Job loses his children, his health and everything he owns. Three friends arrive, sit with him in silence for seven days, and then start explaining.

Their explanations are theodicies — the suffering is deserved, it is corrective, it serves a purpose he cannot see. They argue well for roughly thirty chapters. At the end God addresses them directly and says they have not spoken of him what is right, and that Job, who spent the book complaining, has.

The founding text of the tradition contains a sustained attack on the enterprise this page is about. Anyone constructing a theodicy is working against that, and the good ones know it.

What a theodicy has to do

The problem of evil is the argument. A theodicy is the constructive reply, and Leibniz coined the word in 1710 from the Greek for god and justice.

Every theodicy has the same shape: identify a morally sufficient reason — some good unobtainable otherwise, or some worse evil averted — for which a good and omnipotent God permits what we observe.

And note the bar, because this is where most discussion goes wrong. A defense only has to be possible. A theodicy has to be true. It is claiming to describe how providence actually works, which is a far more exposed position, and it is why Plantinga was careful to call his free-will argument a defense and not a theodicy.

The four answers, and what each costs

Evil as privation. Augustine, inheriting from Plotinus: evil is an absence — a good that should be present and is missing, the way blindness is a missing sight. God created everything that exists, and evil does not, strictly, exist.

What it costs: it can feel like a redescription rather than an answer. The child with bone cancer is not comforted to learn that what afflicts them is metaphysically a deficiency. It handles the question of evil's origin elegantly and the question of its weight not at all.

The best of all possible worlds. Leibniz: God, being perfect, chose the optimum from among the possible worlds. Not a world without evil — no such world may be available, since goods have to be compossible and not all of them fit together — but the one whose balance is maximal.

What it costs: everything about it depends on claims no one can check. And it commits you to saying, of any particular horror, that the alternative was worse. Voltaire made that unsayable in polite company and it has never quite recovered, though Robert Adams has argued the real position is more defensible than the caricature.

Free will. Creatures who can choose the good must be able to choose otherwise, or the choosing is worthless. A world of free agents who sometimes go wrong beats a world of automata who cannot.

What it costs: it addresses moral evil only. Earthquakes, cancers and animal suffering are untouched — nobody chose them. Plantinga suggested fallen angels might account for natural evil and almost nobody follows him there. It also requires libertarian free will, which is independently contested.

Soul-making. John Hick, reviving Irenaeus against Augustine: humans were not created perfect and then fallen. They were created immature, and the world is a place where character is forged. Difficulty is the condition of growth, not a defect in the design.

What it costs: it works well for the suffering that builds someone and badly for the rest. The infant who dies at six weeks, the animal in the fire, the person destroyed rather than deepened by what happened to them — none of them are making a soul. It explains the suffering we have already made sense of.

Where all four strain

Marilyn McCord Adams named the category that breaks them: horrendous evils — suffering so severe it gives the sufferer reason to doubt their life could be a good to them on the whole. Not hardship. The Holocaust, prolonged torture, the systematic destruction of a person.

Her argument is that greater-good reasoning fails structurally here. Even if some cosmic balance came out positive, that does no good to this person, whose life was the cost. A theodicy that works by aggregation cannot reach someone whose individual life was the price of the aggregate.

She thinks a solution requires goods internal to the person's own life — union with God, the evil defeated rather than outweighed — rather than a ledger. Whether that is available is contested. That the ledger approach fails here is much more widely accepted.

The position that rejects the question

Anti-theodicy is the most serious thing on this page, and it is not atheism. Its leading proponents are theists.

The claim, developed after the Holocaust and running through Levinas, Sarah Pinnock and Karen Kilby: to construct a justification for God's permission of a specific atrocity is to assume a vantage point no human occupies, and worse, to console yourself about something that should not be consoled. The intellectual success of a theodicy is not neutral — it is a way of becoming reconciled to horror.

On this view the appropriate responses to evil are lament, protest and solidarity. Not explanation. The tradition has always contained this strand; it is most of the Psalms, and it is what Job is doing while his friends theorize.

Which returns the page to where it started. The comforters are not condemned for reasoning badly. They reason about as well as anyone has since. They are condemned for what they were doing at all, at that moment, to that person.

Why it is worth your time

Theodicy is the clearest case available of an argument that can succeed intellectually and fail completely at what it was for.

You do not need to be religious for that to be useful. The structure — a justification that is internally coherent, arrives at the right moment for the person offering it, and is an insult to the person receiving it — turns up constantly. In an explanation of why a layoff was necessary. In an account of why a system that failed someone was working as designed.

The discipline of theodicy is also the discipline of noticing when an explanation is being produced for the comfort of the explainer. Job's friends are the permanent example, and they meant well.

Further reading