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This final lesson draws together the major responses to evil studied across the course and shows how to evaluate and compare them - the skill that separates a competent answer from an excellent one. The AQA 7062 specification names three responses to evil - Hick's soul-making theodicy, the free will defence, and process theodicy as presented by Griffin - and treats the Augustinian tradition and the protest/anti-theodicy tradition as essential context. A first-class AO2 answer does not merely describe these positions in turn; it sets them against one another on shared criteria, traces the deep assumptions on which they divide, weighs the gravest objection to each, and reaches a judgement that is argued for rather than asserted. This lesson supplies that comparative architecture and ends with a sustained 25-mark synoptic model answer.
Every theodicy responds to a single challenge: how can the existence of evil be reconciled with an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God? The disagreement among them is therefore not about the question but about the answer - and, more precisely, about which of Mackie's three propositions to renegotiate. Recognising this is what turns a list of theodicies into a genuine comparison: instead of describing each in isolation, the able candidate can show how each is a different strategy against one shared argument, and can therefore weigh them on a common footing. The responses divide according to which move they make against Mackie's inconsistent triad (Lesson 1).
Key term: A theodicy attempts to justify God by giving the actual reasons a good, omnipotent God has for permitting evil. A defence (the free will defence) attempts only to show that God and evil are logically compatible, without claiming to know God's actual reasons. The distinction matters in evaluation: a defence escapes Phillips's "obscenity" charge more easily, because it offers the sufferer no comforting justification.
| Response | Move against the triad | Keeps omnipotence? | Greatest strength | Decisive objection |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Augustinian | Evil is privation; the Fall warrants it | Yes | Unified account; keeps God blameless for the design | Scientifically untenable (Fall postdates animal suffering); Schleiermacher's logical critique |
| Soul-making (Hick) | Evil is the warranted condition of moral growth | Yes | Fits evolution; forward-looking; epistemic distance | Dosage; animal suffering; Phillips's obscenity charge; universalism |
| Free will defence | Even omnipotence cannot make free agents who never sin | Yes (rightly defined) | Defeats the logical problem decisively | Only a defence; silent on natural evil and on the amount of evil |
| Process (Griffin) | Denies coercive omnipotence | No | Truly exonerates God; "fellow-sufferer"; fits science | God may be too weak to be worthy of worship (Davis); no guaranteed triumph of good |
| Protest / anti-theodicy | Rejects the project of justification | Varies (Roth keeps it) | Moral seriousness; honours the sufferer | Offers no intellectual resolution; may itself rely on theodical premises |
The table is the backbone of comparison, but the marks lie in interpreting it - in seeing the trade-offs it encodes, which the next sections draw out.
Comparing the responses reveals that they are not competing answers to one question so much as different settlements of three underlying tensions. Naming these tensions lets an answer move fluently between theodicies.
With the trade-offs in view, each response can be weighed precisely - noting its core claim, its real strength, and the objection that does it the most damage.
The Augustinian theodicy holds that evil is a privation of good (not a positive substance God created) and that it entered an originally perfect creation through the free rebellion of angels and then humans (the Fall). Its strengths are real: it keeps God omnipotent and wholly good and the sole creator; it locates responsibility for evil in creaturely freedom, not in God; and privatio boni is a genuinely sophisticated metaphysical account of how evil can be real yet uncreated. Its weaknesses, however, are severe. Taken literally it is scientifically untenable: there was no original paradise, and natural disaster and animal suffering predate humanity by hundreds of millions of years, so they cannot be the consequence of a human Fall. Schleiermacher pressed a logical objection that strikes at the heart of the account: how could a wholly good, flawlessly created being freely originate evil, with no prior evil to tempt it? If the will was truly good, its fall is unintelligible; if it could fall, it was already flawed - and then the flaw, not the creature, is the origin of evil, and the flaw traces back to the creator. The inherited-guilt motif (all humanity sinning "in Adam") also strikes modern readers as morally objectionable. The Augustinian theodicy survives best when demythologised - read as a symbolic statement that evil is privation and that creaturely freedom is its source - but then it loses the historical Fall that did its explanatory work.
Hick's soul-making (Irenaean) theodicy reconceives the world not as a fallen paradise but as a "vale of soul-making": a deliberately challenging environment in which immature creatures, created at an epistemic distance from God, may grow freely into mature children of God. Its strengths are that it fits evolution and an unfinished creation, is forward-looking and hopeful, preserves genuine human freedom, and gives suffering an intelligible role. Hick's epistemic distance is a particularly elegant move, explaining the religious ambiguity of the world as the very condition of free faith. But the objections are weighty. The dosage objection: the sheer quantity and intensity of suffering vastly exceeds any plausible developmental need - a measure of hardship might build character, but a tsunami drowning hundreds of thousands does not look calibrated to anyone's growth. The counter-productivity objection: suffering frequently destroys rather than develops, leaving people brutalised or dead. The animal objection: animals make no souls, yet suffer immensely. And Phillips's moral objection: to justify a child's agony as the means to someone's soul-making is obscene. Hick's reply - universal salvation, so that the process reaches a good end for all - rescues the theodicy's fairness but is theologically controversial and does not answer the charge that the suffering should never have been used instrumentally.
The free will defence is the most philosophically secure response, but only because it is the most modest. It claims merely that it is logically possible that God could not create genuinely free creatures who never sin (Plantinga's "transworld depravity"), so that moral evil is the unavoidable risk of a freedom worth having. Against the logical problem this is decisive - a single coherent possibility defeats a claim of strict contradiction, and Mackie himself conceded it. Its limits follow directly from its modesty: it is a defence, not a theodicy, so it offers no account of why God actually permits evil and no comfort to the sufferer; it covers only moral evil, reaching natural evil only through Plantinga's ad hoc and evidentially empty appeal to fallen angels; and it says nothing about the amount of evil, which is the evidential problem's whole concern. It also presupposes libertarian free will, which is philosophically contested. The free will defence wins its battle precisely by refusing to fight the larger war.
Process theodicy (Griffin) denies coercive omnipotence: God's power is persuasive, luring every self-determining entity towards the good without the ability to compel it, so God genuinely cannot prevent evil. Its strengths are distinctive and considerable - it truly exonerates God (uniquely among the responses), takes suffering with full seriousness through the "fellow-sufferer who understands", fits an evolutionary cosmos, and handles even animal suffering. But the cost is the gravest of any response: it abandons classical omnipotence and creatio ex nihilo, leaving (as Stephen Davis argues) a God who may be too weak to be worthy of worship and who cannot guarantee the final triumph of good; and it arguably dissolves the problem by redefinition rather than solving it. It also rests on the contested metaphysics of panexperientialism. Process theodicy is the boldest trade in the field: maximal exoneration for maximal revision of the concept of God.
The protest / anti-theodicy tradition refuses the whole project of justification. Its strengths are moral, not theoretical: it honours the sufferer, refuses to trivialise extreme suffering, and draws on the unmatched power of Job, Ivan Karamazov and the post-Holocaust witnesses. Its weaknesses are the mirror image: it offers no intellectual resolution, may leave the believer without resources for coherent faith, can be charged with evasion, and - as Lesson 8 noted - often relies on theodical premises of its own (Phillips's "moral monster" is itself a claim about what divine goodness requires). Roth's protest theodicy is the most interesting position here, keeping God powerful and accountable while refusing to excuse the evil - theodicy turned into faithful accusation.
Before asking which theodicy succeeds, a prior question must be faced: is the enterprise of theodicy itself legitimate?
The most defensible position, argued in Lesson 8, distinguishes justifying suffering from understanding God's relation to it. A theodicy that tells the sufferer "this was worth it" is indeed obscene; but a defence that claims only logical compatibility, or Roth's protest theodicy that holds God accountable without excusing the evil, escapes the charge. So theodicy is neither simply legitimate nor simply forbidden: the consoling, justifying theodicies fall to the protest critique, while the modest and the protesting ones survive it.
Even granting that the logical problem is answered (the free will defence having shown God and evil are not strictly incompatible), the harder question remains: does the amount and distribution of evil make God improbable? Here the contemporary debate is a genuine stand-off.
The decisive issue, as Lesson 2 showed, is the direction of the burden of proof, and the debate remains live precisely because it turns on a judgement - how far our moral and metaphysical insight extends - that neither side can settle by proof. Whether evil counts as evidence against God is therefore the right contemporary form of the whole question, and an honest answer concedes that it tilts a balance without compelling a verdict: Rowe's "friendly atheism" captures this exactly. Evil makes theism costly, not impossible.
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