The nature of God as omnipotent, loving and just, and the problem of evil and suffering this creates for believers.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain what Christians believe about the nature of God as one, omnipotent, loving and just, and to show how the problem of evil and suffering challenges these beliefs. It sits at the start of the Christianity beliefs section of Paper 1 and feeds directly into the 12-mark evaluation question on suffering, so you need both the content (the attributes) and the argument (the responses).

The qualities of God

Christianity is monotheistic: there is only one God, who is the eternal creator of everything. Christians describe God using several key attributes that appear throughout the Bible and the historic creeds.

These attributes are grounded in scripture rather than invented by philosophers. "God is love" (1 John 4:8) supports omnibenevolence, "with God all things are possible" (Matthew 19:26) supports omnipotence, and "he will judge the world in righteousness" (Psalm 9:8) supports justice. Christians hold all three together: God's power is always exercised lovingly, and his justice is the justice of a loving father, not arbitrary cruelty. Many Christians also describe God as transcendent (beyond and outside the universe) and immanent (present and active within it), which matters when they explain how a perfect God can still be involved in a suffering world.

The problem of evil and suffering

The challenge is sometimes set out as an inconsistent triad: God is all powerful, God is all loving, yet evil exists, and these three claims appear to contradict one another. If God is all powerful he could stop suffering; if God is all loving he would want to; yet suffering continues. For many people this is the single strongest reason to doubt the Christian God, and the philosopher David Hume pressed exactly this point. AQA expects you to be able to state the problem clearly before answering it, because a strong evaluation depends on stating the objection fairly.

Christian responses

Christians answer the problem of evil in several ways, and a good exam answer gives more than one. Many appeal to free will (the free will defence): God gave humans genuine freedom to choose between good and evil, and moral evil is the unavoidable cost of that freedom, because love and goodness mean nothing if they cannot be freely chosen. Others see suffering as a test or a means of growth: the Book of Job shows a man who keeps faith through undeserved suffering, and Saint Paul writes that "suffering produces perseverance" (Romans 5:3), an idea developed in the Irenaean soul making theodicy. Crucially, Christians point to the cross: in Jesus, God does not stand apart from suffering but enters it and suffers himself, which they say shows a loving God who shares human pain rather than ignoring it. Finally, some appeal to mystery, trusting that an omniscient God has reasons beyond human understanding and that good can come from evil. Practically, believers respond to suffering through prayer, through the hope of the afterlife where wrongs are put right, and by working to relieve the suffering of others.