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The soul-making theodicy is one of the three responses to evil named in the AQA 7062 specification (alongside the free will defence and Griffin's process theodicy). It takes a fundamentally different shape from the Augustinian approach (Lesson 3). Rather than looking backward to a lost paradise and a primordial Fall, it looks forward to the moral and spiritual maturing of humanity. On this view, evil and suffering are not the penalty for past sin but the necessary conditions for genuine human development. The approach is rooted in St Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–202 CE) and was developed into a full modern theodicy by John Hick (1922–2012), above all in Evil and the God of Love (1966). Because Hick is the spec-named author here, his concepts — epistemic distance, the counterfactual paradise, eschatological universalism — must be set out with precision.
Irenaeus, a second-century bishop and Church Father, drew a distinction from Genesis 1:26 — "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness" — that became the seed of the whole tradition:
The crucial implication is that humans were not created perfect. They were created immature: possessing the image but not yet the likeness, with the task of growing from one to the other. Irenaeus held that humanity was created "in process", like children who must mature. This single move — the denial that humanity began in a state of finished perfection — is the hinge on which the whole theodicy turns, and it is what allows the Irenaean tradition to escape the objection that proves fatal to Augustine. If humans never were perfect, there is no puzzle about how they came to do wrong; wrongdoing is simply the expected behaviour of immature creatures still on the way to maturity, not the inexplicable self-corruption of flawless beings.
It is worth being careful about Irenaeus's own theology, since modern textbooks sometimes read Hick back into him. Writing in the second century against Gnostic dualists (chiefly in Against Heresies), Irenaeus was not constructing a philosophical theodicy in the modern sense. His central category was recapitulation: Christ "sums up" and restores in himself the humanity that Adam had set on a false course, retracing and healing each stage of human life. Within this framework he held that Adam and Eve were created not as mature adults but as children — innocent but undeveloped — who were meant to grow toward God under instruction. The Fall, for Irenaeus, was less a catastrophic ruin of a perfect state (as for Augustine) than a kind of childish lapse, a stumble on a journey that God always intended to be developmental and that Christ would bring to its goal. The image/likeness distinction and the theme of growth are genuinely Irenaean; the elaborate machinery of epistemic distance, the counterfactual paradise, and universal salvation are Hick's modern development, and the honest exam answer credits each to the right author.
Key term: Soul-making is the process by which morally immature creatures develop genuine virtue through free response to a challenging environment. The phrase comes from Hick, who borrowed "the vale of soul-making" from a letter of the poet John Keats.
Key term: Eschatology is the area of theology concerned with the "last things" — death, judgement, and final destiny. Hick's theodicy is eschatological because it locates the completion and justification of soul-making beyond death, in the universal arrival of all souls at the divine likeness.
A note on terminology is useful here. Hick's soul-making account is a theodicy in the full sense (contrast the free will defence of Lesson 5): it does not merely claim that God and evil are logically compatible, but advances a positive account of why a good and powerful God permits suffering — namely, to make possible the free development of immature creatures into the likeness of God. Because it makes this stronger, positive claim, it is more ambitious than a defence and correspondingly more exposed: it can be attacked not only for incoherence but for moral and empirical inadequacy (the dosage objection, Phillips's objection, the fact that suffering often destroys). The trade-off between the modest defence and the ambitious theodicy is one of the unit's recurring themes, and it is sharpest in the contrast between Plantinga and Hick.
John Hick systematised Irenaeus's insight in Evil and the God of Love. He argued that the world is a "vale of soul-making" — an environment deliberately structured by God to foster moral and spiritual growth. Three claims do the central work:
Hick organises his theodicy around a two-stage conception of creation, which makes its structure clear. In the first stage, God brings into being, through the long, impersonal processes of biological evolution, creatures who are intelligent, free, and at an epistemic distance from their maker — the "image" of God as raw potential. This stage is essentially complete: we are, biologically, finished products. In the second stage, which is still in progress and reaches beyond this earthly life, those creatures are to be brought freely, through their own moral and spiritual struggle, into the "likeness" of God — into the finished relationship of love and fellowship for which they were made. Evil and suffering belong to the second stage: they are the resistant material against which free, responsible character is formed. This two-stage picture lets Hick reconcile his theodicy with evolution (the first stage just is the evolutionary process, with its incidental suffering) and explains why the world is not a paradise: a finished paradise would complete the first stage but make the second — the free growth into likeness — impossible. The world is, by design, an unfinished and demanding place because only such a place can be a "vale of soul-making".
At the heart of the theodicy lies a value judgement that deserves to be stated carefully, because the whole edifice rests on it: that goodness achieved through free struggle is intrinsically more valuable than goodness implanted ready-made. Hick offers an analogy. Imagine two people who never act cruelly. The first has been hypnotised, or conditioned, or simply created so that cruelty is impossible for them; the second has felt the pull of cruelty and freely, repeatedly, chosen against it. Most of us judge the second person's gentleness to be worth incomparably more — it is a genuine moral achievement, the fruit of a real history of choice, whereas the first person's "goodness" is merely a programmed disposition for which they deserve no credit. If that judgement is sound, then a God who valued real moral goodness in his creatures would have reason to create them immature and free, in a world where virtue must be won, rather than ready-made in a frictionless paradise. This is Hick's deepest answer to the question "why did God not simply create good people?": because beings created already good would not possess the kind of goodness that is most worth having. The argument is powerful, but it is also the point at which critics dig in — they ask whether the value of freely-won virtue could really be great enough to justify the actual horrors of history, and whether an omnipotent God could not have found some third way that secured the value without the cost. The theodicy stands or falls largely on how much weight this single value judgement can bear.
One of Hick's most important concepts is epistemic distance: God must remain at a cognitive "distance" — God's existence must not be overwhelmingly obvious — in order to preserve genuine human freedom. If God's reality were inescapably evident, humans would be compelled toward God by the sheer force of the divine presence, as one is compelled by an armed guard, and free, uncoerced faith and love would be impossible.
Hick reinforces the argument by imagining a world from which God had removed all possibility of harm. In such a world, weapons would turn soft or refuse to wound; falling rocks would not crush; every disease would be instantly cured; the consequences of cruelty would be miraculously cancelled. He argues that this apparently kinder world would in fact be morally and spiritually vacuous:
The very virtues we most prize presuppose a world containing real risk and real suffering. Remove the possibility of harm and you remove the possibility of moral growth: you are left with a "hedonistic paradise" fit for pets, not persons. Genuine soul-making requires that the world operate by stable natural laws whose outcomes are not constantly suspended.
Hick presses the thought experiment further to show how radically such a world would differ from ours. In a paradise without harm, there would be no such thing as a wrong action in any meaningful sense, because no action could ever damage anyone: the concepts of injury, of help, of risk, even of work, would have no application. Knowledge would be impossible too, because the regularities that let us learn cause and effect would be constantly overridden by miraculous intervention; one could never discover that fire burns, because in this world it never would. The upshot is that the cherished idea of a "kinder" world turns out, on inspection, to describe not a better version of our world but a fundamentally different and morally empty one. The objector who says "a good God should simply have prevented suffering" has not, Hick argues, thought through what such prevention would actually involve: it would mean abolishing the very framework within which there can be persons, choices, knowledge and growth at all. The counterfactual hypothesis is thus not a rhetorical flourish but the load-bearing argument for why a loving God might permit a world like ours.
Hick recognises that soul-making manifestly does not complete itself within every earthly life: many die before any growth, or are crushed rather than refined by their suffering. To prevent the process from being, in countless cases, a cruel failure, he argues for universal salvation — the eventual salvation of all. If God's purpose is to bring every soul to the likeness, that purpose must finally succeed for everyone, or the whole scheme stands condemned as unjust. Hick suggests the process continues beyond death, perhaps through further stages or environments, until each soul reaches its fulfilment.
This eschatological dimension is essential to the theodicy's coherence: it is what justifies the suffering as ultimately worthwhile and not wasted. It is also its most theologically controversial element, since many Christians regard universalism as incompatible with biblical teaching on judgement — and critics argue (below) that guaranteed salvation for all undermines the moral seriousness the theodicy is meant to uphold.
It is worth being clear about why Hick thinks universalism is not optional but forced upon him by the logic of his own position. If God's sole purpose in permitting suffering is the soul-making of his creatures, then a creature whose soul-making was never completed — who died too soon, or was destroyed rather than improved by their suffering, or was finally damned — would represent a case in which the suffering achieved nothing and God's purpose simply failed. A God who set up a soul-making world and then allowed the process to fail for vast numbers of his creatures would be neither wholly good nor wholly competent. Universal salvation is the only outcome on which the suffering of every sufferer is finally redeemed and the divine purpose is finally fulfilled. So Hick cannot consistently abandon universalism without abandoning the claim that soul-making justifies the world's suffering; the doctrine is load-bearing, not decorative — which is precisely why its controversial character is so significant a liability.
A part of Hick's theodicy that students often miss is his argument that much natural evil is the unavoidable by-product of the kind of world soul-making requires, not a separate problem to be explained away. For free, responsible action to be possible, the world must operate by regular, dependable natural laws: actions must have predictable consequences, so that agents can deliberate, foresee outcomes, and be genuinely responsible for the help or harm they cause. But a world of dependable laws is necessarily one in which those same laws can injure — fire that warms can also burn, gravity that lets us walk can also let us fall. If God were continually to suspend the laws to prevent every harm (the counterfactual paradise below), the regularity that makes responsible action possible would dissolve. On this view, natural evil is the "shadow side" of a law-governed environment, and such an environment is a precondition of moral growth. This argument is close to Richard Swinburne's claim that natural evil is needed both to provide the stable framework for responsible choice and to give us the knowledge (of how harm comes about) without which we could not deliberately help or harm one another. It strengthens the soul-making approach against the charge that it can explain moral but not natural evil — though critics still object that the amount of natural evil far exceeds what such considerations could justify.
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