The Logical Problem of Evil from a Paraconsistent Perspective

Abstract

The logical problem of evil challenges the coherence of theism by claiming that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God is incompatible with the presence of evil. Within classical logic, such an incompatibility would entail triviality, since any contradiction triggers the principle ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet. This paper investigates the problem by focusing on the logical relation between contradiction, triviality, and theological reasoning. It begins by examining the role played by explosion in classical logic and by tracing the historical development of non-explosive approaches to inconsistency, culminating in contemporary paraconsistent logics. Against this background, a first-order classical system is presented in which omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence are defined in a minimal but precise way and combined with the empirical premise that evil exists. It is shown that, under these assumptions, no contradiction follows, and thus the logical problem of evil does not succeed in its strongest classical form. At the same time, the analysis highlights the vulnerability of such classical solutions: once stronger theological assumptions are introduced, contradiction again threatens to trivialize the theory. The paper then argues that paraconsistent logic provides a robust framework for formal natural theology, allowing tensions between divine attributes and evil to be articulated without collapse.