God’s Trolley, The Argument From Evil Considered

The following is excerpted from my forthcoming book.

Materialists often argue that if God exists, he would not permit evil to exist, and since we know evil exists, we can conclude that God does not. Good arguments depend on the unambiguous use of language, and the argument from evil is no exception. It requires a clear definition of the word “evil,” and materialists face a difficult challenge from the start because they deny the existence of evil. Dawkins, for example, writes that “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”^[1] If Dawkins is correct and there is no evil, it would seem to be impossible to argue that the existence of evil disproves the existence of God.

But that is not the case because when Dawkins says there is no good and no evil, he means there is no objective transcendent morality. In other words, he is saying that in a universe governed by blind physical forces, stuff just happens for no reason, and it is neither good nor evil in the sense of “conforming to an objective transcendent moral code.” However, Dawkins himself uses the word “evil” all the time to describe certain things or people. He believes that discrimination and religion and Hitler and Stalin are evil, to cite just a few examples.[2] There is no contradiction here because when Dawkins uses the word “evil,” he means a “sense” of right and wrong derived from our Darwinian past.[3]

Materialists agree that we feel strong urges to do certain things (which we call good) and not do other things (which we call evil). For the materialist, those urges are reducible to the electrochemical processes of our physical brains, and our brains, like all of our other organs, are the product of evolutionary processes. We have an appendix because, at some point in our evolutionary history, it gave our ancestors an advantage in the Darwinian struggle for relative reproductive success, and we have strong feelings of revulsion about the Holocaust for the same reason. Thus, we arrive at the materialist definition of evil: “That which blind physical evolutionary forces have programmed me not to prefer.”

Now that we have the definitional issue out of the way, we can go on to the argument, which is straightforward and amounts to the following syllogism:

Major Premise: If God exists, he would prevent “evil” – i.e., that which blind physical evolutionary forces have programmed me not to prefer – from happening.

Minor Premise: Things often happen that blind physical evolutionary forces have programmed me not to prefer.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

Thus, we see that if “evil” means what materialists say it means, the argument from evil is absurd. A subjective sense of revulsion caused by evolutionary forces cannot be the basis for asserting God does not exist. To avoid this problem, the materialist must smuggle into the argument an objective meaning of “evil.” But then the argument hits another insurmountable problem. Objective evil can exist only if it is possible to transgress an objective transcendent moral code.[4] But an objective transcendent moral code exists only if God exists. Thus, it makes no sense to argue that God does not exist because things happen that transgress a code that only he could create. The argument eats itself. Objective evil is possible only if God exists. Therefore, the existence of objective evil, far from disproving the existence of God, actually confirms it.

There is no logical contradiction between God’s existence and the fact that he permits evil to exist, for it could be the case that an all-powerful, all-knowing and omnibenevolent God has good reasons for allowing evil to exist and persist.[5] This is not a controversial conclusion among philosophers. Both theist and atheist philosophers widely agree that Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defense[6] demolished the logical problem from evil. Professor Chad Meister writes:

Most people writing at the popular level aren’t aware that professional philosophers of religion, theists and atheists alike have agreed in recent years that this version of the problem of evil [i.e., that the existence of evil logically precludes the existence of God] has been decisively rebutted and is therefore unsuccessful. That kind of consensus doesn’t come very often in philosophy![7]

Well-known atheist philosopher Paul Draper agrees. He writes, “Logical arguments from evil are a dying (dead?) breed.”[8]

While the logical argument from evil is dead or dying, the “evidentiary” version of the argument from evil is another matter. This argument asserts that the existence of evil^[9] and suffering makes it highly improbable that God exists. This appears to be the version of the argument Neil deGrasse Tyson uses to reject the existence of God.^[10] William Lane Craig has provided a detailed and persuasive response to the evidentiary problem, which he summarizes as follows:

As finite persons, we are limited in time, space, intelligence, and insight. But the transcendent and sovereign God sees the end from the beginning and providentially orders history so that his purposes are ultimately achieved through human free decisions. In order to achieve his ends, God may have to put up with certain evils along the way. Evils which appear pointless to us within our limited framework may be seen to have been justly permitted within God’s wider framework.[11]

Dr. Craig then argues that when all of the evidence (not just the existence of evil) is considered as a whole, the existence of God is the most reasonable conclusion.[12]

Dr. Craig’s argument is consistent with the Biblical story of Job. Job was, we are told, a very righteous man. Yet God allowed almost unbearable pain to fall on him. In the midst of his anguish, Job insisted on his innocence and demanded that God explain why he had required him to endure such torment. He shouted, “Let the Almighty answer me!”[13] But God declined to give an account of Himself to Job. Instead, he reminded Job of his unimaginably awesome power and wisdom as demonstrated in creation, and he reminded Job of his own comparatively limited intelligence and perspective.[14] God expected Job to trust Him even when he could not understand Him. Christians are not called to a blind, unthinking belief in God in the absence of evidence. There is plenty of evidence that God exists and that he is good, and, as he did with Job, God invites us to consider that evidence and trust him.

The Christian faith is a reasoned and reasonable one grounded in a sober assessment of several lines of evidence. However, apodictic certainty is unattainable. Some degree of doubt will always be possible, and God requires us to trust Him[15] in the face of that doubt. Sometimes that can be hard, especially when we are suffering or we see the ones we love suffer. Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, was a Christian, but his faith was sorely tested by doubts that arose when he contemplated innocent suffering, especially the suffering of children.

Dostoevsky explored these themes in The Brothers Karamazov, widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time. The novel is written mainly from the perspective of a young Russian Orthodox novice[16] named Alyosha Karamazov. Dostoevsky contrasted Alyosha’s beliefs with those of his brother, an atheist intellectual named Ivan. In the chapter entitled “Rebellion,” Ivan offers, in the words of Professor Gary Saul Morson, “the strongest case against God ever made.”[17] Ivan recounts several gut-wrenching stories of children who endured almost unimaginable suffering at the hands of sadistic torturers. (These accounts are all the more horrifying because Dostoevsky based them on actual newspaper reports.) Ivan rejects God because even if God somehow eventually harmonizes all of creation so that we can see how it all makes sense in the end, the price – innocent suffering – is too high. Ivan declares:

I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket.[18]

Ivan is angry with God for allowing children to suffer, and his anger drives him to reject God unequivocally. His rage is so incandescently hot that he says he rejects God “even if I am wrong.” In other words, he acknowledges that he could be mistaken and God might have morally justifiable reasons for permitting innocent suffering. It does not matter. Ivan will have nothing to do with a God that allows innocent suffering.

The most important thing to understand about Ivan’s declaration is that it is not an argument that God does not exist. It is a visceral emotional rejection of God. This is not uncommon among atheists. For example, one commentator said that New Atheist Christopher Hitchens’ atheism could be summed up with a single sentence: “There is no God and I hate Him.”[19] Ivan has not offered an intellectual argument for his atheism, so it does no good to offer counterarguments. As Dr. Craig has said, those who reject God for emotional reasons do not need a philosopher; they need a counselor.

What would a Christian counselor say to Ivan? First, I don’t think a counselor would dismiss Ivan’s anguish and doubts out of hand. At a certain level, anger at God can be understandable (even if it is ultimately unjustified), and even the most faithful sometimes harbor doubts about God’s goodness in the face of great pain and suffering. Dostoevsky himself was candid about his struggles with doubt. Near the end of this life, he wrote, “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”[20] It is hardly surprising that the man who put in Ivan’s mouth “the strongest case against God ever made” was tormented by doubt.

As Alvin Plantinga writes, while both the logical and the evidentiary argument from evil have been defeated, “this is cold and abstract comfort when faced with the shocking concreteness of a particularly appalling exemplification of evil.”[21] This does not mean that the counselor has nothing to say to Ivan. Again, Job is our example for getting to the other side of the doubt that understandably springs from suffering. In the depths of his misery, pain, and confusion, when he desperately searched for God and could not find him, Job clung to his faith that God was there and that in, the end, he would bring him through.[22]

A Christian counselor would also tell Ivan that he is being unfair to God. In his intellectual hubris, Ivan thinks of God solely in abstract intellectual terms, as if he were a cosmic trolley operator standing above the fray pulling levers[23] as he calmly computes an optimal overall outcome. But that is not who God is. Instead, in the person of Jesus Christ, God entered into his creation and shared in its sufferings in order to redeem it to himself. God does not stand at the lever directing trolleys. He placed himself on the track and allowed the trolley to hit him so that he could save us all. Plantinga writes:

As the Christian sees things, God does not stand idly by, coolly observing the suffering of his creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing his son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. . . . Christ was prepared to endure the agonies of hell itself; and God, the Lord of the universe, was prepared to endure the suffering consequent upon his son’s humiliation and death. He was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin, and death, and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more glorious than we can imagine. So we don’t know why God permits evil; we do know, however, that he was prepared to suffer on our behalf, to accept suffering of which we can form no conception.[24]

Where does all of this leave us? On the one hand, there are compelling reasons to believe that God exists, that He loves us, and that he sent his son, Jesus Christ, to suffer, die, and rise again to save us. On the other hand, God does not force himself on anyone. We must approach him in faith, a reasoned and reasonable faith to be sure, but faith nevertheless. God does not give us absolute certainty. There will always be room for doubt.

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[1] Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 134 (emphasis added).

[2] The God Delusion at 18, 23, 309.

[3] Id. at 245.

[4] Professor Meister writes:

If rape, racism, torture, murder, government-sanctioned genocide and so forth are objectively evil, what makes them so? What makes them truly evil, rather than simply activities we dislike? What made the atrocities of the Nazis evil, even though Hitler and his thugs maintained otherwise? One cannot consistently affirm both that there are no objective moral values, on the one hand, and that rape, torture and the like are objectively morally evil on the other.

Chad Meister, “God, Evil and Morality,” in God Is Great, God Is Good, 109.

[5] Id. at 108.

[6] See Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 54-55.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Draper, The Evidential Argument from Evil, 176-77. The full quotation is:

Logical arguments from evil are a dying (dead?) breed. One reason for this is the following: Since even an omnipotent being’s power would have logical limitations, such a being could produce goods that logically entail the existence (or possibility) of E[vil] only by allowing E[vil] (or its possibility). So, for all we know, even an omnipotent and omniscient being might be forced to allow E[vil] for the sake of obtaining some important good. Our knowledge of goods and evils and the logical relations they bear to each other is much too limited to prove that this could not be the case.

[9] This version of the argument from evil, like the logical argument from evil we have already considered, seems to suffer an insurmountable problem from the outset: On materialism, the word “evil” has no objective meaning.

[10] See Martha Teichner interview of Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Neil deGrasse Tyson on God,” CBS Sunday Morning, (April 30, 2017), available at

(accessed January 15, 2025).

[11] William Lane Craig, “The Problem of Evil,” Reasonable Faith Website, available at https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/the-problem-of-evil

[12] Id.

[13] Job 31:35.

[14] See Job chapters 38-41.

[15] “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Hebrews 11:6.

[16] In this context, “novice” means someone who is preparing to become a monk.

[17] Gary Saul Morson, “The Greatest Christian Novel,” First Things (May 2021).

[18] Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 393.

[19] Frank Turek, “Why are Atheists Angry at God?,” CrossExamined.org, (Jan. 13, 2011), available at https://crossexamined.org/why-are-atheists-angry-at-god/ (accessed January 18, 2025). There is clinical support for the proposition that atheism is often based in anger at God or an image of God that the atheist holds. Julie J. Exline, Crystal L. Park, Joshua M. Smyth, Michael P. Carey, “Anger toward God: Social-cognitive predictors, prevalence, and links with adjustment to bereavement and cancer,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 100(1), Jan 2011, 129-148.

[20] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written in his last notebook [1880–1881], as quoted in Martin, Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane, 86.

[21] Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Tomberlin and van Inwagen, Alvin Plantinga, 35-36.

[22] Job 19:25-27; 23:8-10.

[23] I refer to the well-known “trolley problem,” attributed to Philippa Foot. The trolley problem presents a scenario involving a runaway trolley hurtling down a track toward several people. A bystander has the option to intervene by pulling a lever to redirect the trolley. However, by pulling the lever, the bystander will cause the death of another individual. The problem has several variations that explore the ethical implications of pulling the lever in different situations.

[24] Alvin Plantinga at 36.

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