Either God permits sinners to follow a path that leads to an objective horror for as long as they freely choose, or God at some point prevents them from continuing along their freely chosen path.
Something genuinely terrible or deeply wrong that exists independently of what any individual person thinks about it—not just a matter of personal opinion.
the problem of evil(Contemporary philosophical terminology)
The family of issues raised by the question of why pain, moral wickedness, and varieties of imperfection exist if a perfectly good and all-powerful God alone created everything in the universe.
theodicy(Central concern of Plutarch's era)
The philosophical problem of reconciling the existence of evil and unpunished wrongdoing with the existence and goodness of divine providence.
If this set of propositions is logically inconsistent, as it surely is, then at least one proposition in the set is false. In no way does it follow, of course, that only one proposition in the set is false, and neither does it follow that at least two of them are true. But if someone does accept any two of these propositions, as virtually every mainline Christian theologian does, then such a person has no choice but to reject the third.[1] It is typically rather easy, moreover, to determine which proposition a given theologian ultimately rejects, and we can therefore classify theologians acc...