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Does the presence of evil in the world make belief in God unreasonable? And what about the experience of divine hiddenness—the sense that God is absent or silent? These two questions have driven one of the most intense debates in the philosophy of religion. Since the mid-20th century, a sequence of arguments and responses has progressively refined the challenge, shifting from a claim of logical impossibility to a probabilistic case, and from suffering alone to hiddenness as a separate but parallel difficulty.
The modern debate began in earnest with the Logical Problem of Evil (1955). J. L. Mackie argued that the trio of divine properties—omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness—is logically incompatible with the existence of any evil at all. If God is all‑powerful, he can prevent evil; if all‑knowing, he knows when it will occur; if perfectly good, he wants to prevent it. Since evil exists, the theistic concept of God is internally contradictory. This argument set the agenda because it demanded a direct logical defense: if theism is to remain coherent, evil must be shown to be compatible with God’s existence, not merely explained away.
A few years later, Soul‑Making Theodicy (1966) offered a positive explanatory story. John Hick revived the Irenaean tradition, arguing that God’s purpose is not to create a ready‑made paradise but to allow humans to develop virtues—courage, compassion, patience—through confronting hardship. Evil is not a defect to be eliminated but a necessary ingredient for soul‑making. Unlike a logical refutation, this theodicy coexisted with the logical problem without directly answering it: it assumed compatibility and tried to justify evil’s presence. Its strength was its explanatory power; its weakness was that it did not prove logical consistency.
The decisive logical response came with the Free Will Defense (1974). Alvin Plantinga used possible‑worlds semantics to argue that it is logically possible that God, even with the attributes Mackie listed, could not create a world with moral good without also permitting moral evil, if free will is genuine. The key move was to show that Mackie had not established an explicit contradiction; the burden of proof shifted to the critic. The defense did not claim that God actually has a reason for evil, only that the logical problem fails. This narrowed the debate dramatically: after Plantinga, few philosophers maintained that evil and God are logically incompatible. The real question became probabilistic.
With the logical problem widely regarded as defeated, attention turned to whether evil makes God’s existence improbable rather than impossible. The Evidential Problem of Evil (1979) was formulated most influentially by William Rowe. Rowe pointed to instances of apparently pointless suffering—a fawn burned to death in a forest fire, for example—that seem to serve no greater good. If God existed, he would prevent such gratuitous evils unless there were a compelling reason to allow them. Since we can conceive of no such reason, the existence of such evils makes theism unlikely. This argument replaced the logical problem as the dominant form of the debate because it conceded logical consistency but pressed the evidential force of evil against theistic belief.
Soon after, the Divine Hiddenness Argument (1993) broadened the challenge beyond suffering. J. L. Schellenberg argued that if a perfectly loving God existed, he would ensure that every person capable of relationship with him has sufficient evidence of his existence at the time they are ready to respond. Yet many sincere seekers experience non‑belief or ambiguity about God’s existence. This hiddenness is itself evidence against the existence of such a God. The argument runs parallel to the evidential problem: both claim that the world as we find it is not what we would expect if theism were true. But hiddenness targets a different feature—divine love rather than sovereignty—and so resists responses that work only for suffering.
The Skeptical Theism (1996) response emerged specifically to undercut the evidential problem. Defended by Michael Bergmann, William Alston, and others, skeptical theism argues that human cognitive abilities are too limited to judge that an instance of suffering is truly pointless. We cannot see the full network of goods and reasons that might justify God’s permission of evil. Since our failure to conceive of a justifying good does not show that none exists, the evidential argument is epistemically overambitious. This response remains the most widely debated move in the field today. Its critics charge that it threatens moral reasoning: if we cannot tell whether any evil is gratuitous, how can we judge that it is wrong to allow it? Skeptical theism coexists with the evidential problem in a persistent stalemate, each side defending its epistemic premises.
Finally, Evolutionary Theodicy (2000) extends soul‑making by incorporating the long history of pain and death in biological evolution. Theists such as Christopher Southgate and John Polkinghorne argue that the evolutionary process, with its suffering and extinction, is the only way God could create free, self‑aware beings. Some versions add a co‑suffering God who participates in creaturely pain. This framework does not replace soul‑making but extends it to cover natural evil and animal suffering, areas where traditional theodicies were weakest. It remains a growing, but not yet dominant, program.
Today the central divide is between those who press the evidential problem of evil and those who defend skeptical theism. Both sides agree that the logical problem is dead; their disagreement concerns how much our epistemic limitations should weaken probabilistic reasoning. The divine hiddenness argument adds a distinct, unresolved challenge that interacts with but is not absorbed by skeptical theism. Meanwhile, soul‑making and evolutionary theodicy continue as explanatory traditions, offering reasons for evil that can supplement a defensive strategy but do not by themselves defeat the evidential case. The field remains lively precisely because no framework has delivered a knock‑down refutation or vindication. Each new move refines the terms of disagreement rather than closing it.