[Music] hi I'm Mr McMillan and welcome to part four of this series on the problem of evil this part will examine the Free Will defense just a quick reminder in case you haven't watched these videos in order but a theodicy is an attempt to show how the existence of evil and suffering is compatible with the existence of an all loving all powerful God both the augustinian and Iran theodes were overtly Christian in nature and so may not satisfy those theists who are not Christians while both the augustinian and Iran theodes include a place for the role of Free Will in recent years a number of philosophers have developed the idea of free will into a theodicy all of its own rather unimaginatively it's simply referred to as the Free Will defense instead of starting with a specific religious text such as Genesis the Free Will defense begins with the claim that God created human beings with the intention that they would be able to discover and know him and in some sense have a relationship of Love faithfulness or obedience to him however different religions May Express this in different ways a prerequisite of this situation is that human beings must be genuinely free to respond to God in whichever way they choose and therefore it's essential that they have genuine free will the necessary consequence of a world with free will is that it will include the existence of both good and evil furthermore in order for this free will to be genuine God must not Place limits on it or intervene arbitrarily if God was to intervene every time that someone was about to do something genuinely evil then this would tie our hands and restrict our freedom Richard swinburn a key proponent of the Free Will defense said the less God allows men to bring about large scale Horrors the less the freedom and responsibility he gives them in other words in order for humans to be able to show the virtues that God desires such as courage fairness and mercy then humans must be able to be equally cowardly unfair or cruel we might assume that the Free Will defense is only effective in explaining moral evil but swinburn believes it provides an explanation for natural evil too he argues that a world in which death is a part of nature is a world better designed to bring about God's purposes swinburn gives a number of reasons why a world with death is better than one without it firstly a world without death is a world where a person cannot make the ultimate self-sacrifice secondly having a limited lifespan focuses a person's attention on how they should live as swinburn says a situation of Temptation with infinite chances is no situation of Temptation at all if there is always another chance there is no risk in other words we need to know that we will not have infinite chances to get things right in order to motivate us to at least try thirdly a world without death would mean the young would always be dominated by the old younger Generations would never have the chance to take their place in having responsibility fourthly death limits the amount of suffering one can experience or have inflicted on them a common criticism of theodes is how could God allow so much suffering some supporters of the Free Will defense seek to show that it is not possible to question the amount of suffering swinburn says that when we ask God to create a world with less suffering we are in fact asking that God should make a toy world a world where things matter but not very much he would be like an overprotected parent who will not let his child out of sight for a moment furthermore as John hick has argued if we say some Evils are too much then we get into a relative debate about where do we draw the line as to what is too much suffering for example if we lived in a universe where the worst possible pain we could cause was to flick someone's ear then in this world we would consider those who do such a thing as intolerable monsters akin to the way we view Mass murderers such as Adolf Hitler this seems absurd to us in this universe but highlights that our understanding of suffering is only relative to our own experience so what if anything is wrong with the Free Will defense some of the criticisms leveled at the augustinian and Iran thees are applicable to the Free Will defense and you could use those in the exam for example the question of whether it is acceptable to achieve something good by doing something is as relevant to the Free Will defense as it was to the Iran theoy however the biggest criticism of the Free Will defense was offered by the Australian philosopher John Mackey the Free Will defense claims that when creating the world God faced a simple choice either he could create a world where humans had no free will but in which pleasure is maximized and pain minimized but where humans would effectively be robots or he could create a world where human Freedom was the most important thing although he would know that this would result in some pain and suffering but this was a price worth paying so that it could lead to genuine response to God this is the choice that swim bur believes God would take macki asserts that God had a third and ultimately better option available to him in macky's view God if he was truly omnipotent could have the best of both worlds genuine freedom and the minimization of pain Macky believed that a truly all powerful God could have created humans who are genuinely free but happened to always choose to do the right thing I don't know why but in my head Mackey superhumans somehow looked like cyborgs if God can make someone who chooses to do the right thing on at least one occasion whilst they are still free to do so then it is not logically impossible to create humans who just happen to do this every time Macky says God was not then faced with a choice between making innocent aut tomator and making beings who in acting freely would sometimes go wrong there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who act freely but always go right clearly his failure to Avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his is being omnipotent and holy good supporters of the Free Will defense would argue that what Macky is claiming is logically impossible beings who always do good would not be truly free and therefore this is not possible for God to do not because God can't do it but because it can't be done it is like asking God to create a stone too heavy for himself to lift it creates a logical Paradox thanks for watching that's the end of this part of my series on the problem of evil make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel follow me on Twitter and download the podcast from iTunes [Music]