Theodicies are attempts made by theologians to solve the problem of evil. about 2300 years ago Epicurus summarized the problem of evil as well as anyone can when he said:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?

Of course, Christian theology has added something to the definition of “god” that the ancient Greeks didn’t have, omniscience.

In the different ways Christians try to stand up for their god, it’s influenced by their theology (obviously) and on occasion their theodicies influence their theology. They may change drop traits they ascribe to their god or they may change how they describe the world around them.

Take Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People as an prime example, he’s a fan of the story of Job and explains it and his own child’s death as being a result of God not being omnipotent. In other words, bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people because God is too impotent to do anything about. This is an effective defense, but boils God down to not being very godlike.

Then there’s open theism that views God as not being immutable or timeless. As a result God’s omniscience would not include any future events, so God isn’t to blame for bad things because he finds out bad things happen to you at the same time you do. Unfortunately, ignorance is no excuse since the most heinous of human atrocities have been well planned out and if you knew about the planning, you knew what was going to happen. That also doesn’t excuse such things as massive tsunamis caused by earthquakes, diseases, pandemics or anything else where you literally see the progression and know its coming.

Also popular among the “free will” crowd are various theories of natural disasters being caused by demonic forces. Ignoring for a moment the absurdity of making up a solution to a made up problem, if God is more powerful than them, why doesn’t he stop them? and if God is unable to stop them, then wouldn’t the demons be more worthy of worship since they actually impact your life?

My personal favorite would have to be the Calvinistic approach. They don’t try to defend their god since he chooses who believes in him and who doesn’t, so if you even bring up the problem of evil you must be going to hell. God is god, he’s powerful, he predetermined how all would play out so shut up and deal with the fact that the universe is ruled by a sociopathic asshole. Right?

What I’m sure few, if any Christians have ever figured out, is that atheism is actually just the ultimate theodicy. The problem of evil is resolved and God is not responsible because he simply doesn’t exist. That’s right, everybody has to resolve to problem of evil by taking away at least one of the traditional attributes of God (all powerful, all knowing, good, etc), we just take away the one about existing.