A dispute · spans 3 eras
The Problem of Evil
If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does suffering exist?
Stated sharply by the Epicureans, but the great answers come later. Augustine: evil is privation, not substance, and the result of free will misused. Aquinas refined this within a theological framework. Leibniz argued this is the best of all possible worlds and evil is the necessary cost of the maximal good. After the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire shredded Leibniz in Candide; after Auschwitz, theodicy in any form sticks in the throat for many. The problem is the most powerful philosophical argument against classical theism.
// The sides
Free will defense
Evil is a privation of good rather than a substance of its own, and it is the creatures' misused freedom that lets it into the world; and a world of free beings, even beings able to fall, outranks a world of puppets.
Best-world theodicy
Of all possible worlds this one holds the greatest net balance of good, and even its evil enters here as the necessary cost of that fullness; to demand a world with less evil is to demand a world that would, on the whole, be worse.
The problem stands
No theodicy holds up: the suffering of the innocent on such a scale cannot be reconciled with a God at once all-good and all-powerful.