Paper 1 Problems of evil and suffering and the nature and influence of religious experience: the logical and evidential problems of evil, the Augustinian and Irenaean theodicies, and the argument from religious experience with its challenges.

What this dot point is asking

Edexcel Paper 1 pairs the problem of evil and suffering with the nature and influence of religious experience. The problem of evil asks whether suffering is compatible with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, and how theists respond through theodicies. Religious experience asks whether direct encounters with the divine can serve as evidence for God. Both are heavily evaluative: the exam wants you to weigh the arguments and critics, not describe them.

The answer

The logical and evidential problems of evil

Distinguish moral evil (caused by human choices, such as cruelty and war) from natural evil (from natural processes, such as disease and earthquakes); the hardest cases for the theist are natural evils that no free choice explains.

The Augustinian theodicy

The Augustinian view is criticised for relying on a literal Fall, for the implausibility of an originally perfect creation, and (Schleiermacher) for the contradiction of a perfect world going wrong of its own accord.

The Irenaean (soul-making) theodicy

The Irenaean theodicy, developed by John Hick as "soul-making", argues that humans were created immature and must grow into the likeness of God through freely meeting challenges. Suffering is necessary for developing virtues such as courage and compassion, and God maintains an epistemic distance so that goodness is freely chosen rather than compelled. Hick adds universal salvation: the process is completed for all in the end, justifying the suffering on the way.

Critics object that the scale of suffering seems disproportionate to soul-making, that some suffering destroys rather than builds character, and that universal salvation removes the moral seriousness of free choice.

The free will defence

Alvin Plantinga's free will defence argues that God could not create a world with genuine moral good without the possibility of moral evil, because free creatures must be able to choose wrongly. This answers the logical problem (the triad is not contradictory) but struggles with natural evil, unless that is attributed to non-human free agents or to the conditions necessary for free action.

The argument from religious experience

Challenges to religious experience

• Michael Persinger's experiments stimulating the temporal lobes (the "God helmet") produced experiences subjects described as religious, suggesting a neurological cause.
• Sigmund Freud treats religion as an illusion rooted in wish-fulfilment and the projection of a father figure, so experiences are psychological, not evidence of God.
• Richard Dawkins attributes experiences to the brain's "misfiring" pattern-seeking.
• The diversity of conflicting experiences across religions suggests they cannot all be veridical, weakening the inference to any one God.

Examples in context

Try this

Q1. Evaluate the Irenaean theodicy as a response to the problem of suffering. [20 marks]

• What the marker wants. An AO2 essay explaining Hick's soul-making and epistemic distance, testing it against the scale of suffering and the cases of soul-destroying evil, comparing it with the Augustinian alternative, and concluding with reasons.

Q2. Explain Swinburne's principle of credulity. [8 marks]

• Cue. We should normally believe that things are as they seem to be, so an apparent experience of God is, in the absence of special reasons to doubt it, good evidence that God was experienced; pair it with the principle of testimony for full marks.