From a friend:

It’s easy to confuse theology with theodicy. Of course, theology is all about sin, evil and redemption, and to say theologians have grappled with such things for thousands of years says nothing more than that theologians have thought about life as well as scripture.

As for anyone producing a theodicy (an account of the extent of human and natural evil consistent with an omni times three God) that feels at all satisfying to the author, well, please point me to it.

A survey of Christians teaching philosophy of religion rated the problem of evil at three times more a challenge to classical theism than any other argument.

Even for all Alvin Plantinga has written on theodicy, he still says nothing he writes is at all emotionally satisfying or comforting.

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In the western church, which encompasses Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (what a protestant movement in the Eastern church would have thrown up would have been very interesting), pretty much everyone assumed that the sin of one (or two) people was adequate to explain all the woes of this world. It pretty much assumed that God could curse the rest of humanity and that that was okay. If God was God, who is to argue? You cannot simply argue that this was a very sober examination of how sin could be so rampant on this planet.

Now, however, we do know that nature has been red in tooth and claw since blood became red around 450 million year ago. And no one honestly argues that the federal headship of Adam makes sense of this, just like the imputation of Adam’s sin makes no sense.

So, basically, theodicy for 1800 years in the western church, assumed human and natural evil could all be blamed upon Adam and Eve. Even today, Alvin Plantinga (to all his fellow philosopher’s dismay) maintains that all natural evil, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are the result of Satan at loose in the world causing mayhem.

Frankly, this doesn’t add up to a lot of scholars and philosophers. To have a literal Satan in the garden of Eden is akin to putting a wily peadophile in a childcare centre and then punishing the children.

What most theologians then turn to is the theology of Irenaeus of Lyon, as he saw first of the church fathers that Genesis could not literally explain the origin of evil and suffering.