Hick - Free WIll

2 Pages 602 Words

An attempt to make the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God coincide along with the existence of evil is known as a Theodicy. Theodicy according to our text means the justification of God’s goodness in the face of the fact of evil. Theodicy first divides the evil in the world into Moral evil and Non-Moral evil. Moral Evil is the evil that human being cause - either to themselves or to each other. Non-Moral Evil is the evil that is not caused by human activity - natural disasters, etc.
The existence of Moral evil is explained by claiming, as many theodicies do, that God allows the existence of Moral evil because human beings have free wills. The existence of a free will is necessary for the proper worship of God, and to avoid the pitfalls of predestination. If we wanted the evil to stop, it is up to us to make it happen.
Hick argues that there is a way that God can be omnipotent and benevolent, and still have evil exist in the world. It is because humans have free will. If we are to truly have free will, then we have to be allowed to choose evil. He thinks, also, that a world in which people have free will is the best possible world. Another objection he makes is that "omnipotent" has to be defined in a certain way to make this premise true. It would have to mean that there are infinitely many ways to create a universe and God is capable of creating all of them. But Hick says there are not infinitely many ways to create a universe; any universe must at least be logical. That is a restriction on the kind of worlds that can exist.
My first reply to Hick is that we are not really free anyway. At first thought, there are limitations on what we can do both physically and mentally… so FREE to me seems to be a little far fetched. When I think about free will in more simple terms, for instance, if we didn't have free will we would be puppets and not human beings, and in order to really have free will, one must be able to choose...