Doesn't evil prove there is no God?
As a knockdown proof, no — and this is one of the few places where the philosophers have actually settled something. The claim that God and evil are logically incompatible was pressed hard for decades and then withdrawn by the man who made it. What remains is a weaker and more honest argument: that evil makes God less likely.
There are two versions of this objection and they are not the same argument. Most conversations go wrong because both sides are answering the other one.
This article is about the first. If what you want is the pastoral question — how do I keep believing while my life falls apart — that is a different piece, and it is the more important of the two.
The strong version, and what happened to it
In the 1950s the philosopher J. L. Mackie put it as a contradiction. A God who is all-powerful could remove evil. A God who is all-good would want to. Evil exists. Therefore no such God does — not unlikely, but impossible, the way a square circle is impossible.
That is a serious claim, and if it worked the discussion would be over.
To break it you do not have to explain why God permits evil. You only have to show that the two statements can both be true — that there is some possible reason, however unlikely, a good God might allow it. A contradiction has no room for “maybe”.
Alvin Plantinga’s answer was that free will is such a reason. If God makes creatures genuinely able to choose, he cannot also guarantee they always choose well — not because he is weak, but because “a free choice that cannot go wrong” is not a thing, in the way a married bachelor is not a thing. Asking for it is asking for nothing in particular.
The striking part is what came next. Mackie accepted it. In 1982 he wrote that the logical argument fails, while maintaining his atheism on other grounds. Most philosophers on both sides now agree.
That is worth knowing, because the version that was abandoned is the version most people still meet on the internet.
The version that survives
The serious argument today is different and more modest: not that evil is incompatible with God, but that there is so much of it, distributed so pointlessly, that God becomes improbable.
A fawn burns to death in a forest fire nobody sees. Where is the free will in that?
This one cannot be dismissed with a logical move, and Christians who reach for Plantinga here are answering the wrong argument. It has to be met differently.
What can honestly be said
We are badly placed to judge pointlessness. Not “everything happens for a reason” — that is a slogan and often a cruel one. The claim is narrower: to know an evil is gratuitous you would have to see every consequence of it across all time. We routinely fail at this over a decade. The inference from I see no reason to there is no reason assumes we are the sort of creatures who would spot one.
The argument needs the thing it denies. Calling the fawn’s death an outrage rather than a fact is a moral judgement. If the universe is only physics, it is neither good nor bad that anything burns — it just happens. The force of the objection comes from a moral standard that is very hard to account for if there is no God, which is why this argument has always cut in two directions.
And Christianity does not deny the data. It is not a religion that says suffering is illusory or deserved or unimportant. Its central image is a man being tortured to death. Whatever else that is, it is not a claim that God stands outside the problem.
Objections answered
Free will doesn't explain earthquakes and cancer.
Correct, and it is the strongest form of the objection. The free-will defence was only ever aimed at the logical argument, and it does not pretend to account for natural evil. Christians have offered other lines here — the value of a law-governed world you can act in, a creation itself out of joint — and none is as clean. Better to say so than to stretch free will to cover it.
Couldn't God have made people who freely always choose good?
That is exactly what Plantinga’s argument addresses. If God arranges that you cannot choose otherwise, your choosing well is not free in the sense the objection needs. It is not a limit on God’s power; it is a limit on what the words can describe.
Isn't 'we can't see the reasons' just an excuse?
It would be if it were the whole answer, and if it were used to close down conversation with someone in pain. As a piece of logic it is doing something narrow: blocking an inference from our ignorance to a universal claim. That is a legitimate move, and it is not the same as an explanation.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
All the traditions hold that evil is real rather than illusory, that God did not create it, that it is not part of his intention for the world, and that the answer he has given is not an explanation but a rescue.
Related questions
Inspired by Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — "The Logical Problem of Evil". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
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