Ambrosino, Brandon. Is it God's Will? New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2025.
Here's a recent book on the problem of evil I spotted in a Barnes & Noble. The author Brandon Ambrosino is addressing the problem of evil from a Christian perspective. So the book is a work of apologetics. I read the first few pages and was surprised at how conceding they were to the problem of evil. Consider:
“Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if my goddaughter
were to grow up believing that God took her dad because he wanted to be
with him. Does that mean God is selfish? Doesn’t God know that Carl’s
[the dad] family also wants to be with him? Did God send the heart
attack [at age 44] to get him to heaven quickly? Could he not have found
a less horrific way to do it? Could he have given Rusty [Carl’s wife]
some advanced notice? Or maybe my goddaughter will start to wonder why
God doesn’t take all of us to heaven right now—does he not love us as
much as he loves Carl?” (3)
Good questions!
“How, then, ought we think about God’s relationship to our world, a world that continues to go wrong, to spin off course, to wound us daily?
We might not be able to construct an answer, as in the answer, as in the one and only answer. Anyone who’s suffered knows on a gut level that this kind of answer doesn’t exist. Suffering is unanswerable.” (6)
What a confession! I totally agree. On a gut level we know that evils are apparently unjustified. And until that changes, say, by a compelling theodicy, God apparently does not exist. But is there any hope of a compelling theodicy? Not so, says Ambrosino. "Suffering is unanswerable." And:
“There is no system, theological or otherwise, within which suffering makes sense. . . . We cannot solve suffering, and attempting to do so only discounts the suffering and degrades the sufferers.” (7)
Taken out of context, I would think that this author is about to give a defense of an argument from evil!
Question: If the author thinks there is no answer to suffering, and that even attempting to give an answer to suffering betrays a misunderstanding of suffering and insults victims of suffering, then what exactly is his book for? It's not for answering the question of suffering, because, per the author, there is no answer. It's not for solving suffering, because, per the author, suffering cannot be solved. It's not for providing a theological system in which suffering makes sense, because, per the author, there is no such system. So by the author's own admission in the first few pages, the book is not providing an answer, solution, or systematic account of suffering. How then is this meant to be a defense of Christian belief? Only an answer to suffering or a solution to the problem of evil or a systematic account of suffering can act as a defense of Christian belief. So if none of these things are possible, then that is just to admit that it's not possible to defend Christian belief against arguments from evil.
There is a system in which suffering makes perfect sense, and it's called naturalism. There is an answer – a very simple, elegant, and obvious answer – to the problem of evil: there is no perfect and loving God.