The Theodicy: The Attempt to Vindicate God

If the world was created according to some higher plan, why is there so much absurdity and suffering in it? Most believers sooner or later begin to ask this question. Theodicy comes to the aid of the desperate. It is a religious and philosophical concept according to which God is unconditionally recognized as an absolute good, from which any responsibility for the presence of evil in the world is removed.

Leibniz created this doctrine to conditionally “justify” God. The main question of this concept is: why does God not want to rid the world of misfortunes? The possible answers can be reduced to four: either God wants to rid the world of evil but cannot, or he can but does not want to, or he cannot and does not want to, or he can and wants to. The first three options do not correlate with the idea of God as the Absolute, and the last option does not explain the presence of evil in the world.

The problem of theodicy arises in any monotheistic religion where the responsibility for evil in the world should theoretically be assigned to God. In practice, laying responsibility on God is not possible since religions recognize God as a kind of ideal being who has the right to the presumption of innocence.

One of the main ideas of theodicy is that God created the best of all possible worlds, and, therefore, only the best is collected in it, and the presence of evil in this world is considered only as a consequence of the need for ethical diversity. Recognizing theodicy or not is a personal matter related to one’s faith, but it is certainly worth exploring the concept.