The logical and evidential problems of evil, the distinction between moral and natural evil, and theodicies including the Augustinian (free will and the Fall) and Irenaean (soul-making) responses.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to set out the problem of evil as a challenge to belief in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, distinguish its logical and evidential forms, separate moral evil from natural evil, and evaluate the two major theodicies (Augustinian and Irenaean) along with their strengths and weaknesses.

The problem of evil

Moral evil is suffering caused by deliberate human action (e.g. cruelty, theft, war). Natural evil is suffering caused by the natural world independent of human choice (e.g. earthquakes, disease, famine). The distinction matters because free-will defences answer moral evil neatly (humans, not God, choose to do wrong) but struggle with natural evil, which no human chose. Augustine extends the free-will defence to natural evil by blaming the fallen angels and a Fall that disordered the whole of nature, whereas Irenaean theodicy treats natural evil as part of the challenging environment needed for growth.

It is worth being precise about why the triad bites. The believer is committed to the God of classical theism: omnipotent (able to prevent any evil), omniscient (aware of all evil) and omnibenevolent (motivated to prevent all evil). Mackie's sharpened version adds two quasi-logical rules ("a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can" and "there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do"), so that the existence of any evil seems to refute one of the three attributes. A theodicy must therefore either deny one rule (for example, by showing that some goods logically require evil) or reinterpret an attribute.

The Augustinian theodicy

Augustine argues that God created a wholly good world; evil is not a substance God made but a privation boni, a falling short or absence of the goodness a thing ought to have, just as blindness is the absence of sight. Evil entered through the misuse of free will, first by angels who fell and then by humans at the Fall (Genesis 3). On Augustine's reading all of humanity was "seminally present" in Adam, so the whole race inherits the guilt and disorder of original sin and shares its consequences, including natural evil. Suffering is thus a just punishment, and the cross of Christ offers redemption, so the story ends in greater good (the felix culpa, the "happy fault" that won so great a redeemer).

Criticisms. Schleiermacher argues the account is logically incoherent: a perfect world containing perfect beings could not go wrong, so either the world was already flawed (in which case God is responsible) or evil came from nothing, which is contradictory. Modern evolutionary science undermines a literal Fall from an original perfection, since suffering and death long predate humanity. The doctrine of "seminal presence" and inherited guilt also looks morally unjust, punishing the descendants for Adam's sin.

The Irenaean and soul-making theodicy

Hick argues that a world without challenge would be a "paradise" producing no real virtue: courage means nothing without danger, compassion nothing without suffering. God therefore stays at an epistemic distance (we cannot prove God exists) so that faith and goodness are freely chosen rather than coerced. Because the goal is the perfecting of every soul, Hick concludes that universal salvation must eventually follow, since a process that condemned some to eternal loss would not be the work of a loving God; the eventual good of all justifies the suffering of the journey.

Criticisms. It seems to justify cruelty as a means to an end, making God instrumentalise the victims of atrocities for the spiritual benefit of others. The amount and unequal distribution of suffering looks excessive and arbitrary: dysteleological (apparently pointless) suffering, such as a child dying before any soul-making is possible, fits the theory badly. D. Z. Phillips objects that it is never morally permissible to harm one person for another's growth. Finally, universal salvation removes the incentive to be good, since everyone is saved regardless of how they live.