This post isn't trying to disprove God, or to solve the problem of evil as a whole. It's after something narrower: the existence of extreme, seemingly pointless natural suffering in a world supposedly made by an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God.

The other day I was talking with a friend about the recent wildfires in Gironde. We'd both been evacuated, and I joked, right as the fires were at their worst: "This is when atheists start praying," to which she replied: "If God really existed, there wouldn't be all this misery."

That's probably the single most common argument people use to justify rejecting God. And it makes sense — it's genuinely hard to refute outright. It's easy enough to look at kids taken by cancer, villages razed by fire, or whole lives dissolved by dementia, and conclude that the mere possibility of such evils rules out a loving god. I'd go further: it's not just a loving god we're talking about, but a god who "is love" (1 John 4:16) — in Christianity, anyway.

But I can't help noticing that the West's drift away from religion has grown roughly in step with the general improvement in living conditions. People are healthier, more comfortable, living longer. Back when we had far more occasions to witness misery and conclude God didn't exist, faith was somehow stronger and more widespread. There's no doubt a whole tangle of sociological and cultural explanations behind that, but that's not really what I'm after here. I'd rather set that hypothesis aside and dig into what people who've thought about this way harder than I have actually say about the problem of evil — and why most of their answers leave me unsatisfied.

Human evil and natural evil

My interest in theology already turned up a partial answer, so I want to start with an important distinction: human evil versus natural evil.

You might be tempted to say God can't exist because he allows serial killers, sadistic dictators, rapists, pedophiles, and so on to exist. But in my view, their existence is actually consistent with the argument from genuine love.

I get the need for human freedom, for free will. God wants to be loved by people, and sincere love requires the possibility of rejection. A creature incapable of disobeying, hating, or doing wrong wouldn't really be free. So free will implies the possibility of harming others. That accounts for wars, murders, betrayals, injustices — basically every atrocity that's purely down to human will. That's human evil, and it doesn't explain congenital diseases, childhood cancers, neurodegenerative illness, earthquakes, natural famine, parasitism, or animal suffering that predates humanity entirely. So how do you explain evil that isn't the product of any moral choice at all?

How do you even properly define natural evil? It's a huge, messy category. I'm not suggesting the ideal would be a universe where nothing ages, changes, or dies. The problem isn't that matter changes or decays — erosion, senescence, apoptosis, all of that is fine within a living world. A cell dying, a molecule breaking down under radiation — none of that is suffering. The problem shows up when a sentient being experiences not just pain — pain makes sense as a survival signal — but suffering: a conscious experience of physical and/or psychological distress.

Finitude isn't the problem

I really want to stress this: finitude isn't the issue. A living world implies change, aging, death. Aging can go along with a limited existence, and death can allow generations to renew, matter to keep cycling.

I'm not saying God should have made us physically immortal in a world where nothing unpleasant ever happens — I'm asking why finitude has to take such horrific forms. You could easily accept aging that comes with more fatigue, some physical decline, moderate pain. That doesn't require dementia, Parkinson's, and years of agony on top. So it's not human finitude itself that seems irreconcilable with a loving God to me — it's certain forms that finitude takes.

Excess suffering

Now for the conceptual heart of this: the line between necessary suffering and excess suffering.

I mentioned earlier that pain has a function — it warns us. Suffering also has a psychological use, fostering spiritual growth. A trial can shape you, a loss can make you grow up. But pain almost always has that alert function; psychological suffering doesn't always produce growth.

You can roughly gauge how justifiable a given suffering is using a few criteria: its intensity, its duration, whether it's avoidable, whether any lesson can possibly be drawn from it, and how disproportionate it is relative to whatever good it supposedly enables.

A brief jolt of pain that stops you from leaving your hand in a fire has an identifiable point — it prevents real damage. A breakup can mature the mind, and can reasonably be seen as a survivable trial God set up so we'd grow. But a disease that slowly erases someone's memory, personality, and autonomy over ten or twenty years is just as hard to justify as an infant born with an incurable, agonizing congenital condition. What else is there to conclude, absent any identifiable justification, except arbitrary cruelty?

So yes — we're dealing with disproportionate natural suffering.

The limits of soul-making

A lot of suffering is immediately disproportionate when it lands on beings incapable of drawing any meaning from it. An adult can grow in response to suffering. A baby crushed by leukemia can't. Neither can a child who dies before they can even understand what's happening to them, nor — at the other end of life — someone whose illness destroys precisely the faculties needed to make sense of the ordeal.

Suffering can be formative, sure — but only if the being has some capacity to transform it. And even in adults, it doesn't build character reliably. Some suffering strengthens; some, once past a certain intensity, just traumatizes, destroys, wipes out any capacity to act at all.

Someone might push back here with the soul-making theodicy, popularized by the theologian John Hick: the world wasn't built as a comfortable garden but as a moral crucible, where even suffering with no apparent addressee is part of a genuinely risky world — a world where every evil visibly served a purpose would produce fake virtue, performed rather than chosen. It's a clever argument, but it runs straight into the exact cases I just raised: what authentic virtue does an infant dying of an incurable congenital disease ever get the chance to choose? Saying the suffering serves the moral formation of others — the parents, the people around the child — just relocates the problem instead of solving it: why would an adult's moral formation require torturing a kid who gets absolutely nothing out of it?

The case of animals

As a natural extension of human suffering, there's animal suffering — a well-known sticking point for theologians, because it's genuinely hard to justify. Sentient animals clearly feel pain, fear, distress, but they don't seem capable of assigning their suffering any moral or spiritual meaning comparable to what a human might.

Disease, hunger, untreated wounds, parasites — an animal dying in agony is unlikely to be developing a virtue. Its suffering doesn't visibly prepare it for some higher moral life. And crucially, animal suffering long predates the existence of humans, which pretty seriously undercuts the idea that humans are somehow the cause of it (I'll get to the Fall argument in a minute).

Animal suffering forces you to reckon with pain that doesn't stem from the free will of the one suffering, nor from any moral fault, nor from any identifiable spiritual lesson.

So — why? How do you reconcile a God who "is love" with the undeniable existence of all this suffering? I've thought about it a lot, and so far I haven't found a satisfying answer.

Stable natural laws?

One argument you hear a lot says suffering is just the cost of stable natural laws: God made a living universe, and a coherent world requires constant natural laws. Cells renew themselves but can mutate into something harmful; tectonic plates shape the ground under our feet but also cause earthquakes and tsunamis; the same mechanisms that make life possible can also cause disease and disaster.

That's a reasonable-sounding defense — one that would actually hold up if God were working within constraints he hadn't chosen... which would mean he isn't omnipotent. But we're talking about God, not some engineer who cobbled together a planet with the built-in flaws of a system he's stuck with; the classical God is supposed to be the creator of every single one of these laws and mechanisms. And since he's omniscient, he necessarily foresaw every disastrous consequence of that system, and presumably judged them acceptable anyway.

A simple analogy: an author. A writer can't justify the suffering — fictional, sure, but the principle holds — he inflicts on his characters by pointing to the rules of a universe he himself freely invented, while also feeling genuinely upset about that suffering. That's the paradox right there! Doubly ironic, given the old line that God laughs at people who mourn the effects while cherishing the causes.

Sure, omnipotence doesn't mean being able to produce a logical contradiction, like a square circle. I'll say it again: my point isn't that no suffering at all should exist. A believer could argue that some evils are logically inseparable from the goods they enable, and that objection would be fair in principle. But then you'd have to show that a world without childhood cancer, without neurodegenerative dementia, without prolonged animal suffering, would be logically impossible.

The mere necessity of stable laws isn't enough on its own.

The Fall?

The other argument believers sometimes reach for is the Fall — the idea that, per certain Christian readings, it introduced disorder, corruption, and death into creation following the break between humanity and God.

But since God is supposed to be omniscient, he knew the Fall would happen. He knew exactly what suffering would follow from it. And he had the power to create things differently.

The Fall can explain, within a religious narrative, why the world is imperfect — but it doesn't get an omniscient creator off the hook, one who knew from the very start that his creation would end up corrupted and suffering. The argument shifts the immediate origin of evil elsewhere, but it doesn't remove the question of foreknowledge and creative choice — if anything, I think this defense makes the problem worse. And the difficulty is compounded by the fact that, per the natural history of the planet, disease, predation, and animal suffering vastly predate the appearance of humans.

Mystery and skeptical theism

So what's left? Well, apparently "the Lord works in mysterious ways"... That argument is basically a joker card some believers play, and it's a pretty weak one.

A more sophisticated version of that same joker card shows up as the eschatological argument: earthly suffering gets redeemed, compensated for, in the afterlife. The infant who died young gets a full life after death; the agonizing animal gets folded into a restored creation. But beyond being unverifiable — which just reduces it back to the same problem as "unknowable ways" — this argument runs into a purely moral snag: does an infinite compensation afterward make it okay to have inflicted the suffering in the first place? Say a parent, fully able to prevent it, knowingly lets their child be tortured, then gives them a happy life once they're an adult — why would that later happiness wash away responsibility for the torture? Compensation doesn't erase the responsibility for the act.

Sure, an infinite intelligence could have reasons we don't understand; maybe everything really does have a precise meaning that just escapes us. But which one, then? If that's really the case, it means either we've badly misunderstood God, or we need to rethink our definition of love. And that's the actual knot of the problem: you can't use our moral capacity to declare God perfectly good, and then turn around and declare that same capacity completely incompetent the moment it runs into suffering that contradicts that goodness.

Worth noting: skeptical theism offers a sturdier version of this than the simple "God's grand plan is a mystery" line. Our inability to spot a reason for a child's or an animal's suffering doesn't prove there isn't one — the cognitive gap between a finite mind and an omniscient one means those reasons could be structurally invisible to us, a bit like trusting a surgeon's overall competence without understanding every single incision. But pushed to its limit, the argument inevitably collapses on itself: if it puts God's particular reasons entirely out of reach of our judgment, on what basis, using that same finite mind, could we still claim he "is love"? Skeptical theism saves God's logical consistency, sure — at the cost of his knowability.

A world that's just a bit less cruel

God as described in the Christian religion might be a lot more believable if the nature he created were different in a few key ways. If pain were capped, and simply vanished once it no longer served any protective function; if aging didn't erase personality; if diseases hitting infants didn't inflict extreme suffering; if no species reproduced by slowly torturing another; if the end of life came with a natural easing rather than agony. Would a world like that really be incompatible with freedom, with stable natural laws, with moral development? It would still be finite, serious, vulnerable — there'd still be death, separation, risk, hardship. It would just be a bit less cruel. But working out what a fairer world with limited suffering would actually look like isn't my job here, and it's not what I want to dwell on.

A good but limited god?

Which brings me, in the end, to the dilemma traditionally tied to Epicurus: the existence of excessive suffering makes it genuinely hard to reconcile omnipotence with perfect goodness. Fair enough — but I won't settle that once and for all, and I don't want to reduce my whole point to that one dilemma. Still, I do think a good-but-limited divinity would be a lot easier to square with the world as we actually observe it. A compassionate cosmic entity that stumbled onto life on Earth and is trying to help it along, without being able to override all the laws of reality, wouldn't be morally contradicted by every disaster or terrible illness. The fact that it would suffer alongside living things would feel a lot more coherent, since it wouldn't have deliberately designed every cause of their suffering in the first place.

Personally, I don't have all that much trouble believing some higher reality might exist — my real trouble is believing that reality is the work of a being who is simultaneously all-powerful, all-knowing, and absolutely loving. But then again, I'm just a barstool theologian. So, to my friend, my answer would have been: "Not all suffering, I think — but some of it, though..."