Many who attempt to justify natural evil claim that it is a result of human evil. Others say there is a parallel theodicy that says that natural evil is the result of the corruption of the natural order by demonic beings whose freedom is as important as our own.
The free will theodicy, as applied to human beings and their conduct, is very simple. If this is the best of all possible worlds, it must be the one in which people freely choose to do good, rather than one in which they function as amoral automata.
- Simple free will solution. We are not blind automata, but free agents. As a consequence of God having given us free will, we sometimes choose to do wrong. Suffering results. However, free will allows for certain important goods, such as the possibility of morally virtuous action. God could have created a universe populated with puppet beings that always did as God wants. But the behaviour of such puppet beings lacks the dimension of moral responsibility that makes our actions morally virtuous. By cutting our strings and setting us free, God inevitably allowed some evil. But this evil is more than outweighed by the important goods that free will allows.
- "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."-Isaac Asimov
- God could have made us like robots who do nothing more than say, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” But we’d be forced to do that and that wouldn’t be real love. Love is a choice. And if you have a choice you have to be able to choose not to love and that in itself is the nature of evil. Evil is choosing not to love. So when God gave us the freedom to choose, he gave us not only our greatest blessing, but he also gave us our greatest curse because we can choose to do right or choose to do wrong.
- Alvin Plantinga does not challenge (and thus implicitly concedes) the soundness of Paul Draper's argument for the conclusion that certain facts about good and evil are strong evidence against theism. Plantinga does, however, challenge Draper's view that naturalism is more plausible than theism, which Draper needs to reach the further conclusion that, other evidence held equal, theism is very probably false. In addition, Plantinga challenges the significance of this final conclusion. In this chapter, Draper defends his views on plausibility and then argues that Plantinga's challenge to the significance of his final conclusion fails for two reasons. First, Plantinga fails to show that this further conclusion does not threaten the rationality or warrant of most theistic belief. Second, he mistakenly assumes that, in order to be significant, this conclusion must threaten the rationality or warrant of most theistic belief.
This however is still not enough to prove there is a God for some people. This also does not work for anyone who does not think that people have a free will in the first place.
This free will theodicy raises a number of difficult questions --
- While true freedom may be bound up with glory now and to the eschaton, does there not fall over this formal freedom the shadow of this dual possibility of choice and thus also the threatening possibility of evil?
- It is possible that God is simply allowing evil and suffering in the world to prove that rebellion against Him brings pain and suffering. God may be allowing sin to take its natural course in the world, so that on the day of judgement God can say "Do you see what rebellion against my words brings?" This may seem overly simplistic, but it may prove to be one of the reasons that God allows pain and suffering. After all, did He not make us in His image and give us the freedom to choose? And in our freedom have we not rebelled? Yes, we have. Should God then make us robots or restrict our freedom so much that we have no choices at all?
- Why should the joy and the blessedness of those who would freely accept God's salvation be precluded because of those who would stubbornly and freely reject it?
A free will theodicy, exactly parallel to the one above, can be applied to Lucifer and his minions rather than to people to cover the balance. The target of the theodicy in this case are evils, flaws, and dysfunctions that cannot easily be attributed to human actions or dispositions.
- The Devil's most feared role was as the Tempter, the great seducer of humanity, who had the great capacity to plant suggestions in minds and to lure mankind to sin. This was because he had a preternatural talent to discern inner weakness and fashion his temptations accordingly and by aligning his temptations with the internal temptations of the individual thereby inducing the individual to follow the flesh and the world.
- In movies, novels and TV shows we see this same theme emerge time and time again. The truly evil character defeats the scientific experts. These experts often, then, turn to religious figures. They might wander into a church looking for answers or consult a priest. The character might start to pray. The experience of evil--the residual--draws the characters, as a last resort, to the religious vocabulary. Why? Because the person they are chasing is beyond criminal, beyond human categories. And, just as often, we see the truly evil antagonist defeat these religious shock troops. Hollywood knows it needs the language of the residual, the vocabulary of religion, to make movies which speak to human experience. Screenwriters are artists, not scientists. So they get what I'm talking about. But that doesn't mean that Hollywood is going to embrace organized religion! So priests in the movies are often killed by the evil figure (usually because the priest is a hypocrite). Regardless, the defeat of evil is going to rely on some sort of self-sacrificing goodness. The main plot of the movie is figuring out where that goodness is going to come from.
- it may have been a huge step to finally admit that God exists. While it may be a relief to finally make such an admission, it is just the first step, not the last. The Bible teaches that even demons believe in God - and tremble. (James 2 vs. 19)
Some recognition of the dark side - whether defensive or proactive - seems inevitable for anyone who sees the way the world is and takes it seriously and thinks it is proper to infer the nature of the world's source by means of an argument from design.
The free will theodicy, then, is strong enough to defeat the claim that divine existence is incompatible with the existence of evil, given appropriate auxiliary hypotheses about the nature and importance of autonomy and freedom.
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