Epicurus states the problem of evil as “If God is willing to prevent evil but not able, then God is impotent; if able but not willing, God is malevolent; if both able and willing, why does evil exist?” Let’s try to grant, for a moment, the success of the argument. Then let’s ask, what does the argument achieve?

As far as I know, the traditional answer is that it demonstrates the logical impossibility of an omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly good God or it at least decreases the likelihood of such a God existing.

Let’s suppose God is not omnipotent. How potent is He then? Well, I think one could look around at the things that have been made and reasonably conclude that he is still quite powerful. Furthermore, no one can know just how much evil God has in fact prevented. Wouldn’t you need to know that to make a judgment on His power or ability to stop evil? If in the course of US history, the secret service prevented 999 out of 1,000 attempts on a president’s life, should I conclude after I read about the first successful assassination that the secret service is basically powerless against it?

If we are considering those three attributes alone, we can still conclude the discussion with a God who is:

• All powerful, all knowing, but not quite all good, or
• All knowing, all good, but with at least some limits to his power, or
• All good, all powerful, but not quite all knowing

I sympathize with people who say that the problem of evil gives us some justified doubts about God’s goodness or his power. After all, what if we flipped the problem and asked about the existence of an all-evil, all-powerful God? If we looked around at the world, would we conclude that such a God exists? It doesn’t seem that way. It seems like the world is not as bad as it could be so if this all-evil God existed it seems like there might be some restraints on his power or maybe he’s not entirely evil. Similarly, I don’t think we can conclude that God is all-good, and all-powerful, and all-knowing just by looking at the world around us. We can only get so far. This is one reason why we so desperately need the Bible. We need to see the God who loved the world so much that he became a man and let arrogant and wicked men take a hammer and drive nails through his hands because he loved them.