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Protestant Lens: Why Does Evil Still Exist If God Is Good?

Protestant lens: denominational differences, Messianic Jewish and BibleProject first, then Catholic, Orthodox, LDS and JW, then other religions and worldviews, each with Go Deeper resources

ByKaleb Dixon

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Updated 2026-10-19 · 22 min read
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Problem of evilSufferingTheodicyProvidenceProtestant

Lens on Why Does Evil Still Exist If God Is Good?

This lens answers the question starting from Protestant Christianity. Part I covers the shared Protestant answer, the denominations that differ, and the Messianic Jewish and BibleProject viewpoints. Part II covers the sister branches of Christianity. Part III covers other religions and worldviews. The overview, the At a Glance table and the key points of divergence are on the question page.

Part I — Protestant Perspectives

Common Protestant Answer

Short answer: God created everything "very good" (Gen 1:31). Evil entered through the rebellion of creatures, first Satan and then Adam and Eve, and the curse of sin spread to all of creation (Gen 3; Rom 5:12; 8:20–22). God is not the author of sin, but he is never out of control of it. He permits it, restrains it, and turns it toward good ("you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good," Gen 50:20). He answers evil not with an explanation but with himself: in Christ he suffers it, defeats it at the cross, and will abolish it at the new creation (Rev 21:4).

  • Evil is not a thing God made. Following Augustine, most Protestants treat evil as a corruption or twisting of good, with no independent existence.
  • Free will (or at least real creaturely agency) is the usual explanation for moral evil. Natural evil (disease, disaster) is linked to the curse on a creation "subjected to futility" (Rom 8:20).
  • Greater-good reasoning: "We know that for those who love God all things work together for good" (Rom 8:28).
  • Lament is faithful: About a third of the Psalms are laments. Job, Habakkuk and Jeremiah question God openly and are not condemned for it.
  • The cross is the center. The worst evil ever done, the killing of the Son of God, was the means of redemption (Acts 2:23; 4:27–28).
  • Eschatology finishes the answer. "The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed" (Rom 8:18).
  • Internal divide: How much God ordains versus permits. See Reformed vs. Arminian below.

Go Deeper

  • 📖 The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis (1940): the classic popular treatment: free will, pain as God's "megaphone," and why a good God would allow suffering.
  • 📖 Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, Timothy Keller (2013): surveys how different cultures handle suffering, then gives a pastoral and philosophical Christian answer.
  • 📖 God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga (1974): the "free will defense" that most philosophers credit with answering the logical problem of evil.

Denominational Differences

Anglicans and Baptists split along the same Reformed and Arminian lines as the rest of Protestantism, so they have no separate subsection. The following differ meaningfully.

Reformed / Presbyterian

Short answer: God's providence reaches even to sin, not by bare permission but by "a most wise and powerful bounding" and ordering of it for his own holy ends. Yet God is never the author of sin: the sinfulness comes wholly from the creature. Evil exists ultimately because it serves the display of God's justice and mercy and his people's good.

  • Westminster Confession 5.4: God's providence "extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sins of angels and men," yet

    "…the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God; who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin."

  • Heidelberg Catechism Q27–28: All things, "health and sickness, riches and poverty," come not by chance "but by his fatherly hand," so believers can be patient in adversity and confident about the future.
  • This view is compatibilist: God's sovereign decree and human responsibility are both fully real (Gen 50:20; Acts 4:27–28). Critics within Protestantism argue it makes God responsible for evil; Reformed theologians answer with the distinction between primary and secondary causes.

Go Deeper

  • 📜 Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. 5 "Of Providence": the confessional statement of how God governs sin without authoring it.
  • 📖 How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil, D. A. Carson (1990): a Reformed pastor-scholar on sovereignty, suffering and lament.

Lutheran

Short answer: Sin's cause is the will of the devil and of ungodly people, which turns itself away from God. Lutherans are wary of any theodicy that "explains" evil. Instead they distinguish the hidden God (Deus absconditus), whose ways we must not pry into, from the revealed God (Deus revelatus) in the crucified Christ, where God is found suffering with and for us.

  • Augsburg Confession Art. XIX "Of the Cause of Sin": Although God creates and preserves nature, the cause of sin is the will of the wicked, the devil and ungodly people, which, without God's help, turns itself away from God (citing John 8:44).
  • Theology of the cross: A "theologian of glory" tries to read God off the world's events. A "theologian of the cross" looks for God where he has promised to be: in weakness, suffering and the cross (Heidelberg Disputation, Theses 19–21).
  • In The Bondage of the Will (1525), Luther argues that why God permits evil belongs to the hidden God, and believers should flee from that question to Christ.

Go Deeper

Arminian / Wesleyan

Short answer: God made creatures truly free, because love that cannot refuse is not love. Evil is the misuse of that freedom. God permits it but does not will or decree it, and his prevenient grace keeps working to restore what sin breaks.

  • Wesley rejected the idea that God ordains sin; he held that it would make God "worse than the devil" (sermon Free Grace, 1739).
  • God foreknows evil but does not cause it. His sovereignty is shown in giving freedom and overruling its abuse, not in determining every act.
  • Open theism, a minority view among some Arminian-leaning evangelicals (Gregory Boyd, John Sanders, Clark Pinnock), goes further: the future is partly open, so God does not know free choices in advance and is not behind specific evils. Most Arminians reject this.

Go Deeper

  • 📜 John Wesley, Sermon 128, Free Grace (1739; in any edition of Wesley's sermons): his case against the idea that God decrees sin.
  • 📖 God at War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict, Gregory A. Boyd (1997): the "warfare worldview." Evil comes from free rebel creatures, human and angelic, not from a hidden divine plan. (Boyd is an open theist.)

Pentecostal / Charismatic

Short answer: Much evil, sickness and oppression is the work of a real spiritual enemy (Acts 10:38; Eph 6:12). God's answer is not only to explain it but to overthrow it, and believers share in that through prayer, healing and deliverance.

  • The Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths calls divine healing "an integral part of the gospel" and "the privilege of all believers" (Isa 53:4–5; Matt 8:16–17).
  • Jesus "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil" (Acts 10:38). That sets the pattern: suffering is to be resisted, not just accepted.
  • Internal tension: Prosperity-gospel teachers treat all suffering as a lack of faith. Most classical Pentecostals reject that, holding that God sometimes does not heal and believers still share in Christ's sufferings (2 Cor 12:7–10).

Go Deeper

  • 📜 Acts 10:38; Ephesians 6:10–18; James 5:13–16: the core texts for resisting evil and praying for healing.

Messianic Jewish

Short answer: God is both just and sovereign, and the Tanakh lets the righteous protest to him (Job, the lament psalms, Habakkuk). Messianic Jews add that God answered suffering by entering it: Yeshua is the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, who "has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows," and who will return to set the world right.

  • Job is central: Job challenges God, is vindicated over his friends' tidy explanations, and is answered not with reasons but with God's presence and wisdom (Job 38–42).
  • Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the suffering servant, is read as Messiah bearing the evil of others, which links Jewish themes of righteous suffering to the cross.
  • Many Messianic Jews also draw on the Jewish idea of tikkun olam (repairing the world) as participation in God's coming redemption.

Go Deeper

  • 📖 Job: The Faith to Challenge God, Michael L. Brown (2019): a Messianic Jewish scholar's translation and commentary on Job, focused on how faith can argue with God.
  • 📜 Isaiah 52:13–53:12: the suffering-servant passage central to Messianic readings of evil and redemption.

BibleProject

Short answer: God made a good world and invited humans to rule it with him, trusting his wisdom about "good and bad." Humans, and rebellious spiritual beings before them, grabbed the power to define good and bad for themselves, and the result is the brokenness of the world. The book of Job teaches that we often can't know why we suffer, and that the world God made is "orderly and beautiful but also wild and dangerous," but we can bring our grief to God and trust his wisdom. Jesus is the human who finally trusts God and defeats the powers of evil by giving his life.

  • The tree of knowing good and bad: Tim Mackie argues the Hebrew ra' means "bad" more broadly than "evil." Knowing good and bad is a sign of maturity that humans tried to take rather than receive.
  • Spiritual beings: The Bible pictures an unseen world of creatures who, like humans, rebel against their Creator. The serpent, the satan, and demons are rebels, not equals of God.
  • Job: The book refuses to explain Job's suffering. It challenges the friends' assumption that suffering always means sin, and models honest trust.

Go Deeper

Part II — Other Branches of Christianity

Catholic

Short answer: There is no quick answer: "only Christian faith as a whole" answers the question. God created a good world "in a state of journeying" toward perfection. He is "in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil," but permits it out of respect for creaturely freedom, and "knows how to derive good from it."

  • CCC 309: "If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist?" The answer is the whole of Christian faith: creation's goodness, the drama of sin, the covenant, the Incarnation, the Church and the call to eternal life.
  • CCC 310: "But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it?" Because God willed a world "in a state of journeying," with physical evil alongside physical good while creation moves toward its completion.
  • CCC 311: "God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil." He permits it because he respects the freedom of his creatures, and, quoting Augustine, would not allow evil unless he could bring good from it.
  • CCC 312–313: Joseph's story and above all the cross show God drawing good from evil, "but for all that, evil never becomes a good."
  • Thomist tradition: Evil is a privation (privatio boni), a lack of a good that should be there. Natural evil belongs to a world of changing, perishable things.

Go Deeper

Eastern Orthodox

Short answer: Evil has no being of its own. It is a turning away from God, the source of being, by free creatures, angels and then humans. God does not will evil, and the Orthodox are wary of saying he "uses" particular evils as part of a plan. Death and corruption are enemies that Christ came to destroy: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death."

  • St. Basil the Great, homily That God Is Not the Author of Evil: evil is not a substance but a condition of the soul opposed to virtue. Disease and disaster are "evils" only relatively; true evil is sin, which comes from our own free choice.
  • Ancestral sin: Adam's fall brought death and corruption into the world, which all inherit, but not Adam's guilt. Suffering is the result of a world estranged from its source of life.
  • Victory, not explanation: The paschal hymn and the icon of the Resurrection show Christ breaking the gates of Hades. The emphasis is on Christ's defeat of evil, not on why God permits it.
  • David Bentley Hart's tsunami essay argues that what God permits out of respect for creation's freedom may be contrary to what he wills, and that Christians should hate death and evil as God's enemies rather than call them part of his plan.

Go Deeper

  • 📖 The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, David Bentley Hart (2005): an Orthodox theologian's response to the 2004 tsunami, arguing against theodicies that make evil part of God's will.
  • 📜 St. Basil the Great, Homily: That God Is Not the Author of Evil (4th c.; in On the Human Condition, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2005): the classic patristic statement of evil as privation and free choice.

Latter-day Saints (Mormon)

Short answer: "It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things." Without opposition there could be no agency, no growth and no joy. Mortality is a school in which God's children learn by experience, and the Atonement of Christ heals all its wounds.

  • 2 Nephi 2:11: "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so … righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad."
  • 2 Nephi 2:25: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy." The Fall is seen as a necessary, even fortunate, step.
  • Doctrine and Covenants 122:7: To Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail: "all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good."
  • A distinctive feature: LDS theology rejects creation ex nihilo. God organized pre-existing matter and intelligences that are co-eternal with him. Some LDS philosophers argue this softens the problem of evil, since God works within eternal realities he did not create.

Go Deeper

Jehovah's Witnesses

Short answer: "Jehovah God never causes what is bad." In Eden, Satan challenged not God's power but his right to rule, implying humans would do better without him. God allowed time for that claim to be tested, so that all creation could see that rule independent of God fails. He will soon end suffering through his Kingdom, the ransom and the resurrection.

  • Job 34:10: "It is unthinkable for the true God to act wickedly."
  • 1 John 5:19: "The whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one." Satan, not God, is the "ruler of this world."
  • Suffering also comes from inherited human imperfection and "time and unexpected events" (Eccl 9:11).
  • God does not intervene to stop every crime because that would seem to support the claim that humans can govern themselves.
  • The issue of universal sovereignty is central: the vindication of Jehovah's right to rule is the main theme of the Bible.

Go Deeper

Seventh-day Adventist

Short answer: History is a "Great Controversy" between Christ and Satan over God's character and law. God allows sin to run its course so the whole universe can see the results of rebellion and the justice and love of God, so that evil, once ended, will never rise again.

  • Adventists stress that Satan accused God of being unjust and arbitrary. The cross reveals God's self-giving love and answers that charge before the universe.
  • Adventists also hold conditional immortality: the wicked are finally destroyed, not tormented forever. This is seen as part of God's justice, since eternal torment would itself be an evil without end.

Go Deeper

  • 📖 The Great Controversy, Ellen G. White (1888; revised 1911): the classic statement of the cosmic-conflict framework.

Christian Science

Short answer: God is All, and God is wholly good, so evil, sin, sickness and death have no real existence. They are mistaken beliefs of the "mortal mind," healed through spiritual understanding of God's allness.

  • This is the most radical Christian answer: it denies that the problem's premise (real evil) is true.
  • Healing through prayer is the practical result. Because disease is a false belief, correcting the belief heals the body.

Go Deeper

  • 📖 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy (1875): the founding text, including the chapter "Recapitulation" on the unreality of evil.

Part III — Other Religions & Worldviews

Atheist Materialism

Short answer: There is no problem to solve, because no good God exists. Suffering is the natural result of blind physical and evolutionary processes. For many atheists, the amount and distribution of suffering is one of the strongest arguments against God.

  • Epicurus' dilemma, as reported by the Christian writer Lactantius: "God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling…"
  • Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part X, has Philo restate the dilemma and argue that the world's mixture of good and evil points to an indifferent cause.
  • Evidential problem: William Rowe (1979) argued that even if some suffering serves a greater good, some, like a fawn burning slowly in a forest fire, seems pointless. Pointless suffering makes God's existence unlikely.
  • Dawkins: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." (River Out of Eden, 1995)
  • Many secular thinkers add that "evil" is a human moral judgment, not a cosmic force.

Go Deeper

Islam

Short answer: Allah creates all things, good and bad, but tests humans with them to reveal "which of you is best in deed." Hardship borne with patience (sabr) and gratitude (shukr) is rewarded, sins are expiated by suffering, and God's wisdom (hikmah) exceeds what humans can see.

  • Qur'an 67:2: "[He] who created death and life to test you as to which of you is best in deed."
  • Qur'an 21:35: "Every soul will taste death. And We test you with evil and with good as trial."
  • Qur'an 2:216: "Perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you."
  • Qur'an 18:60–82: Moses and the mysterious servant of God (al-Khidr), who does things that look evil but serve hidden good. It is the classic Islamic story about the limits of human judgment.
  • Hadith (Sahih Muslim 2999): "How wonderful is the affair of the believer… if something good happens to him he is thankful, and if something bad happens he is patient, and that is good for him."
  • Theological schools: Mu'tazilites held that God must act justly by standards humans can understand, and that humans create their own evil acts. Ash'arites held that whatever God does is just by definition, and God creates all acts. Maturidis take a middle path. Shi'a theology generally follows the Mu'tazili emphasis on God's justice ('adl).

Go Deeper

  • 📜 Qur'an 18:60–82 (Moses and al-Khidr): the Qur'an's main story about hidden wisdom behind apparent evil.
  • 📖 Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, Sherman A. Jackson (2009): a Muslim scholar compares how Mu'tazili, Ash'ari, Maturidi and traditionalist theology handle suffering.

Judaism

Short answer: Jewish tradition holds several answers in tension: suffering as punishment or discipline (Deuteronomy), as "afflictions of love" that refine the righteous (Talmud), as mostly self-inflicted or a privation (Maimonides), and as a mystery before which faith may protest (Job). After the Holocaust, these answers were stretched to breaking point, producing new responses.

  • Isaiah 45:7: "I form light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil (ra')." God is sovereign over all, and there is no rival god of evil.
  • Job: The book rejects the friends' claim that suffering always means sin. God answers from the whirlwind with questions, not reasons.
  • Talmud (Berakhot 5a): Suffering that has no apparent cause in sin may be yissurin shel ahavah, "afflictions of love."
  • Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed III:10–12: Evil is a privation, not a thing God creates. Most evils come either from humans harming others or from humans harming themselves, and only a few from the nature of matter.
  • The yetzer hara (evil inclination): God created humans with a drive that can lead to evil, which Torah helps to channel.
  • After the Holocaust:
    • Eliezer Berkovits: hester panim, God "hiding his face" to make human freedom possible.
    • Emil Fackenheim: a "614th commandment" not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning Judaism.
    • Richard Rubenstein: the traditional God of history died at Auschwitz.
    • Harold Kushner (Conservative): God is good but not all-powerful.
  • Movement differences: Orthodox thinkers generally keep God's omnipotence and accept mystery. Reform and Conservative thinkers are more open to revising traditional ideas of God's power.

Go Deeper

  • 📜 Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed III:12: his three kinds of evil and the claim that most suffering is self-inflicted.
  • 📖 Faith After the Holocaust, Eliezer Berkovits (1973): an Orthodox theologian's account of the "hidden face of God."
  • 📖 When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Harold S. Kushner (1981): the bestselling Conservative rabbi's argument that God is good but limited in power.

Hinduism

Short answer: Suffering is the fruit of karma, each soul's own actions in this and past lives. God (Ishvara) dispenses those results justly, so he is not cruel or partial. The deeper problem is ignorance (avidya), which binds the soul to rebirth.

  • Brahma Sutra 2.1.34 answers the charge that God is unequal and cruel because beings suffer unequally: God acts in accordance with each soul's merit and demerit.
  • Because souls and karma are beginningless, there is no "first" evil to explain.
  • Bhagavad Gita 4:7–8: When dharma declines and adharma rises, God takes form (avatar) "to protect the good, to destroy the wicked."
  • Schools differ:
    • Advaita (non-dualism): the world of suffering belongs to maya, the level of appearance, and liberation is realizing one's identity with Brahman.
    • Dvaita and Vishishtadvaita: keep a real, personal God and real souls, and stress grace (prasada) and devotion (bhakti).
  • Lila: Some traditions describe creation as God's "play," which raises its own questions about suffering.

Go Deeper

  • 📜 Bhagavad Gita 4:7–8: why God takes form when evil rises.
  • 📖 The Problem of Evil and Indian Thought, Arthur L. Herman (1976): a study of how karma, rebirth and Vedanta try to answer the problem.

Buddhism

Short answer: Buddhism largely dissolves the problem: there is no creator God to be blamed. Suffering (dukkha) arises from craving and ignorance, and the Buddha taught the path that ends it. Speculation about cosmic causes is not what matters; removing the arrow is.

  • The Four Noble Truths: suffering exists, it arises from craving (tanha), it can cease (nirvana), and there is a path to its cessation (the Eightfold Path).
  • Parable of the poisoned arrow (MN 63): A wounded man who refuses treatment until he knows who shot him will die first. Metaphysical questions are set aside in favor of liberation.
  • Critique of a creator: Some texts, such as the Bhuridatta Jataka, argue that if a creator made the world, he would be responsible for its injustice.
  • Mara personifies temptation and death, but is not a cosmic rival to a good God.
  • Schools differ: Theravada stresses individual liberation from suffering. Mahayana adds the bodhisattva's vow to save all beings, and some Mahayana schools see suffering as empty of inherent existence (śūnyatā).

Go Deeper

  • 📜 Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta (MN 63): the poisoned-arrow parable.
  • 📖 What the Buddha Taught, Walpola Rahula (1959): a clear Theravada account of the Four Noble Truths.

Zoroastrianism

Short answer: Evil has its own source. Two primal spirits stood at the beginning: Spenta Mainyu (the bounteous spirit) and Angra Mainyu (the destructive spirit). Ahura Mazda is wholly good and never the cause of evil. Humans must choose sides, and at the end good will defeat evil completely (Frashokereti).

  • Yasna 30 (one of the Gathas attributed to Zarathustra) describes the two spirits as "twins," one choosing good and one choosing evil.
  • This dualism is ethical, not equal: evil is real and active but temporary, and Ahura Mazda will triumph.
  • Scholars debate how much Zoroastrian dualism influenced later Jewish and Christian ideas of Satan, angels and the final judgment.

Go Deeper

  • 📖 Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, Mary Boyce (1979): the standard scholarly account, including the doctrine of the two spirits.

Gnosticism

Short answer: The material world is evil, or at least defective, because it was made not by the true God but by a lesser, ignorant creator, the Demiurge (in some texts named Yaldabaoth). The true God is wholly good and remote. Salvation is escaping matter through secret knowledge (gnosis).

  • This removes the problem by splitting the Creator from the good God.
  • Early Christian writers, especially Irenaeus (Against Heresies, c. 180), rejected this view and insisted that the one God made the material world and called it good. That debate shaped orthodox Christian thinking on evil.
  • Manichaeism, which the young Augustine followed, taught a similar cosmic dualism of light and darkness.

Go Deeper

  • 📖 The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels (1979): a scholarly introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts and the Gnostic view of creation.

Bahá'í Faith

Short answer: Evil does not exist as a positive reality. It is the absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light and poverty the absence of wealth. Even harmful creatures are not evil in themselves; they are evil only in relation to others.

  • 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, ch. 74 "The Nonexistence of Evil": "good exists; evil is nonexistent."
  • This closely parallels the Christian privation tradition of Augustine and Basil.

Go Deeper

Ancient Greek

Short answer: Greek thought had no single creator who is wholly good and all-powerful, so the problem took different forms:

  • Plato insisted the divine causes only good.

  • Homer's Zeus complains that humans blame the gods for evils caused by their own folly.

  • Epicurus concluded that the gods do not intervene at all.

  • Neoplatonists traced evil to matter.

  • Plato, Republic II (379c): God, being good, is the cause of only a few things for humans, the good ones; for the evils "we must look for some other causes, not God."

  • Homer, Odyssey 1.32–34: Zeus says mortals blame the gods for their troubles, but they suffer beyond their share through their own reckless folly.

  • Epicurus: The gods are blissful and uninvolved, so they cannot be blamed. Fear of them is the real evil to overcome.

  • Plotinus (Enneads I.8): Matter is the principle of evil, the furthest point from the One, where goodness runs out.

Go Deeper

Ancient Roman

Short answer: Roman Stoicism, especially Seneca, answered directly: the universe is governed by a good providence, and what looks like misfortune is training. God tests the good the way a strict father toughens his sons. Nothing is truly evil except vice, which is in our own power.

  • Seneca, De Providentia (On Providence): It opens, "You have asked me, Lucilius, why, if the world be ruled by providence, so many evils befall good men?" His answer: hardship is exercise for virtue, and God "hardens" those he loves.
  • Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus: Externals such as pain, poverty and death are "indifferent." Only our judgments about them make them evil.
  • Lucretius (Epicurean, De Rerum Natura V): the world is too flawed to have been made by gods for us.

Go Deeper

Skipped:

  • Sikhism: it treats suffering mainly as the result of ego (haumai) and submission to divine order (hukam), close to the Hindu karma answer above, so it is not separate here.
  • Daoism and Confucianism: they lack a personal, all-good creator, so the problem does not arise in this form.
  • Secular humanism: covered under atheist materialism.
  • Norse and Egyptian religion: they treat chaos as a force the gods themselves struggle against, rather than giving a developed answer to this question.

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