In Leo Tolstoy’s <em>The Death of Ivan Illyich</em> (1886), the high-court judge Ivan is struck down by illness in the prime of his life and dies an agonising death, with cries that could be heard ‘three rooms off’<sup>1</sup>.<br><br>The world is full of unnecessary suffering and evil — serial murder, war and genocide. In such a world, where is God?<br><br><em>Theists</em> believe in the existence of an almighty and perfectly good God. However, the undeniable existence of evil produces a logical contradiction — two or more statements that cannot all be true — sometimes called the Epicurean paradox. Accordingly, if God exists, He <em>could</em> eliminate evil because He is almighty; and would <em>want</em> to because He is perfectly good. And yet He does not, which implies that He is either powerless or not perfectly good. <br><br>In <em>God, Freedom, and Evil</em> (1974)<sup>2</sup> American Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga showed how the contradiction could be resolved. God is almighty, but even He cannot do the logically impossible; He cannot create free humans and simultaneously prevent them, without suppressing their free will, from committing evil. Therefore, according to the free-will defence, evil occurs when humans misuse their freedom. <br><br>But what of the gratuitously painful death of Ivan Illyich? According to Plantinga, such apparently ‘natural’ evils are caused by the fallen angel Satan misusing his God-given freedom. While viewed in isolation this may indeed seem far-fetched, crucially, the idea of Satan transforms natural evil into moral evil, one committed through free will.<br><br>This allows Plantinga to show that the existence of evil does not make the existence of God impossible — that they can coexist — thereby resolving the Epicurean paradox.<br>