Is Displacing Evil Explaining It? Agency, Ontological Dependence, and Divine Permission in Religious Responses to the Problem of Evil

This article offers a comparative examination of the strategies by which religious traditions displace the agency of evil from a supreme principle onto subordinate agents, created freedom, a dualistic structure, privation, greater goods, divine permission, or an eschatological resolution. It proposes an analytic grid made up of three levels of attribution — moral authorship, proximate causation, and permissive structure — and a condition of ontological ground, and argues that an answer given at one level does not, without further argument, constitute an answer to a question belonging to another. The strategies are reconstructed in their strongest form before being examined: Iranian dualism, the documented redistribution of the initiative of harm in ancient and Second Temple Judaism, the Christian sequence from privation to permission, and the Muʿtazilite/Ashʿarite pair together with the doctrine of acquisition. The result is limited and calibrated: each strategy clarifies a real dimension of the problem, none is a mere subterfuge, and none of them, taken alone, dissolves the justificatory question that bears upon the permissive structure — namely, why a perfectly good ground creates defectible agents, confers causal powers upon them, conserves them, maintains the laws that render harm effective, and does not intervene. The conclusion is not that theodicies have failed, but that the title question receives a variable answer depending on which dimension of evil is under examination.

DIETRICH, Pablo. Is Displacing Evil Explaining It? Agency, Ontological Dependence, and Divine Permission in Religious Responses to the Problem of Evil. RCMOS – Revista Científica Multidisciplinar O Saber, v. 1, n. 2, 2026. DOI: 10.51473/rcmos.v1i2.2026.2896.