The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering – which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil – is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. Why does suffering push some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The aim of this article is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. In the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments.

In her recent book The Image of God: The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Mourning (2022), Eleonore Stump takes up a question she thinks has been unduly neglected by contemporary philosophers of religion: Is the world as good as it would have been had original sin, and all subsequent sin and suffering, not occurred? Stump contends that if we do not answer this question in the affirmative, we are left with a problem – a picture of a world which is a disappointment to God; and this picture could in turn undermine belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good Creator. In response to this problem, Stump sets out to defend the felix culpa view, according to which the world is even better with the Fall than it would have been without. However, I argue in this article that the felix culpa view has unacceptable consequences regarding God’s desires and will, that we can live with the problem of mourning unresolved, and that we need not affirm the felix culpa view to resolve the problem of mourning anyway.

Say theism is the view that an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly loving, and perfectly good being exists. And say pointless atheism occurs just in case there’s an atheist who isn’t resistant to belief in God, and no greater good comes about on account of this atheist’s non-belief. In this article, I show that if two prominent views about evil and divine hiddenness are accepted, theism is compatible with pointless atheism – a result hitherto unnoticed. Furthermore, not only is theism compatible with pointless atheism, it entails pointless atheism. This is significant because many objections to the argument from divine hiddenness have tried to show that all instances of non-resistant atheism are required for a greater good. But if I’m right, given theism, there need not be a point to non-resistant atheism. Indeed, we should expect there to be pointless atheism.

After outlining sceptical theism (ST) and the fine-tuning argument (FTA), I demonstrate how arguments for the former undercut the latter. I then consider and reject three recent proposals for ameliorating the conflict: positive ST, considerations about normative superiors, and appeal to theistic metaethics. I contend, however, that Kirk Durston’s complexity argument for ST does not undercut the FTA but in fact supports it. In defending that thesis, I respond to Climenhaga’s contention that ST undermines all warrant for theistic belief, the FTA included.

Modal panentheism claims that God encompasses all possible worlds and that a substantial number of possible worlds exist. This article defends a version of modal panentheism that is grounded in perfect-being theology, which maintains that God holds all great-making properties to the highest possible degree. In addition to goodness, modal panentheists consider encompassment to be a great-making property, and therefore, God (a maximally encompassing being) is said to encompass all possible worlds.

Nagasawa argues that modal panentheism faces a significant problem: the modal problem of evil. The argument states that if modal realism is true, then there exists a substantial number of possible evils that contradict God’s perfect goodness. Nagasawa proceeds to claim that modal evil poses a greater threat to modal panentheism than actual evil does to traditional theism.

This article develops two responses to the modal problem of evil. The first response (maximal-panentheism) argues that God need not be all-good or all-encompassing. The second response (no evil worlds) argues that worlds contradicting God’s perfect goodness are not possible worlds. In the light of these responses, I claim the modal problem of evil for modal panentheism is no more intractable than the problem of evil for traditional theism.

Can the best arguments for a privation theory of evil be parodied, with equal plausibility, as arguments for a privation theory of good? The privation theory of evil claims that evil has no positive existence, and it is but a privation of good. The privation theory of good claims the opposite. I approach this topic as one element in the so-called evil-God Challenge. Stephen Law has argued that the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect God (theism) is on a par with the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, but completely evil-God (maltheism). In fact, he concludes, the arguments for an evil God are symmetrical with, and isomorphic to, those for a good God. The privation theory of evil has often been used to defend theism against the argument from evil. Thus, part of the evil-God Challenge is to evaluate arguments for the privation theory of evil for their vulnerability to maltheist parody. I consider a broad range of arguments for the privation theory of evil, and I argue that most of them are vulnerable to parodic neutralization. Furthermore, I argue that although the thesis of the convertibility of being and goodness is often held to entail the privation theory of evil, or to be entailed by it (or to be equivalent to it), it is independent of the privation theory. I do find that David Oderberg’s recent argument for the privation theory of evil resists any easy maltheist parody, but I argue that it has a defect. I sketch an argument according to which his good-as-fulfillment account is compatible with a perfectly evil god. My tentative conclusion is that the privation theory of evil enjoys little more plausibility than does the privation theory of good.

The philosophical ‘problem of evil’ goes back at least as far as Epicurus and has remained a powerful argument against the existence of God in contemporary philosophy. The argument is rooted in apparent contradictions between God’s divine attributes and various conditions of human existence. But these contradictions arise only given certain assumptions of what we should expect both God and the world to be like given God’s existence. In this article, I argue that we can utilise the work of the twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil to craft a coherent metaphysical picture of God, creation, and suffering that rejects these common assumptions. Further, I contend that this picture very plausibly follows from commonly accepted tenets of traditional monotheism. Given this, I argue that this Weil-inspired framework provides serious reasons for reframing the problem of evil and its corresponding theodicies by presenting a radically different view of how God must relate to creation. Yet, this picture does not necessarily vindicate the theist. I argue that this picture may leave us with a new question about creation in the face of evil. Namely, is it possible to understand God’s initial creative act as Weil describes it – as an act of love?

Contrary to much of the commentary tradition, the book of Job is not primarily a discourse on how to properly speak (or withhold speech) about God in the midst of innocent suffering, nor is it aimed primarily at offering up the character of Job as an exemplar of how to suffer correctly (or incorrectly). Neither is it a treatise about human submission to (or rebellion from) God’s mysterious sovereign prerogative in permitting evil. It is instead a theological exploration of the dilemmas and demands of consolation that confront us given the inexplicable enormities of human suffering. Its unifying aim is to confront us with multiple voices that pull us into an open-ended—and decidedly pessimistic—reflection on what innocent suffering reveals to us about our creaturely limits and the fragility of our hope in God, features of the human condition that require our capacities for compassion to exceed our capacities for theological sense-making.

If a benevolent and all-powerful God exists, how can there be so much suffering? Could God have created a better world? Or is evil the price we pay for freedom of the will?

Recently, Luis R. G. Oliveira has developed the ‘symmetry challenge’ as follows:

1. (1) If God exists, then for all actual instances of evil e, God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e (the ‘reasons’ thesis).

2. (2) If God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e, then we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e as well (symmetry thesis).

3. (3) So, if God exists, then for all actual instances of e, we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e (Oliveira, 2023).

Thus, per Oliveira, given God’s sovereignty over evil, there is no ethical asymmetry which would compel a moral agent to prevent rather than permit a preventable evil. In this paper, I will defend the asymmetry claim and argue that Oliveira’s argument ultimately fails. First, I will sketch Oliveira’s argument. Then, I will briefly articulate a broadly Reformed-Thomistic model of providence which I will deploy in this article. Third, I will argue that this model of providence and the ethical aim of the Christian life generate two distinct yet inter-related reasons to hold to the asymmetry claim. Finally, I will canvas several theodicies my model rules out and anticipate several objections.

This paper will offer a new defense in response to the problem of natural evil, called the Perfect Will defense. The defense argues that in sustaining the universe, God conforms the system of physical laws to his intellect and will. Yet, God could not fully conform the system of laws (for our universe) to his intellect and will without simultaneously forcing people into a loving relation with God. Yet, since God would not force people to love him, God must thereby initially create people in a universe that has a system of laws that is only partially conformed to God’s intellect and will. However, while a universe with a system of laws that is only partially conformed to God’s intellect and will allows for people to exercise their freedom over their relation with God, it also results in the occurrence of natural evils. The paper will argue that once this defense is fully developed, it is able to account for why God allows for natural evils to occur within the universe. The paper will outline the defense, as well as respond to the defense’s major objections.

We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day Saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God's soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God's allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils.

In this article, I explore the mythic narratives of the Yoruba-derived tradition of Candomblé Nagô to discern the attributes of its Supreme Being. I introduce Candomblé, offering an overview of its central beliefs and practices, and then present theological perspectives on the Supreme Being in African Traditional Religion as a basis for comparison with the myths I will examine. I consider the primary creation myths of Candomblé, emphasizing references to the tradition's Supreme Being and, analysing these myths, I argue that Candomblé's Supreme Being, as depicted in these narratives, amounts to a limited god. This portrayal accounts for the absence of a problem of evil within the tradition. It suggests the moral ambivalence of Candomblé's Supreme Being and other high deities, as well as the world itself. This exploration sheds light on a lesser-explored tradition and its unique approach to philosophical dilemmas, distinct from the predominantly theistic framework of most philosophy of religion, and evinces that philosophizing through immersion in myths should involve appreciating the complexities and richness inherent in these forms of life, free from the imposition of external assumptions or biases.

Using Moses Maimonides’ theodicy to respond to contemporary formulations of the problem of evil initially seems unpromising. Maimonides is committed to claims that make the task harder rather than easier. Chief among them is his belief that all suffering is deserved by the sufferer. But Maimonides is often misinterpreted: he does not hold that innocent people are never subject to bodily harm, but that it is possible to achieve a kind of ‘psychic immunity’ from suffering via intellectual enlightenment, and that failure to do so is blameworthy. I argue that while the Maimonidean psychic immunity theodicy has some attractive features, it struggles to explain ‘inculpably incomprehensible’ suffering: that of infants and people with serious cognitive disabilities. I propose two responses: defending Maimonides’ intellectual elitism using work on moral status from Singer and McMahan; and defending a more limited version of the theodicy grounded on ‘sceptical’ readings of Maimonides that emphasize the limitations of human knowledge. I conclude that the second is more promising, and that the limits of Maimonides’ theodicy point to more general limits on theodicies that insist on what I call ‘first-personal adequacy’ – the requirement that a theodicy provide a satisfying explanation of suffering to sufferers themselves.

Mark Murphy has recently defended a novel account of divine agency on which God would have very minimal requiring reasons and a wide range of merely justified reasons. This account grounds his response to the problem of evil. If God would not have requiring reasons to promote the well-being of creatures, Murphy argues, then the evil we observe would not count as evidence against theism. I argue that Murphy's conclusion, if successful in undermining the problem of evil, also undermines probabilistic arguments for theism. However, there is good reason to resist his conclusion. Even if God does not have requiring reasons, but merely has justifying reasons, to promote creaturely well-being, God may nevertheless have most motivating reason to do so, and this would be enough to predict divine action, at least given Murphy's further assumption that God is perfectly free. It does not follow from the rational permissibility of God's Φ-ing that it is possible for God to Φ.