If God, Why Evil?

The False Dilemma of the Problem of Evil

The problem of evil is often considered the most serious challenge to belief in God, or at least belief in the Judeo-Christian conception of God as all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent), and all-good (morally perfect). In his classic 1955 paper “Evil and Omnipotence,” J. L. Mackie claims that the presence of evil in the world (evil construed broadly enough to include any instance of suffering) shows that belief in God is irrational. After all, Mackie reasons, if God was all-good, he would want to stop all evil, and if he was all-powerful, he could stop it. But evil and suffering do exist, he continues; therefore, God doesn’t. To believe that both God and evil exist,...