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The Big Ten
Why Is There Evil In The World (and so much of it)
Many people argue that the presence of evil in the world is proof that God cannot exist, or if He does exist, cannot be good or all–powerful.
Greg Welty uses biblical exegesis alongside his experience as a philosopher to present a different conclusion. God, the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the world, really does work all things for good. A must–read for anyone struggling with this issue.
Chapter titles include:
1. What is the Problem of Evil?
2. The Greater–Good Theodicy: A Threefold Argument for Three Biblical Themes
3. Licensing the Greater–Good Theodicy: God’s Sovereignty over Evil
4. Limiting the Greater–Good Theodicy: The Inscrutability of God’s Purposes
5. Can Free Will or the Laws of Nature Solve the Problem of Evil?
6. Objections
Appendix: Going Beyond Job, Joseph and Jesus for the Greater–Good Theodicy
Greg Welty uses biblical exegesis alongside his experience as a philosopher to present a different conclusion. God, the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the world, really does work all things for good. A must–read for anyone struggling with this issue.
Chapter titles include:
1. What is the Problem of Evil?
2. The Greater–Good Theodicy: A Threefold Argument for Three Biblical Themes
3. Licensing the Greater–Good Theodicy: God’s Sovereignty over Evil
4. Limiting the Greater–Good Theodicy: The Inscrutability of God’s Purposes
5. Can Free Will or the Laws of Nature Solve the Problem of Evil?
6. Objections
Appendix: Going Beyond Job, Joseph and Jesus for the Greater–Good Theodicy
175 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 24, 2018
21 people are currently reading
69 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 9, 2020
One of the best books I've read on the problem of evil. Being used to the "because God gave us free-will" kind of apology, the book made me rethink the way the Bible relates to this problem ( the 3 cases the author "explains" provide very thoughtful information -Job, Joseph and Jesus).
The author keeps the argumentation biblical, but it doesn't miss on philosophical reasoning and he succeeds in making a powerful case for the Greater-Good Theodicy. While he doesn't condemn the free-will (and the natural law - stable environment for meaningful choice-making) theodicy , he shows the "apparent" advantages ( defending God from the "author of sin"- the card that some people play on the compatibilist camp ) and also the flaws of this theodicy (not the worst, but definitely not the best) - the lack of biblical proof in regards to the free-will response and also the way in which "free-will" is understood;
He also answers to some of the most common objections to this theodicy - he stays consistent with the main principles that makes a good theodicy ( God's good purpose, God's sovereignty and providence, the inscrutability of God's plans)
The author keeps the argumentation biblical, but it doesn't miss on philosophical reasoning and he succeeds in making a powerful case for the Greater-Good Theodicy. While he doesn't condemn the free-will (and the natural law - stable environment for meaningful choice-making) theodicy , he shows the "apparent" advantages ( defending God from the "author of sin"- the card that some people play on the compatibilist camp ) and also the flaws of this theodicy (not the worst, but definitely not the best) - the lack of biblical proof in regards to the free-will response and also the way in which "free-will" is understood;
He also answers to some of the most common objections to this theodicy - he stays consistent with the main principles that makes a good theodicy ( God's good purpose, God's sovereignty and providence, the inscrutability of God's plans)
January 27, 2021
(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).
This is an excellent little book on the problem of evil. I've read at least a couple of dozen books on this issue and this would at least rate in the top ten.
A few quotes:
My theodicy is that the pain and suffering in God’s world play a necessary role in bringing about greater goods that could not be brought about except for the presence of that pain and suffering. The world would be worse off without that pain and suffering, and so God is justified in pursuing the good by these means. (405)
Again and again we see that (1) God aims at great goods, that (2) God often intends these great goods to come about by way of various evils, and that (3) God leaves created persons in the dark (in the dark about which goods are indeed his reasons for the evils, or about how the goods depend on the evils). That is, these narratives reveal the goodness of God’s purpose, the sovereignty of his providence (including his sovereignty over evil), and the inscrutability of his ways. Such themes do not lie hidden in obscurity; they are right there on the surface of the biblical text. And Christians can incorporate them into an overall perspective on evil that is biblically faithful and that presents theodicy in a way that neutralizes the problem of evil. We turn now to three paradigm cases in the Bible, of God pursuing great goods by way of evils: Job, Joseph, and Jesus. (457)
In the Bible, God intends this great good to come to pass by way of various evils: the plots against Jesus by the Jewish leaders at the time (Matt. 26:3–4, 14-15), Satan’s prompting of Judas that he should betray Jesus (John 13:21–30), Judas’s actual betrayal of Jesus (Matt. 26:47–56; 27:3–10), the obviously unjust ‘show trials’ that wrongly convicted Jesus of blasphemy (Matt. 26:57–68), Pilate’s cowardice in condemning a clearly innocent man to brutal death (Matt. 27:15–26), and the Roman soldiers’ carrying out of this sentence (Matt. 27:27–44). This perplexing chain of perverse moral evil stretches from the inauguration of Jesus’s public teaching ministry until his dying moments on the cross, and the removal of any link in this chain would have robbed the world of Jesus’s crucifixion, and therefore of the highest good for both man and God. (634)
There are three themes in the Bible that support a Greater-Good theodicy: the goodness of God’s purpose, the sovereignty of God’s providence, and the inscrutability of God’s ways. (724)
It is time to draw and defend a distinction that not only preserves but argues for God’s moral innocence in the midst of his sovereignly intending evils for good. It is the distinction between primary and secondary causality. (This is sometimes described as the difference between ultimate and proximate causality, or between remote and near causality. These three pairs of terms are attempts to get at the same distinction.) Simply put, it is not a sin to ordain that there be sin. It is not evil to ordain that evil be. Indeed, if the greatest good was only obtainable by way of the existence of evil, it is clearly good that there be evil. If God is so meticulously sovereign over evils, wouldn’t it be wrong for him not to work them out to a greater good? But to do that would require his intention that these evils be the means of that good. The distinction can be illustrated by way of the Job, Joseph, and Jesus passages considered in the previous chapter. In each case we had one set of events but two sets of intentions with respect to those events (human intentions and divine intentions). Thus in each case we had sinful persons on the scene committing the sins and therefore perpetrating the moral evil for which they were accountable: the Sabeans, the Chaldeans, Satan, Joseph’s brothers, Potiphar’s wife, the Jewish leaders, Judas, Pilate, and so on. Their causality is to be recognized and not explained away. But God is not to be listed as one of the sinners at the scene of the crime, acting with evil intentions. In the case of moral evil at least, there is always a human (or fallen angelic) agent who is the secondary, proximate, near cause of the sin in space and time. (1109)
A remarkable example of primary and secondary causality coming together is found in the Old Testament narrative of the death of Saul, who was rejected by God as king of Israel because of his sin, and who was eventually wounded in battle by the Philistines. Saul then commits suicide when his armor-bearer won’t finish the job (1 Chr. 10:4-6)
(1121)
Who killed Saul? The answer according to this passage is also perfectly straightforward: ‘Therefore the Lord put him to death.’ That is, God killed Saul. A more concise combining of the teaching of both passages is to say that God killed Saul by means of Saul killing Saul. The moral evil of Saul’s suicide—that is, Saul’s responsible human agency—was the means by which God put him to death. … If you ‘put someone to death’ you don’t merely allow him to die. You do something. So primary causality and secondary causality are at work in bringing about the end of Saul’s earthly life, and the account would be incomplete if we left out either kind of causality.
Likewise, with the death of Jesus. Clearly, the Roman soldiers put Jesus to death. But according to the prophet Isaiah’s marvelous prediction of the death of Christ, the Bible also says that God did it (Isa. 53:4, 10). Indeed, we may have a third cause of Jesus’s death, Jesus himself: ‘I lay down my life that I may take it up again. (Jn. 10:17-18). (1138)
God does not always do things in the indirect way depicted in the passage about Saul. He is free to bring things about directly, quite apart from responsible, secondary means. This seems to be the case just three chapters after the Saul narrative, when Uzzah foolishly touched the Ark of the Covenant despite God’s clearly commanding it should never be touched (Num. 4:15). In response: ‘the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and he struck him down because he put out his hand to the ark, and he died there before God’ (1 Chron. 13:10).
No secondary causality here needed—this was a miracle precisely because God didn’t use means. Uzzah just dropped dead. (1144)
Of course, some natural evils are likely brought about by secondary causes. The blindness of the ‘man blind from birth’ in John 9:1-3 was presumably the result of a genetic defect (or maternal infection during pregnancy), though Jesus says that behind that blindness was a divine purpose: … But notice that whereas some natural evils may be brought about without secondary causes, and therefore miraculously and directly, moral evils are only brought about by way of responsible secondary causes and never without them, that is, never directly. In this way God remains blameless. The sinful intentions of creatures are never his intentions. God is not Joseph’s brothers. (1155)
There are four kinds of greater-good theodicies none of which explains all evils:
Punishment (God displaying His judgment)
Soul-Building (God displaying His goodness)
Pain as God's megaphone (God displaying His mercy)
Higher Order Goods
The higher-order goods theodicy says that at least some goods can’t exist apart from evils because they are defined with reference to those evils.
Courage is a response to danger, sympathy is a response to human suffering, forgiveness is a response to sin, compassion is a response to human need, and patience is a response to adversity. In each of these, you can’t have the first thing without the second. The idea isn’t that these goods have to exist. God could decline to create a universe that had these goods, or even a universe at all. But if God wants these deep goods to be in his universe, because they make his universe far more valuable than it would otherwise be, then the evils will be there as well. For the goods wouldn’t be the goods they are if they were a response to nothing. (1382)
The Bible never hints at either a free will theodicy (moral evil is due to human abuse of free will)
or a natural law theodicy (natural evil is due to the laws of nature).
This is an excellent little book on the problem of evil. I've read at least a couple of dozen books on this issue and this would at least rate in the top ten.
A few quotes:
My theodicy is that the pain and suffering in God’s world play a necessary role in bringing about greater goods that could not be brought about except for the presence of that pain and suffering. The world would be worse off without that pain and suffering, and so God is justified in pursuing the good by these means. (405)
Again and again we see that (1) God aims at great goods, that (2) God often intends these great goods to come about by way of various evils, and that (3) God leaves created persons in the dark (in the dark about which goods are indeed his reasons for the evils, or about how the goods depend on the evils). That is, these narratives reveal the goodness of God’s purpose, the sovereignty of his providence (including his sovereignty over evil), and the inscrutability of his ways. Such themes do not lie hidden in obscurity; they are right there on the surface of the biblical text. And Christians can incorporate them into an overall perspective on evil that is biblically faithful and that presents theodicy in a way that neutralizes the problem of evil. We turn now to three paradigm cases in the Bible, of God pursuing great goods by way of evils: Job, Joseph, and Jesus. (457)
In the Bible, God intends this great good to come to pass by way of various evils: the plots against Jesus by the Jewish leaders at the time (Matt. 26:3–4, 14-15), Satan’s prompting of Judas that he should betray Jesus (John 13:21–30), Judas’s actual betrayal of Jesus (Matt. 26:47–56; 27:3–10), the obviously unjust ‘show trials’ that wrongly convicted Jesus of blasphemy (Matt. 26:57–68), Pilate’s cowardice in condemning a clearly innocent man to brutal death (Matt. 27:15–26), and the Roman soldiers’ carrying out of this sentence (Matt. 27:27–44). This perplexing chain of perverse moral evil stretches from the inauguration of Jesus’s public teaching ministry until his dying moments on the cross, and the removal of any link in this chain would have robbed the world of Jesus’s crucifixion, and therefore of the highest good for both man and God. (634)
There are three themes in the Bible that support a Greater-Good theodicy: the goodness of God’s purpose, the sovereignty of God’s providence, and the inscrutability of God’s ways. (724)
It is time to draw and defend a distinction that not only preserves but argues for God’s moral innocence in the midst of his sovereignly intending evils for good. It is the distinction between primary and secondary causality. (This is sometimes described as the difference between ultimate and proximate causality, or between remote and near causality. These three pairs of terms are attempts to get at the same distinction.) Simply put, it is not a sin to ordain that there be sin. It is not evil to ordain that evil be. Indeed, if the greatest good was only obtainable by way of the existence of evil, it is clearly good that there be evil. If God is so meticulously sovereign over evils, wouldn’t it be wrong for him not to work them out to a greater good? But to do that would require his intention that these evils be the means of that good. The distinction can be illustrated by way of the Job, Joseph, and Jesus passages considered in the previous chapter. In each case we had one set of events but two sets of intentions with respect to those events (human intentions and divine intentions). Thus in each case we had sinful persons on the scene committing the sins and therefore perpetrating the moral evil for which they were accountable: the Sabeans, the Chaldeans, Satan, Joseph’s brothers, Potiphar’s wife, the Jewish leaders, Judas, Pilate, and so on. Their causality is to be recognized and not explained away. But God is not to be listed as one of the sinners at the scene of the crime, acting with evil intentions. In the case of moral evil at least, there is always a human (or fallen angelic) agent who is the secondary, proximate, near cause of the sin in space and time. (1109)
A remarkable example of primary and secondary causality coming together is found in the Old Testament narrative of the death of Saul, who was rejected by God as king of Israel because of his sin, and who was eventually wounded in battle by the Philistines. Saul then commits suicide when his armor-bearer won’t finish the job (1 Chr. 10:4-6)
(1121)
Who killed Saul? The answer according to this passage is also perfectly straightforward: ‘Therefore the Lord put him to death.’ That is, God killed Saul. A more concise combining of the teaching of both passages is to say that God killed Saul by means of Saul killing Saul. The moral evil of Saul’s suicide—that is, Saul’s responsible human agency—was the means by which God put him to death. … If you ‘put someone to death’ you don’t merely allow him to die. You do something. So primary causality and secondary causality are at work in bringing about the end of Saul’s earthly life, and the account would be incomplete if we left out either kind of causality.
Likewise, with the death of Jesus. Clearly, the Roman soldiers put Jesus to death. But according to the prophet Isaiah’s marvelous prediction of the death of Christ, the Bible also says that God did it (Isa. 53:4, 10). Indeed, we may have a third cause of Jesus’s death, Jesus himself: ‘I lay down my life that I may take it up again. (Jn. 10:17-18). (1138)
God does not always do things in the indirect way depicted in the passage about Saul. He is free to bring things about directly, quite apart from responsible, secondary means. This seems to be the case just three chapters after the Saul narrative, when Uzzah foolishly touched the Ark of the Covenant despite God’s clearly commanding it should never be touched (Num. 4:15). In response: ‘the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and he struck him down because he put out his hand to the ark, and he died there before God’ (1 Chron. 13:10).
No secondary causality here needed—this was a miracle precisely because God didn’t use means. Uzzah just dropped dead. (1144)
Of course, some natural evils are likely brought about by secondary causes. The blindness of the ‘man blind from birth’ in John 9:1-3 was presumably the result of a genetic defect (or maternal infection during pregnancy), though Jesus says that behind that blindness was a divine purpose: … But notice that whereas some natural evils may be brought about without secondary causes, and therefore miraculously and directly, moral evils are only brought about by way of responsible secondary causes and never without them, that is, never directly. In this way God remains blameless. The sinful intentions of creatures are never his intentions. God is not Joseph’s brothers. (1155)
There are four kinds of greater-good theodicies none of which explains all evils:
Punishment (God displaying His judgment)
Soul-Building (God displaying His goodness)
Pain as God's megaphone (God displaying His mercy)
Higher Order Goods
The higher-order goods theodicy says that at least some goods can’t exist apart from evils because they are defined with reference to those evils.
Courage is a response to danger, sympathy is a response to human suffering, forgiveness is a response to sin, compassion is a response to human need, and patience is a response to adversity. In each of these, you can’t have the first thing without the second. The idea isn’t that these goods have to exist. God could decline to create a universe that had these goods, or even a universe at all. But if God wants these deep goods to be in his universe, because they make his universe far more valuable than it would otherwise be, then the evils will be there as well. For the goods wouldn’t be the goods they are if they were a response to nothing. (1382)
The Bible never hints at either a free will theodicy (moral evil is due to human abuse of free will)
or a natural law theodicy (natural evil is due to the laws of nature).
July 19, 2019
This is one of my favorite popular-level treatments on the problem of evil. (I would also recommend Tim Keller's Walking with God through Pain and Suffering.) Welty argues that the best answer to the problem of evil is that God has ordained/allowed evil to occur in order to achieve some greater good not possible without evil. Most apologists and philosophers offer the free will defense: God has granted humans libertarian free will (we can make any choice that's possible), and real freedom is not possible without the option of choosing evil. It's a coherent argument but it's not very biblical. Welty offers a lot of scripture to back up his compatibilistic free will argument: we might not know all the greater goods that God achieves through evil, but they include God's glory, Jesus' incarnation and atonement, teaching Christians to rely more upon God, etc.
In roughly 200 pages, Welty deals very well with this issue, showing why other arguments fail and why his argument (which, humbly, doesn't claim to know more than God has revealed) is the most biblical one.
The fact that it's written at a popular level shouldn't take away from the strength of Welty's arguments. If he were writing for an academic audience (and I'm sure he is more than able to do so), the book would be longer and more philosophically nuanced, I'm sure. Still, pastors, academics, and so-called laypeople can benefit from this book.
In roughly 200 pages, Welty deals very well with this issue, showing why other arguments fail and why his argument (which, humbly, doesn't claim to know more than God has revealed) is the most biblical one.
The fact that it's written at a popular level shouldn't take away from the strength of Welty's arguments. If he were writing for an academic audience (and I'm sure he is more than able to do so), the book would be longer and more philosophically nuanced, I'm sure. Still, pastors, academics, and so-called laypeople can benefit from this book.
September 28, 2021
This was a sobering, humbling, at times frightening, but also a rewarding read. It certainly made me feel smaller, more vulnerable, and more aware of how little control I have over what's going on in my life and around me. It prompted a lot of reflection on how limited my understanding is of greater purposes behind everything that happens. At the same time, it also increased my gratitude for the fact that an eternal, all-powerful, and all-knowing creator chooses to love me and the world, while also acting with justice and giving what is due to those who do evil of every scale.
I also saw an interesting connection with the Brave New World. In that book, John rejects the shallow happiness of the world because it robs people of the opportunities to experience and produce the greater goods of human virtues. In a similar way, greater goods in our world come as a result of evils that are present in it.
I also saw an interesting connection with the Brave New World. In that book, John rejects the shallow happiness of the world because it robs people of the opportunities to experience and produce the greater goods of human virtues. In a similar way, greater goods in our world come as a result of evils that are present in it.
July 26, 2019
Excellent! There are two people this book is for: Christians who are seeking an intellectual response to the problem of evil and suffering and the skeptic that seriously wants to engage Christians with this question. This book is NOT for the Christian who has recently experience evil or suffering in their own life.
I highly recommend this book. It’s one I will be going back to on multiple occasions.
I highly recommend this book. It’s one I will be going back to on multiple occasions.
April 22, 2025
Useful work on this weighty subject. I greatly appreciate Welty taking the Problem of Evil argument seriously since, as the author says, it is an attack on the internal consistency of God’s character. While the doctrine of God’s sovereignty and His inscrutability make it easy to hand-wave away such objections, we Christians must be ready to give an answer when confronted. As the book of Job shows, we cannot remain silent when the ways of our God are called into question.
September 26, 2022
In this short introductory work, Welty summaries the problem of evil and how Christians can respond to it at a philosophical level. This is a good introduction to the topic and provides real world examples to help the argument of the boo. Welty argues for a greater-good theodicy, and mentions several which make sense of evil in this world.
January 6, 2024
Fantastic. Welty is an astute philosopher and logical exegete. Very pastoral and great resource
March 27, 2024
Well rounded, well argued view on evil and God's purposes. I loved the track he took in defending God's providence over the common philosophical arguments used regularly today.
May 3, 2025
Welty is goat
July 23, 2024
This has to be the best deep and concise introduction to the problem of evil that is out currently from a meticulous sovereignty perspective.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews