The theological approach of theodicy justifies the holiness and divine attributes of God. It affirms God’s ability to exist as omnipotent and benevolent while permitting moral and physical evil.
The argument
Religious philosophers hold that God is both all-powerful and benevolent: a being with the capacity to bring about any possible state of affairs, and a perfectly loving will directed toward the good. The difficulty this raises is familiar — the world plainly contains physical evil, such as suffering arising from the natural order, and moral evil, the wrongdoing of free agents. On this view, a theodicy is precisely the kind of account that resolves the apparent tension. Rather than denying that evil exists or quietly diminishing God's attributes, a theodicy takes both realities seriously and shows how they fit together. Proponents argue that the distinctive strength of theodicy lies in what it vindicates. A theodicy defends the divine attributes — particularly holiness, God's perfect moral purity, and justice, God's perfect rightness in dealing with creatures — while frankly acknowledging that physical and moral evil truly exist. This candour matters. An explanation that explained evil away would answer the wrong question; a theodicy instead demonstrates that God's permitting evil is consistent with, and does not compromise, God's holiness and justice. If those attributes survive honest confrontation with the world's evils, then the existence of evil no longer counts as evidence against the God religious philosophers describe. The inference, advocates hold, runs step by step: God is affirmed as all-powerful and benevolent; evil is affirmed as real; theodicies show that the second affirmation does not undermine the first, because the divine attributes emerge vindicated rather than diminished. It follows that theodicies do the explanatory work asked of them — they explain how a loving, all-powerful, benevolent God can exist despite the evil in the world, which is exactly the claim this position advances.
Context
Religious philosophers have debated ‘the problem of evil’ for millennia. Evil is understood to encompass both moral evil (caused by free human actions) and natural evil (caused by natural phenomena such as disease, earthquakes, and floods).
Premises
Counter-arguments
The fact that God does not eliminate evil in this life, despite being all powerful and benevolent means that either God is not benevolent, = is not omnipotent or not omniscient. Any one of these means God as we understand him, does not exist.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] What religious philosophers hold is a report of belief rather than a reason to accept it, and the premise assumes the very attributes whose compatibility with evil the question asks about. [Rejecting P2] "Vindicate" states the aim of a theodicy as though it were its achievement. Whether any particular theodicy succeeds is precisely what is in dispute, and the argument advances none — no free-will, soul-making or privation account — so nothing here explains the evil it acknowledges.