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John Harwood Hick (1922–2012) was a British philosopher of religion and theologian whose work reshaped several fields at once: the problem of evil, religious pluralism, the epistemology of faith, and the philosophy of life after death. Born in Scarborough, he studied at Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge and taught at Cornell, Cambridge, Birmingham and Claremont. His own intellectual journey — from a youthful evangelical conversion, through a "Copernican revolution" in his thinking, to a thoroughgoing religious pluralism — mirrors the trajectory of much twentieth-century liberal theology. For AQA A-Level Religious Studies (specification 7062), Hick is essential on four fronts, each examinable: the Irenaean / soul-making theodicy; eschatological verification (his answer to the verification challenge to religious language); religious pluralism and the concept of the Real; and the replica theory of resurrection. He is the most versatile thinker on the specification, surfacing across philosophy of religion wherever evil, language, pluralism or the afterlife are in view.
This lesson sets out the soul-making theodicy (with epistemic distance, the counterfactual world and eschatological verification); the exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism taxonomy and Hick's "Copernican revolution"; the pluralist hypothesis and the Real; the replica theory; and the major criticisms of each, before weighing whether the soul-making theodicy succeeds. A unifying thread is worth noticing across all four contributions: Hick is consistently a realist about religion who nonetheless insists on the limits of human cognition. He holds that there really is a transcendent reality and a real life to come (against non-realism and verificationist dismissal), yet that our access to the ultimate is always mediated, partial and culturally shaped (hence the unknowable Real, the deferred verification, the soul in via). It is this combination — confident that there is something there, modest about how clearly we grasp it — that both gives his system its breadth and exposes it to the recurring charge that he cannot have it both ways.
Hick's best-known contribution is the soul-making theodicy (he also calls it Irenaean), set out in his landmark Evil and the God of Love (1966; revised 1977). He frames it by contrast with the rival tradition.
The theodicy's core claim is that evil and suffering are the necessary conditions of this growth.
In Hick's own summary of the idea (paraphrasing Evil and the God of Love), the world is not designed as a hedonistic paradise to maximise pleasure and minimise pain; it is designed as a sphere of soul-making, an environment in which finite free beings, by grappling with real tasks, dangers and sufferings, may grow towards the perfection God intends for them. Hick borrows the resonant phrase "the vale of soul-making" from a letter of the Romantic poet John Keats, who contrasted the shallow idea of the world as a "vale of tears" with the richer idea of it as a place where souls are made.
Hick's deferral of the theodicy's vindication to "the end" connects to his celebrated contribution to the religious language debate: eschatological verification. The logical positivists (Ayer) had charged that "God exists" and "there is life after death" are meaningless, because no possible experience could verify them. Hick answers with the parable of the two travellers on a road.
Two people walk the same road. One believes it leads to the Celestial City; the other believes it leads nowhere. They meet the same stretches — the pleasant and the dangerous — and interpret them oppositely: for the believer the journey's hardships are trials on the way home; for the unbeliever the road is just a road. Neither can settle the dispute during the journey. But the issue is not empty, because if there is a Celestial City, then at the journey's end the matter will be decisively settled — the believer vindicated, the unbeliever shown mistaken.
The point is that "there is life after death" (and, Hick argues, "God exists") is verifiable in principle, even though not now and not symmetrically (it could be verified if true, though not falsified if false, since no one would survive to register the disappointment). That is enough, Hick argues, to show the claim is factually meaningful and cognitive — it makes a genuine assertion about reality — thereby defeating the verificationist charge on the verificationists' own terms.
Key term: eschatological verification. The view that religious claims, though not testable now, are verifiable in principle after death (eschaton = the end / last things). It rescues religious language from the charge of meaninglessness by showing it makes a genuine, if future-confirmed, assertion — a cognitive (realist) account, in sharp contrast to the non-cognitive language-game reading of Phillips.
Two features of the proposal repay attention. First, it is deliberately a response on the verificationists' own ground: rather than rejecting the demand that meaningful factual claims be verifiable (as Wittgenstein's later followers do), Hick accepts it and argues that religious claims meet it, only at a postponed and special juncture. Second, the verification is asymmetric — it works in one direction but not the other. If there is survival of death and the consummation Hick describes, the believer will experience it and the claim will be confirmed; but if there is not, there will be no surviving subject to register the falsification, so the claim cannot be disconfirmed. Critics fasten on this asymmetry, and on a deeper worry: it is not obvious that a post-mortem experience could ever verify the existence of an infinite, transcendent God (as opposed to, say, merely confirming that consciousness survives), since the limits Kant placed on knowing the noumenal would presumably still apply to a finite mind even in the next life. Hick's reply leans on the idea of a gradually clarifying experience culminating in an unambiguous awareness of God's purpose — but whether that is coherent remains contested.
Strengths. The theodicy is compatible with evolution, since it portrays humanity as developing gradually rather than falling from an Edenic perfection. It takes the value of moral growth and genuine freedom with full seriousness, and gives suffering a constructive role rather than treating it as sheer privation. The concept of epistemic distance is independently powerful, explaining the "hiddenness" of God that troubles many believers. And by extending soul-making beyond death it at least attempts to account for the suffering this life leaves unredeemed.
But the objections are severe.
Hick's second great contribution is his religious pluralism, stated most fully in An Interpretation of Religion (1989, Gifford Lectures; Grawemeyer Award). To locate it, AQA candidates should know the standard threefold taxonomy of Christian responses to other faiths:
Hick called his shift to pluralism a "Copernican revolution" in theology. Just as Copernicus moved the earth from the centre of the cosmos and put the sun there, Hick proposed moving Christianity (or any one religion) from the centre and putting the Real (or "God," in his earlier language) at the centre, with all the religions — Christianity included — orbiting it as planets. The old "Ptolemaic" theologies that placed their own faith at the centre and explained the others by epicycles of "invincible ignorance" or "anonymous Christianity" should, he argued, give way to this heliocentric picture. His pluralism was driven by two observations.
To make sense of this, Hick borrows Kant's distinction between noumenon and phenomenon:
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