The Bible underneath it
The Problem of Evil
The two arguments philosophers take most seriously.
Set the frame first
Do not claim this proves God does not exist. The strictly logical version is generally conceded to fail. The version philosophers actually defend is evidential: the amount and distribution of suffering makes God's existence unlikely, not impossible. Stanford Encyclopedia
The suffering free will does not explain
- The free will defense covers moral evil. It does not touch natural evil: cancer, earthquakes, birth defects.
- William Rowe's classic case: "In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering." No human free will. No one to learn from it. No one watching. Source
- Scale it up: roughly 500 million years of animals starving and being eaten alive, long before any humans existed to grow spiritually from it.
Divine hiddenness
Harder to answer than evil, because you cannot blame it on human sin:
- A perfectly loving God would be open to relationship with every person capable of one.
- You cannot have a relationship with someone you do not believe exists.
- So no nonresistant nonbeliever should exist: someone open to God, sincerely seeking, who simply is not convinced.
- They demonstrably do exist. Source
I was one of them for months.
When they say
"We cannot know God's reasons." A genuinely respected position with real force. But it carries a steep cost. If our moral judgment is too weak to conclude that a burning fawn is pointless suffering, it is also too weak to conclude that God is good. It proves too much.
"Hiddenness preserves free will." Those goods do not require nonbelief. You believe your parents exist and still freely choose whether to have a relationship with them.
"Nonbelievers are secretly suppressing it." This is unfalsifiable by construction. Any sincere seeker who reports honest doubt gets reclassified as self deceived.