The Evil God Challenge

Focal Point: 

The Evil God Challenge, proposed by philosopher Stephen Law, is a provocative thought experiment questioning why belief in an all-good God is generally seen as more reasonable than belief in an all-evil God. It asks us to imagine a supreme being of infinite power and knowledge whose nature is wholly malevolent, delighting in suffering and using any apparent good as a means to achieve greater harm. Law contends that the same justifications used to defend a good God’s allowance of evil (such as the need for free will or soul-building) could, in theory, be used to justify an evil God’s allowance of good. By challenging this double standard, the Evil God Challenge asks why the existence of suffering should be seen as less problematic for belief in a good God than the existence of joy would be for belief in an evil one.

In stark contrast, the Christian conception of God holds that goodness is not just one attribute of God but is His very essence. Christians believe that God’s goodness is not contingent but foundational to His nature, reflected in His acts of creation, redemption, and love. This belief is supported by the conviction that all people experience a sense of moral goodness because they are made in the image of a benevolent Creator. While Christians acknowledge the presence of evil, they view it as a distortion or corruption of God’s good creation, not as an equally fundamental aspect of reality. Through this lens, the Evil God Challenge misunderstands the Christian God, who is, in essence, not only maximally powerful and knowledgeable but also maximally good—a being in whom love, justice, and mercy are perfectly unified.

Introduction:

Imagine, if you will, a world in which the deity at the helm of all creation is not a being of supreme goodness, but one of supreme malice. In this hypothetical cosmos, each flower blooms only to wither, each creature feels joy only as a brief, cruel prologue to greater suffering, and all kindness exists merely to intensify the inevitable blow of pain. This unsettling scenario, proposed by some philosophers as the Evil God Challenge, is not intended to convince us that the universe is indeed ruled by such a being. Rather, it is a thought experiment designed to ask why belief in an all-good God should be seen as more rational or reasonable than belief in an all-evil one. For the Christian, however, the very premise may appear strange, even nonsensical—akin to asking why we trust a spring of pure water more than a well of poison.

At the heart of Christian thought is the understanding that God is not merely good, but that His goodness is the ultimate reality from which all goodness flows. This is not a matter of arbitrary choice, but an intrinsic quality of what it means to be God, the ground of all being. C.S. Lewis argued that we humans recognize goodness—albeit imperfectly—precisely because we are made in the image of a good Creator, “tuned” to sense the melody of His moral law. If we entertain the notion of an evil deity, we are attempting to build a universe in which the very essence of love, joy, and virtue is hollow. This, as Lewis would have said, is to invite a contradiction; to imagine not merely a twisted version of goodness, but a world where the very idea of goodness has lost all coherence.