“If a good God exists, why do people suffer?”

This is a fair question; it is perhaps the most common objection raised against the classical notion of God. For some people I have met, it is all they need; it seems to serve as the final word on the subject. God can't exist, because if He did, then there would not be any suffering in the world. I don't mean to diminish the seriousness of people’s suffering. The problem of evil is a matter of immense gravity, and I do not believe there will ever come a point in history in which we have ceased to struggle with it. That said- I feel it would be appropriate to delimit precisely what it can and cannot prove. Too often I have heard this problem cited as though it is clear disproof of a loving God, and that is simply untrue.

To begin: it must be noted that the argument from suffering is rarely, if ever, actually formulated as an argument. It tends to be asked as a question; the natural response from the believer, under such circumstances, is to rush into the fray with an attempt to justify God’s conduct. This does not tend to go well. All too often it ends up sounding as though one has to make excuses for what is obviously inexcusable. This is all in the way the issue has been framed: it is made to seem self-evident that suffering per se is unjust, and that the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God somehow represents a necessary contradiction with this reality.

With this in mind, my contention is that no such contradiction exists, and the argument from suffering is incapable of proving what it needs to prove. I think there are several ways to demonstrate this; here I will outline only one, which I term the “counterfactual problem”.

There are two possible forms which any example of suffering can take: the real, and the hypothetical. In the former case, you might recount an instance of suffering in your own life, or point (as did Dostoyevsky) to a particularly heinous piece of news; this thing really happened, to a real person. In the latter case, you might devise a plausible scenario involving people who do not exist, but who could easily be imagined to have existed and suffered.

It is in offering such examples that the counterfactual problem becomes apparent. We will start with the real. The implication, in offering an example of real suffering as evidence against a loving God, is always and in every case “it would have been better had this not happened”. This seems intuitive; it is also impossible to substantiate. We cannot know this. We cannot even begin to quantify it. We do not have access to the counterfactual and never will. It is mere conjecture. The assertion “it would have been better had this not happened” is unfalsifiable: we have no conceivable way to determine its truth value. The import of this should be clear: if it is not possible to tell whether it really would have been better had X not happened, then by definition the fact of X has nothing to say about the existence of a loving God. If it cannot be proven wrong, it cannot be proven right.

We encounter a very similar problem when we enter the realm of the hypothetical. A sceptic might devise a fictional example of what appears to be gratuitous suffering which is meant to stand at odds with the possibility of a loving God: say, for example, a child of three choking on his food and dying. A horrible scenario- and not beyond the realms of possibility. But here again the counterfactual problem proves fatal to the argument. The Achilles’ heel of any hypothetical example is that it can be unravelled by a single valid counter-example. Let us take the case of the child above: instead of dying at three, he grows up to suffer a psychotic episode in his mid-twenties in which he commits a triple homicide. Or perhaps he becomes radicalised by his imam in his late teens and detonates a suicide vest at a crowded concert, killing and wounding dozens. Or perhaps he never takes a single life, but marries a wife whom he beats mercilessly, and has a daughter whom he molests. To my mind, none of these possibilities are improvements; any one of them serves as a defeater for the original supposition. As long as we remain in hypothetical territory, any such counterfactual disproves the claim that a loving God would not allow such suffering. And even if no counterfactual can be imagined, that is a far cry from saying that none exist.

I want to reiterate that I understand the emotional weight of the argument from suffering. We do not like to suffer, or to see those we love suffer. But, as I have pointed out here, as soon as we reach for examples, we run up against the hard limits of the argument. In the case of real examples, the argument requires knowledge we cannot possibly obtain, and thus collapses into unfalsifiability; as for hypothetical ones, there are none which are immune to counterfactual hypotheses. The effect of this is that the evidential argument from suffering is defanged: it cannot possibly prove what it needs to.