Why Do I Suffer? That Is the Rock of Atheism | Evil, God, and Skeptical Theism

Chapter 01: The Man on the Ash Heap

The first messenger came running while the feast was still warm on the table. The oxen were plowing and the donkeys were grazing beside them, he said, when raiders fell upon the field, carried off the animals, and put the servants to the sword. I alone have escaped to tell you. He had not finished speaking when a second man arrived, his face changed, and said that fire had fallen from the sky and burned up the sheep and the shepherds together, and that he alone had escaped to tell. While that man's voice still hung in the air a third came, saying that another band had formed 3 companies, swept down upon the camels, taken them all, and killed every servant but one, and that he alone had escaped to tell. And before he had stopped, a fourth was already in the doorway. A great wind had come across the desert, he said, and struck the four corners of the house where the rich man's sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine. The house had fallen on the young people. They were all dead. And he alone had escaped to tell.

In the space of a single afternoon a wealthy man lost everything he owned and everyone he loved. This is the opening of one of the oldest books in the world, a poem so strange and so unflinching that thinkers have circled it for more than 2,000 years without ever quite leaving it behind. We call it the Book of Job, after the man who sits at its center. It is the oldest and most human form of the question this long night will spend its hours inside.

The story begins quietly, almost like a folk tale told by a fire. There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. He had 7 sons and 3 daughters. He owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 donkeys, and a great household of servants besides, so that he was the greatest of all the people of the east. His sons feasted in one another's houses by turns, and afterward Job would rise early and offer sacrifices on their behalf, in case any of them had sinned in their hearts without knowing it. He was, in the careful language of the book, a good man who had been given a good life, and who handled both his goodness and his fortune with care.

Then the story does something unexpected. It lifts the curtain and shows us a scene the suffering man himself will never see. In a kind of heavenly court, the assembled powers come to present themselves before God, and among them comes a figure the text calls the accuser, a sort of prosecuting angel whose task is to roam the earth and find fault. God points to Job with something like pride. Have you considered my servant, blameless and upright, the finest man alive. And the accuser asks the question that sets everything in motion. Does Job fear God for nothing. You have fenced him round, the accuser says, and blessed the work of his hands. Take it all away, and he will curse you to your face. So a wager is struck. Permission is granted. The accuser may touch everything Job has, only not the man himself. And that is why, on a single afternoon, four messengers come running, each ending with the same terrible words, that he alone has escaped to tell.

Job tears his robe, shaves his head, and falls to the ground. But he does not curse. Naked I came from my mother's womb, he says, and naked I will return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. In all of this he does not sin or charge God with wrongdoing. So the curtain lifts a second time, and the accuser presses further. A man will give everything he has to save his own skin, he says. Reach out and touch his bone and his flesh, and then he will curse you. Permission is granted again, with one limit. His life must be spared. And Job is struck with sores from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot.

Now we find him where the tradition will always remember him, seated among the ashes outside the town, scraping at his ruined skin with a broken piece of pottery. His wife looks at him and says the thing that grief makes people say. Do you still hold to your goodness. Curse God, and die. He answers her gently, and his answer is one of the hardest sentences in the book. Shall we accept good from God, he asks, and not accept hardship too. He will not pretend the suffering is good. He simply refuses to believe that the same hand cannot hold both. There is no triumph in the words, and no resignation either. There is only a man trying to keep his footing on ground that has fallen away beneath him, holding on to the one conviction he has left, that the source of his blessings and the source of his ruin are not two different powers but one.

Word travels, and three friends come from far countries to be with him. When they see him from a distance they hardly know him. They weep, they tear their robes, they throw dust over their heads. Then they sit down with him on the ground, and for 7 days and 7 nights not one of them speaks a single word, because they see how great his suffering is. It is worth pausing on this, because these three men are about to do a great deal of talking, and they will be wrong in almost everything they say. They are never wiser than they are here, in the silence, when they simply sit beside a broken man and keep him company in the dark.

The silence breaks when Job himself breaks it. He opens his mouth and curses the day he was born. Let that day perish, he says, let it be wiped from the calendar of the year. Why did I not die at birth, why was I not a hidden thing, an infant that never saw the light. He does not curse God, but he curses his own existence, and he asks, again and again, the simple unanswerable question. Why. And here the friends begin to answer.

Their answer is the oldest and most natural answer there is, and the whole book is built to test it. The universe, they insist, is morally orderly. Suffering is the wage of sin. The innocent do not perish. Look around you, they say, at how things work. No one who was truly upright was ever swept away. So if you are suffering like this, Job, then somewhere, somehow, you must have earned it. Search your conscience. Confess the hidden fault. Their tone rises through the long speeches, from gentle suggestion to open accusation, because the alternative is unbearable to them. If Job is innocent and still suffers, then the moral order they have leaned on their whole lives does not hold.

Job will not give them what they want. He knows what he has and has not done, and he will not buy back his peace with a lie about himself. I am innocent, he says, and he says it with a steadiness that unsettles them more than any complaint could. And then he does something no one in his world is supposed to do. He does not ask his friends for comfort, and he does not ask for his fortune back. He demands a hearing. He wants to stand before God himself and put his case, like a man bringing a lawsuit, and to be told, to his face, the reason. A fourth and younger man, named Elihu, appears late in the dialogues, angry at everyone, certain the elders have failed and that he can do better, and certain too that his youth has given him a clarity the old men lost. He talks for a while, repeating in fresher language much of what the three have already said. He, too, falls short.

And then the answer comes, though not the answer anyone expected. God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind, out of the heart of a storm, and what comes is not an explanation but a torrent of questions. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth. Who shut the sea behind doors when it burst out of the womb. Have you commanded the morning, have you walked in the depths beneath the waves. Can you bind the chains of the constellations, can you loose the belt of the hunter in the sky. Did you give the horse its strength and clothe its neck with thunder. Can you draw out the great creature of the deep with a hook, as a man lands a fish. On and on it goes, a vast inhuman tour of the wild and ringing beauty of the made world, the wild goats giving birth in the high rocks, the eagle making its nest on the cliff, the morning stars singing together at the dawn of things. There is no mention of the wager. There is no mention of the accuser, no word about the test, no reason given for the oxen or the fire or the wind or the 10 dead children. There is only the world, immense and strange, and the smallness of the man who demanded to understand it.

Job's reply is brief, and it is one of the most quietly shattering moments in all of literature. He says that he had heard of God before only by the hearing of the ear, but that now his eye has seen. He does not say he has been answered. He does not say the books have been balanced. He says only that he had spoken of things he did not understand, things too wonderful for him, and that he is comforted now, in dust and ashes. Something has changed, and it is not the arrival of a reason. It is the arrival of God.

The book could end there, and it would be unbearable. Instead it adds an epilogue, and the epilogue carries a sharp irony. God turns to the three friends, the defenders of the moral order, and tells them his anger burns against them, because they have not spoken rightly of him, as his servant Job has. The men who defended God are rebuked, and the man who accused God of silence is vindicated. Then Job's fortunes are restored, and doubled. Twice the sheep, twice the camels. Ten more children are born to him, 7 sons and 3 daughters, and the daughters are named, which is its own quiet wonder. Their names mean a dove, a sweet spice, and a small jar of the dark powder women painted on their eyes. They were the most beautiful women in the land, and their father gave them an inheritance alongside their brothers, which almost never happened in that world. Job lived 140 more years and saw his children's children to the fourth generation, and died old and full of days. And in all of it, from the first messenger to the last breath, he is never once told why any of it happened.

We do not know who wrote this. Some unknown poet, working somewhere between the seventh and the fourth centuries before the common era, took what may have been a much older folk tale about a patient man and built around it a poem of staggering ambition and nerve. And here is the most remarkable thing about it. It refuses to explain suffering. It had every opportunity. It knew the answer the friends offered, the tidy account in which pain is always deserved, and it put that answer in the mouths of the characters God condemns. It could have told Job about the wager. It chose not to. Instead of solving the problem, it stages it, and leaves it standing on the page, fully lit, for everyone who comes after to look at.

What the book hands the whole tradition is not a solution but a fact, hard and clear and impossible to wish away. An innocent man. A good God. And suffering that neither of them will account for. The oldest answer on record is not an answer at all. It is a man on an ash heap who will not take the easy comfort his friends offer, and will not take the easy despair his wife offers, and who simply sits in the truth that both halves are real. He is innocent and he suffers, and the one does not cancel the other. That single stubborn fact, that innocence and pain can occupy the same life at the same time without either one dissolving, is what every thinker in the coming hours inherits, and what none of them, however brilliant, will ever fully lay to rest.

Chapter 02: The Riddle

The whole of the problem can be spoken aloud in under a minute. It is four short questions, set down by an ancient writer in plain words, and philosophy has spent more than 2,000 years trying to answer them. The questions are small. Their consequences are not. Nearly every theology that follows, every careful defense of a good and powerful God in a world of pain, is in some sense a long reply to this brief and ruthless riddle.

Here is the riddle, laid out as it has always been laid out. Is God willing to prevent evil but not able to do it. Then he is not all powerful. Is he able to prevent it but not willing. Then he is not good. Is he both able and willing. Then where does evil come from. Is he neither able nor willing. Then why call him God at all.

That is the entire engine. Four questions, a fork at each one, and at the end of every path something the believer did not want to arrive at.

The way it reaches us is worth telling honestly, because the story is tangled. The riddle survives because an early Christian writer named Lactantius wrote it down in the early 300s, in a book on the anger of God. He set it out not to praise it but to attack it, the way one quotes an opponent in order to answer him. And he attributed it to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who had taught, centuries before, that the gods take no interest in human affairs. Modern scholars doubt that attribution. The argument may belong to a later school of skeptics who used the name for their own ends. But the name has stuck, and to this day the riddle is usually called the riddle of Epicurus.

Why should so small a thing carry so much weight. The answer is that it asks for nothing from outside. It is what philosophers call an internal critique. It does not smuggle in some hostile assumption that a believer could simply refuse. It takes only what the believer already affirms, and it shows that those affirmations seem to quarrel among themselves.

Consider what the believer affirms. The classical picture of God, the one held across the long centuries by Jews and Christians and Muslims alike, rests on three claims about his nature. He is all powerful, able to do anything that can be done. He is all knowing, aware of every fact, every event, every hidden suffering, with nothing escaping his sight. And he is perfectly good, wholly loving, without a trace of cruelty or indifference. All powerful, all knowing, perfectly good. That is the package, and it is no caricature. It is the inheritance of the great traditions, the God of the philosophers and of the faithful both.

To these three claims the riddle adds a single fact, and it is a fact no one disputes. Suffering exists. The world contains real pain, vast in quantity and often falling on those who have done nothing to deserve it. The man on the ash heap stands for it, but he is only one figure among countless. And now the four things sit on the table together. All powerful. All knowing. Perfectly good. And a world soaked in suffering. The riddle asks, with terrible simplicity, how they are all supposed to be true at once.

It will help, before going further, to sort the suffering into its two great kinds, because the rest of the inquiry leans on the distinction. There is the suffering that people bring about by their own choices. Cruelty, betrayal, theft, torture, the long catalogue of war. One person decides, and another is harmed. This is what gets called moral evil, because it flows from the will of a moral agent who could have chosen otherwise.

And there is the suffering that no one chooses at all. The disease that grows in a body that did nothing to invite it. The earthquake that swallows a sleeping town. The flood, the famine, the slow agony of an animal in the indifferent wild. No human will lies behind these. They are simply the way the world goes. This is natural evil, the harm that comes from nature rather than from malice, and it presses on the riddle from a different side, for it cannot be laid at the door of any human freedom.

So we have two streams of suffering, the chosen and the unchosen, and a God said to be able to stop both, to know of both, and to love those who endure both. The riddle does not tell us how to resolve this. It only insists that something must give, that one of the four pieces must bend, or that some larger understanding must be found in which all four can stand together. Everything that follows is the search for that larger understanding, or the denial that any such thing exists.

A young German playwright caught the force of it in a single phrase. In the 1830s, in a play about the French Revolution, Georg Buchner put into the mouth of one of his characters a question and a verdict. Why do I suffer, the man asks. And he answers his own question by calling it the rock of atheism, the hard place on which faith breaks. The smallest cry of pain, he says, runs a crack through the whole of creation, top to bottom.

That is where the matter rests at the start. Not with an answer, but with a rock. Every attempt to answer must somehow climb that rock or find a way around it. None of them, however gently, is permitted to pretend it is not there.

Chapter 03: Evil as Absence

The first systematic answer to the riddle came from a man who had spent years believing the exact opposite. He knew the rival view from the inside, had lived inside it, had argued for it to others. When he turned against it, he turned with the particular force of a convert, the force of a man who has seen the appeal of a thing and decided it was not enough. His name was Augustine, and he was born in the year 354, in a small town in Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria. He was an ambitious provincial, clever and restless, the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother named Monica, who prayed for him without rest for most of his life.

He gave us, decades later, a single small scene as the emblem of evil. He set it down in his confessions, the long unsparing account he wrote of his own soul. He was 16. There was a pear tree near the family vineyard, heavy with fruit, and he and a gang of boys went out late and stripped it bare. The strange part, the part that haunted him, was that they did not want the pears. They were not hungry. They had better fruit at home. They threw what they took to the pigs. He had stolen, he wrote, not for what the theft could get him, but for the theft itself, loving his own fall, loving the wrong simply because it was forbidden. That scene puzzled him for the rest of his life. Here was evil with no object, done for nothing, wickedness that wanted only itself.

Before he could answer that puzzle, he spent years inside a different answer, the most intuitive answer there is. For roughly 9 years he followed a religion that had come west out of Persia. It taught that there were two great powers in the universe, a kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness, eternally at war. Evil, on this view, was a substance, a real thing, an invading army of shadow pressing against the borders of the light. Good and evil were two armies, two empires, and every human soul was a contested field between them.

It is easy to see why such a picture comforts. It gets the good power off the hook entirely. If evil is a foreign army, then the source of light did not make it, is not responsible for it, and is doing its honest best to hold the line. God stays clean. The suffering in the world becomes enemy action, not a flaw in the one we are asked to trust. For a young man pressed by the riddle, that is an enormous relief. The hardest question, the one that asks how a good and unlimited maker could permit so much pain, simply dissolves, because the maker is no longer unlimited. He is good, and he is doing his best, and that is all we can ask of him.

But Augustine came, in time, to find the picture degrading. A power that must fight for territory, that can be invaded, that can lose ground, is not the highest thing there is. It is one combatant among others, hemmed in, anxious, bounded by an enemy it did not choose and cannot finish. Such a being might be strong. It is not supreme. A god who must struggle to defend his own kingdom, Augustine decided, is not God at all, only a larger sort of soldier. The comfort had been bought at too high a price.

His way out came slowly, in the northern Italian city of Milan. There he heard the bishop Ambrose preach, and found in him a reader who could take the old scriptures and turn them, patiently, into something an educated mind could hold. There too he read the books of the followers of Plato, who taught him to think of the highest reality as something beyond all bodies, not a substance at all. And then, in the year 386, came the scene in the garden. Tormented, weeping, he heard a child's voice from over a wall, chanting words like a game, take it and read, take it and read. He took up a letter of the apostle Paul that lay nearby, opened it at random, and read the first lines his eye fell on. Something in him gave way. The long division of his life closed over.

From the converted Augustine comes the doctrine that would hold the western mind for a thousand years. Evil, he now said, is not a thing at all. Everything that exists is good simply by existing. To be is already to be good, in some measure, however small. Evil, then, is not a presence but an absence. It is an absence of good, a missing wholeness, the way darkness is not a substance but only the absence of light, the way a wound is not a thing in itself but the absence of health in living flesh. The darkness is real in its effects. You can stumble in it. The wound is real in its pain. But neither has any substance of its own. Each is a hole in something good, a place where a good that should be there is not. Cruelty is not a thing added to a person. It is a goodness gone missing in them, a kindness that should be present and has drained away.

This is the move that lets him keep both halves of his faith at once. The source of all things made everything that is, and everything that is, just by being, is good. And yet that source created no evil, planted no shadow, armed no enemy. Because evil is not a thing that can be created. You cannot make a hole the way you make a stone. The hole appears only where the stone has been worn away.

But a hole has to enter somewhere, and here Augustine gives his account of where the absence comes in. It comes through the will. A created mind, free, turns away from the greatest good toward a lesser one, loves a small thing more than it should and a great thing less. Nothing forces the turn. That is what makes it the will's own. An angel turned first, on this telling, then the first human beings, and from that first turning a kind of inherited disorder flows downstream into every life that follows, a crookedness in the very stock of humanity, which he called original sin. It is why the pears mattered. The theft for its own sake was that turning in miniature, a will in love with its own swerve away from the good.

And so even suffering that no human hand causes, the earthquake, the fever, the failing body, he reads as the weather of a world thrown out of joint, a broken and punished place. The disorder runs that deep. Yet he refuses to end in gloom. He offers an image instead. The universe, he suggests, is like a great painting, and a painting needs its dark patches. A shadow that looks merely ugly when you press your eye against one corner of the canvas is, seen from the proper distance, exactly what the whole composition required. The darkness is part of the beauty of the whole.

This answer was carried forward, and two figures carried it best. The first was a Roman statesman named Boethius, who around the year 524 sat in a prison cell awaiting his execution, fallen from the heights of office to the edge of death. There he wrote a book in which philosophy itself appears to him as a tall and grave woman, come to reason him out of his despair. She tells him that the wicked, far from triumphing, are the most pitiable of all, since their wickedness is already its own punishment, a sickness they carry inside them wherever they go. And she tells him that the turning wheel of fortune was never his to keep, that whatever fortune gives it gives only on loan.

The second was Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, who took Augustine's insight and built it into a vast and almost serene system. Evil needs no maker, he agreed, because it is a falling short, a hole in being rather than a being. And the good power permits the evils it permits only because it can draw some greater good out of them, the way a wise hand allows a small harm for the sake of a larger health. For roughly a thousand years, across the Latin west, this was the answer. Evil is absence. The good made all that is. The shadow belongs to the painting.

It is a powerful answer, and it answers a real question, the question of where evil comes from, how it can be in a world made wholly by a good hand. But notice what it leaves standing. It explains the origin of evil in general, the architecture of the broken world. It does not bend down to the particular cry. The man sitting in the ash of his own ruin does not ask where evil comes from. He asks why this evil, why him, why the child, why now. To that question the doctrine of absence has, in the end, very little to say. Its silence on that point is patient and deep, and it will hold for a long time. But it is a silence, and one day it will demand a different kind of book.

Chapter 04: The Best of All Possible Worlds

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz may have been the last man who knew everything. He was born in Leipzig in 1646, into a Europe still smoking from religious war, and he grew into a mind so wide that no single subject could contain it. He invented the calculus, at the same time as Newton and quite independently, and he designed the notation that mathematicians still use today. He drew up plans for pumps to drain the silver mines of the Harz mountains. He worked out the binary arithmetic of ones and zeros that would one day run every machine that thinks. He served the dukes of Hanover as librarian and counselor and family historian, and he carried on a correspondence with half of learned Europe, writing thousands of letters to scholars he never met. He did his deepest thinking in carriages, jolting between courts and capitals, turning a problem over in his head while the horses ran.

The book that concerns us here grew out of an argument with a dead man's living book. Pierre Bayle was a French Protestant who had fled to Holland to escape persecution, and there he had compiled an enormous dictionary, a sprawling work of scholarship laced with footnotes that quietly dismantled one certainty after another. Bayle wrote with dangerous brilliance about the problem of suffering. He argued that on this one question reason and faith could not be reconciled, that the believer who followed his reason honestly would be driven somewhere the believer did not want to go. The old picture of two kingdoms at war, a good power and an evil power locked in eternal struggle, the picture Augustine had abandoned long before, fit the rough facts of human experience better, Bayle suggested, than the orthodox account of one good God in sole command. And so, he concluded, on this subject the wise believer must simply fall silent, must close the mouth of reason and trust where reason cannot follow. This was a more unsettling position than open unbelief. Bayle did not say there is no God. He said something subtler and harder to answer, that whoever reasons carefully about the suffering of the world will find faith and reason coming apart in his hands, and must let one of them go. A great many readers found this conclusion seductive, and a great many others found it scandalous, and either way it could not be ignored.

Leibniz could not let this stand. For years he had discussed Bayle's articles with Sophie Charlotte, the queen of Prussia, a woman of genuine philosophical appetite, in the gardens of her palace outside Berlin. She would press him with the hardest objections and he would answer, and the conversation ran on through many seasons until her early death. Afterward he gathered what they had said into the one large book he published in his whole lifetime, in 1710. For its title he reached into Greek and built a word that had never existed before, joining the word for God to the word for justice. He called it theodicy, the justification of God, and the word has belonged to the subject ever since. To attempt a theodicy is to attempt what Leibniz attempted, a reasoned case that the world's evil does not convict its maker.

His case begins with a single sweeping thought. God, knowing all things, holds before his mind every possible world. Not merely the world that is, but every complete and consistent way that reality could have been, each one a whole universe entire in itself, differing from the next in the smallest detail or the largest. There are infinitely many of these, an endless gallery of unrealized creations, and God contemplates them all at once. Now God is perfectly good, and a perfectly good chooser cannot choose at random, cannot shrug and take whichever world comes first to hand. He must choose the best. And God is all powerful, so that whatever he chooses to bring into being simply is. Put these three together, the perfect knowledge that surveys every option, the perfect goodness that must prefer the finest, and the perfect power that makes the preference real, and the conclusion follows with the force of arithmetic. The world that exists is the best of all possible worlds.

Leibniz was careful, and his care is often forgotten. He did not say the world is perfect. He said it is the best available, the optimum, which is a very different claim. A perfect world might be one with no shadow in it anywhere, and Leibniz never promised that. He promised only that of all the worlds God might have made, this is the one with the most favorable balance, the richest in being, the fullest in order, the greatest in goodness, that the laws of logic themselves permit. And the heart of his defense lies in that last phrase. For not every good thing can keep company with every other good thing. Some goods, when one tries to hold them together, cancel each other out.

Consider what it would take to make a world where no one ever chooses wrongly. Such a world is possible, but only by removing the freedom to choose at all, and a world of free creatures is a greater thing than a world of puppets that cannot err because they cannot decide. Or consider a world governed by steady laws of nature, where fire warms the hearth and cooks the food and lights the dark. Those same laws mean that fire also burns the hand that strays too near. There can be no flame that comforts but never injures, not because God lacks the strength to arrange it, but because the thing described is not a coherent thing at all. It is a string of words with no possible world behind it. The very heat that does the good is the heat that does the harm, and there is no way to keep the one and refuse the other, any more than one could ask for a hill with no downward slope or a road that leads somewhere without also leading back. And here is the move that does all the work. Even omnipotence faces trade-offs. Not from any weakness, but because some combinations of goods are simply contradictions, and power, however complete, does not extend to nonsense. God can do anything that can be done. He cannot do what cannot be done, for there is no it there to be done.

So the world is a vast package, and the items in the package come bound together, the bright with the dark, in bundles that cannot be unpicked. To keep his accounts in order Leibniz sorted the world's evil into three kinds. The first he called metaphysical evil, and by it he meant nothing more than the plain limitation of being a creature rather than the creator. Anything God makes is finite, bounded, less than infinite, simply because it is not God, and this shortfall is the price of existing at all. The second kind is physical evil, which is suffering, the pain and loss that living things endure. The third is moral evil, which is sin, the wrong that free creatures freely do. The first sort comes with the very fact of creation. The other two God does not will but permits, allowing them into the package only because they are the unavoidable cost of the best whole, the necessary cost of a world worth more, taken all together, than any world that lacked them. A general may foresee that some of his soldiers will fall and still march toward the victory, not wanting their deaths and not causing them by wanting them, yet permitting the battle because the cause is worth its cost. So, in Leibniz's bookkeeping, God permits the suffering and the sin that no better world could be had without, never willing the evil for its own sake, only accepting it as the shadow side of a good that outweighs it.

That is the system, and it is magnificent, and there is an objection that has shadowed it from the start. The whole structure hangs on one assumption, that among all the possible worlds there is a best one for God to choose. But perhaps there is no best. For take any world one might describe, however fine, and a better one seems describable too. Add one more happy life to it. Subtract one fever, one early grave. The improved world is plainly conceivable, and it can be improved again, and again, with no end ever reached, in just the way there is no largest number. Name the largest number there is and one more defeats it. If the worlds run upward like that forever, each surpassed by another, then there is no best world anywhere in the series, and a God who must choose the best is asked to choose what does not exist. The central hinge of the argument snaps. A God facing an endless ladder of ever-better worlds cannot be faulted for failing to stand on the top rung, because there is no top rung to stand on. Whatever world he made, a better one was always possible, and so the existence of a finer conceivable world would prove nothing against him. There would be no failure of goodness in making no best world, because the demand itself would be empty, like asking for the last point on an endless line. And if that is right, then Leibniz has not shown that this world is the best. He has only shown that the very idea of the best may dissolve the moment we look at it closely.

Leibniz's defenders have answers to this, and so did Leibniz, in his way. But the objection has never quite gone away, and it sits beneath the whole grand edifice like a question that refuses to close.

Leibniz himself ended in a kind of quiet. He died in Hanover in 1716, an old man fallen out of favor. His employer, the elector of Hanover, had gone to London to be crowned king of England, and had left his aging philosopher behind, no longer wanted at the new court across the water. When Leibniz died, almost no one came to his funeral. A secretary followed the coffin. The man who had corresponded with all of Europe, who had been welcomed at courts and academies from Hanover to Paris to Rome, went into the ground nearly alone, attended by scarcely more mourners than a poor man would have drawn. The learned societies he had helped to found took little notice of his passing. His great optimism outlived him in the public mind by hardly a generation, and what eventually broke its hold was not, in the end, an argument at all. As the eighteenth century opened, though, the system still stood in its full calm confidence, and educated Europe could rest in the assurance its greatest mind had given it, that whatever is, however dark it may look from inside, is in truth, all things considered, for the best. That confidence had not yet met the thing that would shake it.

Chapter 05: The Morning Lisbon Fell

The argument leaves the study and goes out into the street on a single morning, and the morning is the first of November, 1755. It is All Saints' Day in Lisbon, then one of the richest cities in Europe, a port heavy with gold from across the ocean. The churches are full. Thousands of candles burn for the dead, and the faithful kneel for the morning services. At around twenty minutes to ten the ground begins to move. Three great shocks come over several minutes, and the stone vaults of the crowded churches fall in upon the people gathered beneath them. The candles, knocked over, start fires that will burn for the better part of a week. Those who escape the falling stone run toward the open ground along the river, seeking the one place where nothing can collapse on top of them. There they watch the water draw back from the shore, exposing the mud and the stranded boats, and then return as a wall, a single great wave that climbs the bank and sweeps across the waterfront. The safest ground had become the most exposed. No one ever counted the dead with confidence. Perhaps 30,000 in the city, perhaps 40,000, and some said the toll ran higher still across Portugal and the coast of Morocco. The number cannot be fixed, and a calm mind does not pretend otherwise. What can be said is only that a great city, in the space of a morning, became a field of stone and ash.

Then came the argument the rubble started. The disaster had struck the most devout city on the most sacred day at the most sacred hour, and it had killed the faithful where they knelt, while, as many noticed with bitterness, certain houses of vice along the harbor stood undamaged. The reckoning of the dead obeyed no moral order anyone could read. Voltaire, by then the most famous writer in Europe, read the reports in fury, and within weeks he had written a poem on the disaster of Lisbon, an open attack on the comfortable doctrine that all is well, that this is the best of all possible worlds. He asked what crime, what sin, the small children could have committed, the infants crushed and bleeding on their mothers' breasts. To answer their ruin with the serene claim that everything is for the best, he argued, is not consolation. It is an insult to the dead.

The following summer brought a reply from Rousseau, a long and careful letter in defense of providence. Nature, he wrote, had not gathered 20,000 people into houses of six and seven stories. The scale of the catastrophe was the work of human hands, the crowding of the city, the tall stone walls, and the fatal habit of running back into burning buildings after buried valuables. If the optimist's slogan gives offense, he argued, the fault lies with those who misread it, who take a remark about the whole order of things as a careless promise to each suffering person. The world as a whole might still be good, he held, even where a particular life within it is broken, and the goodness of the design was not his to inspect from where he stood. Faith, for Rousseau, was the thing that made the loss bearable, and he was unwilling to let the cleverness of a poem take it from the grieving. The exchange between the two most famous writers on the continent did something new. It carried the problem of evil out of the seminary and into the newspapers and the drawing rooms, and made it, for the first time in the modern age, a public quarrel.

Voltaire's last word came three years later, in 1759, and it came not as an argument but as a grin. He published a short novel, the tale of a gentle and trusting young man who has been tutored by a philosopher of relentless cheer. Through shipwreck, through war, through the cruelty of the Inquisition, and through the Lisbon earthquake itself, the tutor repeats his lesson, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He repeats it over each fresh ruin, calm and undisturbed, while the world around him gives him every reason to stop. By the end the phrase has worn through. It refutes itself simply by being said one time too many, until the reader cannot hear it without flinching at the gap between the words and the wreckage they describe. Laughter accomplished what the angry poem could not. A reader can argue with a poem, can answer fury with a counterargument and feel the better for it. It is much harder to argue with a joke that has already landed. The novel made the cheerful doctrine ridiculous, and a doctrine that has become ridiculous is very hard to take seriously again.

That is the historical mark Lisbon left. The grand and confident defense of the world, the claim that this is the best arrangement that even infinite wisdom could contrive, never recovered its standing in public. It did not vanish from the libraries. It withdrew from the drawing rooms, where a thing must seem plausible to survive, and after that morning it no longer seemed plausible there. Educated people went on believing in God, in great numbers and with real conviction, but fewer of them would say aloud that the suffering they saw was woven into the finest of all possible designs. The serene system had lost its nerve. And with it gone from the open air, the old question stood in public once more, undefended and plain, the way it had first stood on the ash heap.

Chapter 06: The Posthumous Bombshell

The most dangerous book on the problem of evil ever written in English was published only when its author was safely dead. David Hume composed his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in the 1750s, and then he did a strange thing. He put the manuscript in a drawer and left it there for the better part of 25 years. He took it out only to polish it, sentence by sentence, returning to it across a quarter of a century the way a man returns to a wound he cannot leave alone. He showed it to friends, and his friends, alarmed by what they read, begged him never to print it. He listened to them, and he kept writing, and he did not print it. A man does not labor for 25 years over a book he means to bury. Hume knew exactly what he had made. He had built an argument so quietly destructive that he could neither bring himself to release it nor bring himself to destroy it, and so he kept it close, a thing too dangerous to publish and too good to burn.

He died in the year 1776, of a wasting illness in the abdomen, and he died calmly. This calm was itself a scandal. The pious of Edinburgh had expected the great unbeliever to break at the end, to call out in terror for the God he had spent his life questioning, and instead he joked with his visitors about the excuses he might offer the ferryman of the dead. His serenity unsettled people more than any argument could. A wicked life was supposed to end in a frightened death. His did not. He grew thinner and weaker through that summer, and he stayed cheerful, ordering his affairs with the steady good humor of a man tidying a room before a journey. Before he died he made careful arrangements for the book, the way another man might arrange for a child. He asked his closest friend, the economist Adam Smith, to see it through the press, and Smith, who loved him, gently declined the task. So it fell to Hume's young nephew, and the Dialogues appeared in the year 1779, three years after the death of the man who wrote it, with no publisher's name printed on the title page. No one wished to be the visible hand behind it.

The book is not an essay. It is a conversation among three invented men, set in a garden, overheard and reported by a young listener. Each of the three holds a position, and each is drawn with enough life that we cannot simply reduce him to his thesis. There is Demea, severe and devout, a mystic who holds God so far above the human mind that reason cannot reach him at all. To Demea, to claim that we understand the divine nature is already a kind of insult. There is Cleanthes, the confident modern, who looks at the order of the world, the eye fitted for seeing, the wing fitted for flight, and argues from that order to a designer, a mind like ours but vastly greater, who made the machine. And there is Philo, relaxed and quick and sharp-tongued, the skeptic, whom most readers then and now have taken to be Hume himself, speaking through a mask. Philo spends most of the book in courteous ambush. He has the sharpest tongue in the garden and the gentlest manner, and he uses the manner to deliver the tongue. He agrees warmly with whichever man he is about to undo, praises the position he is about to dismantle, leads his companion forward with every appearance of friendship, and only then, when the ground is prepared, lets the difficulty fall. The drama of the thing lies in watching him work, and a reader who treats the book as a dry treatise misses half of what is happening on the page.

The heart of the book is its treatment of evil, and the scene is remarkable for who builds it. Philo and Demea construct the catalogue of misery together, and they do it almost lovingly. They describe the war that runs through all of living nature, every creature set against some other, the strong preying on the weak and the weak trembling before the strong. They name disease, and the slow defeat of the body. They name the terrors of the mind, the despair and the dread that need no outward cause. Demea joins in eagerly, because for him this very misery is religion's foundation. It is wretchedness that drives people to their knees and toward heaven. He does not see, at first, what his companion is building out of the bricks they are stacking side by side. When at last he does see it, he is appalled, and he leaves. Demea is the only character in the book who walks out of the conversation, and his exit is the quiet hinge of the whole drama.

Philo reminds the company that the old questions attributed to Epicurus remain unanswered, and he names them only as the old questions, without restating them, because everyone in the garden already knows them by heart. But the riddle is not his deepest move, and here the book earns its lasting place. Philo does something more patient and more devastating. He grants, for the sake of argument, that pain might after all be logically consistent with a perfect and loving God. Perhaps there is no flat contradiction. He sets the contradiction aside, and he turns instead to a question about evidence, about inference, about what we are entitled to conclude.

The situation, Philo points out, is this. We are standing in front of the world, this single mixed world of beauty and slaughter, of the nursing mother and the hunting wolf, and we are asked to read off, from the world alone, the character of whatever made it. That is the task the argument from design sets itself. Very well. But from a mixed world, the most you could ever honestly infer is a mixed cause, or an indifferent one. Finite, blended evidence yields a finite, blended conclusion. You cannot climb from a world that is partly good and partly terrible all the way up to a cause that is infinitely and purely good. The arithmetic does not permit it. The believer, Philo observes, does not actually reason this way. The believer arrives already holding the conclusion that the cause is perfect, and then sets about explaining the evidence so that it fits. The goodness is not read off the world. It is brought to the world from somewhere else, settled in advance, and the suffering is then accommodated to it, fitted in, made room for, explained away one case at a time. That is not reasoning from the world. That is reasoning in spite of the world, in the teeth of it. And once the move is seen plainly, it is hard to unsee, because so much of what passes for an answer to suffering has exactly this shape, the conclusion arriving first and the evidence trailing dutifully behind.

Then comes the passage that is Philo's quiet masterpiece, the four circumstances. He identifies four features of the world that between them produce nearly all of its suffering, and his point about each is the same. None of them looks necessary. None of them looks like something a wise and powerful maker could not have done without.

The first is that pain exists at all as a goad. Living things could have been steered by pleasure alone, drawn toward what they need by degrees of delight, the merely useful feeling good and the harmful feeling merely less good. Instead they are driven by agony. The second is that the world runs by general laws, steady and blind, rather than by particular acts of care. The same rain that feeds one valley drowns the next, because the law does not bend for the drowning. A maker willing to intervene, even rarely, could have caught the worst cases as they fell. The third is the frugality of nature, the narrow margin. Every creature is given barely enough power to survive and not a grain more, no reserve, no surplus of strength or wit, so that any small misfortune, a dry season, a turned ankle, tips at once into catastrophe. The fourth is the rough workmanship of the great machine itself. The forces that sustain life constantly overshoot and undershoot. The wind that scatters seed rises into the hurricane. The rain that waters the field swells into the flood. The very organs of the body, so finely made, run to excess and to failure. Each of these, Philo concedes, might have some hidden justification we cannot see. He gives that. But stacked one upon another, the four together make the world look exactly like what we would expect from careless work, or from work done by a power that simply did not care how it came out.

The book ends strangely, and people have argued about its ending for two and a half centuries. In the final part, Philo suddenly bows. After pages of relentless pressure, he turns and grants that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence, and he says it almost gently, as a man conceding a small point to end a long evening. Readers have never agreed on what to make of it. Some call it pure irony, the skeptic dropping a coin in the collection plate on his way out the door. Some call it prudence, the necessary cover for a book this dangerous. And some take it for a real concession, the genuine residue of Hume's own mind, the admission that some intelligence, however remote and however cold, may stand behind the order of things, a cause with no more regard to good than to ill. The text does not settle it, and perhaps it was not meant to.

What is certain is what the Dialogues did to the whole debate. Before this book, the central question had been whether God and evil could logically stand together without contradiction, a question one might answer at a desk with definitions. Hume moved the ground. He set that question aside, granted it for argument, and asked a harder one. What is this world, taken whole, evidence for. What would an honest observer, told nothing in advance, infer about its source from the thing itself. That is a different question, and a more dangerous one, because it cannot be answered by tidying up the words. It can only be answered by looking, and by being willing to say what one sees. The defender of God is no longer asked merely to avoid contradicting himself. He is asked to show that this world, with its slaughter and its frugality and its rough overshooting machinery, is the kind of world a perfect goodness would actually produce, and that is a far steeper thing to show. From that shift, almost everything in the long argument that follows takes its bearing. The riddle had asked whether the words could be made to agree. Hume asked what the world itself was saying, and he left the question standing in the open, unanswered, where it has stood ever since.

Chapter 07: Returning the Ticket

The most devastating statement of the problem of evil is not in a philosophy book. It is a conversation between two brothers in a shabby Russian tavern, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, finished in the year 1880, only months before his death. The two men have grown up apart, and they meet now almost as strangers, sharing a single lunch across a small table. Ivan is the elder, the cold and brilliant intellectual, a man who has reasoned his way to the edge of everything and found the edge no comfort. Alyosha is the younger, a novice monk, gentle, still resting inside his faith. They have no shared childhood to draw upon, no easy warmth to fall back into, and so the talk has nowhere to go but straight to the bottom of things. And Ivan chooses this one unhurried hour, this single lunch in a noisy room, to show his younger brother at last what he has been carrying alone.

The genius of the scene lies first in Ivan's method, in the care with which he narrows the ground before he says a word about God. He will not argue about the suffering of adults. Adults, he says, have eaten the apple. They are compromised, they have done their share of harm, their accounts are too tangled to read, and whatever is done to a grown man can always be set against some dark ledger of what the man himself once did. So Ivan sets the adults aside and restricts the whole of his evidence to children, who have done nothing, who cannot have deserved anything, whose innocence no one can dispute. And he does not invent his examples. He tells Alyosha that he collects them, that he keeps clippings from the newspapers, real cases, set down in plain print by people who had no philosophical point to make.

He gives them to his brother with terrible restraint, one quiet sentence each. There are the educated, cultivated parents who shut their small daughter in the freezing outhouse through a whole winter night, while she prayed in the dark for someone to come. There is the general, master of vast lands, who set his pack of hounds upon a serf boy and ran the child down in front of the boy's own mother. There are the soldiers in the wars who made games of infants, amusements out of the smallest and most helpless of the conquered. Ivan does not elaborate. He does not stage them or dwell on them or reach for our pity, because he does not need to. He names each one and moves on, and the moving on is itself the horror, because it tells us how many more clippings are waiting in the drawer, and how little any single one of them surprised the man who collected them.

Then comes the argument, and here is the central precision, the thing most easily misheard. Ivan is not arguing against the existence of God. He says so plainly. He accepts God, he tells his brother, he accepts him straight out, without reservation. He is not the unbeliever the pious feared, and he will not let his brother mistake him for one. The whole force of what follows depends on this concession being real. What Ivan refuses is something else entirely. He does not accept God's world. He rejects the arrangement, the design, the architecture of the thing, the particular world in which the agony of children has been built in as a load-bearing stone, a part that holds the rest of the structure up.

For he knows the answer he is meant to receive. He has been told, as everyone in his tradition is told, that all of it serves a final harmony. At the end of time, when the last page turns, every tear will be accounted for and explained, every wrong gathered up and made to mean something, and the reconciliation will be so complete that even the mother will stand beside the man who tore her child apart, and embrace him, and cry out with everyone else that the maker of the world was right. And Ivan answers that he does not want that harmony. He does not want it on those terms. He is not even sure he wants the mother to forgive, he says, for what right has she to forgive on behalf of the child who actually suffered. The harmony, he says, is not worth the tears of that one tortured child. The price of admission is set too high. And so, with the whole of his soul, while there is still time, and most respectfully, he hands the ticket back. He returns his entrance ticket. He would rather stay outside the gates with his unanswered suffering than walk in at that cost.

Then he turns the whole weight of it onto his brother, in a question so quiet it is almost gentle. Imagine, he says to Alyosha, that the task fell to you. Imagine you yourself were raising the building of human destiny, a world of final and perfect happiness for all of mankind. And imagine it was necessary, unavoidably necessary, to lay the foundation of that happiness on the unavenged tears of one small creature beating its breast in a dark room. Would you agree to be the architect of such a world on such a foundation. Would you consent. And Alyosha, the believer, the monk, the one whose whole life is built upon the very promise Ivan is refusing, answers softly that he would not. No, he says quietly. He would not consent.

It is worth holding still on what has just happened across that table. The believer has conceded the moral point. The faithful brother, given the cleanest possible case, will not buy the harmony at the price of the child either. Dostoevsky, a devout Christian, a man who had stood before a firing squad and kept his faith through prison and exile, has written here the strongest attack on his own religion that anyone has ever penned. He has placed it in the mouth of his coldest character, and he has let his holiest character agree, and in the moment he offers no rebuttal at all. Alyosha's only immediate reply is wordless. He rises and crosses to his brother and kisses him. It is not an argument. It is an echo of an answer rather than an answer, a gesture set down where a refutation should be.

Dostoevsky knew this. He did not mean the kiss to close the matter. He intended the entire remaining length of the novel to be the reply, the long indirect answer that no single speech could give. The teaching of the elder Zosima, his gospel of active love, of going out and laboring in the world rather than reasoning about it from a chair. The lives of the brothers themselves as they are tested and broken and remade. All of that was to be the response, a life set against a syllogism, a way of living offered where a proof had been demanded. And it is one of the most honest facts in the history of this whole question that Dostoevsky worried, to the very end, that he had failed. He feared that his answer, spread across hundreds of pages of ordinary human struggle, was weaker than the attack he had compressed into a single afternoon. An attack can be perfect in an hour. A reply of this kind cannot be perfected at all, only lived, slowly and imperfectly, and offered without the certainty that it has answered anything. The objection was sharp and total and could be held entire in the mind. The reply could only be slow, and could never quite be held.

Consider, finally, what Ivan adds to a tradition already centuries deep. Before him, the great challenge had nearly always been a challenge to belief, a question of whether God and suffering could stand together without contradiction, a matter to be settled by reason at a desk. Ivan moves the ground entirely. His refusal is not logical but moral. He grants, for the sake of the thing, that there may be a justification, that the books may indeed balance in the end, that the harmony may be real. And he says that even so, even if the reason exists, accepting it might itself be a wrong. To look at the tortured child and agree to the bargain that uses her, to sign the ledger and walk through the gate into the promised happiness, could be its own kind of corruption, a failure of the very decency the bargain was meant to honor. The harmony does not merely cost too much. It asks the one who accepts it to become a little less human in the accepting, to harden the place in himself that should have refused. And so the refusal is not a tantrum and not a despair. There is a dignity in it, in standing outside the gates with empty hands and saying no. And that thought, the idea that a person of conscience might decline a justification for evil rather than accept it, was so far ahead of its hour that philosophy would need the better part of a century to circle back and find it waiting.

Chapter 08: After Auschwitz

In 1984, in the old German university town of Tubingen, an old man rose to accept a prize and to speak. Hans Jonas had left Germany in 1933, when the Nazis came to power, and he had left with a vow. He would set foot in that country again only as a soldier in the army that conquered it, and not otherwise. He kept the vow. He returned in uniform, fighting in a Jewish brigade of the British army, and only then. His mother had not left. She had been murdered at Auschwitz. The prize he stood up to receive was named for Leopold Lucas, a rabbi and a scholar who had died in the camp at Theresienstadt. Every fact in that room pressed on the same point. The German town, the rabbi's name, the dead mother, all of it bore down on the single question the old philosopher had chosen to speak about, the concept of God after Auschwitz.

He did not come with a proof. He came with what he called a piece of frankly speculative theology, a story he offered and did not claim to have established, a thing held out with open hands. And the story turned the whole tradition inside out. The old picture had bound three things tightly together, that God is wholly good, that God is real, and that God is all-powerful. Faced with the camps, Jonas said, one of the three has to be let go. Not the goodness. Not the reality. What has to be surrendered is the power.

His picture ran like this. In making a world and giving it genuine freedom, God did not hold something back in reserve. God gave the world over entirely, emptied himself into time, and let the world fall into its own hands. After that act there is no rescuing hand above the world, because God kept none. God now suffers along with creation rather than standing untouched above it. God becomes alongside what happens, changed by it, waiting on it. He hopes in us rather than commanding us. And so the answer to why the victims were not saved is not that their suffering was permitted for some hidden good. The answer is that God could not save them, having already given away the power to intervene. It is the reverse of every classical move. It does not explain why a good and mighty God would allow such a thing. It removes the might, and lets the question dissolve for want of the attribute that posed it.

Jonas stood at one point on a wider spectrum of response. Richard Rubenstein, writing in the 1960s, had reached the harder conclusion that after the camps the God who acts in history could no longer be believed in at all. Eliezer Berkovits answered from inside the faith, holding that the believer may still speak of the hiding of God's face, and that a world containing real human freedom was always going to carry this cost, the price the camps had simply revealed at its full and terrible scale. Between Rubenstein's despair and Berkovits's continuity, between letting the old God go and keeping him unchanged, Jonas chose a third path. He chose revision. He would keep God, and alter him.

He was not alone in the shape of that alteration. A whole school of twentieth century thought, the strand called process theology, descending from the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, had already reimagined God along similar lines. On that account God was never the almighty kind of power to begin with. God works by persuasion rather than command, a gentle pressure threaded through every happening, present in all of it and yet guaranteeing none of it. Such a God lures the world toward the good without ever forcing it there, and so cannot be charged with the outcomes, because the outcomes were never his to dictate. Jonas reached by way of a vow and a murdered mother a place that others had reached by way of metaphysics, and found them already standing there.

It is worth sitting with what this family of answers costs and what it gives. The gift is real. A God who could not help cannot be blamed. The old accusation, that a being both able and good would surely have acted, loses its grip, because the ability is gone and only the goodness remains. The suffering of the world is no longer a charge laid against the divine character. It is something the divine shares. But the same stroke that lifts the blame removes something else, quietly, in the same motion. A God who cannot intervene cannot be asked to. There is no point in praying for rescue to a power that has handed away the power to rescue. What is left is not a deliverer but a companion, one who suffers beside us and waits with us and cannot lift the weight, who can be joined in the dark but never called upon to end it.

And so the deepest question is left hanging, and Jonas knew it was. He had set out to save God from the wreckage of the twentieth century, and to do it he had taken from God the very strength the tradition had always meant by the word. The being who remains is good, and present, and suffering, and bound. Whether that being is still the God of Abraham and of Job, recognizable under the changes, or whether this is a long and tender farewell to that God, spoken in his own language and using his own name, is exactly what the lecture did not decide. The old philosopher offered his story, called it a guess and no more, and let the question stand unanswered in the Tubingen air, where it has gone on standing.

Chapter 09: Three Propositions

In the year 1955, in a British philosophy journal called Mind, an Australian philosopher named John Mackie published a short paper with a plain title. He called it Evil and Omnipotence. And in it he advanced a claim sharper and colder than anything the old skeptics had ventured. They had said that belief in a good and powerful God, set beside the suffering of the world, was unsupported, or unproven, or hard to square with the facts of the world. Mackie said something stronger. He said it was positively irrational. Not merely that the believer lacked good reasons, but that the believer held, at the same time and with equal conviction, beliefs that could not all be true together, beliefs that contradicted one another. The charge was no longer that faith stood on weak ground. The charge was that faith stood on no ground at all, because the ground was self-defeating.

The machinery of the charge is simple, and its simplicity is the point. Take three statements. God is all powerful. God is wholly good. Evil exists. The believer affirms all three. Mackie's claim was that these three form what logicians call an inconsistent set. They cannot all be true. To hold them together is to hold something with the shape of a plain contradiction, like insisting that a single figure on the page is a perfect circle, drawn entirely out of straight lines, and lying in full view. You may say each phrase aloud, but the thing the phrases describe cannot exist.

Now a careful reader will object that the contradiction is not yet strict. From all powerful, wholly good, and evil exists, no formal collision follows until something connects them. Mackie knew this, and he supplied the connection. He added two further principles, which he took to be not controversial but obvious, the quiet assumptions any believer already shares. The first is that a good being eliminates evil as far as it can. That is simply what we mean by goodness. The second is that there are no limits to what an all powerful being can do. That is simply what we mean by power. Grant those two plain principles, and the set snaps shut. A wholly good being would want to abolish every evil. An all powerful being could. So if such a being existed, evil would not. And yet it does.

From this, Mackie drew his diagnosis, and the diagnosis was the most wounding part. Faced with the closed set, the believer cannot keep all three propositions standing. One of them must give way. Something must be quietly dropped. And what the theologian does, Mackie charged, is equivocate. When the pressure is on, one proposition is softened, the goodness redefined, or the power hedged, just enough to relieve the contradiction. Then, when the pressure passes, the full strong proposition is restored, and the believer goes on affirming everything at once. Theology survives, Mackie said, by this silent weakening and restoring, holding the strong claim in worship and the weak claim in argument, and never letting the two meet in the same room.

He then turned to the proposed escapes, the ways thinkers had tried to keep all three. He worked through them in order, a few sentences each, and dismissed them one by one, like a man clearing a table. Consider first the claim that good cannot exist without evil as its necessary counterpart, that we could not know light except against dark, nor health except against the memory of pain. Mackie answered that this makes God subject to a logical constraint the believer elsewhere denies, for it says there is something even omnipotence cannot manage. And even granting it, a faint shadow would do the work. A single trace of evil would furnish all the contrast goodness could ever require. It does not explain this abundance, this ocean of it.

Consider next the claim that evil is a necessary means to greater good, the surgeon's cut that heals. Mackie answered that means belong to the finite. We use means because we are weak, because we cannot reach the end directly and must go the long way around. An all powerful being has no long way around. It reaches every end at once, by simple will, and so needs no painful instrument to arrive there. Consider next the old aesthetic line, that a universe containing some evil is, taken as a whole, richer and better than a bland universe with none, the discord that deepens the music. Mackie allowed that this might, at most, justify certain evils of a certain kind. It cannot reach down to license any particular cruelty inflicted on any particular child. The whole may be praised, but the wound is not thereby answered.

He saved the strongest for last, because he judged it the strongest, the appeal to human freedom. Evil, on this view, flows from the free choices of created beings, and freedom is so great a good that a world containing it, and the wrong it permits, is better than a world of puppets who cannot sin because they cannot choose. Here Mackie pressed the objection on which everything afterward would turn, and it deserves to be stated exactly. If it is logically possible for a person to choose rightly on one occasion, then it is logically possible for that same person to choose rightly on every occasion. There is no contradiction in a free being who always, freely, does the good. And if that is possible, an all powerful God could have created beings of exactly that kind, free and yet faultless, choosing well at every turn and never once choosing harm. That God did not make such beings, that he made us instead, convicts him. Either he could not, and is not all powerful, or he would not, and is not wholly good. The freedom defense, Mackie concluded, does not survive its own logic.

He closed with a flourish, a puzzle he set against omnipotence itself, to show how unstable the idea is even on its own. Can an all powerful being make rules that then bind him, laws he cannot afterward break. Can he make a thing he cannot control, a creature beyond his own power to govern. Consider either answer. If he cannot make such rules or such beings, there is already something he cannot do, and his power has a ceiling. If he can make them, then once they exist there is something he cannot do, namely break the rule or master the creature, and again the power has a ceiling. Whichever way the question falls, omnipotence leaks away somewhere. The word that was supposed to name a limitless power turns out to describe a power that surrenders itself at the edges, and a believer who has not felt the strangeness of this has not looked at the word closely enough.

So the matter stood, and the standing of it was new. The suffering of the world had unsettled faith for as long as there had been faith, in poetry, in scripture, in the cry of the afflicted and the long labors of the theologians. But now, for the first time, the trouble was set down as a formal charge of contradiction, stripped of all feeling, printed in the cool pages of a technical journal, and laid before philosophy as a thing to be proved or disproved. It asked for no consolation. It offered none. It demanded only one thing, a demonstration that the three propositions could after all stand together without collapse, a proof of bare logical consistency, nothing more and nothing less. And the reply, when at last it came, would meet the charge on precisely this ground. It would concede nothing whatever about the weight of suffering, and everything about the rules of logic.

Chapter 10: The Free Will Defense

The answer to the most formidable charge ever laid against belief in God came from an unlikely quarter. It came from a tall, plainspoken philosopher of Dutch descent, raised among Calvinists in Michigan, a man who carried the unembarrassed piety of his childhood into rooms where piety had become a kind of bad manners. When Alvin Plantinga entered the field in the late 1950s, serious philosophy of religion had all but vanished from respectable departments, and to work on such questions was to mark yourself as behind the times. By the time he was done, no one could say that anymore.

He was born in 1932, the son of a philosophy professor, so the trade ran in the family. He studied at Calvin College, the small Christian school in Grand Rapids, and after years elsewhere he returned to teach there for nearly two decades before moving on to Notre Dame. He was a strange and bracing figure for his moment, a man who combined absolute technical rigor, the cold machinery of formal logic handled without a single loose joint, with a faith he never apologized for and never softened. He did not treat his belief as an embarrassment to be smuggled past his colleagues. He treated it as a position to be defended with every tool the discipline owned, and then he picked up the tools.

To see what he did, we need one distinction, and the whole argument turns on it. There is a difference between a theodicy and a defense. A theodicy is the grander, riskier thing. It claims to tell us God's actual reasons for permitting the suffering of the world, to state the real purpose behind the cancer ward and the drowned village. That is an enormous claim, and most who make it sooner or later overreach. A defense asks for far less. It claims only to describe a possible state of affairs, a single coherent story, in which God and evil exist together. The story need not be true. It need not even be likely. It need only be possible, internally consistent, a way things conceivably could be.

Why should so modest a thing matter. It matters because of the exact shape of the charge it answers. The accusation in its strictest form was not that suffering makes God unlikely. It was that an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God and the existence of evil cannot both be true at once, that holding all three together is to believe what no arrangement of reality could make true. The claim was contradiction, flat and total. And against a charge of contradiction, mere possibility is a complete acquittal. Picture a courtroom. The prosecutor does not say the accused probably did it. The prosecutor says no innocent account of the evidence could possibly exist, that guilt is the only story the facts will bear. To answer that, the defense need not prove what really happened on the night in question. It need only exhibit one innocent account that hangs together. If even one is possible, the claim of impossibility falls. Plantinga, with the modesty that is really a form of precision, offered exactly that and nothing more. A defense, not a theodicy.

Now the machinery, which sounds forbidding and is not. Philosophers speak of possible worlds, and the phrase can be made simple. A possible world is just a complete way everything could have gone, the whole of reality specified down to the last detail, every fact settled, nothing left open. The actual world is one such way, the one that obtained. But there are countless others, ways things might have run instead, each one entire and consistent within itself. The device is only a tool for making talk of possibility exact, for replacing the vague could have with something we can reason about carefully. Think of it as the difference between gesturing at the weather and reading a finished map. When we say a thing is possible, we are saying there is at least one such complete way, one map among the many, on which it comes out true. When we say a thing is impossible, we are saying no map shows it anywhere, that it appears in none of the ways things could go. The whole argument lives in that quiet difference, between what some world contains and what no world could.

Here was the assumption almost everyone shared, the critic included. If God is all-powerful, then God could bring about any possible world he pleased. Among all those complete ways things might go, surely the maker of everything could simply select the best and make it actual. Plantinga's central discovery was that this assumption is false, and false for a deep reason, if creatures are genuinely free. Consider what freedom means. If a choice is truly free, then what the creature does with it is up to the creature, and not up to anyone else, not even God. That is simply what the word free contains. God can create the chooser. God can arrange the whole situation around the choice, the circumstances, the options, the moment. But God cannot also reach in and settle which way the free choice falls, because if he settles it, it was never free. The outcome belongs to the creature, by definition.

And from this a startling result follows. Whole classes of possible worlds turn out to be worlds God cannot bring about. Not for any lack of power. There is no power that could do it. The lovely worlds, the ones where every free person, in every situation, always freely chooses the good, those worlds may simply lie beyond God's reach, because their content depends on free choices that are not his to make. God can offer the situation. He cannot guarantee the answer. The description of such a world is perfectly coherent, but whether it can be realized depends on what free creatures would do, and that hangs on them.

Then comes the deeper twist, and it is worth taking slowly. It is possible, Plantinga argued, merely possible, that every free person who could ever exist suffers from a kind of flaw, a crooked streak running through them across all the worlds where they might be made. Suppose this held. Then for any such person, whatever world God created containing that person with real freedom, that person would go wrong at least once. Not in every choice. Just somewhere, at some point, in some world, freely. If that grim possibility is true of everyone God might create, then even omnipotence is caught. God cannot get free creatures without getting some evil along with them, because the only free creatures available are ones who would, somewhere, freely fall. And that single possibility, never asserted as a fact, never claimed to describe our actual situation, is enough. It is enough to break the alleged contradiction. The critic had said a world of free beings who never go wrong was something an all-powerful God could simply have made. Such beings are describable, certainly. But describable is not the same as creatable. Whether the description can be made true depends on free choices, and those are choices no one, not even God, can make on the chooser's behalf.

The reception of this argument is the real historical drama, and it has an ending of a kind philosophy almost never provides. The critic whose challenge had set the terms lived to read the reply. In his final book, published in 1982, he granted the point. He wrote that the problem of evil does not, after all, show the central doctrines of theism to be logically inconsistent with one another. That is a remarkable sentence to find under the name of the man who had pressed the contradiction hardest. It is one of the rare moments in the history of the subject when an argument is widely judged to have closed a dispute. The rough consensus since, shared even by most philosophers who do not believe in God at all, is that the strictly logical version of the problem has been answered. The charge of plain contradiction has been withdrawn.

But honesty requires a careful ledger of what was not answered, and it is a long ledger. Begin with natural evil. The free will defense speaks to the harms that flow from human choices, the cruelty, the betrayal, the violence of person against person. It says nothing obvious about the earthquake, the cancer, the flood, the long agonies of disease, none of which issues from any human will at all. To this Plantinga offered a reply that was famously, almost startlingly, minimal. It is possible, he suggested, that such evils trace to the free actions of nonhuman spirits, beings other than ourselves choosing wrongly. He needed the suggestion only to be possible, and within the strict logic of his project it qualifies. But this is plainly the spot where the defense is running on fumes. The argument that had moved with such elegance through human freedom arrives at the earthquake and offers something most readers cannot take seriously as anything but a placeholder. It marks the visible edge of what the method can do.

And there is a second and graver limit, which is the narrowness of the victory itself. To prove that no contradiction exists is not to make the suffering make sense. An acquittal is not an explanation. Showing that God and evil can coexist without logical absurdity leaves entirely untouched the question of why this particular world, with this particular weight of agony, should be the one a perfect goodness produced. The defense was never meant to answer that. It answered only the charge it was built to answer, and the man who built it knew the difference exactly.

Two late notes round out the picture. In a paper of 2004, Plantinga stepped past his own long-held caution and sketched, for once, a genuine theodicy rather than a mere defense. He reached for an old and beautiful idea, the thought that the most valuable worlds of all are the ones that contain rescue, the entering of God into the world and the costly redemption of it. But a world that contains rescue must contain something to be rescued from. If the greatest goods require a fall to be lifted out of, then the best worlds are not the unblemished ones. The best worlds contain evil, because they contain the overcoming of it. This is the idea the medieval church dared to express in a hymn that called the first sin a happy fault, a fault fortunate in what it made possible. It is the boldest move in the whole tradition, and Plantinga, near the end, was willing to make it.

The second note is briefer, a single nod toward a different camp. Some thinkers, the open theists, accept the free will defense but push it further than Plantinga would. They hold that free choices cannot be known in advance at all, not even by God, because there is simply nothing there to be known until the choice is made. Where Plantinga traded away only God's control over free outcomes, keeping intact God's knowledge of them, they trade away the foreknowledge itself. It is a steeper price, paid to protect the same freedom.

So we are left with a strange and exact state of play, the one the defense created and then handed forward. The logical charge has been withdrawn. The cleanest, most ambitious form of the objection, the claim that belief in God is not merely unlikely but flatly incoherent, no longer commands the field. And yet the suffering itself stands precisely where it always stood, undiminished, unexplained, every bit as heavy on the ash heap as before any of this began. Nothing about the drowned village has been made better by proving that no contradiction was committed in permitting it. The argument that follows knows this, and so it changes the question. It stops asking whether God and evil can possibly coexist, a question now widely thought to be settled, and begins asking something harder. It asks whether this much evil, of this kind, spread in this pattern across the innocent and the guilty alike, counts as evidence against God, evidence that need not prove contradiction to do its work. That is a different fight, and a far harder one, and it is the fight the rest of the long argument will be.

Chapter 11: The Vale of Soul-Making

The defense had won an acquittal, and an acquittal was not enough for everyone. Showing that God and evil could coexist without contradiction left the suffering itself unexplained, and one English philosopher of religion wanted the explanation. John Hick did not want to prove only that the books might balance. He wanted to tell the story behind the figures, an actual account of why a loving God would make a world shaped like this one, with this much pain in it and this little obvious reason. In 1966 he published that account in a book called Evil and the God of Love, and it became the most influential theodicy since the medievals, the one that everyone afterward had to answer.

He was born in 1922. As a young law student he underwent a sudden and intense Christian conversion, the kind that rearranges a life from the inside in a matter of days, and it sent him out of law and toward the questions he would spend the rest of his years on. When the Second World War came he refused to fight. He served instead with an ambulance unit, carrying the wounded through the very conditions that pose the problem he would later try to answer. His was a long career, and a controversial one, because his views kept widening as he aged. He moved at last toward a generous religious pluralism, a sense that the great faiths were many windows onto one reality, and that openness nearly cost him his standing as a minister.

His first move was to draw a map, and the map organizes everything that follows. Hick argued that Christian thought had carried two rival pictures of evil inside it all along, two different stories about what had gone wrong with the world. The first he traced through Augustine. On that picture humanity was created perfect and then fell by its own free choice, and evil entered as catastrophe and punishment, the wrecking of something that had once been whole. It is the story of a ruined estate, a great house brought down from a height it once occupied. The second picture Hick found only in hints, in the writings of an early church father named Irenaeus, who wrote in the second century. This second story put growth at its center, and Hick took it up and made it his own.

On this growth-centered view, humanity was never perfect to begin with. We were not made finished and then broken. We were made unfinished, immature, standing at the beginning of a long process rather than after the end of one. We were raw material for persons, the rough first version of a creature meant to become something more. And the world, on this telling, is not a paradise that fell into ruin. It is a workshop. It is an environment built on purpose to be hard, an arrangement of difficulty and risk deliberately suited to the slow growing of souls. The point was never to be safe. The point was to be made.

Two ideas carry the weight of the theodicy, and the first is what Hick called epistemic distance, his name for the studied ambiguity of the world. Imagine a God who stood plainly present, unmistakable, filling the sky so that no one could look up without seeing him. Such a God would compel acknowledgment the way the noon sun compels squinting. No one chooses to believe in the sun. And love that is forced from a creature in that way is not love at all, only a reflex, the helpless response of a thing that had no room to do otherwise. So God creates at a distance instead. He makes a world that can be read honestly in either direction, as shot through with the divine or as containing nothing of the kind, a world whose evidence does not settle the matter. The ambiguity is the gift. It leaves space for a person to come freely to faith, by a movement that is genuinely the person's own, because nothing in the world cornered them into it.

The second idea is soul-making itself, and it begins from a quiet observation about which virtues we most admire. Consider courage, compassion, patience, forgiveness, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for another. These are the dispositions we honor above all others, and every one of them is logically impossible in a world without danger and suffering and real loss. Courage cannot exist where nothing threatens. There is no bravery in a place that is perfectly safe, because there is nothing to be brave about. Compassion cannot exist where no one hurts, because there is no pain to be moved by. A world that was nothing but a painless pleasure garden would be a moral nursery, a place where no one ever had occasion to grow up, fit for the keeping of pets rather than the making of persons. And a virtue earned through struggle, Hick held, is worth more than the same disposition installed effortlessly at the start, the difference between a kindness won against the grain of one's nature and a kindness simply built in at the factory. So a loving God, precisely because loving, furnishes a dangerous world, because only a dangerous world can grow the souls worth growing.

Hick took the phrase that carries this idea from a letter, written long before there was any theology built around it. The poet John Keats, in a long letter to his brother and sister-in-law, set himself against the old familiar description of the world as a valley of tears, and proposed another in its place. Call the world instead, he said, the vale of soul-making, the place where a raw intelligence is schooled by hardship into a self that is its own. It was an offhand thought in a private letter, a poet musing about pain to his family. Hick lifted those few words out of it and built a whole theology on them.

Then come the costs, and Hick was honest about every one. The whole theodicy needs the process to succeed. It needs the souls to be finished, to actually arrive at the persons they were the raw material for. But most souls leave this world conspicuously unfinished, broken off mid-sentence, nowhere near completed, and so the logic forced Hick somewhere the tradition does not usually go. He embraced a continuation of the work beyond death, and beyond that, the eventual completion of every soul without exception, a universal salvation in which no one is finally lost and the workshop loses no piece it began. That doctrine sits well outside the traditional mainstream, and Hick paid that price knowingly, because the alternative was a process that fails for most of those it was meant to perfect.

And there is a harder residue, which he admitted in his own pages. Some suffering does seem to build a soul. But much suffering visibly destroys one. There is the pain that crushes rather than teaches, that leaves a person smaller and not larger. There is the dementia that slowly unmakes a person, erasing the very self the process was supposed to be forming. There is the child who dies before any lesson could possibly be the point, gone before the curriculum could begin. Pain arrives in amounts and in distributions that look nothing like a course of instruction, scattered without proportion across the deserving and the undeserving, far too much of it landing where it can teach no one anything. Some suffering builds souls. Much of it plainly wrecks them, and Hick did not pretend otherwise.

At that cliff edge his theodicy made its final appeal, and the appeal was to mystery. Perhaps, he suggested, the very randomness of suffering is part of the design. A world where pain fell justly, neatly proportioned to need, would be a world whose moral structure was legible on its face, and that legibility would undo the ambiguity the whole scheme depends on. So the senselessness might itself be in service of the world's honest uncertainty, the excess and the unfairness part of what keeps the world readable in either direction. It is a delicate move, and it carries the argument as far as the argument can go. But it is worth noticing what has happened in it. A theodicy that set out to give God's reasons has ended by appealing to what we cannot see, to a purpose hidden behind the very disorder that seemed to count against it. And an argument that ends there has quietly begun to change into something else. It is no longer entirely an argument about God's reasons. It is becoming an argument about our eyesight, about the limits of what a creature can make out from where it stands. The next movement of the long debate would take that thought, the one Hick reached almost in passing at the edge of his own theodicy, and build its whole foundation on it.

Chapter 12: The Fawn in the Forest

Consider a single death that no one will ever record. Somewhere in a distant forest, lightning strikes a dead tree, and the dry wood takes the flame at once. The fire spreads through the underbrush, low and quick, and a fawn caught in its path cannot run clear. It is badly burned. It does not die in the merciful instant we might hope for. It lies in the scorched grass for several days, terribly hurt, in an agony that has no audience and no end in sight, until at last death comes and relieves it. No human being ever passes that way. No one learns of it, then or after. No lesson is drawn, no soul is shaped, no courage tested, no freedom exercised, no witness changed by the sight. The suffering simply happens, complete in itself, and then even its memory is gone, dissolved back into a world that never noticed.

That fawn belongs to William Rowe, who set it loose into the argument in 1979, and something about the man is worth knowing before we follow the case he built around it. He was born in 1931, and he came to religion as a teenager, a convert so ardent that he trained for the ministry, fully intending to give his life to it. Then his faith quietly dissolved under examination, not torn away by some shock but worn down by his own honest looking, until one day it was simply no longer there. He spent his career at Purdue University, and he earned across decades a reputation as perhaps the most courteous atheist in American philosophy. He even gave his own position a name. He called it friendly atheism, by which he meant the view that God does not exist, held together with the frank admission that an intelligent, fully informed person could weigh the same evidence and rationally believe otherwise. This is rarer than it sounds. Most people who have concluded that they are right find it hard to grant that those who disagree are anything but careless or dishonest. Rowe granted exactly that. He thought the believer mistaken, and he thought the believer reasonable, and he saw no contradiction in holding both. Much of the unusual civility of the whole modern debate descends from that small, generous concession.

His paper of 1979 appeared in a journal called the American Philosophical Quarterly, and it became the most cited paper in the field's recent history. The argument it carries is short, and its bones can be laid out plainly. It has two premises. The first is that there exist instances of intense suffering which an all-powerful being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good, and without having to permit some evil equally bad or worse. The second is that a wholly good being would prevent any suffering it could, unless prevented from doing so by exactly that kind of cost. From these two the conclusion follows directly. There is no all-powerful, wholly good being.

The second premise, Rowe was the first to point out, is barely disputable. It does not smuggle in any controversial doctrine. It only says, in careful words, what goodness already means, that a good being does not stand by while it could spare needless agony at no cost to anything that matters. We do not praise as good a person who lets a child suffer for nothing when a word or a step would have stopped it. Goodness, whatever else it is, includes that much. So the second premise is nearly free. Almost everything, then, hangs on the first premise, the claim that some suffering really is needless, that it buys nothing. And here the chapter must move slowly, because everything to come will press on this exact joint. How could anyone know that any particular suffering is genuinely pointless. We cannot read the books of heaven. A justifying reason might exist, real and sufficient, that we have simply failed to see, lying just past the edge of what we are able to know. This is the gap the believer will lean on, and Rowe knew it was there before any believer pointed it out.

Rowe's answer is not a proof, and he never pretended it was. It is an inference, the ordinary inductive kind, the kind that runs from evidence to a likely conclusion rather than from premises to an airtight one. Consider the fawn again. We cannot demonstrate that no justifying good exists, hidden somewhere beyond our sight. But we have looked. Honest people have searched these cases for centuries, holding up every good they could name, and the goods we know of all fail to fit. None of them requires that particular fawn to burn in that empty forest. And the longer and harder humanity looks, across the staggering number of such cases on record, the more reasonable it becomes to conclude that at least some of them, perhaps only one, are exactly what they appear to be. The step is from we can find no justifying reason, after real and careful search, to probably, in at least one case, there is none. That is a humble inference, and we make its like every day. It is how we conclude that the roof does not leak. We have not examined every shingle. We have watched the ceiling through a season of hard rain, looked where the water would have to show if it were getting in, and found nothing, and that is enough. The conclusion could still be wrong, of course. An inference of this kind never promises certainty. It promises only that, given what we have seen and how hard we have looked, one belief is now far more reasonable than its rival. Rowe asked for nothing stronger than that, and he thought the weight of the world's suffering supplied it.

Later Rowe set a second case beside the fawn, and this one was real, drawn with great restraint from the Michigan newspapers of 1986. A small girl was beaten to death by her mother's companion on the first day of that year. He gave it one sentence, no more, and no detail beyond what the argument required. He set it there for a reason. The fawn is a case of natural evil, suffering with no human hand behind it, while the murdered child is a case of moral evil, suffering that a person chose to inflict. Placing the two together means that no single theodicy can quietly cover both, that whatever answer is offered must reach the fire and the fist alike. An explanation that leans on human freedom does nothing for the fawn, since no one chose the lightning. An explanation that leans on the blind workings of nature does nothing for the child, since a person chose every blow. The two cases together close that escape, forcing any reply to account for suffering of both kinds at once. Rowe was not alone in this line of attack. In the same years Michael Tooley was building evidential arguments of his own, and the two are remembered together as the makers of this turn.

And it is a turn, a real one, away from the kind of objection that had gone before. The earlier and most famous attack had sought a flat contradiction, and that charge had met its answer in the free will defense. Rowe sought no contradiction at all. He conceded, freely, that the two are logically consistent, that no strict absurdity lies in holding them together. His claim was of a wholly different sort. It was a claim about evidence and probability. The suffering of the world, he argued, does not disprove God. It makes God's existence unlikely, the way a defendant's fingerprints on the weapon make innocence unlikely without strictly ruling it out.

That shift changes what counts as a reply. Against the older charge, possibility was a full acquittal, and the defense that supplied it was the right tool for the job. Against this one, possibility is no longer an acquittal at all. A merely possible justification, a reason that for all we know might exist, does nothing to move a probability that has been built up from a vast and patient record of looking. The fingerprints are still on the weapon. To be told that some innocent explanation is conceivable does not lift them off. A juror who has seen the prints, the motive, and the lie under oath is not talked out of a verdict by the bare reminder that conceivably, somehow, an innocent story could be told. The story would have to be shown to be likely, not merely shown to be possible, and that is a far heavier thing to carry. The instrument that had ended the old argument was simply the wrong instrument for the new one, and much of what follows is the long search for a better one.

It belongs to Rowe's character, and so to this chapter, that he drew the map of escape routes himself, including the one most damaging to his own conclusion. He saw clearly that a believer could take his argument and run it backward. Where Rowe reasoned from the apparent pointlessness of the fawn's suffering to the probable absence of God, the believer could begin from the other end, holding that since God exists, a justifying good must exist for every evil, the fawn's included, whether any human being ever sees it or not. The two arguments share their materials and disagree only on which end is more certain. Rowe named this reversal after the philosopher G E Moore, who had once answered the skeptics doubting the outside world not by argument but by holding up his own hand, taking the plain thing he was surer of and letting it overrule the clever doubt. Whether that reversal is wisdom or evasion depends on everything else a person already believes, on whether the existence of God is, for them, the held-up hand or the thing in doubt.

Rowe would not decide that question for anyone, and that restraint is the whole tenor of the man. So the chapter ends where he left it, on the fawn. He chose that case with deliberate care, precisely because no human interest touches it anywhere. No freedom is at stake in it, no growth, no community, no soul being slowly made. The grander answers that comfort us elsewhere have nothing to grip here. There is no person being refined by the ordeal, no lesson waiting to be carried home, no bond of love deepened by shared hardship, because there is no one present to refine, to learn, or to love. It is a piece of suffering addressed to no one, complete in a forest no one walks through, asking nothing and teaching nothing. And the question he placed beside it he placed almost tenderly. Looking at that, at the fawn in the grass and the slow days it lay there before the fire's work was finished, what exactly are we entitled to conclude.

Chapter 13: The Hypothesis of Indifference

Ten years after the fawn, a young philosopher named Paul Draper changed the question again. His paper appeared in 1989, in the journal Nous, under a title so mild it could have passed unread, Pain and Pleasure, an Evidential Problem for Theists. Rowe had argued that some particular suffering probably lacks any justifying reason, and had built his case around particular instances of horror. Draper made no claim about any single case at all. He did not ask whether this or that horror could be excused. He proposed a contest between explanations instead, and let the whole of the evidence decide it.

The contest is simple to state. Take one body of evidence, the way pain and pleasure are actually distributed among living things, every nerve that has ever fired in every animal that has ever lived. Now set against this evidence two rival hypotheses. The first is ordinary theism, the claim that the world is governed by an all-powerful, perfectly good person. The second Draper called the hypothesis of indifference, the bare proposal that whatever else is true, neither the nature nor the condition of living things results from any benevolent or malevolent action by anything supernatural. This is not quite the denial of God. It is only a universe that was not aiming at anyone's welfare, that meant nobody well and nobody ill, that simply produced what it produced. Then ask the question a scientist asks of two theories. On which hypothesis is the actual evidence less surprising. The move is subtle, and easy to underestimate. The believer is no longer asked to defend God against a particular horror, to find the reason behind one particular case. He is asked only to say which of two pictures the world looks more like, and that is a question he cannot answer simply by pleading ignorance about any single case.

And the evidence has a shape. Pain and pleasure track biology, not biography. They attach to survival and reproduction with a mechanical fidelity, the burn that teaches the hand to pull back, the hunger that drives the animal to hunt. And they fire just as readily where no lesson is taught and no purpose is served, the agony of the dying creature that has nothing left to learn, the long distress of a body simply breaking down. Pleasure and pain alike are handed out by what a body is, not by what a soul deserves or needs. On the hypothesis of indifference, this is exactly what one expects. Feeling is biological equipment, and equipment follows function, useful when it serves the body's odds and present even when it does not. On theism, the same pattern becomes a puzzle that demands extra stories, since a good governor could have tied feeling to moral growth, to desert, to anything at all, and seems instead to have tied it to tissue. There are answers the believer can give, of course. Perhaps the pain of the dying animal is the unavoidable cost of a nervous system good for living things on the whole. But each such answer is an extra assumption the hypothesis must carry, a patch added to keep the account fitting the facts, and every patch lowers the standing of the whole. The indifferent universe needs no patches. It predicted this distribution from the start.

It is worth naming what this did to the field. Call it the probabilistic turn. After Draper, the argument from evil increasingly spoke the language of likelihoods, of which hypothesis predicts the data we find. This is the same comparative logic by which scientists weigh competing theories, asking not which is certain but which would have led us to expect the world we see. Philosophers on both sides began to build formal models, fitting the question out with the full machinery of probability, the careful weighing of how likely each account makes the thing we observe. The dispute took on the cool exactness of a measurement, two accounts laid side by side, the evidence read off against each. It was a quieter way to argue, and in some ways a more dangerous one for the believer, because it no longer required the critic to find a single horror that could not be excused. It required only that the world, taken whole, look more like one picture than the other.

Set Draper apart from the old objection one last time. Hume had argued that a mixed world, shot through with both joy and misery, licenses no inference upward to perfect goodness. Draper argued something stronger and more pointed. He held that the actual pattern is positive evidence in favor of indifference, that the distribution of feeling does not merely fail to support theism but actively tilts the scales the other way. The mixed world is no longer just unhelpful to the believer. On Draper's reading it is a witness for the other side.

This leaves the believer in a particular and narrow position. If the force of the argument lies in what theism leads us to expect, then the cleanest reply is to deny that theism leads us to expect anything definite here at all. We are in no position to say what a perfectly good God would do about pain, the reply runs, because we are in no position to survey the reasons such a God might have. The whole comparison assumes we can read the divine intention well enough to be surprised by tissue and not by desert, and perhaps we cannot. Perhaps the expectation that Draper measures against is one we were never entitled to form. That reply was already taking shape elsewhere in those very years, gathering into a position with a name. It is where the long argument turns next.

Chapter 14: The Parent and the Child

A parent sits in a small bright room holding a child not yet old enough to speak, a child of one year, warm and trusting in the crook of an arm. A doctor leans in with a needle and slides it into the soft skin of the little arm, and the child stiffens, and the face crumples, and then comes the cry. But before the cry there is a look. The child turns its eyes up to the parent's face, and in that look there is something that no parent ever quite forgets, a pure bewildered sense of betrayal. The one person in the world who could have stopped this pain stood there and let it happen. The child cannot understand why. The child has no machinery for understanding why, no concept of disease, no notion of the years ahead, no grasp of what a needle prevents. There is no point in explaining. The words for the explanation have not yet entered the child's world, and would not be understood if they had. And yet the why is entirely good. The parent permits the small suffering precisely out of love, to spare the child a far greater suffering it cannot imagine. From inside the child's experience, the situation is plain and terrible. From outside it, the same situation is plain and tender. Everything the child can see argues that it has been abandoned. Everything the child cannot see argues the opposite. The two views do not contradict each other. They are simply taken from different heights.

In 1984, a philosopher named Stephen Wykstra, teaching at Calvin College, in the same halls that had produced the free will defense a generation before, published a paper that built an entire position out of the look on that child's face. The paper carried a forbidding title, the Humean obstacle to evidential arguments from suffering, and beneath it a quieter subtitle, on avoiding the evils of appearance. It was aimed with great precision at one man and one argument, at the evidential case that had recently been pressed against belief in God. The target was the joint of that argument, the single hinge on which it turned. Its opponent had moved from a careful starting point, that we can find no justifying reason for some terrible instance of suffering, to a sweeping conclusion, that there probably is none. Wykstra set himself against that step, the step from we cannot see a reason to there is no reason.

He did it by stating a principle about appearances, and the principle is the heart of everything that follows, so it deserves to be laid out slowly and in the plainest words. Claims of the form it appears that there is no such thing are only ever as good as your eyes. To say honestly that it appears there is nothing there, you must have some reason to think that if the thing were there, you would probably be able to see it. Consider two ordinary sentences. It appears there is no elephant in this room. Said in good faith, that is excellent evidence, very nearly proof, because an elephant is not the sort of thing that could be present and hidden. If one were here, you would know. Now the other sentence. It appears there are no fleas in this room. That claim is nearly worthless. Fleas do not announce themselves. They could be all around you, in the carpet, along the baseboards, and you would notice nothing at all. The two sentences have the same grammar and almost no shared force. The difference lies entirely in visibility. The move from not seeing a thing to its not being there is licensed by one factor only, by whether you would expect to see the thing if it were real. Where the expectation is strong, the absence of sight is powerful evidence of absence. Where the expectation is weak, the absence of sight is evidence of nothing. This is not a rule invented to defend belief in God. It is a rule we already obey, without naming it, every day of our lives. A person who looks at a calm sea and says there are no whales out there is not contradicted by the next breaching whale, because whales spend most of their lives unseen below the surface. The honest report is only ever that nothing is visible, and how much that report is worth depends entirely on what we had reason to expect would show.

Now the application, which Wykstra pressed carefully and fairly. Suppose the God of classical theism exists, a being who made the universe and knows it whole. Then the gap between such a mind and ours is at least as wide as the gap between a parent's mind and an infant's. Wykstra pressed the comparison even further. A parent and a child are, after all, two human beings, separated by years and knowledge but not by kind. The distance he had in mind was greater than that. It was more like the distance between a mind that made the world and a mind the world had made, a difference not of degree but of order. If such a being permits some particular suffering, its reasons might well reach into goods that lie altogether beyond our horizon, connections threaded across centuries and across the lives of strangers, values we have never so much as conceived. The infant cannot trace the logic that runs from the needle to the decades of health it protects. That logic is not hidden by accident. It is hidden because the mind looking for it is too small to hold it, not yet built to contain the long causal chains and the weighing of distant goods that the explanation requires. We might stand in just that relation to the whole vast web of consequence that a divine reason would have to weigh. The point is not that we are foolish. The point is that the gap is real, and that a real gap in vision changes what our failure to see is allowed to prove.

From this a striking result follows. If theism is true, then we should expect, in advance, before we ever look at the world, that a great many evils would strike us as pointless. Their justifications would be no more visible to us than the logic of the vaccine is visible to the child in the chair. And here is the turn that gives the whole reply its force. If apparently pointless suffering is exactly what theism leads us to expect, then finding apparently pointless suffering cannot count as evidence against theism. It is precisely what the theory predicted. The baby's bewilderment is not evidence that the parent has no reasons. It is exactly how things would look to the baby whether the parent had reasons or not. So the bewilderment tells us nothing, one way or the other, about whether reasons exist. The argument against God had read the absence of any visible reason as the absence of any reason. That, Wykstra said, was a flea inference wearing the clothes of an elephant inference. It had the confident grammar of the elephant case and the actual evidential weight of the fleas.

He later gave the move a homely name that stuck to it for good. In the north woods there are tiny biting midges so small you never see them, though you feel their bite for days. Country people call them noseeums, because you do not see them. And so Wykstra called the bad inference a noseeum inference. You did not see um, and from that alone you concluded they were not there. The name is half a joke, but the joke does real work, because it puts the whole error into a single homely picture. A reason for permitting some suffering, on the theist's own account of God, would be more like a midge than an elephant, the sort of thing that could easily be present and never felt by us at all. The whole disputed step in the argument from suffering was, he claimed, a noseeum inference, the move from an unseen thing to an absent thing, made without first asking the one necessary question, whether this is the kind of thing we could expect to see.

The position founded on this argument acquired a name in the literature that grew up around it, and the name is awkward enough to be worth pausing over. It came to be called skeptical theism. The phrase can mislead, because the skepticism it names is not skepticism about God. It is skepticism about us. The skeptical theist holds two things together. The first is ordinary belief in God, held without apology. The second is a deep modesty about the reach of the human mind, a frank doubt that creatures like us are in any position to survey the full realm of goods and evils and the countless connections that bind them. Notice carefully what such a thinker does and does not do. She does not offer a reason for the agony of any particular creature. She does not claim to know the purpose behind a single tear. That restraint is the very center of her view. What she declines to grant is something quite different. She refuses to concede that anyone at all, on either side of the dispute, the believer or the doubter, is in a position to judge with confidence that no good reason exists. She does not say there is a reason you cannot see. She says only that no one can see far enough to be sure there is not. It is a quieter position than it first appears, and also a more stubborn one. It wins no argument by force. It simply refuses to let the other side win theirs, by denying them the one premise their case required, the premise that our search of the moral landscape was thorough enough to trust its silence.

The argument was answered, for the debate ran on for decades and was conducted, unusually, with real mutual respect. The atheist whose inference Wykstra had attacked replied that the analogy proves at once too much and too little. Too little, because a loving parent who cannot explain the surgery does not merely permit the pain and withdraw. The parent stays in the room. The parent holds the child through it, and makes the love unmistakable even where the reasons cannot be made plain. A child may not follow the argument, but it feels the arms. The reasons are invisible, but the love is not, and it is the visible love that makes the invisible reasons bearable. And our world, he observed, does not obviously contain that compensating presence, those felt arms, in the hour of worst suffering. Many die alone and in terror, with no sense of any hand at all. An analogy that leans on the held child seems to promise something the world does not plainly deliver. And too much, because if our blindness really runs as deep as the defense requires, if we truly cannot survey the goods, then it grows unclear what the believer may still claim to know of God's purposes at all. A darkness wide enough to hide the reasons for suffering may be wide enough to hide a great deal more.

That is the picture skeptical theism leaves us with, and it is worth holding still a moment. A child in a bright room, watching a pair of hands, certain of nothing in all the world but the hands themselves. Whether those hands are kind, whether they move by reasons too large for the small mind to hold, the child cannot say, and on this view neither, in the end, can we. We are left with the hands and with our trust or want of it. And the question of what else that darkness might be made to swallow, of what it costs to plead a blindness this complete, would occupy the finest minds on both sides for the next 40 years.

Chapter 15: The Limits of Sight

In 1991, one of the most respected students of knowledge in America turned the whole machinery of his discipline against the argument from suffering. William Alston had spent his career on the theory of knowledge itself, on the hard question of how anyone is entitled to claim that they know a thing at all, and on that question his authority was close to universal. He was not a man with a denomination to defend. He had drifted from the church across decades of his adult life, a working philosopher with no particular stake in faith, and then in middle age he had returned to Christianity, quietly and on his own terms. When he brought his expert eye to the problem of evil, he did not arrive carrying consolation. He arrived carrying a question about what human beings are in a position to know. Where Wykstra had offered a principle, Alston offered an inventory.

The inventory is a catalogue of the limits built into the human mind, and it is best taken slowly, one entry at a time. The first limit is simply a lack of data. We do not have the facts. We cannot see far into the past, or at all into the future, and we cannot read the hidden interior of another person, the secret weather of a single human heart, let alone all of them at once. We do not know what, if anything, lies on the far side of death. And we have no view whatever of the totality of what a God, if there is one, would be holding together at any given moment. We are working, always, from a small and broken sample of the relevant facts.

The second limit is complexity beyond our processing. Every event sends consequences outward, and those consequences ramify without any visible end, branching into other lives and other times in chains too long to follow. To judge that a particular suffering could have been prevented at no cost, that nothing of value anywhere would have been lost by its absence, one would have to trace all those branches to their ends. No mind we know of can trace them even a little way. The web is simply too large for the instrument we have been given to read it.

The third limit concerns the range of the possible. When we say a thing could have been otherwise, that a world without this affliction was genuinely available, we are leaning on a sense of what was possible. But we do not actually know the full menu of possibilities. We do not know which alternative laws of nature, which alternative histories, which alternative worlds were really on offer to a creator. Our feeling that an easier arrangement was there for the choosing is an intuition, not an inventory. It is a hunch about the catalogue, made by someone who has never seen the catalogue.

The fourth limit concerns the range of values. We assume we have a decent grasp of what is good, of which things are worth having and worth protecting. Yet there were almost certainly goods our distant ancestors could not so much as conceive, the value of humility, perhaps, or the particular good of romantic love between equals. Beings who once could form no idea of such things may stand in exactly that relation to goods that lie beyond our present reach, goods we cannot name because we have no concept for them yet. The good we can picture may be a small clearing inside a forest we cannot see.

The fifth limit is subtler. Even where we do perceive the values in play, even where the goods and harms are ones we recognize, we are poor at weighing them against each other when the trade is a fine one. To say that this measure of suffering was or was not worth this measure of some good requires a precision of judgment that our faculties do not reliably deliver. We can see the weights and still misread the scale.

And the sixth limit gathers up the rest. We have no way of knowing how representative our sample is. Whatever goods, whatever evils, whatever connections between them we have managed to discover, we cannot tell whether they are a fair cross section of all there is, or a small and skewed corner of it. This last point received its sharpest statement a little later, from the philosopher Michael Bergmann, and his version became the standard modern form of the position. We have no good reason, Bergmann argued, to think that the goods, the evils, and the entailments between them that humans have so far found are representative of all the goods, evils, and entailments there are. The fish of one reef are no guide to the whole of the sea.

Two homely pictures carry the force of all this for anyone who has never read a page of philosophy. Imagine a beginner watching a grandmaster at chess. At a certain moment the master gives away her queen, the most powerful piece on the board, and to the beginner the move looks like ruin, a plain blunder thrown away for nothing. The beginner cannot see the point of it. But his inability to see the point is no evidence at all that there is no point. He simply lacks the eyes. Were a second grandmaster to sit down, study the position, and also find the move baffling, that would be evidence, because she would be equipped to see a reason if one were there. The weight of a failure to find a reason depends entirely on whether the one searching would have found it.

The second picture is plainer still. A patient holds a prescription written by a physician, a set of instructions resting on knowledge the patient has no way to check. The patient does not understand why this drug and not another, why this dose, why this schedule. And yet, in the ordinary case, the patient takes the medicine, because the gap in understanding is exactly the gap that expertise is for. This is how we behave in every field where some know more than others. We accept, without strain, that the untrained eye failing to see a reason counts for almost nothing against the reason. The only live question is whether the distance between any human mind and the mind of God, if God exists, resembles the distance between the novice and the master. The skeptical theist's entire claim is that it would have to be a distance incomparably wider than that, the widest gap there could be.

What the pictures defend is the position Wykstra's reply had founded, unhedged belief in God joined to that narrow modesty about the realm of reasons, and what Alston and Bergmann gave it was a claim about its character. The modesty, its defenders insist, is principled. It is not skepticism about morality, or about the world outside our heads, or about the reliability of the senses, and it was not invented to escape an argument. It flows directly from what theism itself already says, namely that the distance between the creator and the creature is vast. The modesty is supposed to be a consequence of the belief, not a convenient exception to it.

By the close of the century this had become the dominant theistic answer to the evidential argument. It was the move cited in every survey of the field, the default reply that a working philosopher reached for first, and it had quietly displaced the great theodicies from the center of the discussion. The ambitious projects that tried to state God's actual reasons gave ground to a position that declined, on principle, to state them at all. There is something striking in that reversal. A tradition that had once labored to read God's mind now found its strongest defense in the claim that no one can read it, that the very inscrutability the older theologians had struggled against was the thing that kept the believer safe. The retreat had become the fortress.

But the success was purchased at a price not yet paid, and the unease is easy to feel even before it is named. A position built upon the darkness of God's reasons must, sooner or later, say what that darkness does to everything else the believer thought she knew. The same wide gap that hides God's reasons for permitting a suffering cannot be made to hide only that. If the gap is wide enough to conceal good reasons for the suffering of a child, what else might it be wide enough to conceal. The next two chapters belong to the thinkers who pressed exactly that question, and would not let it rest.

Chapter 16: The Moral Cost

A man is walking home late, along a street he half knows, when he hears a child cry out from the mouth of an alley. He turns, and in the thin light he sees what is happening. A grown man has hold of a small one, and the thing underway is an assault, plain and unmistakable, the kind no one needs a second look to read. The walker is strong. He could cross the few steps and end it with his own hands, and the fear that would stop most people is not what stops him. What stops him is a thought, and the thought is theological. For all he knows, he says to himself, God permits this. And if God permits it, God may have reasons, reasons that lie beyond any horizon a human mind can reach, reasons woven into goods he cannot see and could not weigh if he saw them. Perhaps the permitting serves some end. Perhaps, if he intervenes, he tears a thread out of a pattern whose shape is hidden from him. By his own settled principles he cannot estimate what his acting will cost, nor what his refraining will spare. So he stands in the dark and reasons, carefully, fairly, while the child goes on crying.

Every listener recoils from that figure. The recoil is immediate, and it is total, and it arrives before any argument is spoken. And the recoil is itself an argument, the strongest objection that has been raised against the believer's modesty. Philosophers pressed it sharply in the early years of this century, among them Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy, and in a wider and more unsettling form Stephen Maitzen, and the charge they bring is not that skeptical theism is false. The charge is that taken seriously, lived all the way down, it eats away at the ordinary moral life, that it turns a decent person into the man in the alley.

The force of the objection lies in its fairness, so it must be unfolded slowly. The believer escaped the evidential argument by insisting that human beings are in no position to judge whether any particular evil is genuinely pointless, that the realm of goods and evils, and of the long chains of connection that bind them together, runs far past the edge of what we can survey. That was the move. It was the darkness invoked against Rowe, the refusal to read absence of a visible reason as absence of a reason. But notice what moral deliberation seems to require. The man at the alley must judge that the assault is, all things considered, a thing to be stopped. He must reach a verdict about consequences, about whether his acting makes the world better or worse on the whole. And if our moral eyesight is too weak to conclude that the fawn's agony is probably without a point, it seems exactly that weak to conclude that ending the assault probably improves things. The same darkness that was summoned to cover the forest floods into the alley. It does not stay where it was wanted.

And there is a sharper edge still. The believer who crosses the street and stops the assault may be acting against her own evidence. For on her view, God could prevent this and does not, and God, she holds, has reasons that lie past her sight. So when she intervenes, she may be working to undo precisely what those hidden reasons were meant to secure. The atheist who stops the assault prevents a clear harm and risks nothing he believes in. The believer, by contrast, may be reaching into a design she has already confessed she cannot read, and pulling at a thread she was the first to admit she could not follow. Who is she, on her own account, to thwart what the maker of the world has allowed. The very modesty that protected her belief now seems to reach down and unsteady her hand, so that the more sincerely she holds her position, the less she can trust herself to act.

The responses are real, and they carry genuine weight, and the first is a difference of roles. Divine permission and human permission are not the same act performed by two parties. A surgeon may cut a body where a bystander who tried it would be a criminal, because the surgeon stands in a role that licenses the cut. The same parent who holds the child still for the doctor's needle will leap across a room to stop a stranger who raises a hand against that child. The allowing and the preventing live together without contradiction, because they belong to one person occupying one office. So the inference from God may have reasons to permit this all the way to therefore I should permit it confuses two agents with two different commissions. What is permitted from the seat of the maker of the world need not be permitted from the seat of a passerby, and nothing in the believer's modesty obliges her to confuse the two.

The second response turns on commands and duties. The believer does not stand before the alley with nothing but her ignorance. She holds, as part of the very faith in question, that God has issued standing instructions, plain and old and unmistakable. Care for the injured. Protect the weak. Lift the one who has fallen. Deliberation carried out under instructions does not require that the one obeying first survey the whole ledger of the universe. The soldier who is given an order to hold a bridge is not frozen by his ignorance of the general's entire campaign. He was never asked to weigh the campaign. The order exists precisely because the full plan is not his to assess, and the instruction does the weighing that his limited sight cannot. So the believer at the alley acts not as a calculator of cosmic totals but as one who has been told what to do, and being told relieves her of the calculation she could never have completed.

The third response reaches down to the shape of ordinary morality itself. The objection quietly assumes that doing right is a matter of producing the best total outcome across the whole long run of things, and most of our moral traditions deny exactly that. We do not, in fact, live by summing the consequences out to the end of time. We act on duties, on the rights of the person in front of us, on the goods that lie within arm's reach and make their claim now. The child in the alley has a claim that does not wait upon a calculation of final totals, and a person who answered that claim by saying the sum is too large for me to compute would have misunderstood what the claim was. Skeptical modesty about cosmic totals is therefore beside the point, because cosmic totals were never what duty rested on. Be humble about the ledger of the universe, and the duty to the child is left standing, untouched, where it always stood.

There is a further thought that loosens the grip of the whole worry, and it belongs to Peter van Inwagen. He observed that for many of the purposes a good God might plausibly have, there may be no minimum amount of evil that those purposes require. Think of a flood. There is no smallest number of raindrops that could have made it. Any single drop could have been left out, and the flood would still have come, and yet the flood as a whole was genuinely necessary to the river's rising. Each drop is dispensable. The mass is not. Now carry that across to suffering. For any particular evil you care to name, God could almost certainly have prevented that one, just as he could have spared that one drop. The critic seizes on this and asks, then why not one less, why not this child, why not tonight. But the question has no stable answer, and its having none is not an evasion. Whatever amount of evil a world contains, one could always have asked of it the same thing, why not a little less, and the asking could go on without end. A line has to fall somewhere, and wherever it falls it will look arbitrary, because every line drawn through a continuous mass is arbitrary in just that way. The single drop is always sparable, and the asking why not spare this one can always be repeated, and neither fact touches the necessity of the rising water. The apparent removability of each single evil is therefore perfectly consistent with the necessity of the whole weight of evil together. It is an unsettling thought, and it is a coherent one, and it pulls the floor out from under the demand that God account for each particular tear taken one at a time.

So the believer is not, after all, condemned to stand reasoning in the dark. She crosses the street. She stops the assault. The roles are distinct, the instructions are clear, the duty to the child never depended on a sum she could not finish, and the demand for an account of each evil dissolves into the arbitrariness of any line drawn through a flood. Her hands are freed. She acts, and she acts rightly, and the man frozen at the mouth of the alley turns out to be a caricature of her, not a portrait.

And yet something has shifted in the texture of the thing, and honesty requires that we name it rather than hurry past. The replies rescue her conduct. They may not rescue her sight. She does the right thing, and she does it well, and she does it while officially unable to say whether what she does serves the deepest order of the world or works against it. She has her instructions and she follows them, but she follows them blind to the end they finally serve. This is obedience without sight, action under orders whose purpose is sealed. Perhaps that is nothing new at all. Perhaps it is faith's oldest posture, the very thing the man on the ash heap was brought to in the end, trust held fast in the dark with no map of why. Or perhaps it is a new thing, and a corroding one, a quiet loosening of the bond between knowing the good and doing it, so that the doing carries on by habit and command while the knowing has been signed away. Which of the two it is, the ancient consolation or the new corrosion, is not a question that can be closed here, because it may be the question on which the whole position finally stands or falls. And the hardest form of this entire family of worries, the version that no role and no command and no flood of raindrops seems able to answer, does not walk upright at all. It walks on four legs, and it is still waiting.

Chapter 17: The Skeptical Spiral

Skeptical theism was built to be a firebreak. It was a controlled and limited modesty, a strip of cleared ground meant to stop one fire, the fire of the evidential argument, from crossing into faith. The whole appeal of the position is that it concedes so little. It does not doubt the world, or the senses, or right and wrong. It doubts one thing only, whether the human mind can survey the realm of goods, of evils, and of the long connections between them well enough to declare any particular horror genuinely without a point. That is the line, drawn carefully, and the second great objection is simply this. The fire does not respect the line. If our grasp of the realm of value gives out when we look at a burned fawn in a forest, it gives out everywhere that grasp was needed, and the spiral begins.

Follow the spiral outward, one turn at a time, and watch where it goes. The first stop is the goodness of God itself. The believer says that God is good, and she means something definite by it. She means that God is the kind of being who prevents what cruelty he can, who does not deceive, whose purposes, if we could ever see them whole, would look to us like love. But the skeptical theist has gone on record. She has testified, under oath as it were, that we cannot anticipate what a being of that order would do or permit, that set beside the divine mind our expectations are the expectations of an infant guessing at the plans of an adult. So on what basis does she expect anything of God at all, goodness included, in any sense that still carries content. A goodness that is compatible with permitting every horror in the human record, for reasons that will never once become visible, starts to function like no claim at all. The word stays. The substance thins toward nothing.

The second stop is revelation and the felt presence of God. The believer trusts her scripture, and she trusts the nearness she senses in prayer. But run the position's own formula across those too. For all we know, it says, God has reasons beyond our horizon. Then for all we know God has reasons beyond our horizon for permitting deception, and perhaps even for practicing it, a worry that some critics pressed under the blunt name of divine lies. If unknowable goods can justify the agony of a child, they can surely justify a misleading book, or a warm and consoling illusion that asks nothing and comforts much. And notice the trap closing. The very instrument the believer reaches for to know God, her trust in the text and in the inner voice, was certified by exactly the faculty the position has just declared unreliable about the ways of God. She cannot use the thing she has called untrustworthy to vouch for itself.

The third stop is reached only by the boldest critics, and it is the steepest. It is ordinary induction, the plain trust that the sun will rise and the bread will nourish, since for all we know there are unseen reasons why the regularities we lean on might not hold. Most parties on every side agree that this furthest turn overreaches, that here the spiral has spun past anything the original modesty could license. But the critic's point in naming it is to ask where, before this, the believer ever stepped off.

The defenders have an answer, and it deserves to be stated at its strongest. Bergmann chief among them insists that the skepticism is principled, and that it stays confined. It concerns one thing, our grasp of the total realm of value and its connections, and it touches neither perception, nor testimony, nor logic. And theism, they add, does not arrive empty. It supplies positive grounds of its own, revelation and religious experience, and those grounds stand on their own feet until something specifically defeats them. The believer's confidence in God's goodness was never an inference drawn from surveying the cosmic ledger and finding it balanced. It came from elsewhere, from encounter, from trust, from a tradition received. So being modest about the ledger leaves that confidence exactly where it was. The darkness was always only about the accounting, and the believer's faith was never an accountant's conclusion.

Whether that holds the line is the open question, and reasonable people divide on it. But there is one more thing to see, and it is the quietest and the sharpest thing of all. The sword cuts both ways, and both sides have come to know it. The same darkness that blocks the atheist from claiming that some particular evil is probably pointless blocks the believer's oldest projects too. It blocks every confident theodicy, every attempt to state the actual reason God allowed a given grief. It blocks every claim to read the hand of providence in the rise and fall of nations. It blocks the sermon that explains, gently and with conviction, why the disaster came and what it was for. Skeptical theism wins its war by salting its own fields. The weapon that silences the prosecution silences the defense in the same stroke, and the believer who picks it up must lay down the ancient ambition to explain the ways of God at the very moment she stands up to defend them. She may say only that there is a reason. She may no longer say what it is.

Some count that price clarity, a long overdue confession that the reasons of God were never ours to recite, and that honesty begins where the explaining stops. Others count it everything, the surrender of the whole consoling work that made the believer want to speak in the first place. The position purchases its safety with a silence, and the argument that runs through this whole inquiry is finally an argument about what that silence is worth.

Chapter 18: Horrendous Evils

There had never been anyone in the field quite like Marilyn McCord Adams, and the discipline had no settled place to put her. She was a rigorous analytic philosopher and a scholar of the Middle Ages, at home among the densest logical writings of medieval thinkers, the kind of work that only a few dozen living people can read in the original. That alone would have made a career. But in the middle of her life she did something her colleagues had no category for. She was ordained an Episcopal priest, and for years she gave her hours not only to journals and seminars but to the bedsides of the dying and the disordered, in hospitals and in parishes, among people the world had broken and could not mend. She knew the hospital from both sides of its door, as the one who reasons about suffering and as the one who sits with it through the night. In time she became the first woman ever to hold one of the ancient chairs in divinity at Oxford, a seat older than the modern world. And out of those two lives held in one person came, in 1999, a book whose title says exactly what it is about, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God.

The book turns on a single idea, defined with great care, and everything else follows from getting the definition right. A horrendous evil is not merely a very bad thing. It is not a large quantity of ordinary suffering. The mark of the horrendous is precise and terrible. A horrendous evil is one in which a person takes part, whether as the one who suffers it or as the one who does it, of such a kind that taking part in it gives that person reason to doubt whether their life, taken as a whole, could ever be a great good to the one living it. These are not evils that merely wound a life. They are evils that reach into a life and eat its meaning from the inside, that make the sufferer wonder whether, on balance, it would have been better not to have lived at all.

Her examples are named once, plainly, and then left to stand without elaboration. The abuse of a child. The betrayals that unmake a self. The slow cruel deaths of those we love most. The participation in an atrocity that a person cannot afterward live with. To dwell on such things would be a kind of trespass, and the register here does not permit it. What must be held onto is the structure she identified beneath them. A horrendous evil does not simply add pain to a life. It threatens to defeat the very possibility of that life being found worth living by the one who lived it. And here is a feature of her definition that is easy to miss and must not be skipped. The horrendous destroys perpetrators as well as victims. The one who commits the unspeakable is also placed, by the act, beyond the ordinary reach of a life that could be received as good. The category cuts both ways through the human heart.

With that definition in hand, Adams turned and looked back over the whole long argument that had preceded her, and what she saw was a shared mistake running through both sides of it. The standard debate, whether mounted by the believer or the doubter, dealt almost entirely in what she called generic and global goods. The balance of the universe as a whole. The value of free will in general, as a feature of the design. The laws of nature taken as a single package, lawful and regular and therefore sometimes cruel. These are goods stated at the level of the whole, goods that belong to the world considered all at once. And her objection is as simple as it is devastating. A global good does not touch the person the horror has devoured. To tell someone whom an atrocity has unmade that the universe, taken as a whole, is better arranged for containing such possibilities is not to answer them. It is to change the subject.

The sufferer, she insisted, is not a line item in a cosmic budget. A God who balanced the books of the world that way, who let one person be destroyed because the grand total came out higher, might be an excellent administrator of a vast estate. He would not, on that account, be anyone's father. And the God of the tradition is supposed to be a father, good not merely to the sum of things but to each person within it. So the real question, Adams argued, is not whether the world's total ledger justifies its maker. The real question is whether God can be good to each individual person, one at a time, and above all to those particular people who have been swallowed by horror. A theory that vindicates the whole while abandoning the one has not solved the problem. It has only learned not to look at it.

To say what would count as being good to such a person, she reached back to a distinction drawn by an earlier philosopher, Roderick Chisholm, and it is the technical heart of her work, so it is worth taking slowly. There are two quite different things that can happen to an evil inside a life. The first she called balancing off. An evil is balanced off when enough separate goods are heaped into the other pan of the scale, so that the good outweighs the bad. But notice what balancing off leaves untouched. The evil itself remains exactly what it was, a dead loss, simply outweighed. It sits there in the life as so much sheer negative weight, unredeemed, merely compensated for by goods that have nothing to do with it. A man loses a leg and is given a sum of money. The money may outweigh the loss on some scale. The loss is still pure loss.

The second thing is altogether different, and Chisholm called it defeat. An evil is defeated when it is woven into the very structure of a larger good within that person's own life, so that the evil is no longer a separate piece outweighed by other pieces, but a part of something whose whole worth depends on its being there. Defeat is when the person themselves, looking back over the finished shape of their life, would not finally wish that chapter unwritten. Think of how a crushing failure can become, inside a life, the hinge on which its whole meaning turns, the thing without which the person would not be who they came to be. The failure is not compensated. It is transfigured. It is taken up into a meaning it did not have on its own. And the crucial point is where defeat can and cannot happen. Balancing off can be done at a distance, with goods stored anywhere in the universe, goods the victim never sees and never shares. Defeat cannot. Defeat has to happen inside the horizon of the one individual life. It is something that must occur to the person, not merely on their behalf.

This is what forces her positive proposal, and she offered it openly, from inside her own Christian commitment, without disguise. Nothing finite, she argued, can defeat a horrendous evil. The arithmetic of created goods, however vast, will never reach far enough, because the horrendous is precisely the kind of evil that swallows finite goods whole. So the only thing that could possibly defeat it would be a good of an entirely different order, a good that cannot be traded against finite quantities at all, an incommensurable good. And for her there was only one candidate, intimacy with God himself, a relationship whose value is not a larger amount of the same currency but a different currency altogether, one against which no finite sum of suffering can be set.

The engine of defeat, in her account, is a particular claim at the center of the Christian story. God did not stay outside human horror, looking on from a height. God entered it. And because God entered it, the very worst that a human being can undergo becomes, without ceasing for one moment to be terrible, a point of contact and identification with God, a place where the sufferer is closest to the suffering God rather than furthest from him. On this view every horror laden life can, beyond death, be gathered into a relationship so good that it reaches backward over the whole of that life and lets its owner receive even the horror as part of a life now seen as good. The horror is not explained. It is not justified by some hidden purpose it served. It is integrated, taken up, defeated from within.

She accepted the obvious criticism with entirely open eyes, and that honesty is part of what made the book matter. All of this works only inside Christian assumptions. It needs resurrection, a life beyond death, a God who himself suffers. Strip those away and the proposal has nothing to stand on. And so it is not addressed to the skeptic demanding a neutral proof that would convince anyone of any creed. It is addressed to the believer, to the person already inside the faith who is asking how that faith can be held with intellectual honesty after the very worst has happened. Adams thought, moreover, that the demand for a neutral solution was itself part of the field's long mistake, that a problem about whether God can be good to a particular wounded person was never going to be answered in the currency of arguments built to persuade no one in particular.

What she shifted is hard to overstate, and it outlasts every objection. Before her, the serious theistic question had been whether some reason, seen or unseen, might permit the horror to occur, a question pointed backward, toward excuse, toward the justifying of a past permission. After her the question turned around and faced the other way. The serious question became what God would have to do, for the very person the horror devoured, to make that person's life a thing the person could finally receive as good. Not what reason permitted the wound, but what could possibly heal it. The older question had stood with its back to the sufferer, facing the past, asking how the permission might be defended. Her question knelt down beside the sufferer and faced what came next. It did not ask the maker of the world to account for himself. It asked what he would do. And for a discipline that had spent centuries trying to excuse God, learning instead to ask what God owes is no small turning. A question addressed forward, toward rescue, of someone who has already been lost.

Chapter 19: Wandering in Darkness

There are two ways to know a person, and only one of them can be written down. A doctor can hold a patient's whole chart in mind, her height, her history, the long ledger of her illnesses and her habits, every fact of her true and listable, and still not know her at all. The other kind of knowing has no list. It is what one has of a friend's face across a table, gathered over years and lost in an afternoon, that no inventory of facts will ever add up to. Eleonore Stump, a philosopher at Saint Louis University and one of the world's leading scholars of her medieval master, Thomas Aquinas, built her monumental 2010 book on a single claim about this difference. The distinction between knowing facts about a person and knowing the person, she argued, is the exact place where the entire debate about suffering went wrong.

Her diagnosis comes first, and it is severe. The argument from evil, on every side and in every camp, the formal triads and the careful probabilities and the principles about what would and would not be visible, is conducted entirely in the first kind of knowledge. It traffics in claims, premises, propositions, facts about the world arranged into chains. But suffering is not a proposition. It happens to persons, inside the dense particular weave of a single life, and between persons, in the space where one human being matters to another. The grief of a widow is not a quantity of pain that could in principle be measured. It is the absence of one particular man at one particular table, the shape his presence used to make in a room. A way of thinking that can handle only facts will systematically miss what suffering actually is, and miss, just as surely, whatever could conceivably redeem it. It will be left holding an accurate description of a thing it has not begun to understand.

Philosophy is not helpless against this, she insisted, but it must borrow an instrument it has long disdained, and the instrument is narrative. A story is how the second kind of knowledge travels from one mind to another. Consider the difference between a one-line summary of a novel and the long experience of reading it. The summary gives the facts, who loved whom and who died, and it leaves the reader knowing nothing about the people at all. The novel, read slowly to the end, leaves the reader feeling she has lost a friend. A great narrative does not report a relationship from the outside. It admits the reader into one, granting something close to the experience of knowing the people inside it, the knowledge of having been with them. This is knowledge in the second person, the knowledge of being present to another, of standing face to face rather than reading a report, and it is real knowledge, not decoration. And so stories can serve as genuine evidence for philosophy, data about persons that no argument could ever state, because the instant such knowledge is stated it collapses back into a list.

From that conviction comes the book's astonishing shape. The bulk of it is hundreds of pages of slow, close reading of four ancient narratives of suffering, each examined with a medievalist's patience and a novelist's eye for the turn of a glance. There is the story of Job, which she reads against the whole weight of the tradition, as a story about whether the sufferer is known and loved rather than about whether the cosmic ledger has been made to balance. There is the story of Samson, the strong man hollowed out from the inside, the one whose ruin is mostly his own doing. There is Abraham, the father asked, without explanation, for the one thing he could not bear to give. And there is Mary of Bethany, the friend who sends for help and is met with silence, who watches death arrive while the one who could have prevented it stays away, and so carries the particular grief of the help that comes too late. Four losses, four different shapes. She does not retell them to comfort us. She reads them the way one reads a witness, for what each knows about suffering that no theory had thought to ask.

Then comes her own frame, and she gives it in plain words. Drawing on Aquinas, she takes the deepest possible human flourishing to be union with God, closeness to the source of everything, and she takes the deepest possible suffering to be whatever stands between a person and that closeness. That much a long tradition had said before her. But flourishing, in that high sense, is a thing every person shares, the same shape of good held out to all. To this familiar architecture she adds the idea the book is loved for, an idea pitched at the opposite scale, the desires of the heart. These are the particular things a particular person has set her heart upon, not flourishing in the abstract but this work, this marriage, this child, this one irreplaceable face. They are not interchangeable, and that is the whole point of the idea. The loss of the thing a person actually wanted cannot be made good by handing her some different good of equal weight, because the wanting was never generic. It had a name. It had a particular shape that nothing else, however valuable, fits.

This is where her quarrel with the whole tradition of theodicy becomes sharp and personal. A theory that secures a person's ultimate flourishing while treating her heart's desires as expendable, as the breakage a larger plan can afford, has not answered that person. It has overruled her. It has told her that what she lost did not finally matter, which is the one thing a sufferer cannot be told. Any serious account of suffering, Stump argued, must speak to both at once, to the flourishing and to the heart, to the soul's ultimate good and to the particular things this life was built around. And precisely because the heart's desires are particular, because they have names and faces and cannot be summed across a population, the account can only be given at the scale of a single life. It has to be done in stories. It cannot be done at the scale of worlds.

There is a quiet revolution in that last move, and it is worth feeling before it is named. For three centuries the problem had been argued at the largest possible scale, about worlds and their balances, about whether a perfect being could permit the sum total of earthly pain, about systems weighed against systems. Stump turned the whole apparatus around and pointed it at one bed in one room. The general goods and the global plans that the great theories leaned on, she thought, were exactly the things that cannot reach a sufferer, because a sufferer is never general. She is this person, with this wound, mourning this absence, and what she needs to know is not whether the universe nets out in the black. What she needs to know is whether she is seen.

So the problem of evil, after all the triads and all the probabilities and all the careful principles about what the mind can and cannot detect, returns in the end to the bedside. It returns to a single person, in pain, asking the oldest question there is, whether anyone is there, whether she is known, whether the thing she lost was registered by anyone who mattered. Marilyn McCord Adams had already begun to turn the discussion toward intimacy and the goodness of God to particular persons. Stump pressed the turn further and made it methodological, making the single suffering life not the occasion for the philosophy but the unit of it. A philosophy that could only operate at the altitude of worlds, she suggested, that could speak about suffering in general but never to a sufferer in particular, was never going to be adequate to its subject, however valid its forms, however clean its proofs. The forms were not wrong. They were simply pitched too high to hear the only voice that the whole question had ever been about. A proof can be flawless and still answer no one. And the suffering person, who never asked for a proof, was waiting all along to be answered.

Chapter 20: Against Theodicy

There have always been philosophers who think the problem of evil should not be answered but refused. For them the attempt itself is the error. To sit down and explain why a perfect God permits the agony of the world is not a difficult task badly done. It is a wrong task, and doing it well only deepens the wrong. This position has a name. It is called anti-theodicy, and its most uncompromising modern voice belonged to a Welsh philosopher named D Z Phillips.

His charge, delivered in a late book on the problem of evil and the problem of God, was not the usual one. He did not say that theodicies fail by being unconvincing, that their arguments leak, that the goods they offer are too small for the horrors they are asked to cover. He said something stranger and harder. They fail by succeeding. The very act of weighing a child's torture against some compensating benefit, of entering that torture into the books as a debit covered by a credit somewhere else in the accounts, is already a moral catastrophe in the person doing the weighing. Some things, Phillips held, should be unthinkable. And a believer who has trained himself to think them, calmly, professionally, in seminar rooms, has not defended the goodness of God. He has lost his grip on goodness itself.

There is a picture behind the charge, and it is worth holding still. Imagine a man who can sit with the worst that has ever been done to an innocent, and treat it as a quantity, a sum to be set against other sums until the ledger balances. Something in him has gone quiet that should be screaming. The God whose ways can be justified by such arithmetic, Phillips thought, is a being trading torments against benefits, a moral agent among others, only larger, doing what we do but on a cosmic scale. And that was never what the word God meant inside a praying life. The believer at prayer is not addressing a shrewd accountant of the universe. So the theodicist, in defending God, has quietly swapped him for an idol, and called the swap a defense.

An earlier and angrier version of the same refusal came from Kenneth Surin, writing in the middle of the 1980s, and it carried a sharper political edge. Theodicy, Surin argued, is the genre of the spectator. It is written at a desk, in the third person, about sufferings the author does not share. Its famous calm is purchased by distance, the distance of a man describing a fire he is not standing in. And the responses that actually fit real evil are not theoretical at all. They are practical. Resistance. Solidarity. Lament. The binding of wounds, the sitting with the dying, the refusal to let the thing be forgotten. A discipline that meets a massacre with a consistency proof has mistaken its own office. It has answered a wound with a syllogism. Surin wrote in the shadow of the camps, and the anti-theodicy tradition generally does its thinking in that shadow, in the long aftermath that philosophy has learned to call simply after Auschwitz.

Both men knew their literary ancestor, and both claimed him. It was Ivan whose refusal they inherited, now wearing academic dress, walking into the seminar where it had once stormed out of a novel.

The reply from the working philosophers is brief, and it deserves a fair hearing. Refusing a question does not dissolve it. Theism makes claims, definite claims, about a being of a certain kind, and claims have consequences, and someone has to check whether those consequences hang together. That checking is what the discipline is for, and indignation, however righteous, is not an argument. A moratorium on thinking, enforced by moral outrage, has its own quiet dangers, for outrage has sheltered a great deal of nonsense over the centuries. And some pressed a sharper point still. The anti-theodicist, they said, is trading on a theodicy of her own. Her whole position rests on a confident claim about what a good God would want, namely that he would not want his ways justified by his creatures. But that is itself a thesis about the divine nature, argued for, defended, and no more self-evident than the views she condemns. She has not left the game. She has only refused to admit she is still playing it.

What the dispute is really about lies underneath all of this, and it is not finally a dispute about God. It is a boundary war over what philosophy is for. The theodicist holds that the discipline's job is to test the logic of what we say, to take our claims about God and see whether they cohere, and that no subject, however dreadful, is exempt from that examination. The anti-theodicist holds that some speech acts are corruptions whatever their logic, that there are sentences a decent person should not be able to complete, and that philosophy's first duty before horror is the duty everyone else has. Not to explain it. To fight it, and to mourn it.

These are two different conceptions of the philosopher's office, and they do not meet. One sees a thinker obliged to follow the argument wherever it leads, even into the accounting of a child's tears. The other sees a human being first, who happens to think for a living, and who betrays something deeper than logic the moment the accounting begins. Between those two pictures there may be no higher tribunal to appeal to, no neutral ground from which one could be shown the truer. There is no pretense here of supplying one. What remains is only the place where the two of them stand, facing each other, and refusing to move.

Chapter 21: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

In the spring of 1860, in the study at Down House where most of his quiet revolution had been done, Charles Darwin sat down to write to a friend across the ocean. The friend was Asa Gray, an American botanist and a devout Christian, a man who admired the new theory and badly wanted to keep it inside the warmth of providence, to read the long unfolding of life as the patient work of a loving hand. Darwin had published his great book only a year before. He owed Gray honesty, and he gave it. There was, he confessed, too much misery in the world. He could not persuade himself that a beneficent and all-powerful God would have designedly created the creatures that troubled him most, the parasitic wasps, made with the express intention that their young should feed within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

The wasp he had in mind does a particular thing. It finds a caterpillar, alive and soft, and lays its eggs inside the living body, and the young hatch there and begin to eat. They eat slowly, and with a kind of order, taking first the parts the host can lose and live, so that the caterpillar stays alive and feeding and fresh for as long as the larvae need it, and only at the end is it consumed entirely. Nature had shown Darwin something theology had largely managed not to look at. He was not the first to feel the weight of the world's pain. He may have been the first to see, in fine biological detail, that the pain was built in, written into the mechanism itself, as much a part of the design as the eye he so admired.

Now widen the view, slowly, until the study and its single letter fall away and what remains is time. Sentient creatures have been suffering on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. Long before anything we would call a person walked anywhere, there was predation, the chase and the kill repeated past counting. There was parasitism, the slow feeding from within. There was starvation in hard seasons, and disease, and the great extinctions that erased most of the species that have ever lived, whole forms of life snuffed out with all their members. The fossil record is, among other things, a record of pain, laid down in stone on a scale that empties the imagination. And not one moment of it can be laid at any human door. It happened before there was anyone to sin, to learn, or to be free. It is suffering with no possible human cause, stacked in layers older than thought.

This is the case that brings the old machinery to its limit, and it is worth seeing precisely how each familiar answer fails here, not from weakness but from sheer bad timing. The free will tradition reaching back to Augustine traces suffering to the misused choices of creatures, but no choice of any creature explains the long ages of agony that ran before any chooser existed. Soul-making needs a soul under construction, a self being slowly drawn toward courage and compassion through what it endures, and whatever a trilobite was doing on the floor of an ancient sea for a hundred million years, it was not being refined into a saint. The appeal to a world corrupted by some primal fall collides with the plain order of the rocks, which says without ambiguity that the suffering came first, by margins no story of a later ruin can absorb. The standard exits are not merely difficult here. They are bricked shut, every one of them. This is why, when one philosopher wanted the cleanest possible instance of suffering that no human good could touch, he reached not for a man but for a fawn alone in a forest.

The pressure falls hardest, though, on the most modern of the theist's replies, the one that asks us to be humble about what our minds can survey. Its gentlest image is the parent and the child, and that image strains badly out here. The infant, whatever it cannot understand, at least exists inside a relationship. But what relationship reaches the trilobite. What face leans over the unwitnessed billions, the creatures that lived and were eaten and left no trace but a curve in the limestone, and that on most traditional accounts have no afterlife in which any wrong done to them could ever be answered or undone. The parent at least stays in the room. Here there is no room. Unknown goods, if they are doing the work, must justify an ocean of agony that no one remembers, that closed over without a witness. The modesty that seemed reasonable about one fawn must now be stretched across geological time, asked to cover an emptiness it was never measured for.

The defenders of belief have not been silent here, and their answers deserve a fair hearing. The most careful gathering of them is a book by the philosopher Michael Murray, which takes its title from a phrase the poet Tennyson set down years before Darwin's letter, the line about nature red in tooth and claw, written when the poet too was struggling with what the new sciences seemed to be saying. Murray sorts the responses into three broad families. The first holds that animal experience may be radically unlike our own. The pain of a creature without our kind of memory, our anticipation, our long unified sense of a self that this is happening to, might lack the felt awfulness that makes our pain morally weighty, might be something less than the inner horror we naturally read into it. The science, oddly, leaves this more open than our sympathy does, though even those who press the view admit its ethical danger, that to doubt the reality of a creature's suffering is to stand very near the place where cruelty makes its excuses.

The second family grants the suffering fully and asks instead about the price of any world at all. A universe capable of growing life, and finally of growing minds that can love and choose, would have to run on steady and dependable laws. And stable laws have teeth. The fire that warms the flesh is the same fire, working by the same rule, that burns it, and a world where fire warmed but never burned would be a world without the regularities that make life and growth possible in the first place. The cost of a lawful world, on this view, is a world that can wound. The third family is older than one might expect, reaching back through centuries of quiet speculation, and it proposes simply that animals too may continue beyond death, that the books are not in fact closed at the limestone, that somewhere the suffering of the eaten thing is gathered up and set right. Each of these replies buys back its coherence at a cost worth naming plainly. The first risks our moral footing. The second leaves the sheer quantity of pain looking larger than any law seems to need. The third must be believed before it can console, resting the whole weight on a hope it cannot show.

So return, at the last, to the study and to the rest of that letter, the part less often quoted. Having confessed that the misery of the world weighed on him, Darwin did not simply close the door on God and walk out into a clean unbelief. He could not be content, he went on, to look at this wonderful universe and at man as the result of brute force either. The whole subject, he wrote, was too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. And he ended not with a verdict but with a wish, that each man might hope and believe what he can. There he sat, the very man who had found the mechanism, who had looked further into the workings of life than almost anyone before him, and he placed himself precisely on the line this whole long inquiry walks. On one side the wasp in the caterpillar. On the other the wonder. He would not pretend the line was not there, and he would not pretend to stand cleanly on either side of it.

Chapter 22: The Hidden God

There is a second great argument against God, and it is younger than most of the people now alive. It was formulated only in the 1990s, and it mentions no suffering at all. Its subject is not pain but silence. The Canadian philosopher J L Schellenberg published a book called Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason in 1993, and in it he turned the oldest charge against God onto an entirely new ground. The engine of his argument is not the world's agony. It is love, and the strange absence at the heart of it.

The argument can be given plainly, and it is best taken at walking pace, one step set down before the next is lifted. Begin with what it would mean for God to be perfectly loving. A being of perfect love would seek a conscious, reciprocal relationship with every person capable of having one, the way a loving parent wants not merely to provide for a child but to be known by that child, to be present to them as one person to another. That wanting is much of what loving even means. Now notice what such a relationship requires at the very least. The other party must believe that you exist. There can be no closeness, no answering, no shared life, with someone you are not even convinced is there. So a perfectly loving God would see to it that every person open to such a relationship, every person not refusing it, at the very least believes that God exists.

But the world plainly contains people of exactly the other kind. There is the honest seeker who searches for decades, who would give anything to find, and meets only silence. There is the child raised somewhere the message never arrived, who could not refuse what was never offered. There is the philosopher who examines the case with all the goodwill in the world and finds that belief simply will not come, who would gladly believe and cannot. None of these is resisting. None has slammed a door. Their unbelief is not a refusal but an honest emptiness, and Schellenberg gave it a plain name, nonresistant nonbelief. Its mere existence, he argued, is itself evidence against a perfectly loving God. No torment is needed, no fawn in any forest, no murdered child. The missing voice is the whole of the datum.

Set this beside the argument from suffering, and the kinship is unmistakable. The skeleton is the same. There is an expectation drawn from divine love, of what such a God would surely do. There is an observation that contradicts it, plainly, out in the open. And there is an inference back against the love that was supposed to be there. Only the content has changed. Where the older argument points at the world's pain, this one points at the world's silence, and asks the same hard question of both.

And the standard reply is the familiar one, lifted out of its old setting and laid over the new. Perhaps God has reasons beyond our horizon for remaining hidden. Perhaps goods are served by the silence itself, goods we are in no position to survey, just as we could not survey the reasons behind a given grief. Hick's old thought about epistemic distance is invoked here by name, the idea that a certain hiddenness might be the very condition of free and uncoerced love. The skeptical theist's modesty, in other words, gets stretched over one more dark territory. We do not know why the loving God permits the silence, but our not knowing is no surprise, given what we are.

Here, though, is the tension, the place where the two defenses are made to bear weight at once and begin to grind against each other. A believer may say that God is hidden for reasons we cannot see. The same believer may say that God's reasons for permitting evil are likewise beyond us. Each move, on its own, has its defenders and its dignity. But saying both at once begins to describe a very strange object of devotion. It describes a God who cannot reliably be detected, and whose ways cannot reliably be anticipated, of whom, it seems, no expectation may safely be formed at all. A God whose goodness, by the terms of the defense, predicts nothing whatever that we could observe. And critics press the obvious question. What, at that point, is left of the living God of the traditions, the one who answers prayer, who judges, who rescues, who walks with his people through the valley.

This is the cost the defense may not be able to refuse. A strategy that wins by making God undetectable and inscrutable may win every single exchange and still lose the religion it was defending. The deity it so carefully protects begins to shade into something that, from inside an ordinary human life, is indistinguishable from simple absence. A God who is never seen and never anticipated, who explains nothing and promises nothing we could check, is hard to tell apart from no God at all. Defenders feel the force of this and answer it. They say that the hiddenness is only partial and only temporary, that religious experience and revelation still carry the relationship across the gap, that the silence is not the whole story but a passing chapter within a longer one. The voice is quiet, they insist, not gone.

So the two arguments now stand together, side by side, as the twin pillars of the modern case against God. There is the world's pain, the ancient charge. And there is the world's silence, the new one. They are different in their materials and identical in their shape, and between them they press from two directions at once. And facing both, holding the line against each, stands a single answer, the same modesty about what our minds can grasp of the divine. One position is asked to absorb the pain and the silence together, to be the load bearing reply to evil and to hiddenness alike. Whether that single defense, asked to carry so much, is a remarkable economy of thought or a quiet confession of how little is left to say, is a question the believer and the doubter must each weigh alone.

Chapter 23: The Rock and the Rope

The problem of evil did more than trouble theology. It rebuilt a discipline that had nearly died, and the rebuilding is itself a part of the answer to why the question will not lie down. A subject can be measured by what it produces, and this one produced an entire field, twice over. It produced the field in its modern form, and then it produced the reasons that field gives for its own survival. That is a strange thing for an objection to accomplish. The most serious case ever pressed against the existence of God turns out to be much of the reason that careful, professional argument about God exists at all.

Consider where the study of religion stood at the middle of the last century. It was close to a corpse. The reigning movement in English-speaking philosophy had ruled that talk of an unseen God was not false but empty, a string of words that pointed at nothing a person could ever check, and on that verdict the subject was quietly retired from the serious journals. To call a sentence about God neither true nor false but meaningless is not to defeat it. It is something colder. It is to refuse it a seat at the table where truth and falsehood are decided. What discussion remained had withdrawn into the seminaries, where it spoke mostly to those already convinced, in a language the wider profession had stopped troubling to learn. A bright student with a taste for rigor was steered elsewhere, toward logic, toward the philosophy of science, toward anything that looked like real work. The question of whether there is a God had ceased, in the best rooms, to count as a question at all.

What brought it back was the argument over suffering, conducted at the highest technical level across the second half of the century. That argument was the engine. Around it new journals were founded, devoted to exactly the questions the older verdict had declared closed, and new societies formed where believers and unbelievers met as equals to test each other's reasoning in public. Conferences gathered, anthologies appeared, careers were built on the dispute, and the dispute repaid them by deepening year over year. A generation of philosophers on both sides came to treat the existence of God as a live question, one answerable, or at least seriously approachable, with the discipline's sharpest tools, and they pursued it with the same patience and the same refusal of easy comfort that any hard problem in the field commands. The believers sharpened those tools because they were under fire, and the critics sharpened them because the believers had begun to answer back. The whole revival fed on the heat of a single dispute. There is a quiet irony in this that deserves to be said plainly. The strongest weapon ever aimed at faith is a large part of why rigorous reasoning about faith returned from the dead.

Stand now in the present and survey the ground that has gone firm. The two boldest positions, the ones that promised to settle everything, have both fallen, and they fell together. Almost no one now argues that belief in God is a flat self-contradiction, a knot that pure logic alone can show cannot be tied. And almost no one now offers a confident and complete theodicy, a finished account that names the reason behind each tear and balances the books to the last entry. There is something fitting in their falling as a pair, because each was a kind of overreach, and each made the other look reasonable by comparison. The extreme on one side claimed too much certainty against God, the extreme on the other claimed too much certainty for him, and the long argument wore both of them down. What is left after the two collapses is not a winner. It is a narrower and more careful field where the surviving moves on each side have learned to claim less and to defend it better.

What survives on the believing side is more layered and more honest than either. There is the modest move of showing only that suffering and a good God might both be true, that no outright collision has been proven. There are partial stories offered as glimpses rather than ledgers, fragments of possible reason held up without the claim that they cover the whole. And standing above these, as the steady answer to the sharpest modern challenge, there is skeptical theism, the patient insistence that a creature's failure to find a reason is weak evidence that no reason is there. For four decades now that has been the dominant reply in the literature, the position the critics must get past before they can advance.

What survives on the critical side has changed its shape as well. It no longer trades in proof. It is probabilistic and cumulative, an argument from the sheer pattern and weight of the world's pain, and it has grown more formal with every passing year. The case from suffering is now argued side by side with the case from divine hiddenness, the two pressed together as a single accumulating weight. And here is the remarkable thing about the whole exchange. Both sides have conceded that the other is serious. The model of disagreement that one of its most courteous practitioners called friendly has largely held across the field, a rare civility among people who think the stakes could not be higher. There is a lesson folded into that civility, about how a disagreement that reaches all the way down can still be conducted between people who respect each other's sight.

Yet the debate, pressed to its limits, revealed a gap it could not close, and the gap runs between two rooms. There is the seminar room, where the problem of evil is a structure of premises to be tested. And there is the sickroom, where suffering is not a structure at all but a person, in a bed, at three in the morning. The two share a name and almost nothing else. No one walks into a hospital corridor carrying an inventory of human cognitive limits, and no grieving person was ever consoled by being shown that a sound objection has a possible answer. The most rigorous argument in the world has nothing to say to the parent in that corridor, and it does not pretend otherwise. Its competence ends at the door. The praying traditions have always known this, and known it from the inside. Their genius before suffering was never explanation. It ran instead through presence, through lament, through the willingness to sit in shared silence with someone for whom no sentence will help, and to stay there long after every sentence has been used up.

And so two roads arrive, from opposite directions, at the same quiet place. Philosophy spent 40 years retreating from the confident theodicy, learning by hard argument how little it could responsibly claim to see. The traditions reached the same restraint long before, not by argument but by practice, at ten thousand bedsides where the explaining voice was found to be useless and something gentler took its place. Before certain facts the voice that explains falls silent, and what remains is company. There is a real integrity in this. A discipline that pushes its own methods to the edge, and discovers by those very methods where the methods stop, has not failed. It has done something honest and rare. It has mapped the border of its own competence.

The argument has not ended for all that. It has only moved into new registers, and the frontier is busy. There are formal models that try to weigh the world's data the way a scale weighs ore, asking what the totality of observed pain and pleasure really makes probable, and they bring to the oldest of questions the cool machinery of evidence and likelihood. There is the study of disagreement itself, asking what it can mean that thinkers of equal honesty and equal skill divide on this question and stay divided for a lifetime, neither able to convict the other of a single error. There are the sciences of the mind, asking why this particular question grips every human culture that has ever kept a record, why no people anywhere, in any age, has failed to ask it, as though the asking were written somewhere very deep in us. The problem of evil has become a crossroads where logic, ethics, and the study of knowledge meet, and one need not believe anything in particular to find oneself standing there. Students still enter the whole of philosophy through this single door, because it is the rare technical question that every human being has already asked, alone, in the dark.

Which returns us, at the end, to the oldest image of all. The rock still stands. The fact of suffering remains the hardest ground on which any belief in a good God must try to build, and nothing in two and a half thousand years of effort has dissolved it. The old playwright who first set that rock at the foot of belief named something that has not softened since. What the modern argument added to that ancient rock is a rope. The rope is the honest admission of how short the reach of human sight really is, and how much of the climb must be made blind, hand over hand, in the dark above the last thing one can see clearly. Different climbers tie on with different confidences. Some find that the rope holds, that it bears weight where the eye reaches nothing, and they go up into the cloud and trust what they cannot see. Some test it and find it slack, and take that slackness as proof there was never a summit to reach, only a wall and the long fall back. And some stand at the base with the rope in their hands, unable to commit their weight either way, which is its own honest place to stand. The mountain does not say which of them is right. It only stands there, in the weather, holding its own counsel, as it has stood through every generation that ever roped on at its foot.

And everyone who has ever sat beside an unexplained pain has already stood on this ground, whether or not a single name from these long hours ever crossed their mind. The philosophers who spent careers here differ from the rest of us in one thing only. They refused to look away. They kept their eyes on the hardest fact in the world and went on thinking in front of it, when it would have been easier, and kinder to themselves, to turn the gaze aside. There is company in that refusal, old as the first complaint ever raised against heaven and continuing tonight in every quiet room where someone lies awake turning the same question over. The question keeps its watch, and so does whoever holds it, and the night goes on around them both, wide and unanswering and still.