Perhaps someone will move this theodicy discussion to its own thread so that Patrick’s sub-topic can be pursued on its own. Meanwhile, here’s my response:
I could wish that I had taken more philosophy courses long ago so that I could better articulate the various reasons why my philosophy colleagues [including an atheist who chaired the department back in the days when I was asked to teach a cross-listed course in logic. Long story.] could explain to me, with a certain amount of justifiable condescension, why the theodicy problem is no longer considered a problem in modern philosophy. They told me that this kind of problem of evil decried by Stephen Fry and countless others is not some kind of “grand gotcha” at all and most professional philosophers no longer worry about it.
I don’t recall all that much of their explanations except this summary: Skeptical theism says that it is fully logical that an omniscient and omnipotent God could allow an evil (such as children dying of cancer)…
(1) … if God knew that allowing such an evil would avoid some greater evil or
(2) … if God knew that allowing such an evil would bring about some consequent result that produces a greater good.
Obviously, as to #1, we use similar logic all the time as parents. For example force our children to endure a painful needle injection in order to avoid the greater suffering and evil of getting dangerous childhood diseases which could kill them. (Those of us of the older generation well remember getting our smallpox vaccination, which was more like a painful branding. The torture device consisted of eight needles arranged in a circle and heated to a high temperature. The resulting burn resulted in a dime-sized disk of grilled skin gradually sloughing off in a few weeks time and leaving a life-long scar.)
I vaguely recall several over arguments which “retired” the theodicy question around a century ago but I can’t do them justice. They should be easy to find in some standard reference work, such as the philosophy encyclopedia published by Stanford, I think??
By the way, if someone thinks they can dismiss the above by saying “But God is omnipotent. He should be able to achieve such “lesser evil” or “greater good” without such terrible phenomena taking place.” That is another popular argument that was rejected by philosophers and theologians long ago. It fails because it misunderstands the definition of omnipotent. (Many people assume that omnipotent means “God is so powerful that he can do absolutely anything.” That pop-definition doesn’t apply to the God of the Bible and it doesn’t fit the standard definition of an omnipotent God in philosophy. I’m tempted to dive into the Systematic Theology of Divine omnipotence but my tangents have deviated far from the thread topic of Cancer and Evolution. For now, I’ll just say that Divine omnipotence means that God is never lacking in power to carry out the Divine will and the Divine will never contradicts or defies God’s other divine attributes.)
POSTSCRIPT: Keep in mind that there is nothing inconsistent or bizarre about an atheist philosophy saying that the theodicy problem is no longer an interesting problem. The above arguments simply maintain that there is nothing illogical or impossible about such a God potentially allowing extreme evil. The philosopher is not claiming that these arguments demand the existence of God or prove the existence of God. Obviously, the individual philosopher can and will continue to reach personal conclusions about whether or not such a God actually exists. My main reason for this post is to point out that plenty of atheist philosophers refuse to harp on the alleged “theodicy problem” because the logic was sorted out long ago and is no longer all that interesting (as my philosopher colleague used to say.)