Pass the Theodicy, Please! A Parent’s Guide to Discussing the Problem of Evil

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As parents, we have a godly desire for these kinds of discussions to deepen our children’s relationship with God, preparing them to impact culture and share the good news of Jesus Christ. This is a desire rooted in a command; 1 Peter 3:15 states “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” This verse is often quoted by apologists and applied in the context of cultural engagement or evangelism, but it applies equally, and as a matter of greater urgency, to our families.

Peter’s command? Be prepared.  

Terminology: Theodicy

As beings made in God’s image, bumping around in the creation God has made, we experience wonder and pain as twin, inescapable realities. Wonder leads us to worship our Creator, but pain—say, a tick bite, or worse, a tick-borne disease—calls us to question the motives or competency of that same Creator. Any attempt to express that tension logically is referred to as the Problem of Evil.

When someone offers an explanation for why God would allow evil and suffering in His creation, this is called a “theodicy.” As we teach students at camp, a little etymology is a powerful tool, and fancy words shouldn’t intimidate us. Theodicy is a combination of two Greek words: theos, meaning “God,” and dikē (pronounced DEE-kay) meaning “justice.” The Problem of Evil is the most emotionally potent argument against classical theism and has been marshalled in opposition to a Biblical worldview with significant effect at least since the 4th century BC. From the Greek philosopher Epicurus to more recent atheist influencers like Alex O’Connor, the Problem of Evil is repackaged for each generation. The Christian response throughout history has been robust, so let me admit right off the bat that this article will merely skim the surface. 

The modest goal of this work, beyond encouraging you to take up the mantle of High Apologist in your home, is to provide a method for drawing out your child’s real question and a framework for understanding the intellectual Problem of Evil. Parents should cultivate deep, God-honoring conversations around their dinner table. Far from being a liability, honestly and enthusiastically engaging our children in these difficult questions produces beautiful fruit.

Methodology: Ask Questions

At every Worldview Academy camp, we teach students to spend more time asking questions and less time making assertions. It is a great habit to train both ourselves and, by example, our children, to ask the Four Killer Questions.

When you repeatedly answer your children’s questions with a question, it may cause some momentary frustration, but you are building life-long habits of thought and action. You are training them to think deeply instead of being spoon-fed answers, and you are training them to ask questions themselves!  Plus, we don’t want to launch into an answer to a question our children aren’t really asking.

When I asked Claire, “Why do you hate ticks?” her response was something like “Because they don’t do anything. They’re just gross and suck your blood!” I followed up with “How do you know they don’t do anything?” Just like that, we were exploring epistemology (the study of knowledge), a critically important presupposition. I could have launched into a lecture about evil, but that wasn’t necessarily what was on her mind at that moment. We got there eventually, but the winding path is more scenic, impactful, memorable, and usually more fruitful than the freeway.

When someone asserts that the existence of evil is somehow a problem for Christianity, start by asking them what they mean. Continue to ask clarifying questions until they arrive at an argument you can actually sink your teeth into. Often, you will serve them by forcing them to clarify something they have never truly thought through, and you will avoid many painful circular conversations.

Framing: What’s At Stake?

In a recent dialogue with an online atheist, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig responded to the Problem of Evil in a counterintuitive way. Instead of immediately addressing it directly, he made the following claim: the suffering of sentient life is vastly more probable given theism than given atheism or naturalism. Why? Because, if atheism is true, it is “incomprehensibly more probable that there wouldn’t even be life!”

Before you dive into these kinds of discussions, set the stage. The Problem of Evil isn’t a discussion in a vacuum; it is one small piece of a much larger tapestry. We know from Scripture that God has revealed Himself effectually and gloriously in nature and conscience, and that mankind’s problem isn’t knowledge, it is will.² Highlighting this fact, along with the overwhelming amount of evidence God has given us, serves to defang the discussion and lower the stakes, allowing your children to take comfort in a “faith seeking understanding.”³

Rational vs. Emotional

The Problem of Evil is really two problems that require distinct, though related, responses. As John Lennox points out, there is a vast difference between the perspective of an oncologist who sees cancer primarily as a problem to be solved rationally and the perspective of a young girl who has just been given six months to live. A purely rational response can fail to satisfy because a person is really hurting, and their questions are a function of that pain. But purely emotional responses can be too shallow, and thus fail to resolve the issue in a way satisfying to the intellect. In conversations with our children or others, making this distinction explicit, between the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil, helps them to recognize their own motives and opens up their assumptions.

It also lowers the bar for any particular answer so that if you are addressing the question pastorally (i.e., to address the emotional problem), they are less apt to dismiss your response because it isn’t intellectually robust, and vice versa. 

We will outline the Intellectual Problem here, saving the Emotional Problem for a later article. This intellectual problem takes two forms: the Evidential Problem and the Coherency Problem. The second of which rests on two key assumptions we’ll examine in turn. The possible responses offered are a mere sampling; your doctrinal traditions will provide deeper insights and offer different emphases.

The Intellectual Problem of Evil

1. Evidential Problem

Someone seeking to wield the evidential argument is claiming to have evidence external to Christianity that proves it to be false. They would assert that (1) evil exists and (2) the existence of evil is incompatible with an all-loving and all-powerful God. How might we respond?

Well, simply put, this version of the problem is self-refuting. Seeing evil in the world as positive evidence that the Christian God does not exist is like using the existence of inches to disprove the existence of rulers. Without a standard to define “inch” and “foot,” inches and feet would be meaningless!

Similarly, if there is no objective standard of good and evil beyond human opinion (i.e., God), then evil becomes a meaningless concept. C.S. Lewis describes his own struggle with evil and God in Mere Christianity. He wrote: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”⁴ Lewis realized that, if God did not exist, then the notion of right and wrong would reduce to a matter of personal opinion. However, if that were true, “then my argument against God collapsed too – for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.”⁵ 

Evil assumes good; good and evil assume a standard by which to differentiate between them; and without God there is no objective standard. This means that good and evil would be mere subjective experiences, not objective realities. Thus, if God does not exist, neither does evil.

Counterintuitively, if evil is real, it actually implies that God exists! 

2. Coherency Problem

We will call the second version of the argument the “Coherency Problem.” It avoids self-refutation by instead framing the argument as an internal critique. “You Christians believe in evil and you believe God exists; these two propositions are mutually exclusive,” so the argument goes. By not affirming the existence of objective evil themselves, the skeptic doesn’t end up with the same incoherency.

Instead, they accuse the Christian of an internal incoherency. You will rarely encounter this version unless you are engaging a professional skeptic, online influencer, or someone who consumes a lot of online content from those corners of the internet. That being said, popular online personalities use platforms like YouTube to share hours of content that, in my experience, our young people are watching. I recently asked a group of about 40 Worldview alumni if they had listened to Alex O’Connor (the aforementioned atheist influencer), and the majority raised their hands. 

Assumptions of the Coherency problem

Remember, ask questions! Why do they believe God and evil cannot both exist? What you will find is some variation on two assumptions: that God could create anything He wants, and that God (if He existed) would always want a world without suffering and evil. In a later article, we will discuss the emotional weight of the second assumption. For now, we can see the argument spelled out in a syllogism:

The argument is valid, meaning that if the premises are true, the conclusion would have to be true. However, when we take a look at the key assumptions contained in the two premises, we discover that the argument is unsound, meaning one or more of the premises are false.

There are many possible ways to demonstrate this, but historically the responses have tended to center on two contentions: human freedom entails the possibility of evil, and God has good moral reasons for allowing evil and suffering in the world.

Response: Omnipotence

If premise one entails God being able to create logically incoherent states of affairs, then premise one is false. Christian theism agrees that God is all-powerful; however, every time God chooses to create a particular state of affairs, He limits His additional options to conditions that are consistent with that state of affairs. For example, should God choose to create a world inhabited only by a handful of bachelors, He chooses to exclude the possibility of marriage. This isn’t actually a “limitation”; rather, a “married bachelor” is a meaningless term, not a thing that God cannot create.

There is something similar going on with freedom and force, so the response goes. Forcing mankind to always “freely” choose good is incoherent, as “force” and “freedom” appear intuitively contradictory. So, the Christian response to the Problem of Evil has historically pointed out that, by choosing to create a world of human creatures with free will, God has so chosen a state of affairs that entails the possibility of choosing good or evil.  Thus, genuine human freedom entails the possibility of a world with evil and suffering. 

Response: Divining Divine Preferences

This leaves us with the second premise. Is the statement “objects of God’s perfect love experience suffering” logically incoherent? Clearly not. Logically incoherent statements must violate a law of logic! “Bob is a married bachelor” is an example of an incoherent statement. There must be additional hidden assumptions, namely the claim that God could not possibly have good reasons, morally sufficient reasons, for allowing evil and suffering.

The “Coherency Problem” really comes down to this intuition, for it would imply that God (by definition a perfectly loving being) fails to love perfectly. It is both the chief logical contention and also at the heart of the emotional problem.

However strong the emotional appeal, as a logical contention it places an unbearable burden of proof on the skeptic. How could any finite human possibly claim to know that God, with His eternal and omniscient perspective, cannot possibly possess good reasons for this state of affairs? Debunking this rationally is as simple as offering one or more logically possible explanations. Can we not imagine or suppose any reasons that could lead God to prefer a state of affairs for His creation that would be filled with adversity? The Bible itself offers many. We will explore some of these soon.

In the meantime, ask your children to make their own list!

For further study:

• Tactics by Greg Koukl
  • A must-read book with practical suggestions for engaging in excellent conversations.

• Apologetics at the Cross by Chastraw and Allen
  • An introduction to apologetics that surveys various apologetics methods without endorsing any one method as superior, ultimately encouraging readers to model their approach after the example of Jesus and the Apostle Peter. 

• Why Is There Evil? by R.C. Sproul
  • A good primer on the topic deeply influenced by Augustine.

• A Severe Mercy by Sheldon van Auken
  • This memoir of a man’s emotional and theological struggle with loss is among the author’s top three favorite books, and is recommended by multiple other Worldview Academy faculty. 

• Hard Questions Real Answers by William Lane Craig, 
  • An accessible, though theologically and philosophically rigorous, response to important social issues of our time from a Biblical worldview.  

• Theodicy of Love by John Peckham
  • An academic but accessible critique of mere free-will defenses that suggests God’s sovereign cosmic love is really at the center of all things, providing significant insight into the problem of evil. 

• The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
  • Lewis’s classic posits that the possibility of genuine love, the need for moral development, and God’s use of pain to “shout” to our consciences largely explain the coexistence of an all-powerful, loving God with suffering. 

• God, Freedom, and Evil by Alvin Plantinga
  • An advanced and philosophically rigorous free-will defense addressing the problem of evil  by the most influential living Christian philosopher.

Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the problem of evil. Read Part 2 here.

1. “Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion, While Others Stay?,” Pew Research Center, December 15, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/12/15/why-do-some-americans-leave-their-religion-while-others-stay/. ↩︎
2. Ps. 19:1–2; Rom. 1:18–20 ↩︎
3. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, chap. 1. ↩︎
4. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), Book 1, chap. 1, “The Law of Human Nature.” ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎