The Christian May Say

we humans rightly do many things we expect to cause avoidable harm. We build a bridge from San Francisco to Marin County, knowing that in the construction some workmen will fall into the water and die. We could avoid their deaths by not building the bridge. But the bridge is a great good. Given our human limitations, we cannot build it without some people dying a result. So we build it and accept their deaths as part of the cost of bridging those waters. And God‘s permission of evil may also be justified by the greater goods it leads to.

An omnipotent being, of course, does not face all the hard choices we do. If he wants a bridge across those waters, he need only say, “Let there be a bridge.” And there will be. This fact that God is supposed to be omnipotent puts constraints on the kinds of good he might be able to use to justify his acceptance of the evils he allows. What kind of good could be so intimately connected with evil that even an omnipotent being would have to accept the evil, as the price of realizing that good? And what good could be so great that it would justify such a being‘s accepting the amount of evil there is in the world as the price of attaining that good?

The usual answer is: freedom. There must be freedom, if there is to be moral goodness. And the price of giving humans freedom is that sometimes they will misuse it. Even an omnipotent being can‘t cause a person to freely do good. If he caused one of his creatures to behave well, that person would no longer be acting freely. His ‘acts’ would no longer be his acts, and he would not deserve moral credit for them. Freedom, with the moral goodness which sometimes results from it, is a good sufficiently great that it makes the evils which also result worth accepting. This is what is called the free will defense.