The existence of evil poses perhaps the largest logical obstacle to belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and/or all-good God.
As I have previously written about, the existence of an intelligent designer is, I think, logical and even very probable (and, in any event, everyone believes in the transcendent because everyone believes, even if they claim otherwise, that they have free will).
But the logical case for a creator does not necessarily tell us the nature of that creator.
When we look at the created world, it is both beautiful and brutal.
Looking only at the created order, we would draw very different conclusions about the characteristics of its creator than those of the major theistic religions.
Logical Quandary
Here is the logical quandary:
- God is all-powerful.
- God is all-knowing.
- God is purely good.
- There is evil in the world.
If God is all-powerful, presumably He could have created the world in such a way that people have free will and yet simultaneously only choose to do what is right (and hence there would be free will with no evil). The only solution to the problem of evil here is to say that God can do anything that is possible, but it is not possible to create agents with free will who will always choose to do what is right (the standard example here of what is impossible despite omnipotence is to say that God could not create a square circle because such a thing cannot exist). Perhaps this is the beginning and end to the problem of evil: God did not have the power to create humans with free will without allowing them to do evil because doing such a thing is simply impossible. But, this solution still puts a limitation on what most people would conceive of as “all-powerful.”
If God is all-knowing, then He would know the future. If God knows the future and chose to create the world as it is, knowing full well all the evil that would transpire, then God chose to create the world as it is even with unbelievable atrocities. That does not sound like a good God. The solution here? To, again, put a limitation on God: perhaps God too exists within time and does not know the future. In which case, all-knowing means knowing all that it is possible to know, which does not include what will happen in the future. Again, this is a solution, but it puts a limitation on God’s knowledge that most followers of the major theistic religions would reject. Or, an alternate solution: God does know the future, saw all the atrocities that did, do, and will occur but sees that there will be goods beyond our comprehension that could not be brought about without the existence of those atrocities and thus justify the permission of such atrocities to occur. The latter, however, is stomach-churning and sounds more utilitarian (in the sense that the ends justify the means) than we are used to seeing in the major theistic religions.
Or, perhaps God is just not what we would conceive of as “good.” Certainly many religions across time have seen gods as more powerful versions of humans, flaws and all. But that, more than any of the other premises, is rejected by the major theistic religions. God’s goodness is least up for serious inquiry.
And yet there is evil, so the existence of evil poses a serious logical problem to everyone who would believe that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good.
As a Christian, this conundrum has deeply troubled me and has consumed a large portion of my thoughts, particularly over the last year. The most impactful resources with which I have engaged have been “The Problem of Evil,” “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” and innumerable lectures from those of every philosophical and religious persuasion. I have not struck upon a solution but upon a conclusion.
A Conclusion
If you are not a Christian, you can stop reading here — or carry on with the understanding that I am going to be pre-supposing that Christianity is correct (I have both personal reasons and researched justifications for firmly believing in Christianity, but those are not the topic of this post).
So, with the presumption that Christianity is correct, how is a Christian to reconcile the above quandary with their belief that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good?
Jesus’ reply to Nicodemus in John 3:9-12 offers some insight.
9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? 11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
John 3
I think Jesus’ response to Nicodemus would likely be His answer to us as well. How can we make sense of the logical quandary? We can’t. We lack the ability to comprehend its solution, and we might never comprehend it, even for all of eternity.
That conclusion (that we can never understand) might feel unsatisfying. But the truth need not be satisfying, at least not in the way that we would expect or desire.
Try explaining a black hole to a 2-year-old and that, past the Schwarzschild radius, gravity becomes infinite. With sufficient explanation, most adults can comprehend this. With infinite explanation, a 2-year-old never will. It’s simply not possible for a 2-year-old to do so.
If God is omniscient, then the difference between God’s ability to reason and understand and our ability to do so is perhaps literally infinitely large. As such, the difference between our understanding and a 2-year-old’s and between God’s understanding and ours is incomparable: the gap between us and God is inconceivably greater.
If a 2-year-old cannot understand what we can, then why would we necessarily presume that we should be able to understand what God can?
Thus, if there is a solution to the logical quandary, it’s not only possible but potentially even likely that we will never be able to grasp it.
What Then?
In the Garden of Eden (I don’t believe the story literally, but I believe it conveys many important truths), Adam and Eve were told not to eat “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” That is a very confusing statement. And the confusion continues: Eve saw “that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (or so she thought).
We are told repeatedly throughout the Bible to seek truth, to turn away from falsehood, to value and pursue wisdom, etc.
So why would the only thing that God forbid be to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
I think it is because, above all, God requires trust and obedience from us.
Returning to the analogy of the child, there are many things that you would not explain to a child. First, the child would not understand. And, second, partly because they could never understand, you would only scar them by explaining it to them (such as the knowledge of good and evil, because knowledge of evil could do great harm to a child, and so no loving parent would ever impart that knowledge to a child). Thus, knowledge can be harmful. A good parent would keep harmful knowledge from a child. And, if that knowledge was accessible, a good parent would instruct the child not to seek it out. (And God warned that “in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.”)
Don’t get caught up diving down the rabbit hole of the analogy. The point is that a good parent requires the obedience and trust of a child for the benefit of the child. There is no possible way for the child to know why they must do as instructed. But, if a child follows a good parent’s instructions, the child will be better off.
It is possible that we will never understand the existence of evil. The question remaining is if we will trust and obey regardless.
Addendum
For years, the question of evil and its implications for a belief in a good God concerned me greatly. Recently (in the summer of 2026), this question bothers me little to not at all. The reason is best encapsulated by the adage “If there’s no solution, then there’s no problem.”
Evil poses a logical problem for the existence of a good God. If the solution to that problem is that God does not exist, then good and evil do not exist. The universe would have, as Richard Dawkins accurately states, “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
And thus women and children being buried alive poses no moral problem. It is not bad. It just is. Any human action is, at bottom, simply atoms bouncing into one another with the same value as a drop of rain landing in an ocean: indistinguishable and wholly unimportant.
Yet atheists (like everyone else) have a moral compass — often quite a strong one. Despite often following the logic of their beliefs to the point of saying that they do not believe in good and evil, they live in complete contradiction to this alleged belief. The simple fact that they are so disposed to try to convince people that they are right shows that they think something matters. Look more to what people do than to what they say.
And so it is that atheists could not bring themselves to torture a young child, even though — following the logic — doing so is not actually morally wrong. They and others could not (assuming they are not psychopaths) physically bring themselves to do it. Because if we have even a small part of our humanity, we would be unable to do it. Because we know that right and wrong are real. Like gravity. We take gravity for granted. So, too, do we take some level of morality among others and within ourselves for granted. In short, we all actually believe that there is right and wrong — and even the psychopath believes that there is right and wrong done to themselves, even if they have no empathy for others. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov murders a woman to prove to himself that he is not bound by the socially constructed laws of man. The guilt of doing so drives him insane — as it would any sane person. As much as a person could allege they don’t believe in gravity, they walk around just as if they do. In the same way, as much as a person could allege they don’t believe in morality, they too walk around as if they do.
And thus, atheists don’t actually answer the problem of evil with “There is no God and no good or evil.” They still, in reality, believe that there is good and evil. And if there is good and evil, there is a God. Granted, perhaps there is a God that is indifferent to humanity — but not many people believe this because they sense that God is not, in fact, indifferent to good and evil. And thus atheism brings us right back to where we started: how can there be evil if there is a good God? On the latter point, the only way to stop the logical circuit that leads back to itself is to say that we don’t know.
One last note about living out one’s beliefs: the atheist believes there is no God, should believe that there is no right and wrong, but then lives as if right and wrong exist.
The Christian lives with no such contradiction: there is a God, there is good and evil, it’s entirely possible that there is an answer that we cannot understand, and thus we will live trying to be good and trust that God will work everything for good.
In short, the problem of evil leads to the belief that there is no God, which leads to the belief that right and wrong do not exist, which no one actually believes, which brings us right back to belief in God. There is no solution there. If there is no solution, there is no problem (at least none worth dwelling on). How you choose to live after that is up to you, but, given that there is good and evil, it seems obvious that we should seek what is good. Doing otherwise leads to our enslavement to vice and desire, whereas the good person could always choose to do what is wrong but desires instead to do what is right and chooses to do so. It is the good person who freely chooses, whereas people who intentionally and repeatedly choose evil will become enslaved by it. Fortunately, God imbued us with conscience, and most people have not become entirely deaf to it.
Logical Circuit
It is a logical contradiction that God is all good, all knowing, and all powerful, yet evil exists.
Thus, God does not exist.
And thus, good and evil do not exist.
Yet, good and evil do exist.
And thus, God exists.