The Question of God and the Problem of Evil
What Is God Like?
One of the biggest questions in philosophy and religion is: what is God actually like? Religious traditions answer this question in rich and varied ways. Most Christians understand God through three key qualities: God is omnipotent, knowing everything past, present and future (omniscient), and perfectly good. These qualities are called the “divine attributes.” For many believers, understanding God’s nature is essential — it shapes how they pray, how they act, and how they make sense of suffering.
Christians believe God is deeply personal: a being who created the universe not out of necessity but out of love, and who continues to be involved in the lives of people. The letter of 1 John 4:8 makes this claim directly: “God is love.” This short statement carries enormous weight. It suggests that love is not just something God does — it is what God fundamentally is. This framing shapes how Christians respond to suffering and evil.
The three core divine attributes are omnipotence (all-powerful), omniscience (all-knowing) and omnibenevolence (all-loving or all-good). Together they form the classical theistic view of God and provide the basis for the problem of evil.
God’s Relationship With the World
Believers also debate how God relates to the world he created. A transcendent God is utterly beyond the universe — distant, wholly other, not directly involved in day-to-day events. By contrast, an immanent God is close and personally active, felt in everyday life. Most mainstream Christian traditions hold both: God is transcendent in greatness and yet immanent through the Holy Spirit, prayer, and the life of Jesus Christ.
The parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11–32 captures this sense of an immanent, personally involved God. The father in the story runs to meet his returning son — a picture of God actively pursuing a relationship with humanity rather than remaining remote. For believers, this parable shows that God’s relationship with the world is not passive but active and loving.
God as Good: What Does Goodness Mean?
Religious believers argue that God is the source and standard of all goodness. Genesis 1:31 records that after God finished creation, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” This suggests that goodness is built into the fabric of creation. God does not merely follow a moral code that exists independently — God is the moral order. When believers say God is good, they mean his actions, character and purposes are never destructive or selfish.
However, believers disagree about what divine goodness means in practice. Some argue that God’s goodness is the same as human moral goodness, only perfect. Others say God’s goodness is so far beyond human understanding that we can only speak of it by analogy. The medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas argued we use language about God “analogically” — terms like “good” apply to God in a related but not identical way to how they apply to people.
Many Christians believe God’s goodness is expressed through his benevolence — his care and mercy towards all humanity. They point to passages like Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) and the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus calls his followers to reflect God’s goodness through love, compassion and justice.
Some denominations, particularly within the Reformed tradition, emphasise God’s justice alongside his love — arguing that goodness also means God cannot ignore wrongdoing. Evangelical Christians often stress that God’s goodness is shown supremely in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who took on human sin so that people could be forgiven and restored to relationship with God.
The Problem of Evil and Suffering
The most challenging objection to belief in God is the problem of evil. The argument runs like this: if God is omnipotent, he could prevent suffering. If he is omnibenevolent, he would want to prevent it. Yet suffering clearly exists. So either God is not all-powerful, or not all-good — or does not exist at all. This is what philosophers call the “logical problem of evil.”
Suffering takes two forms. Moral evil arises from human choices — such as violence, theft or oppression. Natural evil arises from the natural world — earthquakes, cancer, floods. Non-believers often argue that natural evil is especially difficult to explain, since it cannot be blamed on human free will.
Moral evil and natural evil together form the “problem of evil.” The dilemma is ancient: it was expressed in Psalm 22:1 when the psalmist cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — and in the Book of Job, where a righteous man suffers without apparent cause.
Religious Responses to Suffering
Religious believers have developed a range of responses to this challenge. One of the most important is the “free will defence.” God gave humans free will — the genuine ability to choose good or evil. Without this freedom, human beings would be moral robots, incapable of love or virtue. Moral evil is therefore a consequence of human freedom, not evidence against God’s goodness.
A second response concerns the purpose of suffering. The prophet Jeremiah, speaking on God’s behalf in Jeremiah 5:19, frames suffering as a consequence of turning away from God — a call to return. This does not mean God causes every individual suffering as punishment, but that suffering can prompt repentance, growth and a deeper relationship with God.
Many believers also point to the example of Jesus Christ, who suffered on the cross. Far from being absent from suffering, in the Christian tradition God entered into it. This is called the “theology of the cross” or divine solidarity. For many Christians, the resurrection then shows that suffering does not have the final word.
Atheists and agnostics argue that the existence of widespread, apparently pointless suffering is strong evidence against an all-powerful, all-good God. The philosopher J.L. Mackie argued that the co-existence of God and evil is a logical contradiction — a truly omnipotent God could create free beings who always freely chose good.
Humanists respond to suffering by emphasising human responsibility: rather than praying for divine intervention, the moral response is human action — working to reduce poverty, disease and injustice. Many non-believers also argue that natural disasters show a universe that is indifferent to human welfare, not one designed by a loving creator. In a 15-mark “Discuss” response, presenting these views fairly alongside religious responses demonstrates the evaluative thinking that lifts an answer.
The Islamic tradition also engages with this question. Muslims affirm that Allah is Ar-Rahman (the Most Gracious) and Ar-Rahim (the Most Merciful), and that trials and suffering are a test of faith and a means of spiritual purification, not evidence of divine absence. This perspective reflects the multi-faith nature of the theme as examined on this paper.