The Free Will Defense and Omniscience

In the essay Evil and Omnipotence John Mackie argues that there is a contradiction between the existence of evil and the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God1. According to John Hick, however, there is no contradiction2. He appeals to the need for free will in order to show that that the existence of evil can be reconciled with the existence of God. I will argue that rather than reconciling the attributes of God with evil, Hick is simple denying Gods omniscience. I will further argue against John Hicks defense of free will as a sufficient good to justify evil.

Hicks free will argument, as a response to the problem of moral evil rests on two premises. Firstly, if God were to create truly free creatures, then he could not guarantee that they would always choose good. Secondly, a world containing this kind of free will is better than any other world. Bold as the second premise may be, I will spend most of my time responding to the first claim.

I will concede to Hick that perhaps in order for libertarian free will to exist, there must be the possibility of moral evil. This does not, however, account for the actual existence of evil in the world. As Mackie points out, there is nothing contradictory about a the idea of a world in which there is the possibility of moral evil, but its inhabitants always choose good. To illustrate this, consider a world containing just one person with free will who only lives for long enough to make two moral choices. If God were to actualize such a

person knowing that they would choose good on both occasions, they would still have free will. There are three possible responses to this that I will consider in turn.

I would like to quickly rule out the idea that such a person would not have free will. It is very unlikely that there is some threshold number of moral choices that a person has to make in order to be considered free. It is also unlikely that a person who choose good twice would somehow have less free will than a person who choose good once and evil once. It is hard to see how one could escape the conclusion that such a person would indeed have free will.

A second response would be that the result doesnt generalize to worlds containing more creatures and more choices. It might be that God is capable of actualizing one or two or three persons who consistently and freely choose good, but is unable to create a world containing several million who freely choose good. Unfortunately, this would not salvage Hicks argument. Hick stated that it is impossible for God to create any world containing free creatures such that they would always choose good. My hypothetical world is a direct counterexample to Hicks claim.

Perhaps Hicks argument can be easily adapted to that last challenge. Perhaps God cannot create a world of several billion free beings and have them consistently choose good without suppressing their freedom. It is hard for me to see why there would be a limit on the number of free creatures who consistently choose good, especially given the enormous set of possible individuals and possible worlds. If there were a limit, then why

wouldnt God simply create that many people? In order for this argument to work it would have to be the case that creating a world containing more free beings and some evil, is somehow better than creating a world with less free will and no evil. But if thats the case, then whats so special about a world containing several billion free creatures? Why not one trillion? This argument seems to require some special pleading in order to show that our world contains the optimal number of free creatures.

The final response, and the one that Hick would most likely propose, is that even though there is a possible world in which morally free agents only choose good, it would not be within Gods power to actualize that specific world and still have the creatures be morally free. For example God could create two persons, and those two persons could choose good on each occasion, but God could not guarantee that they would only choose good without denying them their free will. This sort of response strikes me as odd. Most theists have maintained that there is no contradiction between Gods omniscience and free will. They usually argue that it isnt Gods knowledge of our choices that causes us to make them. But in this case, why would creating beings, knowing that they would only choose good, suppress their free will? We have already ruled out the idea that beings who choose a mixture of good and evil are somehow more free than beings who consistently choose good. Hick does try to address this when he says there is a contradiction in saying that we shall of necessity act a certain way and that we are [free]. But this seems to be an impossible condition to satisfy. How can free beings not act a certain way1? For almost

Hick smuggles in the term by necessity but this is a sleight of hand. People can choose good consistently without choosing it by necessity. To use an analogy, I could

any world, all of the choices made will obviously share some characteristics. In this world for example, all of our choices obey the law of gravity (we cant choose to fly), but this does not suppress our freedom.

Perhaps omniscience was the problem after all. If God were able to create us knowing what our choices would be without suppressing our free will, then this would defeat Hicks argument. There would be no problem in creating a world of free creatures that only choose good. In that case, the only way for God to create truly free creatures would be to make them in such a way that their actions are unpredictable. For each choice that these creatures make, it is entirely up to them to decide which choice to make. Hence, the only plausible account of the kind of free will needed to solve the problem of evil is one that also denies the omniscience of God.

Having dealt with the first step of Hicks argument, I will now point out some difficulties with (though not necessarily refutation of) the second. In order for Hicks argument to work, free will must be a sufficient justification for the existence evil. Hick defends the need for free will, by suggesting that it is needed for soul building. This is a process by which free beings by virtue of their choices and hardships become children of God. Hick doesnt mention heaven, but I suspect that he would agree that soul building is important because it is a means for persons to enter Heaven.

make the same opening move in chess each time but I would still be making a choice. I wouldnt be doing it by necessity.

If I were to frame this argument from Mackies point of view, heaven is a high order good whereas as the existence of moral evil is a lower order good hence it is better for a world to contain both heaven and moral evil, than to contain neither. This line of reasoning, does however seem to fall prey to Mackies counterargument. If heaven is an nth order good, then there is certainly an nth order evil, in particular hell (unless of course everyone went to heaven, which is unlikely within a Christian framework). There is another issue with soul making theodicy that I would like to address.

The idea that God uses soul-making, as a means to an end seems to place some limit on Gods power. If his goal all along was to create heaven, then why not just actualize it and populate it with creatures? I doubt that Hick would state that soul-making is a sufficient good in and of itself to justify the existence of evil (heaven being a mere bonus). It seems much more likely that soul-making is an instrumental good, justified by the promise of heaven. Another option would be to claim that heaven could only contain creatures that at one point had libertarian free will2. This sort of restriction on the nature of heaven is very unusual. Suppose for a second that God wanted to actualize a fried egg. Most theists would agree that God would be able to actualize is directly he wouldnt have to create a egg and then fry it, because even though fried eggs are casually connected to fresh ones, there is nothing intrinsic about fried eggs that logically requires them to have once been fresh. In the physical world, everything is casually preceded by something else, but there are no logical ties. The kind of causality operating within the free will defense, therefore,

I say, once had free will because I assume that souls in heaven are not capable of choosing evil.

is radically different than the kind we observe on Earth and would require a substantial defense.

The problem evil poses a number of challenges to the traditional conception of God. John Hick has come up with a several arguments in response and I have addressed two of them: the supposed need for evil in order for humans to have free will, and the need for free will itself. I have argued that the only plausible way to support the first proposition is to concede that in order for libertarian free will to exist, God would not be able to predict our choices. I have also challenged Hicks justification of free will, by pointing out that a world containing heaven and hell is not obviously better than a world with neither. Furthermore, it is not clear that creating heaven logically requires an antecedent world containing free will.

References 1) 2) 1973). J. L. Mackie, Evil and Omnipotenec, Mind, Vol. LXIZ (1955) John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pretice Hall,