The presence of evil in the world offers the most serious challenge to the idea that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving god. But evil exists, say the theists, because we make our own choices. Human freewill is a divine gift of enormous value, but God could not have made this gift to us without the risk of our abusing it. So God cannot be held responsible for bad things happening, for they are our fault alone and should not be used to cast doubt on God’s existence.
The manifest existence of evil—the daily drama of pain and suffering that surrounds us—suggests that, if there is a god at all, it is far removed from the perfect being described in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Instead, we are more likely to suppose a being that is either unwilling or unable to prevent terrible things from happening, and hence one that is scarcely deserving of our respect, let alone our worship.
Attempts to block this challenge need to show that there are in fact sufficient reasons why a morally perfect god might yet choose to allow evil to exist. Historically the most popular and influential suggestion is the so-called “freewill defense.” Our freedom to make genuine choices allows us to live lives of real moral worth and to enter into a deep relationship of love and trust with God. But we can misuse our freedom to make the wrong choices. It was a risk worth taking and a price worth paying, but God could not have eliminated the possibility of moral baseness without depriving us of a greater gift—the capacity for moral goodness.
In spite of its longevity and perennial appeal, the freewill defense faces some formidable problems.
In the 2002 movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays police chief John Anderton in the Washington DC division of “precrime.” Anderton arrests murderers before they actually commit the offense, since it is believed their actions can be foreseen with absolute certainty. When Anderton himself is accused, he becomes a fugitive, unable to believe he is capable of killing. In the end, precrime is discredited and determinism along with it, leaving the viewers’ faith in freewill intact.
Natural evil Perhaps the most obvious difficulty that confronts the freewill defense is the existence in the world of natural evil. Even if we accept that freewill is a possession so precious that it is worth the cost in moral evil—the bad and vicious things brought about when people use their freedom to make wrong choices—what possible sense can we make of natural evil? How would God have undermined or diminished our freewill in any way if it had suddenly wiped out the HIV virus, hemorrhoids, mosquitoes, flash floods and earthquakes? The seriousness of this difficulty is illustrated by some of the theistic responses to it: that natural disasters, diseases, pests and the like are (literally) the work of the devil and a host of other fallen angels and demons; or that such afflictions are God’s “just” punishment for Adam and Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden. The latter remedy traces all natural evil to the first instance of moral evil and thereby seeks to exonerate God from any blame. This explanation appears unconvincing. Is it not a monstrous injustice of God to visit punishment on the great-(great-great …)grandchildren of the original offenders? And how does it benefit those already judged by the actions of their (distant) forebears to be given freewill in the first place?
Most philosophers have found the idea of determinism hard to resist, so have either accepted that freewill is illusory or struggled valiantly to find some accommodation. At the same time the attempts of libertarians to explain how events might occur without cause, or indeterminately, have tended to look ad hoc or just plain odd. But is the libertarian helped out by quantum mechanics? According to this, events at the subatomic level are indeterminate—matters of pure chance that “just happen.” Does this provide a way to dodge determinism? Not really. The essence of quantum indeterminacy is randomness, so the idea that our actions and choices are at some profound level random does nothing to salvage the notion of moral responsibility.
The difficulty of natural evil aside, the freewill defense inevitably runs into a major philosophical storm in the form of the problem of freewill itself. The defense assumes that our capacity to make choices is genuinely free in the fullest sense: when we decide to do something, our decision is not determined or caused by any factor external to us; the possibility of doing otherwise is really open to us. This so-called “libertarian” account of freewill accords well with our everyday sense of what is happening when we act and make choices, but many philosophers feel that it is in fact impossible to sustain in the face of determinism. And of course, if the libertarian account that underlies the freewill defense is unsustainable, the defense itself immediately collapses with it.
The problem of freewill involves reconciling the view we have of ourselves as free agents fully in control of our actions with the deterministic understanding of those actions (and everything else) suggested by science. Simply put, the idea of determinism is that every event has a prior cause; every state of the world is necessitated or determined by a previous state which is itself the effect of a sequence of still earlier states. But if all our actions and choices are determined in this way by a series of events that extend back indefinitely, to a time before we were even born, how can we possibly be seen as the true authors of those actions and choices? And how can we conceivably be held responsible for them?
The whole notion of our acting freely seems to be threatened by determinism, and with it our status as moral beings. It is a deeply significant matter that has elicited a very wide range of philosophical responses. Amongst these the following main strands can be picked out:
the condensed idea
Freedom to do wrong
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.300BC | The problem of evil |
| c.AD400 | The freewill defense |
| 1078 | The ontological argument |
| 1670 | Faith and reason |
| 1789 | Theories of punishment |
| 1976 | Is it bad to be unlucky? |