Download Free Will Defence

The free will defence
Peter Vardy (The Puzzle of Evil) suggests a parable.
“Imagine a king falls in love with a peasant girl. He
could simply demand her love. However, love
cannot be compelled – it must be earned. Love for
God cannot be compelled – it too must come
about freely.
 Richard Swinburne also lends support – he argues
that mass-suffering (such as the Holocaust)
cannot be prevented by God without
compromising the freedom of humanity.
 Swinburne also argues that death, the
cause of a great deal of suffering, is
necessary because without mortality it
would not be possible to take genuine
responsibility for our actions. If we were
immortal there would be no consequence to
our actions.
For human beings to have freewill, we have to have
a totally free choice.
 In a free world, a person should be free to act
wrongly as well as to act in accordance with a
moral code.
 It is illogical to propose that a person can be
‘infallibly guaranteed always to act rightly’ (J. Hick,
Philosophy of Religion)
 To suggest that God should not have created
beings with the capacity to sin is to suggest that
God should not have created people.
J. L. Mackie
 J. L. Mackie suggests that it is possible that a
person should choose to do good on every
occasion.
The choice that faced God was not only between
obedient robots and willfully disobedient free
agents.
Rather, there was also the opportunity to create
beings that would act freely but always do right.
Mackie held that God’s failure to do this is
inconsistent with his being an omnipotent and
wholly good God.
John Hick
John Hick argues that if human beings appear to be
able to make a completely free choice while only
choosing good, then they do not have completely
free choice.
Humans who have their choice limited in this way
are no better than robots.
This has implications for our ideas about freewill and
determinism – if God knows what choice we will
make, He is guilty of tolerating evil. If God does
not know, it limits His omniscience.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The most powerful objection to the free will
defence comes from the Russian author Fyodor
Dostoyevsky in his book ‘The Brothers
Karamazov’
 Dostoyevsky catalogued a series of atrocities
visited on innocent children. He asked whether
human free will is worth the suffering of innocent
children, and he suggested that God is
responsible for evil. He therefore concluded that if
God has created a world in which free will leads to
such suffering, then God is not worthy of worship.
 ‘It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat
itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its
stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind
God’! It’s not worth it because those tears are unatoned for.
They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony…..
Too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our
means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to
give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I
am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I
am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I
most respectfully return him the ticket.’