Hollywood’s "Exorcist" industry is alive and well—the sixth film in a series begun in 1973 is out and available to stream today. "The Exorcist: Believer" is not a particularly good movie, but it resonates because it deals with a big question: Why is there evil in the world?

Hollywood is not usually considered a good stop for answers to deep questions. But pop culture has always played a major role in addressing enduring, troubling issues. In "The Exorcist: Believer," audiences are asked to witness the basic horror of tortured, innocent children. It is unpleasant to watch, but since we know that bad things do happen in the real world, we are compelled to see travesties acted out and cathartically resolved onscreen.

Wrestling with the problem of evil has a long pedigree. A whole branch of theological thinking called “theodicy” seeks to resolve the question of evil in an ostensibly divinely ordered world. Philosophers from Plato to Voltaire to Hannah Arendt all struggled with evil, each deriving different explanatory formulations.

Mental science gives us another set of tools to deal with the problem of evil. Sigmund Freud suggested that humans actually desire their own, and........

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