Editing Problem of evil (section)

==Related issues==
Philip Irving Mitchell, Director of the University Honors Program at Dallas Baptist University, offers a list of what he refers to as issues that are not strictly part of the problem of evil yet are related to it:
* ''Evil and the Demonic'': Mitchell writes that, given the belief in supernatural powers among all three monotheistic faiths, what do these beliefs have to do with evil? 
* ''The Politics of Theodicy'': Does explaining the causes of evil and suffering serve as a justification for oppression by the powerful or the liberation of the powerless? <ref name="Peter L. Berger"/>{{rp|59}} 
* ''Horrific Evil'': The Holocaust, child abuse and rape, extreme schizophrenia, torture, mass genocide, etc. Should one even speak of justification before such atrocities? What hope of restoration and healing can be given to survivors? 
* ''The Judgment of God'': Many theodical discussions focus on "innocent" suffering and experiences of profound evil, while ignoring wrongs common to individuals, ideas, belief systems, and social structures. Can evil be understood as God's judgment upon sin and evil?
* ''The Hiddenness of God'': The divine hiddenness of God (deus absconditus) is sometimes considered a subset of theodicy. Why does God often seem not to openly, visibly respond to evil (or good) in an indisputable way? 
* ''Metaphysical Evil'': What exactly is evil? What is its origin and essence?<ref name="Mitchell"/>

===The existential problem of evil===
The existential problem asks, in what way does the experience of suffering speak to issues of theodicy and in what way does theodicy hurt or help with the experience of suffering? Dan Allender and Tremper Longman point out that suffering creates internal questions about God that go beyond the philosophical, such as: does God, or anyone, care about what I am suffering every day?<ref>Allender, Dan and Tremper Longman III. ''The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God''. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1999. {{ISBN?}}</ref>{{rp|24, 45, 135}}

===Literature and the arts===
Mitchell says that literature surrounding the problem of evil offers a mixture of both universal application and particular dramatization of specific instances, fictional and non-fictional, with religious and secular views. Works such as ''[[Doctor Faustus (play)|Doctor Faustus]]'' by [[Christopher Marlowe]]; ''[[Paradise Lost]]'' by [[John Milton]]; ''[[An Essay on Man]]'' by [[Alexander Pope]]; ''[[Candide]]'' by [[Voltaire]]; ''[[Goethe's Faust|Faust]]'' by [[Goethe]]; "[[In Memoriam A.H.H.]]" by [[Tennyson]]; ''[[The Brothers Karamazov]]'' by [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]]; ''[[Four Quartets]]'' by [[T. S. Eliot]]; [[The Plague (novel)|''The Plague'']] by [[Camus]]; ''[[Night (memoir)|Night]]'' by [[Elie Wiesel]]; ''Holy the Firm'' and ''For the Time Being'' by [[Annie Dillard]]; and ''[[The Book of Sorrows]]'' by [[Walter Wangerin Jr.]] offer insights for how the problem of evil may be understood.<ref name="Mitchell"/><ref>{{cite journal |last=Styler |first=Rebecca |title=The Problem of 'Evil' in Elizabeth Gaskell's Gothic Tales |journal=Gothic Studies |year=2010 |volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=33–50 |publisher=Edinburgh University Press |doi=10.7227/GS.12.1.4 | url=https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.7227/GS.12.1.4 |url-access=subscription }}</ref><ref name="Peter Kivy"/>

While artist Cornelia van Voorst first declares that, "artists do not think of the world in terms of good and bad, but more in terms of: What can we make of this?", she also offers the example of [[Pablo Picasso]]'s 1935 etching ''Minotauromachie'', currently at the [[Ashmolean Museum]], where a little girl holds up her small shining light to confront and face down the evil Minotaur of war.<ref name="Cornelia van Voorst">{{cite web |last=van Voorst |first=Cornelia |title=Art and the nature of good and evil |url=https://www.abc.net.au/religion/art-and-the-nature-of-good-and-evil/10901112 |date= 14 March 2019 |publisher=ABC Religion & Ethics |access-date=19 April 2021}}</ref> Franziska Reiniger says art depicting the overwhelming evil of the Holocaust has become controversial. The painting of Lola Lieber-Schwarz – ''The Murder of Matilda Lieber, Her Daughters Lola and Berta, and Berta's Children Itche (Yitzhak) and Marilka, January 1942'' – depicts a family lying dead on the snowy ground outside a village with a Nazi and his dog walking away from the scene. His face is not visible. The scene is cold and dead, with only the perpetrator and maybe one of his victims, a child clinging to its mother, still remaining alive. No one knows who was there to witness this event or what their relationship to these events might have been, but the art itself is a depiction of the problem of evil.<ref name="Franziska Reiniger">{{cite web|last =Reiniger| first=Franziska|title=Are There Boundaries to Artistic Representations of the Holocaust? |url=https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/boundaries-to-artistic-representations-of-the-holocaust.html| publisher= Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrance Center |access-date=19 April 2021}}</ref>