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John Hick
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Introduction to Philosophy
John Hick, "Allowing for Evil"
Abstract: Hick argues that moral evil is a
result of the mystery of free will. He believes the occurrence of nonmoral
evil in the world is a necessary condition for the ethics of
choice and the process of soul-making.
- According to Hick what is the most powerful
positive objection to the belief in God?
- On what ground does he refute the Christian
Science solution to the problem of evil?
- How does he refute the Personalist school
solution? The Augustinian solution?
- What objections have been raised to the
traditional Christian position concerning moral evil?
What is Hick's reply?
- What objection has been raised to the
traditional Christian position concerning nonmoral evil?
What is Hick's reply?
- What is Hick's ultimate answer to the problem
of evil?
- John Hick's important work on the problem of evil from the 1960's
was a turning point in the study of theodicy.
- Several biographical points should be briefly mentioned.
- Hick supports the view of religious pluralism—the view that
all religions have insight and truth into what is real, and no
one religion is exclusively absolute.
- Different religions are culturally based.
- Hick emphasizes the epistemological aspects of faith over the
act of will. Faith, to Hick, is a cognitive interpretation of experience
rather than leap of volition.
- Much of Hick's interest in philosophy of religion is with
theodicy—the
justification of the nature of God with the
presence of moral and natural evil in the world.
- His life-work is sometimes summarized in the thesis: theodicy can
be sensibly articulated, in large measure, through eschatology—the
study of the possibility of events beyond and succeeding earthly human existence.
- The reading from which these notes drawn is
"The Problem of Evil" in John Hick, Philosophy of Religion 4th. ed.
(Upper Saddle Hill, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989). Selections from this
classic introductory analysis are available from many philosophy
and philosophy of religion anthologies.
- Notes are arranged in response to the questions stated above in
reference to the chapter "God Can Allow Some Evil" from
Classic Philosophical Questions, eds. James A. Gould and
Robert J. Mulvaney, 11th ed. (Upper Sadddle Hill, N.J.: Pearson,
2004), 275.
- According to Hick what is the most powerful
positive objection to the belief in God?
- The problem of evil is most often posed as an argument
as follows.
- The Problem of Evil:
- If God is perfectly good, then He must want to
prevent evil.
- If God is all-powerful, then He can prevent evil.
- Evil exists.
- Therefore, God is either not perfectly good or God
is not all-powerful, or both.
- The problem as it stands appears to be a valid argument.
Since we want to reject the conclusion, there must be
at least one false premise (of course, there might be
more than one false premise).
- Note in the following questions from the reading how each proposed
solution to the problem attacks one of the premises. Hick's
discussion of those objections and counterobjections can be
summarily portrayed in this chart of the argument.
Hick's Argument Concerning the Problem of Evil
The Problem of Evil |
Objections |
Hick's Counterobjections |
If God is omnipotent, God can prevent all evil. |
Personalists—God is finite in power. |
Limited power contradicts Biblical faith. |
If God is perfectly good, God must want to prevent
all evil. |
Hick—Evil is a necessary possibility
for persons to exist.
Mackie—God could create wholly good
persons. |
A "wholly good person" is a logical
impossibility, a meaningless conjunction of words. |
Evil exists. |
Augustine—evil is not created by
God but is the decay of good.
Christian Science—evil is
an illusion |
The denial of evil contradicts Biblical faith. These
views raise anew the question of the origin of
evil |
Thus, God is either not omnipotent or not perfectly
good or both |
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- On what ground does he refute the Christian
Science solution to the problem of evil?
- The Christian Science solution is to reject the premise
that evil exists. What could this position mean? Possibly,
from our limited perspective and intelligence we cannot
see how the parts of the universe fit together for the
total harmony of the good. "We cannot see the forest for
the trees."
- Hick's response to the Christian Science position is
that this belief contradicts Biblical Faith—a point
of view that he simply assumes to be true without argument.
On this supposition, then, on Hick's view, some other
premise must be false.
- How does he refute the Personalist school
solution? The Augustinian solution?
- The Personalist School denies the truth of the premise
that God is omnipotent. God is thought to be the most
powerful being in the universe, but He is not
all-powerful.
- To say that God is all-powerful is tantamount to
committing heresy, on this view, because I have some power.
If I had the power to do something wrong, we would not
want to say God is responsible; we would want to say I
did it. So some power in the universe is not God's.
- John Stuart Mill has objected to this view along the
following lines:
"In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are
hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's
every day performances. Killing, the most criminal
act recognized by human nature, Nature does once to
every being that lives; and in a large proportion of
cases, after protracted tortures such as the greatest
monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted
on their fellow creatures … All this, Nature
does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy
and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and
noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon
those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest
enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of
the noblest acts … I will call no being good, who
is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow
creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell
for not so calling him, to hell I will go."
(John Stuart Mill, "Nature" in Three Essays
on Religion (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1998) 5.)
- So Mill concludes that God does the best job that
can be done in an intractable world.
- The Augustinian Solution attacks the premises
which hold that there is evil to be prevented. Hence,
there is an existential fallacy involving all the
premises in the dilemma. Augustine sees evil as the
absence of goodness or the decay of good; evil is
nothing in and of itself. Like temperature or sunlight
exist, but the absence of them, cold and shadow, do
not exist.
- Hick believes that Augustine's view of evil as the
decay of good merely raises in a different form
the question of the origin of evil. What is evil?
It is important to distinguish between …
- moral evil which is dependent upon persons
and their free will (e.g., poverty, oppression,
persecution, war, and injustice), and …
- nonmoral evil which is dependent upon nature
(e.g., earthquake, hurricane, storm, flood,
drought, and blight).
- Note that Hick points out that often it is difficult
to distinguish the two kinds of evil, as in psychosomatic
illness where injustice leads to sickness, and so on.
- What objections have been raised to the
traditional Christian position concerning moral evil? What
is Hick's reply?
- The main objection is that God could have created
wholly good persons. Hick's response is that the idea
of a person who can be infallibly guaranteed always
to act rightly is a self-contradictory since to be a
person is to be a finite center of freedom. That is,
the belief that God could create wholly good persons
is a meaningless conjunction of words, a logical
impossibility.
- Mackie argues that we could still be free and God
could create the world in such a way that we "happen"
always to make the right decision. The idea is that
God could have the world predestined, but from our
point of view we freely decide--the two events simply
coincide.
- God might see the universe-process without time. On
the lower dimension, think about your path to school
as you walk it in time. On the higher dimension think
about your path from the point of view of a map. In your
mind's eye you can see the whole path in "no time."
So, likewise, God's view of the universe is outside
time.
- Hick's response to Mackie is that this kind of free
will is not freedom at all, but is the same sort of
delusion as some sort of hypnotic suggestion. We wouldn't be
genuinely free unless we could have acted
otherwise. Hick's conclusion is that the complete answer
to the question of the origin of moral evil can only
be answered when we have the answer to the free will
problem.
- What objection has been raised to the traditional
Christian position concerning nonmoral evil? What is Hick's
reply?
- The traditional Christian position is that nonmoral
evil serves the purpose of good in the universe. The main
objection is, of course, Dostoevsky's—namely, how can
the evil inherent in the suffering of one innocent child be
construed as a good thing. Isn't such a position contradictory?
- Hick's response is that the world must be seen as a place
of soul-making; there could not be a place for soul-making
in a permanent hedonistic paradise.
- I.e., he champions a method of Negative
Theodicy: a theodicy, as discussed above, is the attempt to
justify the fact of God's goodness with the fact of evil
in the world. A Negative Theodicy shows that without
evil, there could not be a divine purpose.
- If there were no evil, the laws of nature would have to be
suspended, and there could be no science, nor would we have
ethical concepts such as right, courage, generosity, and so
on because no harm could come to anyone. There would be no
suffering or pain.
- For "soul-making" to be possible, Hick believes we
need all the heartaches of the present world.
- What is Hick's ultimate answer to the problem
of evil?
- Moral evil is forever wrapped up in the problem of free
will. If a causal explanation could be given, there would, of
course, be no free will. This mystery remains.
- Nonmoral evil is a necessary condition for possibility of
the process of soul-making and efficacy of ethics. Even so,
evil can only be answered if there is a future good which overcomes it.
There must be something beyond this life which explains it,
even though we cannot know exactly what it is. There is no
other way to explain the business of soul-making.
Further Reading:
- “Eschatology”
Walter Schmithals reviews the historical background of &lquo;the
doctrine of last things” or the notion of the afterlife from
the Apocalyptics, Gnostics, Christians, and Idealists and concludes
the problem of eschatology is a matter of faith in the Dictionary
of the History of Ideas maintained by the Electronic Text
Center at the University of Virginia Library.
- John Hick:
A brief biography of Hick, a discussion of his theory of religion,
his religious pluralism, and bibliographies are provided by Richard
Peters, Robert Smid, and Mark Mann in the Boston
Collaborative Encyclopedia of Modern Western Theology, edited by
Wesley Wildman.
- John Hick: A brief
discussion of Hick's religious pluralism and reviews of his best-known
works in religious epistemology and theodicy are presented in the
Wikipedia.
- John Hick: Official
Website: Many papers by Hick as well as an extensive bibliography
are made available.
- The Evidential Problem
of Evil: The view that the existence of evil in the world constitutes
some evidence for the conclusion that the creator is not all-good,
all-powerful, or all-knowing is discussed with emphasis on William
Rowe's evidential argument and Stephen Wykstra's objections. In addition,
Nick Trakakis, the author of this entry in The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, sketches a theodicy in response
to Rowe's evidential argument.
- The Logical Problem of
Evil: The problem of evil explained as a logical conflict and
various theistic explanations are discussed with a special emphasis on
Alvin Plantinga's free will defense, by James R. Beebe in The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
- Problem
of Evil. Radoslav A. Tsanoff essays extensive summary approaches
to the problem of evil in philosophical, literary, and religious
thought in the Dictionary of
the History of Ideas.
- The Problem of Evil:
The logical (or incompatibility) and the evidential (or the inductive)
formulations of the argument from evil are reviewed by
Michael Tooley in this entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The inductive or evidential discussion of the problem by Tooley is
extensive.
- “Theodicy”
Leroy E. Loemker's entry in the Dictionary
of the History of Ideas maintained by the Electronic Text
Center at the University of Virginia Library discusses the the
problems raised by the presence of evil in the universe and the
presence of a wholly good omnipotent God. Both philosophical and
theological theodicies, together with their criticisms, are
presented.
“God can do everything' a signification not of Pious Intention
but of Philosophical Truth, they have only landed themselves in
intractable problems and hopeless confusions; no graspable sense
has ever been given to this sentence that did not lead to self-contradiction
or at least to conclusions manifestly untenable from the Christian
point of view.” Peter Geach, Providence and Evil (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 4
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