find unpersuasive. It depends on the libertarian conception of free will, which is contested. And it defeats only the logical problem of evil; the evidential problem (whether the quantity and distribution of evil count as evidence against theism) remains.

Soul-making theodicy

John Hick's Evil and the God of Love (1966, revised 1977) develops the Irenaean alternative to the Augustinian tradition. Hick argues that humans were not created perfect and fallen but created immature, with the world functioning as a "vale of soul-making" in which moral and spiritual development is forged through encounter with genuine difficulty. Evil is the price of moral growth: a world without challenge, suffering, and risk would not be a world in which mature moral beings could develop.

The soul-making theodicy is associated historically with Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–c. 202) rather than Augustine, and Hick presents it as the recovery of an alternative Christian tradition that the Augustinian framework displaced. Contemporary developments include Stephen T. Davis's edited Encountering Evil (1981) and Marilyn McCord Adams's Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999), which extends the soul-making framework to address the most extreme cases of suffering. The theodicy has been criticized for understating the moral cost of suffering for soul-making — particularly the suffering of children, animals, and those whose lives end before any soul-making could plausibly have occurred — and for assuming a developmental teleology many find theologically suspect.

Common confusions

Theodicy is not the same as the problem of evil. The problem of evil is the question or argument from evil against theism; theodicy is the constructive theistic response. The two are correlative but distinct: a theist with no theodicy still faces the problem; an atheist examining a theodicy is examining a response to the problem.

Theodicy is not the same as the free-will defense. The free-will defense is one possible move within the discipline — and indeed, as Plantinga emphasizes, is offered as a defense rather than as a theodicy proper. Theodicy includes the free-will defense, the Augustinian privation account, the Leibnizian best-possible-world account, the soul-making account, and others.

Theodicy is not pastoral care. Pastoral response to suffering, while it may draw on theodical resources, is governed by considerations that do not reduce to the intellectual project — the responsibilities of presence, of accompaniment, of acknowledgment. A theodicy that is logically watertight may be pastorally disastrous if offered in the wrong register at the wrong moment, as Job's friends discovered.

Live debates

Several debates structure the contemporary discipline.

Skeptical theism, developed by William Alston, Stephen Wykstra, and Michael Bergmann since the 1990s, holds that human cognitive limitations make us unable to judge whether God has morally sufficient reasons for the evils observed. The position responds to the evidential problem of evil by arguing that our failure to see God's reasons does not give us reason to think God has none. Critics (Bruce Russell, Paul Draper, Michael Tooley) argue that skeptical theism is too corrosive of moral knowledge generally, since the same skeptical strategies that block inferences about God's reasons would block inferences about ordinary moral facts.

Anti-theodicy, developed in the wake of Holocaust theology and influenced by Emmanuel Levinas, Sarah Pinnock (Beyond Theodicy, 2002), and Karen Kilby, holds that the theodicy project itself is morally and theologically illegitimate. To offer a justification of God's permission of the Holocaust, of child cancer, of mass starvation is to assume a vantage point of cosmic clarity that no human being can occupy — and to risk consoling oneself about evils that should not be consoled. Anti-theodicy is not atheism; many anti-theodicists are theists who hold that the proper response to evil is lament, protest, or solidarity rather than philosophical justification. The position has been developed in Jewish, Catholic, and post-liberal Protestant theology.

The horrendous-evils debate concerns whether traditional theodicies can address the extreme cases — the Holocaust, the prolonged suffering of children, mass atrocity. Adams in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999) argues that traditional theodicies fail at this register and that the response to horrendous evil requires an account of personal goods (union with God, defeat of evil through participation in Christ's suffering) that strictly secular theodicies cannot supply. The debate remains active in analytic philosophy of religion and Christian systematic theology.

Contemporary engagement

The contemporary literature is large and active. Standard works include Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) and The Nature of Necessity (1974), Hick's Evil and the God of Love (1966, revised 1977), Stump's Wandering in Darkness (2010), Adams's Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999), Peter van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil (2006), and William Hasker's The Triumph of God over Evil (2008). On the atheistic side, Paul Draper's papers on the evidential problem (collected in the Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. McBrayer and Howard-Snyder, 2014) and Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods (2006) set the contemporary terms.

The discipline is institutionally hosted by the journals Faith and Philosophy, Religious Studies, the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophia Christi. The Society of Christian Philosophers and the European Society for Philosophy of Religion organize the field. The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil (2014) and the Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (2013) are the standard reference works.

The discipline also engages with Holocaust theology (Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, Hans Jonas, Eliezer Berkovits), process theology (Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin's God, Power, and Evil, 1976), and open theism (John Sanders, William Hasker), each of which proposes a modified theism that is supposed to make theodicy easier — at the cost of revising classical divine attributes.

Further reading

• Problem of Evil — the argument that theodicy responds to.
• Natural Theology — the parent discipline within which theodicy operates.
• Cosmological Argument — establishes the God whose goodness theodicy must defend.
• Ontological Argument — the a priori counterpart; same target God.
• Augustine — the canonical Christian theodicist; privation, free will, felix culpa.
• Leibniz — coiner of the term; best-of-all-possible-worlds optimism.
• Summa Theologiae — Ia qq.48–49 contain Aquinas's scholastic theodicy.

Theodicy is the constructive theistic response to the problem of evil — the project of showing how a good and powerful God can be reconciled with the world's suffering.