The fluctuating maximal God thesis, developed by Jeffrey et al., offers a conception of God that removes the characteristic of divine immutability, allowing the degrees of God's great-making properties to change over time. This god-concept provides a substantial advantage over the ‘static’ maximal God thesis proposed by Yujin Nagasawa if it can adequately sidestep what I call ‘the problem of inconsistent evil’. This problem questions how a static god can be compatible with the inconsistent dispersion of evil in the world. It is founded on the observation that evil is distributed neither equally nor fairly across time, space, and individuals. I distinguish between temporally inconsistent, spatially inconsistent, and interpersonally inconsistent evil and argue that the fluctuating maximal God thesis can account for all types of inconsistent evil if God fluctuates not only through time but also through space.

In his fairly recent article in this journal, ‘The Evil-god Challenge – A Response’ (Think 40), Keith Ward attempts to nullify Stephen Law's evil-god challenge by presenting several arguments intended to demonstrate that an omniscient, omnipotent being cannot conceivably be evil. In this article, I critically respond to each of Ward's arguments to reach the conclusion that an omnipotent, omniscient being could indeed be evil. To achieve this, I claim that neither perfect empathy nor rationality entails benevolence, that the desire for suffering is not necessarily pathological, and that human desire for a good god does not entail that god is actually benevolent.

In her 2016 article in Religious Studies, Anastasia Scrutton attempts to undermine Stephen Law's Evil-god challenge by arguing that belief in a good god is more justified than belief in an evil god, despite the alethic similarity of the two hypotheses. Drawing on the epistemological theory of pragmatic encroachment, Scrutton claims that is it more reasonable to believe in a benevolent deity than a malevolent one because belief in the latter (i) is detrimental to one's well-being and (ii) has worse moral consequences, whereas belief in the former (i) is good for one's well-being and (ii) has better moral consequences. In this article, I critically respond to Scrutton's argument by proposing that even if belief in a good god results in better consequences than belief in an evil god does, pragmatic encroachment does not undermine the Evil-god challenge. I further argue that pragmatic encroachment potentially undermines itself in this instance.