At the heart of ideological liberalism lies a paradox: If all folks are equal, why is there inequality? This contradiction has been of critical historical importance as it provides a rational spur to the impetus to challenge liberalism's present hegemony, especially the challenge presented in recent decades by the so-called “woke” social justice movement. But to philosophers trained in theology and philosophy of religion, we can recognise this paradox as something more: it is a restatement of the ancient problem of evil.

The Problem of Evil

“Deus, inquit, aut uult tollere mala et non potest; aut potest et non uult; aut neque uult, neque potest; aut et uult et potest. Si uult et non potest, imbecillis est; quod in Deum non cadit. Si potest et non uult, inuidus; quod aeque alienum a Deo. Si neque uult, neque potest, et inuidus et imbecillis est; ideoque neque Deus. Si uult et potest, quod solum Deo conuenit, unde ergo sunt mala? aut cur illa non tollit?”
“God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?”
—Lactantius, De ira Dei, Ch. 13 (c.318)

The problem of evil is the most powerful argument against the existence of God as traditionally understood. It runs roughly as follows, (phrasing from SEP):

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists (and how to eliminate it).
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists (or how to eliminate it), or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

Theodicy

Theist responses to the PoE, culminating in gnostic rejection of goodness of material world

There are many theistic responses to the problem of evil; clearly so, for religion has not vanished. These arguments are called “theodicies”, or “defences of God”, that is, defending God against the accusations of evil. (Some would distinguish between theodicies and defences, but I think that that is arbitrary hair-splitting between points on the same scale. I think that the logical problem of evil and the defences against it are all just more extreme functional versions of the evidential problem of evil and the theodicies against it, expressed more or less dogmatically.¹) I will not go through every variant of every defence, but the main arguments rely on denying, or otherwise reïnterpreting, one of the above steps of the problem. We can therefore examine them in turn. This will look a lot like a philosophy essay at first, and one with nothing new to say at that, but I think it is important to enumerate these theodicies so that we can later observe the parallels to the situation of liberalism.²

1. “If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.”

This idea of God as perfect, physically, mentally, and morally, arises from the philosophical conception of the monotheistic divine, rather than the ancient conceptions of the gods as jealous, capricious tyrants. No one would accuse Zeus or Odin of being morally perfect! More subtly, nor were they supposed to be omnipotent or omniscient. The combination of omnipotence and omniscience is impossible in a pantheon of competing and contradictory gods. If one of the gods were omnipotent and omniscient, the others would not lack the status of gods and instead be mere spirits. If multiple of the gods were omnipotent and omniscient, they could cancel each other out, and thus not be omnipotent. This is an irresistible force–immovable object problem. The problem of evil is therefore only a profound problem for the classical monotheistic God (capitalisation significant, indicating the name of a single entity).

So the problem of evil can be avoided by saying that there are no omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect entities. This, however, is at most only a spiritual form of atheism. Note that although militant modern atheism has developed a hardline opposition to all forms of immaterialism, the word itself only implies disbelief in God, a word which for a few thousand years has meant an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect entity. If one rejects that definition entirely, one is precisely denying the existence of that kind of entity, which we call God. We will have to look into narrower limitations on the concept before we simply throw our hands up and call ourselves atheists.

2. “If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.”

We can perhaps divide the impetus for religious belief into two sentiments: the veneration of power; and the adoration of goodness. For absolutists of the former, it might seem that a God whose power is limited is not worth worshipping. Yet moderates, or absolutists of the latter, could still worship a God who was perfectly good and still very powerful. So we could still call a merely very powerful and morally perfect entity God without raising too many questions about whether it deserves the name.

Yet the claim that God is not powerful enough to intercede meaningfully to prevent evil is not a popular defence in itself. Although a few modernists will defend the idea that God is a powerless “friend”, the worship dynamic relies too heavily on veneration of absolute power in exchange for prayed-for perks. A God who cannot answer prayers is ultimately not a God that most theists would want to worship.

The most that theists will tend to concede is that omnipotence does not mean that God can do the impossible. At its most tautological, they will say that god cannot create a square triangle, or cannot create a rock He cannot lift. This seems a reasonable position to me: omnipotence means being able to do everything, but that does not include being able to do non-things. That is, for all x, if x is an action, a God could do it. ∀x[Ax→Gx] only covers whatever is in the set of “all x”.

This does not in itself resolve the problem of evil, or even get very close, but it is an important premiss of a claim that there is de facto no evil: that this is for some reason (such as free will) the best of all possible worlds that God could have created. We will cover this under point five. But note for now that even small constraints on God's power, beyond the most pedantic and formal, are deeply disturbing to the worshipful impulse.

3. “If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists (and how to eliminate it).”

Again, we could notionally imagine a God worthy of the name who is very powerful but is constrained by severe limits on His knowledge. Especially, a God within time in a non-deterministic universe could not predict with certainty the outcomes of a given state or action. We could suppose a God who does not have unlimited focus, who can miss actions that are done while He is not paying attention. Indeed, Bronze Age myths of ancient religions, such as those contained in the Greek myths or in the early parts of the Bible, contain depictions of fallible gods like this.

But this is even less popular than limiting God's omnipotence. If few want to worship a weak God, even fewer want to worship a stupid God. Is this at least partly because of theology's post-Axial Age take-over by nerds who deified their own intelligence? After all, many ancients worshipped gods who were less than geniuses, though this was as part of a pantheon, where they would still have recourse to call on another clever god if one were needed. Regardless of the reason, the idea of a God who cannot explain the world for us is out.

4. “If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.”

Here we find more room for quibbling. After all, is “evil” always “bad”? First though, we must accept that the basic premiss is undisputed, at least in modern polite society. Even self-proclaimed “Satanists” simply claim that their object of worship is more moral, according to their lights, than their conception of “God”. Some ancients seem to have worshipped for propitiary reasons Gods they accepted as being evil, but today this is not an accepted reason for worship. Perhaps this will revert in future, though.

There is room, however, for positions that claim that some degree of evil is necessary, and therefore permitted to exist by a God who could prevent it. This is distinguished from (5) because it is not claiming that evil does not exist at all, but that it does exist, but is justified. Is a necessary evil truly evil? Well, let us leave that little conundrum aside and accept this argument's categorisation on its own terms.

The most famous defence on these lines is that the existence of evil is necessary for free will.

5. “Evil exists.”

The Liberal Problem of Inequality

Dive into why liberalism needs equality, despite the fact of inequality; side-note on ideological liberalism vs pragmatic liberalism

We can construct a parallel Problem of Evil for liberalism:

1. The liberal society has sufficient agency to achieve its ends, is a reliable guide to action, and desires equality.
2. If liberal society has sufficient agency to achieve its ends, then it has the power to eliminate inequality.
3. If liberal society is a reliable guide to action, then its officials and advocates know when inequality exists and how to eliminate it.
4. If liberal society is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Inequality exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists (or how to eliminate it), or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

Liberodicy

Enumeration of conventional liberal (“theist”) responses to the LPoE

Woke gnosis

Linking of SJW denunciation of systemic discrimination with Gnostic denunciation of the Demiurge's evil world-system

The Illiberal Solution

Exposition of the atheist-analogue: the truth of inequality and the falsity of the liberal faith