# Problem of Evil, Soul-Making Theodicy ## Intro The soul-making theodicy answers the problem of evil by identifying a good that could not exist without the conditions the objection complains about. The good in question is developed character: courage, compassion, patience, perseverance, self-sacrifice, and the kind of love that costs something. The claim is that goods of this kind are **not the sort of thing that can be created ready-made**. A God who wanted a universe containing courage could not simply install courage in creatures at the moment of creation, because courage that was never exercised in the face of anything frightening is not courage. It is a disposition-shaped blank. That is the argument's whole spine, and it is a necessity claim rather than a preference. If second-person virtues logically require an environment containing risk, hardship, and other people whose need is real, then a world containing those conditions is not a world God failed to improve. It is the only kind of world in which those goods are possible at all. The complementary point concerns what the alternative would look like. Imagine a world engineered so that no action ever caused harm: bullets soften in flight, cruelty produces no injury, negligence has no consequence. In such a world nobody could be generous, because nobody could be in need. Nobody could be brave, because nothing would be at risk. Nobody's choices would matter, because outcomes would be independent of them. That world is safer and it is morally empty. The framework is called Irenaean, after the second-century bishop who framed human beings as created immature and intended to grow into likeness rather than created finished and then falling from perfection. Its modern form comes from John Hick, who took the phrase *vale of soul-making* from a letter of Keats. Two things must be said honestly at the outset, because the argument is discredited when they are not. It is not a claim that every particular instance of suffering produces character, which is plainly false. And it is not offered as something to say to a person in grief. It is an answer to an argument, not a pastoral script. ## In full Argument responding to the evidential problem of evil: *"A wholly good, omnipotent God would prevent suffering he could prevent without losing a greater good or permitting a worse evil. Much suffering appears to serve no such purpose. So probably no such God exists."* The theodicy grants that God could prevent the suffering and denies that doing so would leave the goods intact. It identifies a class of goods, the moral and spiritual formation of persons, whose existence entails an environment of genuine stakes. Its principal statement is John Hick's *Evil and the God of Love* (1966), which contrasts it with the Augustinian tradition's focus on the fall and on evil as privation. See the concept treatment at [Soul-Making Theodicy](/codex/soul-making-theodicy/), [Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense](/codex/problem-of-evil-free-will-defense/) for the companion argument, and [Evil as Privation of Good](/codex/evil-as-privation-of-good/) for the Augustinian frame. ## Argument structure | # | Premise | |---|---| | **P1** | Some goods are second-order: they consist in a response to difficulty and cannot exist without it. | | **P2** | Second-order goods cannot be created directly; they can only be developed by the agent whose goods they are. | | **P3** | Their development requires a stable environment with genuine stakes, real risk of harm, and other persons in genuine need. | | **P4** | Such an environment necessarily permits suffering, including suffering that is not deserved and not individually purposive. | | **P5** | The goods so developed are of great enough value, and are consummated in a life beyond this one, to justify a world containing those conditions. | | **C** | **A world containing genuine suffering is compatible with a wholly good and omnipotent God, because it is the only kind of world in which soul-making goods can exist.** | ## Form Defensive theodicy with a necessity claim at its centre. P1 and P2 are the load-bearing premises and are close to conceptual truths. P3 is where most of the argumentative work happens, since the objector will grant P1 and P2 and press that far less suffering would do. P5 is where the argument becomes distinctively theological, since without an eschatological consummation the ledger does not balance, and honest defenders concede this rather than pretending the argument is purely philosophical. ## Cheatsheet **30-second reply:** *"Courage is not something God could have installed at creation. A creature who has never faced anything frightening does not possess courage, it possesses a label. The same holds for compassion, patience and self-sacrifice. Those goods only exist as responses to real difficulty, which means a world containing them has to be a world containing difficulty. The alternative is a padded room where nothing you do matters to anyone, and that world is safer and morally empty."* **Fast facts:** - The framework is second-century, from Irenaeus (*Against Heresies* IV.37-39), and predates Augustine's dominant alternative. - The modern statement is John Hick, *Evil and the God of Love* (1966), which takes *vale of soul-making* from a Keats letter of 1819. - The distinction between first-order and second-order goods is the argument's technical core. - Hick's version is universalist, holding that soul-making completes for everyone eventually. The theodicy does not require this, and most non-universalist defenders detach it. **Counter-moves:** 1. Establish the necessity claim before anything else. If the interlocutor grants that courage requires danger, the rest of the argument has somewhere to stand. 2. Ask them to describe the world they would build instead, then examine what it contains. 3. Do not claim every instance of suffering is character-forming. Concede immediately that much of it destroys. 4. Pair it with the free-will defence rather than running it alone. **Concessions to grant, and what each collects:** - **Grant that much suffering crushes rather than forms.** Collects the right to restrict the claim to the necessary *conditions* of soul-making rather than to each instance, which is the only defensible version anyway. - **Grant that the theodicy is not a pastoral response.** Collects credibility, and separates the philosophical question from the emotional one so the argument is judged on its merits. - **Grant that animal suffering is not well handled by this argument alone.** Collects the recognition that theodicies are cumulative rather than singly sufficient, and moves the discussion to where the argument is strong. **Closing line:** *"You are asking why God did not make a world where nothing hurts. I am telling you what such a world would lack: everyone in it would be safe, and no one in it could ever be brave, or kind, or needed."* --- ## P1, Some goods are second-order and require difficulty ### Affirmative case (second-order arguments) 1. **The conceptual point.** Courage is not a feeling, it is acting well in the presence of fear. Remove the danger and there is nothing for the virtue to be. The same analysis applies to compassion, which requires suffering to respond to; to patience, which requires provocation or delay; to forgiveness, which requires an offence; and to perseverance, which requires an obstacle. 2. **The distinction is not invented for the occasion.** First-order goods, pleasure, comfort, satisfaction, can be produced directly. Second-order goods are responses to first-order evils, and the structure is recognised independently of theodicy in virtue ethics going back to Aristotle, where virtue is acquired by habituation in circumstances that call for it. 3. **We treat it as obvious elsewhere.** No one thinks a person who inherited a fortune has thereby demonstrated industry, or that an athlete who never trained is disciplined. The idea that certain excellences must be earned through the exercise they name is ordinary moral common sense. ### Anticipated objections 1. **"God is omnipotent, so he could create courage directly. Saying he cannot limits him."** 2. **"These virtues are only valuable because we live in a broken world. In a perfect world they would be unnecessary, so their value is instrumental and does not justify the cost."** ### Rebuttals 1. **Omnipotence is the power to do what is logically possible, and this is a logical limit rather than an external one.** God cannot make a married bachelor, and this is not a deficiency in his power but an absence of anything to be made. A creature who has courage without ever having faced danger is in the same category: the description does not pick out a coherent state of affairs. Note that the objection would equally require God to be able to create a freely chosen act, which is the parallel point at [Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense](/codex/problem-of-evil-free-will-defense/). 2. **This concedes P1 and disputes P5, which is a different premise.** Grant that these virtues would be unnecessary in an unfallen world. The question is whether a world in which persons *become* certain kinds of beings is better than one in which they are manufactured as those beings, and the intuition that achievement differs in value from installation is widely shared. ### Live-cite kit - **Scripture:** [Romans 5:3-5](/codex/romans-5-3-5/), tribulation produces perseverance, character, hope, in that stated order; [James 1:2-4](/codex/james-1-2-4/), the testing of faith producing endurance; [Hebrews 5:8](/codex/hebrews-5-8/), that the Son learned obedience from what he suffered, which is the strongest form of the point available. - **Scholarly:** Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* IV.37-39; John Hick, *Evil and the God of Love* (1966), ch. 13-17; Aristotle, *Nicomachean Ethics* II, on habituation. - **Aphorism:** *"Courage without danger is not courage. It is a word with nothing under it."* ### Tactical notes - Lead with a concrete virtue, not with the abstract distinction. Courage works best because the dependence on danger is immediate. - [Hebrews 5:8](/codex/hebrews-5-8/) is the most striking citation here and is rarely anticipated, since it applies the developmental principle to Christ himself. --- ## P2, Second-order goods cannot be created directly ### Affirmative case (second-order arguments) 1. **They are constituted by their history.** What makes a disposition a virtue rather than a mere behavioural tendency is that the agent formed it through choices. A character trait implanted whole is not the agent's achievement and does not belong to him in the relevant sense. 2. **The parallel to knowledge and skill.** A person given a true belief by direct implantation does not thereby know in the fullest sense, and someone given the muscle memory of a pianist without practice has not learned to play. Formation matters to what the thing is, not merely to how it came about. 3. **This is why the objection's alternative is not a better world but a different and lesser one.** A universe of manufactured saints contains beings who behave well and have done nothing. ### Anticipated objections 1. **"God creates angels who are good without a soul-making process."** 2. **"Heaven is supposed to have no suffering. If character can be sustained there, it could have been created that way from the start."** ### Rebuttals 1. **The angelic case is disputed and does not obviously help the objector.** The tradition generally holds that angels underwent a decisive choice rather than being created confirmed in goodness, which is the same structure in compressed form. If some beings are created good without process, the argument concludes that God made a world containing both kinds, which is a richer creation than one containing only one. 2. **Sustaining a character and forming one are different operations.** The claim is not that virtue requires perpetual suffering but that its development does. A person who has become courageous remains courageous in safety. This is precisely the eschatological structure the theodicy predicts: formation in this life, consummation in the next. ### Live-cite kit - **Scholarly:** John Hick, *Evil and the God of Love*, on the distinction between creation and person-making; Eleonore Stump, *Wandering in Darkness* (2010), on the narrative structure of formation. - **Aphorism:** *"A virtue you did not acquire is not yours. It is furniture."* ### Tactical notes - The heaven objection is the most common and is answered in one sentence. Have it ready, because fumbling it makes the whole theodicy look ad hoc. --- ## P3, Development requires an environment with genuine stakes ### Affirmative case (second-order arguments) 1. **Stable natural law is a precondition.** Moral action requires predictable consequences. If outcomes were adjusted case by case to prevent harm, no one could aim at anything, and choosing to help would be meaningless because helping would be impossible to accomplish or to fail at. A law-governed world that permits fire to warm also permits fire to burn. 2. **Epistemic distance.** Hick's term for the condition in which God's existence is not overwhelmingly evident. A creature confronted with an unmistakable and immediately enforcing God could not develop freely chosen character, only compliance. This connects the theodicy to divine hiddenness, which becomes a feature rather than a further problem. 3. **The needs of others must be real.** Compassion requires someone genuinely worse off. A world where all needs are met directly by God contains no occasion for anyone to be needed by anyone. ### Anticipated objections 1. **"Granted, but the amount is the issue. Far less suffering would achieve the same formation."** 2. **"Some suffering forms no one. A fawn burned in a forest fire nobody witnesses, the case William Rowe made famous, and the suffering of infants."** 3. **"This justifies passivity. If suffering builds character, relieving it is interfering with God's programme."** ### Rebuttals 1. **The objection requires knowing where the line is, and nobody can specify it.** Whatever quantity of suffering existed, the worst instance in that world would attract the identical complaint, which means the argument regresses without limit until no suffering remains, and that is the padded-room world already rejected. Reducing the objection to a demand for an unspecifiable threshold is not a dodge; the objector is asserting a comparative claim about possible worlds that no one is in a position to evaluate. This is the sceptical-theist reply, and it is the strongest response available on this premise. 2. **This is the hardest objection and the answer is partial, which should be said plainly.** Three parts. The theodicy defends the general conditions rather than each instance, so undirected suffering is expected within a law-governed world rather than being an anomaly. Rowe's inference from *appears pointless* to *is pointless* assumes we would recognise the point if there were one, which is exactly what is in question given the causal reach of any single event. And on the specifically Christian version, the answer is not solely explanatory: the claim is that God entered the suffering rather than merely permitting it from outside. Marilyn McCord Adams develops this at length in her work on horrendous evils. 3. **It inverts the argument.** The conditions that make compassion possible are the conditions in which compassion is exercised, and exercising it is the good in question. A theodicy holding that character is formed by responding to need cannot conclude that one should not respond to need. Scripture's own commands on relieving suffering are unqualified. ### Live-cite kit - **Scripture:** [Matthew 25:35-40](/codex/matthew-25-35-40/), the needs of others as the occasion of the decisive judgment; [2 Corinthians 1:3-4](/codex/2-corinthians-1-3-4/), comfort received becoming comfort given, the mechanism stated directly; [Luke 10:30-37](/codex/luke-10-30-37/), the Samaritan. - **Scholarly:** John Hick on epistemic distance; Richard Swinburne, *Providence and the Problem of Evil* (1998), on the necessity of stable natural law; William Rowe (1979) for the objection in its canonical form; Stephen Wykstra on sceptical theism. - **Aphorism:** *"A world where nothing can go wrong is a world where nothing you do matters."* ### Tactical notes - Concede objection two immediately and visibly. Attempting to explain a specific child's suffering loses every audience, and the concession costs nothing the argument needs. - The regress reply to objection one is the single most useful move on this page. State it as a question: *"How much less? Name the amount, and I will ask why the worst case in that world is not the same objection."* - Do not deploy sceptical theism as the whole answer. Used alone it sounds like an evasion; used after the necessity argument it lands as a limit on what either side can claim to know. --- ## P4, Such an environment necessarily permits undeserved suffering ### Affirmative case (second-order arguments) 1. **Regularity is indiscriminate by nature.** A law that operates only when the outcome is deserved is not a law. The same physics that permits building permits collapse, and it does not consult the merit of who is standing underneath. 2. **Genuine freedom entails genuine victims.** If choices have real effects, some of those effects fall on people who did not choose. The alternative is freedom whose consequences are suppressed, which is freedom in name only. See [Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense](/codex/problem-of-evil-free-will-defense/). 3. **Scripture explicitly denies the merit-tracking assumption.** Jesus rejects the inference from suffering to guilt twice in quick succession: the Galileans killed by Pilate and the eighteen crushed by the tower of Siloam were not worse offenders than anyone else ([Luke 13:1-5](/codex/luke-13-1-5/)), and the man born blind was not being punished for anyone's sin ([John 9:1-3](/codex/john-9-1-3/)). The Bible is not committed to the position the objection attacks. ### Anticipated objections 1. **"Then God is responsible for setting up a system whose costs he foresaw."** 2. **"Natural evil is not covered. Earthquakes and cancer involve no one's free choices."** ### Rebuttals 1. **Responsibility for a system is not culpability for its misuse, given the necessity claim.** If the goods at stake require these conditions, then instituting the conditions is what a good God who wanted those goods would do. The objection has to defeat the necessity claim rather than restate the cost. 2. **Natural evil is covered by the stable-law argument rather than by the free-will one**, which is precisely why the two theodicies are deployed together. Plate tectonics that produce earthquakes are the same processes that recycle carbon and sustain a habitable planet, and cellular replication that permits cancer is the mechanism of growth and healing. The point is not that each disaster is individually justified but that a law-governed world containing agents is not separable from a law-governed world containing hazards. ### Live-cite kit - **Scripture:** [Luke 13:1-5](/codex/luke-13-1-5/), the explicit rejection of the merit inference; [John 9:1-3](/codex/john-9-1-3/), suffering not as punishment; [Matthew 5:45](/codex/matthew-5-45/), rain on the just and the unjust. - **Scholarly:** Richard Swinburne on the necessity of natural regularity; Peter van Inwagen, *The Problem of Evil* (2006). - **Aphorism:** *"A law that made exceptions for the innocent would not be a law, and no one could plan a single act."* ### Tactical notes - [Luke 13:1-5](/codex/luke-13-1-5/) is worth quoting in full. Many objectors assume Christianity teaches that suffering tracks desert, and hearing Jesus deny it disarms an objection they were holding in reserve. --- ## P5, The goods justify the conditions, with eschatological consummation ### Affirmative case (second-order arguments) 1. **The value of formed persons.** What is at stake is the existence of beings who have genuinely become something, capable of love that costs, rather than beings manufactured in a finished state. The intuition that this is worth more is the same intuition that distinguishes an achievement from a gift. 2. **The ledger balances only eschatologically, and the argument says so openly.** Paul's claim is not that present suffering is small but that it is not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed ([Romans 8:18](/codex/romans-8-18/)), and that the affliction is producing an eternal weight of glory ([2 Corinthians 4:17](/codex/2-corinthians-4-17/)). Without a life beyond this one the theodicy is incomplete, and defenders should say so rather than be caught conceding it. 3. **The Christian version adds participation, which no other theodicy has.** The claim is not merely that God permits suffering for good ends but that he entered it. Whatever else the cross does, it removes the charge that the arrangement was designed by someone exempt from its costs. ### Anticipated objections 1. **"Compensation later does not justify harm now. Paying someone after wronging them does not make the wrong permissible."** 2. **"Hick's version requires universalism to work. If some are lost, their suffering formed nothing and the accounting fails."** 3. **"This makes people means to an end, which is precisely what morality forbids."** ### Rebuttals 1. **The claim is defeat rather than compensation**, which is Marilyn McCord Adams's distinction and the correct reply. Compensation leaves the evil intact and adds a good alongside it. Defeat means the evil is integrated into a whole in which it is organically related to a good that could not have existed otherwise, so that the sufferer himself, in retrospect, would not will it away. Whether that is achievable is the real question, but it is a different and stronger claim than payment. 2. **A genuine problem for Hick's version specifically, and detachable from the theodicy.** The soul-making structure does not entail that everyone completes the process, only that the process requires these conditions. Most contemporary non-universalist defenders retain the framework without the universalism, at the cost of leaving the unformed case unresolved. 3. **The end is the person's own good, which removes the Kantian objection.** Using someone as a means is instrumentalising them for another's benefit. Here the good developed belongs to the sufferer, which is the difference between a coach and an exploiter. ### Live-cite kit - **Scripture:** [Romans 8:18](/codex/romans-8-18/), the incomparability rather than the smallness of present suffering; [2 Corinthians 4:17](/codex/2-corinthians-4-17/), affliction producing glory; [Revelation 21:4](/codex/revelation-21-4/), the wiping away of tears, which is a claim about defeat rather than about forgetting. - **Scholarly:** Marilyn McCord Adams, *Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God* (1999), on defeat versus compensation; Eleonore Stump, *Wandering in Darkness* (2010). - **Aphorism:** *"Not compensation for the wound. The wound taken up into something that could not have been without it."* ### Tactical notes - Be candid that this premise is theological rather than neutral. Pretending the theodicy is complete without eschatology invites a fair charge of evasion. - The participation point is the strongest closing material available, because it answers a moral objection rather than a logical one, and moral objections are what actually move people. --- ## Conclusion **A world containing genuine suffering is compatible with a wholly good and omnipotent God, because it is the only kind of world in which soul-making goods can exist.** The argument turns on a necessity claim rather than on an assertion about outcomes: courage, compassion, patience and costly love are constituted by response to difficulty, cannot be installed ready-made, and require an environment with stable laws, real stakes and genuine need. The objection asks why God did not remove those conditions; the answer specifies what would have been removed with them. ## Master objections to the argument as a whole - **"This explains suffering in general and no particular suffering."** Accepted, and it is the honest scope of the argument. Theodicies address the evidential problem by showing that a good God could have reasons; they do not claim to identify the reason in any given case. - **"It is cold."** As a response to grief it would be, which is why it is not one. The problem of evil is posed in two forms, an argument and a wound, and answering the wound with a syllogism is a pastoral error rather than a philosophical one. - **"Animal suffering across millions of years before any humans existed forms no souls."** The strongest remaining objection to this theodicy on its own, and it is why it is deployed alongside others rather than as a complete account. ## Tactical opening and closing **Opening line:** *"Before I answer, describe the world you would have made instead, the one with none of this in it. Take a minute over it, because I want to ask what is in it as well as what is missing."* **Closing landing strip:** *"I have not told you why your particular grief happened, and I am not going to pretend I can. What I have said is narrower. A world where nothing can go wrong is a world where nothing you do matters, where no one can be brave and no one can be needed. And on the Christian account, the God who set it up did not watch from outside. That does not make the suffering good. It makes it something other than abandonment."* ## See also - [Soul-Making Theodicy](/codex/soul-making-theodicy/), the concept treatment with Hick's development in detail - [Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense](/codex/problem-of-evil-free-will-defense/), the companion theodicy covering moral evil - [Evil as Privation of Good](/codex/evil-as-privation-of-good/), the Augustinian alternative frame - [Nietzsche Concedes Problem of Evil](/codex/nietzsche-concedes-problem-of-evil/), the adjacent engagement - [Arguments](/codex/arguments/), master index ## Common questions this page answers **Q: What is the soul-making theodicy?** It is the argument that a world containing genuine hardship is necessary for the development of moral and spiritual character. Courage, compassion, patience and self-sacrifice are second-order goods: they consist in responses to difficulty and cannot exist without it. Since God could not create them ready-made any more than he could create a married bachelor, a world containing those goods must contain the conditions they require. **Q: Couldn't God just create people with good character directly?** Not coherently, on this argument. Courage that has never faced danger is not courage but a label with nothing under it, and a virtue implanted whole is not the agent's achievement in the way that makes it a virtue. Omnipotence is the power to do what is logically possible, and a formed character that was never formed is not a state of affairs God declined to bring about but a description that does not pick out anything. **Q: Doesn't a lot of suffering destroy people rather than improve them?** Yes, and the argument should concede this immediately. The theodicy defends the general conditions under which character can develop, not the claim that each instance produces growth. Insisting that every particular suffering is character-building is both obviously false and the fastest way to discredit the argument. **Q: What about suffering nobody witnesses, or animal suffering long before humans existed?** This is the hardest objection and the answer is partial. The theodicy defends the conditions rather than each instance, so undirected suffering is expected in a law-governed world. William Rowe's inference from apparently pointless to actually pointless assumes we would recognise a purpose if one existed. Animal suffering across deep time is the weakest point for this theodicy taken alone, which is why it is deployed alongside others rather than as a complete account. **Q: If suffering builds character, should we stop relieving it?** No, and the argument forbids the inference. The conditions that make compassion possible are the conditions under which compassion is exercised, and exercising it is the very good being described. A theodicy holding that character forms by responding to need cannot conclude that one should not respond to need, and Scripture's commands on relieving suffering are unqualified. **Q: How is this different from the free will defence?** The free will defence explains moral evil, harm caused by the choices of free agents, by arguing that genuine freedom entails the possibility of its misuse. The soul-making theodicy explains the environment, including natural evil, by arguing that stable laws and real stakes are required for character to develop. They cover different ground and are standardly deployed together rather than as competitors.