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Is the free-will defence a convincing solution to the problem of evil?
If God is wholly good and God is omnipotent, then evil cannot exist. Because evil
manifestly does exist in the world, God is not both good and omnipotent. This is the
problem of evil, simply stated, and it is a problem for various religions which hold the
existence of a good and omnipotent God as one of their central tenants, such as
Judaism, Christianity or Islam. The problem of evil is an attempt at a knock-down
argument showing that this type of God cannot exist. The most popular family of
attempted rebuttals has come from exposing the hidden premise in the logic above:
that a wholly good and omnipotent God would create a world without evil. It is this
premise which has been most attacked, and it is this premise that the free-will defence
argues against.
The free-will defence says that a wholly good and omnipotent God would create a
world with free-will. This would give people the opportunity to live good lives and to
find God, but would also necessarily give people the opportunity to commit evil. The
ills of the world are created by people straying from the path laid out by their religion,
but evil can be defeated if people are good. However, even if all people everywhere
were good then the world might not be the utopia you would expect from a wholly
good and omnipotent God; virtues such as forgiveness and charity can only exist in a
world where people are wronged and unequal, and if the world has been created to
give people a chance at virtue, then iniquity is necessary. But only by people
abstaining from evil can the imagined utopia even be approached.
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The use of the word ‘evil’ in the name of this argument implies a deliberateness of
intent. As such, the free will defence seems to provide a good explanation, that people
can perform evil actions because God has granted free will, which He must do in
order to allow people to choose goodness. In this way suffering arises because of the
evil actions of people, and people suffer due to their evil actions. But it is the suffering
in the world that the problem of evil highlights, whether or not it has intent. When evil
is seen in this broader light, as relating to suffering, the free will defence becomes less
certain.
Two questions immediately appear: what about suffering from non-human causes,
and what about non-human suffering? Earthquakes, tidal waves, epidemics and
drought; all these things bring about huge suffering. They strike seemingly at random,
with no link between those affected and their goodness or otherwise. They are
features of the world, and would be present with or without human free will. The
arbitrariness of the world which a benign creator is supposed to have brought into
being is not explained by the free will defence. San Francisco is particularly afflicted
with the first of the disasters listed but, while San Francisco may be a very evil place
by some people’s reckoning, there must be many other more evil places that deserve
treatment as harsh. Not only is the existence of evil a conundrum, the apparently
arbitrariness of its distribution is also a problem. Even while granting free will, God
could have built an appearance of justice into the world. The free will defence can
give no answer as to why God would create a world where this was the case.
A further problem is the area of animal suffering. Animals have no hope of improving
their souls, nor of acting in a good way as opposed to an evil way. If suffering exists
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in the world from the choice of rational beings to do evil rather than good, it would
seem to follow that beings who cannot make that choice should not be able to suffer.
Mountains, rivers and all inanimate objects fall into this category of things that cannot
choose and cannot suffer, but animals do not. They can suffer, but they cannot follow
a religious path to save themselves. That suffering in the animal world can be as bad
or worse as anything experienced by humans is now widely accepted by the public,
and it becomes even more evident to biologists who have studied further. Charles
Darwin wrote:
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have
designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their
feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with
mice…
(Darwin in Book 6, p104)
There are several possible answers to this. Descartes saw animals as nothing more
than clockwork, which could suffer no more than clockwork could suffer. This highly
counter-intuitive, absolute denial of animal feelings is a consequence of Cartesian
Dualism and suffers from all the flaws of that ideology. In this century the
philosopher John Hick put forward a less radical denial of the nature of animal
suffering, saying that animals have no anticipation of the future, nor memory of the
past, both of which are integral parts of suffering. While it seems reasonable that the
memory and anticipation of pain can cause as much suffering as the pain itself, it is
not clear why animals are so blind to anything but the present. That laboratory rats
can be trained by electric shocks implies a memory of pain in the past, and a desire to
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avoid situations that cause pain. Likewise the image of a dog cowering under his
brutal master’s hand suggests the dog has a good grasp of what the future holds in
store for him, and is bracing himself for the pain of a beating. Hick’s arguments seem
unsound in this respect, and also unconvincing with regard to pain felt in the present
moment. He does raise the valuable point that pain is “within the general system
whereby organic life is able to survive” (Hick in Book 6 p171). That is, that pain is
sometimes necessary to show animals and, for that matter, people, unwise courses of
action. However, the sheer amount and nature of suffering within the animal kingdom
goes vastly beyond what is necessary for any teaching purposes, and Hick does not
counter that point.
A further objection to the free will defence says that although God could have granted
us free will and the chance to choose evil, He could have put in safeguards to protect
people. Teachers allow children freedom in the playground, and they have the chance
to break the rules or to follow them. But if bigger children start hurting others even in
minor ways, let alone to the extent of maiming and death, teachers step in to protect
those who cannot protect themselves. In God’s playground he has allowed us the
same freedom but with no safeguards. The evil committed by people is not checked
and its consequences are felt indiscriminately. Two points can be made for the free
will defence. First, the consequences of actions may be necessary for the evildoer to
see the effects of his actions and fully understand them. Second, any intervention by
God would have to restrict the freedom of the evildoer, and that would lessen any
value of any subsequent faith and well doing, which was the purpose of giving people
free will in the first place. Still, despite those two counter-arguments, the scale and
ferocity of pain man can unleash on man would strongly suggest some minimum
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safeguards should be put in place. Their absence is a puzzle and one which the free
will defence cannot explain.
Despite these very damaging objections, the biggest problem the free will defence
faces is from a two part argument levelled at the very conception of free will it relies
upon.
God could have created people with free-will who always chose to do good. There
have been, after all, some people who have chosen always to do good, and they, as
people, must have had free-will just like the rest of us. From this it follows that people
can exist who both possess free-will and always choose to do good. Because they
could exist, it follows that an omnipotent God could have populated the world with
such people, thereby allowing free-will but without creating evil. This train of logic
has been argued against, again by John Hick. He replies that while from the human
perspective there would be both free-will and total goodness, from God’s point of
view this goodness would be valueless because He would know He had created it.
This is equivalent to
A loving and devoting him/herself to B, and of B valuing this love as a
genuine and free response to himself whilst knowing that he has so
constructed or manipulated A’s mind as to produce it.
(Hick in Book 6, p168).
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Hick’s point is that even if there was free will from our side, God would know the
outcome that would always be produced, and so any goodness that was chosen would
be valueless. While seeking to give an explanation of why God would not have
created a universe where everyone was free but chose God, Hick raises a more
fundamental problem with the free will defence: the conception of free will being
used.
Any goodness in the perfectly good world is worthless, Hick argues, because God
caused it Himself. But how is our own world any different? The traditional conception
of God being defended here is as an all powerful, benign creator. Even in our own
imperfect world, any goodness would have come from God and so would be as
worthless as the goodness in the perfectly good world. The free will defence ‘seems to
depend on a conception of free will that seems to be incoherent’ (Blackburn (1999),
p174). It imagines that while we ourselves are part of the world and are affected by it,
there remains a part of us, the ‘Real You’ inside your head, who can intervene and
make decisions. Separating the free will part of thinking seems to save it from the
deterministic universe we live in every day, where every effect has had its cause. The
problem is that the determinism will effect the ‘Real You’ just as much as it does your
body; the stimuli you see and hear, the people you meet and the opinions you
encounter will have just the same affect wherever the decision making takes place.
From this view, if God created the universe he is responsible for any goodness or
otherwise in it, and He cannot be surprised. So He might as well have made the world
full of good people; their worship would have been as worthless as ‘A’s love for ‘B’,
but as least there would have been more of it.
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In total there seems to be very little to recommend the Free Will Defence. From its
foundation on a suspect conception of free will to its applications in the cases of
suffering from non-human causes, and of suffering inflicted on non-human animals,
the Free Will defence is found wanting on every level. Therefore the free-will defence
is not a convincing solution to the problem of evil.
Word Count: 1852
Bibliography:
Book 6
Simon Blackburn (1999) Think, Oxford Univeristy Press
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