ABSTRACT
The problem of evil is widely regarded as the greatest challenge to traditional Christian theism. While anti-theodicists have claimed that theodicies are unhelpful, they have failed to consider the experiences of those sufferers who have found theodicies helpful for making sense of suffering. Although those who grieve rarely search for explanations of how God works in the universe, eventually ‘there comes a time, when the initial anguish subsides, that people seek the larger picture of what God is doing in the universe’ (Jones 2016). To understand this larger picture we need to first consider the Big Questions such as, ‘What is the (greatest) good? What is the meaning of life? Where do I come from? Where am I going?’ Whereas many atheists have claimed the existence of objective evil as evidence against the existence of God, others have argued that it presupposes the existence of God as the transcendent ground of objective morality. I have defended the arguments for Christian theism in other publications (Loke 2017a; 2017b; 2020a), and I shall develop the answers that Christian theism offers to those Big Questions and use them to respond to the problem of evil using a transdisciplinary approach.
