Even if some evil is justified, the sheer amount of evil in the world is far too much

The force of the objection

This objection is less about logic and more about weight. You can accept that some suffering serves a purpose and still feel crushed by the totality of it. The twentieth century alone saw tens of millions killed in wars and atrocities. Add disease, natural disaster and private cruelty, and the scale is almost unimaginable. It's natural to say: surely half of this, or a tenth, would have been enough.

How much is "too much"?

The problem is that we have no clear standard for what amount of evil a good God could allow. Peter van Inwagen, in The Problem of Evil, makes a striking argument here. Suppose God reduced the suffering by one instance. Would that make the world worse? Probably not. Then by one more. And so on. There may be no single point at which the amount becomes "just right," just as there's no exact number of grains of sand that makes a heap. If so, any amount God permits could be criticised as too much, and the objection becomes impossible to satisfy.

Freedom at scale

If God gives billions of people real freedom across thousands of years, the total amount of evil will be enormous simply because there are so many free choices. Most of history's great horrors were human-made. To drastically reduce them, God would have to override human freedom constantly, which would undercut the very thing that makes love and responsibility possible (see An all-powerful God could create free beings who always choose good).

The limits of our vantage point

We see suffering from inside a single lifetime and a single culture. God's purposes, if he exists, would span all of history and eternity. That doesn't make evil less evil, but it gives reason to be cautious about confident judgments that it is too much (see Skeptical theism).

Weighed against eternity

Christianity holds that this life is not the whole story. The apostle Paul, who suffered beatings, shipwreck and imprisonment, wrote that "our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed" (Romans 8:18). That's not a dismissal of pain. It's a claim that the final good will be so great that even immense suffering will be overwhelmed by it. Marilyn McCord Adams argued in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God that God can defeat even the worst evils within each person's life.

A fair concession

This is an emotionally powerful argument, and many people walk away from faith because of it. A believer can honestly say they don't know why the amount is what it is.

How to explain this to a friend

In conversation, it's wise not to argue about numbers at all. Acknowledge that the scale of suffering is overwhelming, because it is. Then you can ask, gently, what amount a good God would be allowed to permit, and how we would know. Most people realise there's no obvious line. That doesn't answer every question, but it shows why the objection is harder to press than it first seems.

The bottom line

The amount of evil is staggering, and no one should minimise it. But it's hard to say how much a good God could allow, and the Christian story claims the final outcome will outweigh it all. For the wider picture, see The problem of evil.