The Innocent Evil

Name: Christopher Cover

Student #:5727292
Course: PHIL 1F90
Seminar Leader: Jeff
Turn it in #:
Upon arrival back to Earth Father Tom shared his stories of travel over tea with his mutual
acquaintances John Hick and Chris as he struggled to find a way to break this newfound
knowledge to the religious and scientific communities.

Father Tom: What need was there for a race such as this to be so fully wiped out? How could the
God of all that is good allow such a thing to happen?

Chris: What do you mean Father Tom? Is that simply not just the way of the universe.

Hick: A valid question Father Tom. The problem does not lie in why did good let this happen
But rather, why does evil such as this exist?

Father Tom: I have struggled to reason that perhaps it was just their time in Gods eyes and so he
exercised his will.

Chris: Evils such as this have existed long before this tragedy they are just a part of the way it all
works. if the theories of the Boston Personalist school are to be believed, God is doing the best
he can with what is available to him.

Hick: Well let us look at this, what powers must be present for us to consider an entity "God"

Father Tom: God is all good, all powerful and all loving.

Hick : Then we have a problem. If "God" is all good and all loving and in direct opposition to
evil then he must want to stop it and prevent the suffering of his creation. But he is already all
powerful so why not just do it? The fact that evil exists means then that he is either not
omnipotent that is to say all powerful or all loving.

Father Tom: But then between those two definitions what is described cannot be God!

Hick: This is true, but what if it exist not in natural opposition to the heavenly mandate but
instead as part of the process of soul-making. As a means of allowing his creations to achieve
their status of being in the Christ-like image through hardships experienced in this life.

Chris: So are saying is that rather than being in opposition it is instead a necessary consequence
of the system and serves to achieve a greater goal?

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Hick: I would have to break this into two points. Firstly being the problem of moral evils which
are those evils done of the free will of man and why its continued existence allowed by an all
powerful god.

Chris: So moral evils are things like crime and violence towards others right?

Father Tom: Yes but also things like wars and poverty which are products of the acts of man.

Hick :Moral evil arguably could have been done away with in the first instance by God when
creating persons. He had at all times the choice of creating a being which instead of choosing of
their own free will to do good while every now and again doing bad making it so that at all times
the being would have done good.

Chris: I never considered that; wouldn't that just go to show that because he didn't create them or
couldn't create them because god is indeed not all powerful?

Hick: These innocent automata would not fall into what we generally consider to be persons; as
their will would, at the core, have been predestined to make choices contrary to what may be
freely open to them.

Father Tom: Had he made us to act in a predestined way then we would not be truly free things
happen according to his will but our reaction is our own. We cannot say that he definitely could
not have made us one way or the other in all his infinite power.

Hick: It is not outside his scope to have created such beings but they could not have been what
we considered to be persons. If we all acted based on a predetermined set of rules and
instructions the closest comparison would be that of a hypnotist who gave suggestions upon
which we then acted without remembering. Our will would be ours from our viewpoint but in
truth and in fact we would be naught but puppets in the eyes of God.

Father Tom: So soul making is the process of allowing persons to come of their own volition to a
relationship with God through their free will

Hick: In a nutshell yes, and in a wider sense the fact that through free will we learn that actions
have consequences in turn gives rise fundamentally to our virtues. If you would allow me i can

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show how this follows through to the concept of Non-moral evil which stems from things outside
of mans control.

Chris: So events such as Earthquakes, Hurricanes and other disasters like Floods are what could
be considered non-moral evils I presume?

Father Tom: Even something so complete as the supernova could fall within the definition Hick
has given I suppose, but they did not deserve to suffer as they did with a Creator with power such
as God who could have stopped it and for such a reason as being a mere symbol to us.

Hick: Not every evil out of the control of the persons affected can be said to be serving a divine
purpose but what could be said is that the purpose as Judaeo-Christian religions understand it
could not be fulfilled in a world which existed in a Permanent Pleasure Paradise.

Chris: What do you mean by Permanent Pleasure Paradise?

Hick : A permanent pleasure paradise is a situation in which it is assumed that man is created as
fully formed creature and as such his creator would make the best possible environment in which
this creature has the absolute best possible comfort.

Father Tom: that sounds wonderful tell me more, It sounds comparable to the story of Eden.

Hick : True it does, but the permanent pleasure paradise could not exist as in such a world there
could be no consequences or hardships unlike in our own. there would be no need for persons to
be virtuous or kind as every other individual would have their immediate wants and needs
fulfilled instantly.

Father Tom: Merely having needs fulfilled ought not to negate the kindness towards others I
would think you have to be more thorough in you explanation

Hick: Fair enough, say for example a child was in danger of falling out a window what would
you do Father Tom?

Father Tom: I would step up to try and catch the child even if it meant getting hurt in the process
of course!

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Hick: Inside the PPP this would be an unnecessary action as there could be no common standard
universal laws of consequence for every situation. for example a child falling out a window
would cause suffering to the child and the parents of this child. the laws of gravity would have to
be suspended by God so that this child would safely float to the ground and you as an inhabitant
of the paradise would know that no harm could come to them be it gravity suspension or the
appearance of a bed of feathers and thus have no real need to go out of your way to save the
child. As a result right there both the virtues of kindness and courage have been lost if this was
the way the world worked

Chris: I think I follow what you are getting at, Nobody could harm another person except for the
belief from their own perspective that the actually did. Stolen objects would have to
automatically reappear and there would be no consequences for lying or anything else for that
matter since everyone had to be satisfied with what happened to them at all times.

Hick: There could be no sciences as no rule would be set in stone for scientists to study or
universal laws which persons feared the consequences of each person would be in almost in a
dream state of their own with each of their individual needs fulfilled to the maximum.

Father Tom: That would be chaos! No one would be able to tell right from wrong if everything
always worked out.

Hick: Exactly, the very concept of achieving the status of being in God's image would be lost to
the nature of the world created by the permanent pleasure paradise. The virtues are born out of
the hardships experienced in this life, essentially making the soul into what the final product
ought to be. A world like our own is therefore necessary to create and mould the free beings we
are into the divine design.

Father Tom: Through righteously accepting the hardships of the world we can attain a our full
potential. The good can indeed come from great evil but does not negate the evil done.

Chris: But what if like those poor souls given to that inferno for a symbol; we had already
achieved all this and were innocent and good did not create hardships and evils for each other but
lived peacefully?

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Hick: The death of Christ is the primary faithful example of this as his death although tragic was
the divine will and it brought about the redemption of humanity through the application of
hardships to spiritual uses. In a matter as you describe Father, had not all the earthly soul-making
taken place and therefore a completion of purpose, what is left to a situation such as that but the
considered forging of the soul in the afterlife as there is no truly perfect soul alive mistakes are
made on even minor matters and as such the process of soul - making logically has to continue in
the afterlife.

Father Tom: This cannot be so Hick, for all life's hardships I have spent my earthly time
believing in the promise of Heaven and peace in death. If what you say is true then Heaven
would merely be a step above earth. The same hardships with only and increased closeness to
God.

Hick: The star of Bethlehem was a great good signalling the birth of salvation within the Judeo-
Christian belief and like the child for which it shone it is a symbol of a great good borne of a
great evil.

Chris: A civilization utterly obliterated for no reason would be no act of a good God. But when
framed within the grounds of soul-making I guess it could make sense that since they had served
their worldly aim. A symbol of good unknown at the time was destroyed by an evil to serve
another greater good. It is chilling to think that such a possibility exists for us if such a theory is
true and we were to achieve a peace such as theirs.

Hick: Father Tom, your faith need not be shaken for a matter which at the core is already a major
occurrence in your beliefs. Take its purpose as it is to be a point of reflection at what it takes to
make a soul in the divine image.

Father Tom: It is a bitter pill to swallow and the many who I must deliver this new knowledge to
may not take it in the manner as you have laid out. This could easily be construed as the non-
existence of a God all together.

Chris: It is not a difficult leap to make though I cannot full agree with either argument fully. We
cannot know what is the will of a God who exists and neither can we ascertain if he even truly
exists and for what purpose were we put here. If the purpose of life is soul making then simply

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living in the best possible manner one can ought to be enough, if in the end the soul making
process shall continue after death. The fact that they were innocent to begin with, whether by
design or of their own volition to me says that a God who obliterated them did so knowingly
choosing to end the innocent. The act was not of a non-moral nature but a genuine moral evil
against the innocent regardless of the symbolic purpose.

Father Tom: Yes, many of a like mind are likely to say such things, there is no justification for
Gods actions nor is there any reason for him to give one. The one who has created something is
perfectly free to do as he wishes with his creation and this truly was a point where one has to
question the motives of a God who could allow the death of these innocents for a sign.

Chris: A creator has no true motive to explain to his creation its purpose. I can agree with you on
that Father Tom, but all this has left me with are more questions. As logical a path your argument
follows Hick there is no way to truly know if it holds except to meet the being who may or may
not exist. Was the Christian Eden and the ensuing fall of man God realizing the error of a PPP
and correcting it through a test of free will? Were these aliens, our innocent Automata forsaken
for a more functional creation? These are the things left me at the end of our conversation.