The Scale of Suffering
The scale and apparent arbitrariness of suffering challenge the claim that an all-powerful, loving God governs the world.
6 min readUpdated
Explanations for why a good and all-powerful God would permit suffering have to account for how much of it there is, how much falls on those who made no choices, and how long it went on before humans existed.
This page collects figures on that scale. The numbers come from different years and measure different things — annual deaths, current prevalence, historical estimates, modeled ranges — and none of them settles a philosophical question on its own. They set out what an explanation has to cover.
Human suffering today
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Children under 5 dying annually of largely preventable causes | About 4.8 million, of which roughly 2.3 million in the first 28 days of life | WHO |
| Deaths from cancer, 2022 | About 9.7 million | American Cancer Society |
| People facing acute hunger | About 343 million, with 1.9 million near famine conditions | World Food Programme |
| People in forced labour or forced marriage | About 50 million, of whom 27.6 million in forced labour | International Labour Organization |
| People living with depression | About 280 million | WHO |
| People living with an anxiety disorder | About 301 million | WHO |
Deadliest recorded natural disasters
| Event | Year | Estimated deaths |
|---|---|---|
| China floods | 1931 | 1–4 million |
| Yellow River flood | 1887 | 900,000–2 million |
| Shaanxi earthquake | 1556 | About 830,000 |
| Yellow River flood | 1938 | 400,000–900,000 |
| Tangshan earthquake | 1976 | 242,000–655,000 |
| Bhola cyclone | 1970 | 300,000–500,000 |
| Coringa cyclone, India | 1839 | 300,000 or more |
The 1938 Yellow River flood was caused deliberately: Chinese forces breached the dikes to slow the Japanese advance. The rest were not caused by anyone.
Suffering among wild animals
Most animals belong to species that produce very large numbers of offspring, nearly all of which die young. Death is usually by starvation, predation, disease, or exposure.
| Animal | Offspring | Surviving to adulthood |
|---|---|---|
| Atlantic cod | Up to 9 million eggs per female | Under 0.01% |
| Oysters | 50–100 million eggs per female per year | Under 0.1% |
| Sea turtles | About 110 eggs per nest | About 1 in 1,000 |
| Atlantic salmon | 2,500–7,000 eggs per female | About 15% |
| Frogs | Hundreds to thousands of eggs | About 2% |
This is not an occasional failure of the system. It is how the system ordinarily works: producing many offspring cheaply and losing almost all of them is a common and successful reproductive strategy.
Mass extinctions
Large-scale death long predates humans. Five extinction events are conventionally recognized as mass extinctions.
| Event | When | Losses | Cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ordovician–Silurian | 445–443 million years ago | About 85% of marine species | Glaciation and falling sea levels, in two pulses |
| Late Devonian | 372–359 million years ago | About 75% of species | Ocean oxygen depletion over a prolonged period |
| Permian–Triassic | 252 million years ago | About 81% of marine species, 70% of land vertebrates | Siberian Traps volcanism, warming, ocean acidification |
| Triassic–Jurassic | 201 million years ago | About 80% of species | Central Atlantic Magmatic Province volcanism |
| Cretaceous–Paleogene | 66 million years ago | About 75% of species | Asteroid impact at Chicxulub, roughly 10 km across |
The evidence for these is independent of the fossil counts: an iridium layer worldwide at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, shocked quartz and tektites, carbon isotope excursions marking volcanic carbon release, and black shale deposits marking oxygen-depleted oceans.
Common objections
"Suffering is the price of free will"
Alvin Plantinga's free will defense, set out in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), argues that a world containing genuinely free creatures is worth more than one without, and that God cannot guarantee free creatures always choose well. Most philosophers accept that this succeeds against the claim that God and evil are logically incompatible.
It covers suffering caused by human choices. It does not obviously cover the categories on this page. No one chose the Shaanxi earthquake, the Permian extinction, or childhood cancer. Extending the defense to those requires a further argument — usually that free agents need a stable natural order, which then has to explain why that order includes those particular features.
"Suffering builds character and brings people to God"
John Hick argued this in Evil and the God of Love (1966): the world is a place for developing souls, and courage, compassion, and patience require difficulty to develop.
The difficulty is fit. Much of the suffering above reaches no one who could learn from it — animals that die before reproducing, infants who die within days, people killed instantly in disasters. Where the suffering destroys the sufferer rather than developing them, the explanation does not apply.
"Suffering entered the world through the Fall"
On this account, death and suffering are consequences of human sin, not part of the original creation.
The order of events runs the other way. The extinctions above happened hundreds of millions of years before humans existed, and predation, parasitism, and disease are visible in the fossil record long before that. Applying this answer requires either dating the Fall before humans or treating the geological record as something other than a record of events.
"Animals don't suffer the way humans do"
Michael Murray sets out the serious version of this in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (2008): pain behavior may not be accompanied by the kind of awareness that makes suffering morally significant.
Vertebrate nervous systems, pain receptors, and stress responses are broadly similar to human ones, and the behavioral evidence for pain in mammals and birds is strong. The argument may reduce the weight given to fish and invertebrates. It does not reach mammals and birds, which account for a large share of the deaths described here.
"God has reasons we can't understand"
Skeptical theism holds that a limited mind should not expect to identify God's reasons, so failing to find a justification for a particular instance of suffering is weak evidence that none exists.
This is a real limit on how much any inference from evil can establish, and it is not merely evasive.
It also cuts in more than one direction. The same reasoning would undercut claims to recognize God's goodness, or to identify any event as an answered prayer or a blessing, since those judgments rely on the same capacity to read divine intentions from outcomes.
What the figures show
Suffering on a very large scale is a regular feature of the natural world, most of it falling on creatures that made no choices, much of it occurring before humans existed, and a substantial share of it unconnected to any human action.
This does not disprove the existence of a good and all-powerful God. Every objection above is held by serious philosophers, and the free will defense is generally accepted as answering the strongest version of the logical argument.
What the figures do is set the size of the problem. Any explanation has to cover not one child's illness but the categories and quantities above, including the several hundred million years of them that preceded anyone who could learn anything from the experience.