If God Is Good, Why Does Evil Exist?

The argument from evil is a real argument, and it deserves a real reply. Its strongest form depends on one premise that is very hard to prove: that a good and all-powerful God could have no good reason for allowing the evil we see. Without that premise, the argument loses its logical force. It does not lose its weight. Dr. Leo Percer, a professor of biblical studies who trains doctoral students in apologetics, adds a distinction that is easy to skip. The problem of evil poses two different questions, one about whether belief in God is rational and one about why this suffering happened to this person. An answer to the first does not automatically answer the second.

How does the argument actually work?

Laid out step by step, the classic version runs like this:

1. If God exists, he is wholly good.
2. If God exists, he is all-powerful.
3. A wholly good being would prevent evil as far as it is able.
4. An all-powerful being is able to prevent any evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. Therefore, God does not exist, or he is not wholly good, or he is not all-powerful.

Christians affirm the first two premises, so they cannot escape the argument by giving up either God’s goodness or his power. The fifth premise is not in doubt either. Percer does not soften it. Asked which apologetic question he finds hardest, he named this one and listed what makes it concrete: a pandemic, the horror of war, racial injustice, political unrest. He said some of these problems are directly attributable to things we would honestly call evil.

So the argument stands or falls somewhere else. Almost all of its force sits in premise three.

Which premise is doing the real work?

Premise three sounds obvious until you test it. Do good people always prevent every harm they are able to prevent? They do not. A parent who could stop a teenager from every disappointment, and does not, is not thereby a bad parent. A doctor who sets a broken bone causes pain she could have avoided by doing nothing. In both cases a good person permits a harm because something else is at stake.

That counterexample has a limit, and the limit matters. The parent and the doctor are constrained. They allow pain because they cannot get the good result any other way. God is not constrained in the same manner, so the analogy cannot simply be carried over. What it does show is narrower and still decisive for the logic: goodness does not mean preventing every evil no matter what. Goodness means preventing evil unless there is a morally sufficient reason to permit it.

Once premise three is stated accurately, the argument changes shape. It now has to claim that God has no morally sufficient reason for permitting any of the evil in the world. That is a claim about every possible reason an infinite mind could have. It is a universal negative, and universal negatives are very hard to establish. To prove the argument, the skeptic would have to show that no such reason could exist, not merely that he cannot think of one.

It helps to be clear about what would count as a morally sufficient reason. It is not just any benefit. The good secured would have to be real and weighty enough to justify the evil permitted, and it would have to be a good that could not be had without permitting that evil or something comparable. A reason that fails either test is an excuse, not a justification.

Christians have proposed candidates that aim to meet both tests. A common one is that genuine love requires genuine freedom, and freedom that cannot be misused is not freedom at all. If that is right, a world with real love is a world where real evil is possible, and preventing every misuse would mean removing the freedom itself. Whether that proposal fully succeeds is a longer debate. Percer did not lay out that case in detail here. For readers who want it, he recommends his friend Clay Jones’s book Why Does God Allow Evil?

The logical point, though, does not depend on any one proposal being correct. If it is even possible that God has a reason meeting those tests, the strict version of the argument fails to prove its conclusion, and the burden of showing impossibility stays with the skeptic. That is what Percer means when he says plainly, “I think there’s good sound, apologetic answers to it, quite frankly.”

What is left once the strict version fails?

A great deal is left, and an honest reply has to say so. The skeptic can retreat to a weaker and more realistic claim. Perhaps some reason for evil is possible, but the sheer amount of suffering, and its worst forms, make it unlikely that a good God is behind the world. This is no longer a claim that the beliefs contradict each other. It is a claim about probability.

Logic alone does not dispose of a probability argument. The Christian can point out that a finite person would not expect to see all the reasons of an infinite God, so our failure to see a reason is weak evidence that none exists. That reply has real force. It also faces a serious counter. The skeptic can say it proves too much: if our ignorance means we can never judge any evil pointless, then no horror, however extreme, could ever count against God, and the reply seems to excuse anything.

That worry sets a real limit. The appeal to our limited view can lower the weight of the probability argument, but it cannot be used to call evil good or to stop opposing it. Percer is clear on the second point: “Jesus called out evil, called out sin when he saw it.” A Christian who uses the limits of human knowledge to soften moral judgment has misused the argument. Used properly, it shows only that our inability to see God’s reasons is not proof that he has none. The probability version is best treated as a case to be answered rather than a verdict already reached.

Percer is willing to sit inside that unresolved space. Elsewhere in the same conversation he explains why he will say “I don’t know” to a student rather than bluff: “telling the truth about something is more important than winning an argument.” Applied here, that means a Christian can say two things at once. The argument does not prove what it claims. And the question it raises is still the hardest one we face.

Why can a sound answer still fail the person asking?

This is the distinction the whole subject turns on. Percer’s full sentence about the answers continues past the confidence: “I do think there’s some good philosophical answers to it, but that’s the most challenging to me because it’s real life.”

The two forms of the problem ask different questions. The intellectual form asks whether belief in God is rational given that evil exists. The personal form asks why this happened, why to her, and where God is right now. An argument can answer the first question well and leave the second untouched. That is not a defect in the argument. It is a mismatch between the question and the answer.

Percer knows the second question firsthand. His wife has multiple sclerosis, and he described crying out to God about what she faces that healthy people do not. Of that experience he said, “it does raise the question of why,” and he would not deny it. A philosopher who holds that the argument fails can still lie awake asking why. Those are not contradictory positions. They are the two levels of the problem showing up in one life.

Lisa Fields recalled bringing her own wrestling with this question to Percer years earlier, and summarized what she took from him: “The arguments help, but it won’t necessarily take the pain that goes along with wrestling with the problem of evil.” She also observed that the same argument can satisfy one person and repel another, saying that what may be a satisfactory answer to you “may be a discouraging answer to another person.”

Percer’s example is a seminary friend, Ed, who was nearly killed in a bicycle accident and had to relearn how to walk and eat. Percer could have told him to follow the doctor’s orders. That advice would have been accurate and still wrong for the moment. “He needed my agreement, not my correction.” Truth and fit are different properties. A statement can have the first and lack the second, and in that moment the lack of fit can do real harm.

Isn’t turning to presence just a way of avoiding the argument?

This is the strongest objection to Percer’s approach. A skeptic could say that once the logic gets uncomfortable, Christians change the subject to comfort, and comfort is not an answer.

Percer’s reply is that God himself did not treat evil as a debating point. “I realized that God faced the problem of evil head on,” he said, pointing to Jesus facing temptation in the wilderness and then bearing sin on the cross. God did not, in Percer’s words, “treat it as a philosophical conundrum, addressed it, and he endured it.”

Read carefully, this claim does something specific and limited. It does not supply God’s reason for any given evil. It answers a different charge that often travels with the argument: that God, if he exists, is a distant spectator who allows suffering without sharing in it. The incarnation and the cross deny that charge directly.

Percer adds a claim about time: “the promise of the resurrection, the Sunday morning when Jesus gets outta the tomb, is the promise that evil is short term is not long term.” This bears on the probability version of the argument. Whether suffering looks pointless depends partly on whether the story ends at the grave. If the resurrection is true, the evidence the skeptic weighs is incomplete, because the final chapter has not been counted. That does not promise that a given illness will be healed in this life. Percer prays for his wife and still watches her live with a chronic disease.

What does this mean for how Christians answer the question?

The New Testament asks believers to have answers. Percer pointed to 1 Peter 3:15, which in the KJV tells believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” The older phrase “meekness and fear” is often rendered in other translations as something like gentleness and respect. The verse joins a reasoned answer to a manner of giving it, and does not let either one replace the other.

Percer applies this by asking what kind of question is in front of him. Some people raise evil to win a debate. Others are genuinely seeking. For someone in fresh grief, the philosophical case can wait: “we can always have a cup of coffee and a philosophical conversation about why bad stuff happens to good people.” In the moment, he says, the harder task is “bearing a burden as opposed to answering a question.” Paul’s instruction to “weep with them that weep” in Romans 12:15 is a command about what to do with people, not a thesis about God’s reasons. Knowing which question is being asked is part of answering it well, and Percer’s phrase for that is being “sensitive to the need of the moment.”

What remains unsettled?

An honest account has to name what the Christian reply does not do. It does not tell anyone the specific reason behind a specific tragedy. Scripture rarely offers that, and people who claim to know usually wound the people they are trying to help. Christians also differ on which explanation of evil they find most persuasive, and these differences are matters of argument, not tests of faithfulness.

What can be said with confidence is narrower and sturdier than either side usually admits. The argument from evil does not prove that God cannot exist, because it rests on a premise no one has shown to be true. The probability version remains a serious case, weakened but not erased by the limits of what finite minds can see. And the pain behind the argument does not go away when a premise fails, because the pain was never a premise. It was a person. A believer who keeps those apart can be rigorous with the skeptic’s logic and truthful with the grieving, and will know which conversation is happening.