The Problem of Evil

A perennial problem in the philosophy of religion is the problem of evil: if God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, then how can he allow such atrocities as the Holocaust to occur? Surely he would intervene to stop them from happening. One defense often given for the presence of such evil is that God gave us free will, that by giving us free will he gave us the power to choose evil, but that the possession of free will is such an important and great gift from God that it is better, all things considered, for humans to have free will and sometimes choose evil than to never do evil but lack free will.

What should we make of this defense? First, I assume that Christians will accept the following three claims:

(1) God is all good
(2) God has free will
(3) God is all powerful

Because God has free will, he could have chosen not to create the universe, or could have chosen to create it differently.

I will also a assume that, all things considered

(4) a world in which people that have free will but always choose to do good is better than a world in which people have free will but sometimes choose to do evil.

An important question then arises: could God have chosen to create a world where people have free will but always freely choose to do good? If so, then it would seem that God's failing to choose to create such a world shows that he does not always choose what is best (from (4)) and thus that either he is not all good or not all powerful or not free.

I want to argue that, indeed, God could have chosen to create a world where people have free will but always freely choose to do good. The argument for this is rather straightforward. First, let's consider God again and his attributes. What does God's perfect goodness imply? Among other things, it implies that he always chooses the good. A God that occassionally chooses to do evil cannot be a perfectly good God, since evil is a "privation." But God also has free will. So God himself, according to this view, is an actual being who both always does what is good and yet possesses free will. Since God, himself, is supposed to be a being that has free will but always chooses the good, could not God have created us in such a way that we always freely choose to do the good? Since it is not logically impossible for there to be such beings (since God himself is such a being), and since God can do whatever is logically possible (I take it that this is entailed by his being all powerful), God could have created beings that always freely choose to do what is good. And since a world where people always freely choose to do good is a better world than a world where people sometimes freely choose to do evil, God is either not all powerful, not all good, or lacks free will.