The problem of evil has haunted theistic philosophy for millennia. How can an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God permit the suffering we witness—children dying of cancer, natural disasters obliterating innocent populations, the long evolutionary history of predation and parasitism? Sophisticated theologians have developed ingenious responses, from soul-making theodicies to free will defenses to skeptical theism.

But here's the rarely acknowledged irony: the most philosophically rigorous defenses of God's existence require abandoning the very God most believers actually worship. Each sophisticated theodicy purchases its logical coherence at an enormous theological cost—requiring a deity so radically different from traditional conceptions that one might wonder whether 'God' remains the appropriate term.

This isn't an attack from outside the tradition. It's an observation about internal tensions within theistic philosophy itself. The God who survives philosophical scrutiny bears little resemblance to the God of Abraham, the God who answers prayers, the God who loves humanity with infinite tenderness. What remains after theodicy has done its defensive work may be logically consistent—but it's also unrecognizable to most believers and functionally equivalent to certain forms of atheism.

The Irenaean theodicy, developed most notably by John Hick, proposes that God permits suffering because it's necessary for soul-making—the development of moral character, compassion, and spiritual maturity. We couldn't become genuinely virtuous without genuine challenges. A world without suffering would produce moral infants, never tested, never grown.

This is philosophically sophisticated, but examine what it concedes. First, it requires abandoning traditional divine omnipotence in any meaningful sense. If God could create souls already possessing mature virtues but chooses not to, this seems arbitrary or even cruel. If God cannot create such souls—if soul-making genuinely requires suffering—then God is constrained by logical or metaphysical necessities external to the divine will.

Second, the soul-making theodicy struggles with the distribution and intensity of suffering. Why does soul-making require childhood leukemia? Why do some people receive crushing amounts of 'character development' while others coast through comfortable lives? The response typically invokes mystery—we cannot understand God's particular allocations. But this transforms the theodicy into something quite different: not an explanation, but an admission that we have no explanation.

Third, and most devastating: the Irenaean approach implies that God values the process of character development over the welfare of actual conscious beings. The child suffering from bone cancer is, on this view, instrumental to some larger spiritual economy. This may be logically coherent, but it describes a God most believers would find morally monstrous if encountered in any other context.

The soul-making God is not the loving Father of traditional Christianity or the merciful Allah of Islam. It's closer to an impersonal cosmic principle that prioritizes abstract goods over concrete welfare—resembling the Brahman of certain Hindu philosophies or the Tao more than any personal deity. Believers who find comfort in soul-making theodicy rarely notice they've quietly replaced their God with something fundamentally different.

Takeaway

When someone defends God using soul-making theodicy, ask whether the God being defended is still the God they actually pray to—often the philosophical defense succeeds only by abandoning the personal, loving deity that made the question urgent in the first place.

Alvin Plantinga's free will defense represents perhaps the most technically sophisticated theodicy in contemporary philosophy. God permits moral evil because genuine free will—the libertarian kind, where we could genuinely do otherwise—is so valuable that it's worth the risk of misuse. God cannot create beings with genuine freedom who are also guaranteed to choose rightly; that's a logical contradiction, like a square circle.

Grant this argument its considerable merits. What does it actually concede? First, it requires God to value a particular metaphysical property—libertarian free will—over the actual welfare of conscious beings. The rape victim's suffering is, on this defense, the acceptable cost of preserving the rapist's metaphysically interesting capacity for genuine choice. This is a coherent position, but it describes a God whose priorities most people would find deeply alien.

Second, the free will defense faces the problem of heaven. Traditional theology affirms that heaven involves both freedom and the absence of sin. If this is possible post-mortem, why wasn't it possible from the beginning? The usual response is that heavenly freedom differs somehow from earthly freedom—but this concedes that the freedom we have now isn't actually necessary for the goods heaven provides. Why the earthly detour through suffering?

Third, free will explains moral evil but not natural evil—earthquakes, disease, animal suffering predating humanity. Extending the defense to include fallen angels or cosmic spiritual warfare creates more problems than it solves and strains credulity even among believers. Most philosophers acknowledge that free will, however valuable, cannot bear the full explanatory weight theodicy requires.

The God of the free will defense is essentially a libertarian in the political sense—so committed to non-interference that innocent suffering becomes acceptable collateral damage. This may be defensible, but it's far removed from the shepherd seeking lost sheep or the father running to embrace the prodigal son.

Takeaway

The free will defense works philosophically only if you accept that God values metaphysical freedom more than preventing innocent suffering—a trade-off that, stated plainly, many believers would reject but accept unknowingly when it's wrapped in philosophical sophistication.

Skeptical theism represents the most modest theodicy—or rather, the refusal of theodicy altogether. We shouldn't expect to understand God's reasons for permitting evil, given our cognitive limitations. Just as a child cannot understand why a parent permits painful medical procedures, we cannot fathom divine purposes. Our inability to see reasons for suffering doesn't mean no reasons exist.

This approach has significant philosophical merit. It correctly identifies the hubris in assuming human cognitive capacities can fully comprehend infinite divine reasoning. It acknowledges genuine mystery without pretending to explanations we don't have. Many sophisticated believers find it the most honest response available.

But skeptical theism extracts an enormous epistemological cost that its proponents rarely acknowledge. If we cannot trust our moral intuitions about what a good God would permit, what can we trust? The same cognitive limitations that prevent us from judging God's tolerance of suffering should equally prevent us from making any theological claims whatever. How do we know God is good? How do we know God loves us? How do we know anything about divine attributes or intentions?

The skeptical theist typically wants to preserve mystery selectively—invoking it when confronting the problem of evil but abandoning it when making positive claims about divine love, providence, or salvation. But this is philosophically unstable. If our moral intuitions about God are unreliable when they condemn divine tolerance of suffering, they're equally unreliable when they affirm divine benevolence.

Skeptical theism, consistently applied, collapses into theological agnosticism. We cannot know that God permits evil for good reasons, but we equally cannot know that God is good, that God cares for humanity, or that divine purposes align with human flourishing in any recognizable sense. What remains isn't theism in any traditional sense—it's reverent ignorance before an inscrutable cosmic principle.

Takeaway

Skeptical theism purchases logical defense against the problem of evil by mortgaging the entire theological enterprise—if we genuinely cannot judge God's actions, we cannot meaningfully claim to know God's character, which leaves us with an unknown deity indistinguishable from no deity at all.

The pattern across theodicies reveals something profound: philosophical rigor and traditional theism exist in genuine tension. Each sophisticated defense succeeds only by quietly replacing the personal, loving, responsive God of actual religious practice with something far stranger—an impersonal cosmic principle, a metaphysical libertarian, an inscrutable mystery.

This doesn't prove atheism. Perhaps the philosophically coherent God is the true God, and popular religious conceptions are simply confused. But it does suggest that the intellectual defense of theism involves costs believers should acknowledge honestly. The God who survives the problem of evil is not the God most people pray to.

For secular philosophers, this offers not triumphalism but clarity. The choice isn't between naive theism and aggressive atheism, but between honest acknowledgment of profound mystery and the intellectual comfort of theodicy's hidden theological compromises. Understanding what theodicy actually concedes makes genuine dialogue possible.