I’ve heard it said that theodicy — the problem of how an all powerful God allows pain, suffering, evil — is a modern problem. (Modern in the sense of a Christian tradition going back a couple thousand years.) It’s interesting to think on why this may be.
I suspect that, in part, it’s because in the pre-modern era, humanity’s lot didn’t really get any better. Thus, the world was as the world was. If there were things that were bad, it was not implausible to think that it was somehow necessary.
As we entered modernity, humanity started to improve things. We started seeing that things could be better. They could be better through the effort of us mere humans. Thus, it makes more salient the fact that an all powerful God didn’t make things better, even in the small ways that humanity was able to. And so for those embedded in the modern mindset, theodicy becomes a critical problem. One critical enough to be at the root of much of the Western version of atheism.
I suspect a postmodern attitude tends back toward finding it less of an issue. Not because of any assumption that the world as it is has the best possible form. Rather, I suspect it’s because a postmodern approach to theodicy sees omnipotence as merely a lens for describing what deity might be. Saying God is omnipotent is a way to describe useful properties of people’s theological beliefs, but it need not be taken literally as all powerful, in the sense that we imagine power.