When Free Will Stops Explaining Evil

The free-will defence asks us to consider whether moral freedom could justify God's permitting some wrongdoing. The God in question is understood to be all-knowing, all-powerful and wholly good. A being with those attributes would know about suffering, have the power to prevent it and have a moral reason to do so. The proposed reply is that creatures capable of choosing between good and evil possess something valuable, and that securing this value requires leaving some possibility of wrongdoing.

On an account of freedom that requires a choice to remain genuinely open, determining every decision in advance would remove the kind of agency being valued. A person whose conduct is always made good by someone else would have a different relationship to that conduct. The difficult step comes when this possibility is used to explain the suffering we actually encounter. Allowing a harmful choice and allowing all its consequences are distinguishable decisions. We routinely limit what people can do to one another while leaving them substantial freedom.

A logical defence has a narrower task: it attempts to show that God's existence and evil are compatible by describing a possible reason for permitting evil. It need not establish that this is God's actual reason. A theodicy attempts the more demanding explanation of why God does permit suffering. Even if the logical defence succeeds, questions about the kind, amount and distribution of suffering remain. A possible justification for some wrongdoing leaves much of the world to be accounted for.

Human agency also varies with the capacities and conditions through which a choice is made. Economic pressure can restrict available alternatives, and a person's history can affect what they expect from others or recognise as a possible response. These influences belong in an assessment of responsibility. Predictability alone cannot tell us how much freedom someone has: a reliable decision may express a person's considered values, while an unpredictable act may involve little control. The empirical question concerns which capacities and opportunities are affected, rather than whether behaviour has causes.

Consider a hypothetical request for a child to sit still and sustain attention. If the child has ADHD, difficulty meeting that demand may require an account of attention and self-regulation, together with consideration of how the task and support could change. Treating the difficulty as a straightforward refusal would miss what needs explaining. The example illustrates why a person's ability to meet a particular demand needs to be understood before their response is judged. In questions involving blame, we likewise need to establish what a person understood, what they could control and which alternatives were realistically available.

Experiments associated with Libet, and later studies using brain imaging, add questions about conscious intention. In tasks involving simple movements or arbitrary choices, researchers have detected neural activity before participants report becoming aware of their intention; some signals predict aspects of the later choice better than chance. Those findings require interpretation. The tasks, the accuracy of prediction and the method of dating awareness all matter. Activity preceding a reported intention does not by itself establish that a decision was already irrevocably settled, or that the person had no control over it.

Calling the activity physical also leaves open whether it belongs to the person's agency. If deliberation depends on the brain, discovering neural processes involved in it would be expected. Philosophers disagree about whether responsibility requires an ability to have done otherwise under exactly the same conditions, or can instead depend on acting through one's own capacities for understanding and responding to reasons. Neuroscience can inform this dispute without a timing experiment settling it. My concern is how much the theological explanation assumes about freedom before establishing which account of it is defensible.

Even a substantial capacity for choice reaches only part of the suffering in question. A child's cancer or an animal's pain in a naturally occurring fire is not produced by that victim's moral decision. Human choices can affect prevention, treatment and exposure, but acknowledging those contributions leaves suffering that would occur without human wrongdoing. A further argument is needed to connect its permission to some valuable freedom or other good. The free-will reply, applied only to human choices, has not yet supplied it.

Sometimes permitting harm can be justified by the consequences of preventing it. Imagine a rescue team with limited equipment that can reach one person only by abandoning a larger group. Under those stipulated conditions, there may be a reason to accept the smaller loss. The justification depends on the team's real limitations and on the absence of a better available course. Transferring this reasoning to God requires care, because limited equipment is precisely the sort of restriction an omnipotent being is assumed not to face.

Omnipotence is commonly understood to concern what is logically possible. If a good necessarily entails some risk or suffering, demanding that God secure the good without that condition may describe an impossibility. The work is in establishing the connection. Why would preventing this injury, reducing its severity or providing help necessarily destroy the valuable capacity? Freedom can give a reason to allow people consequential choices; explaining why it requires a particular victim to suffer to a particular extent takes a further argument.

William Rowe's imagined fawn, badly burned in a forest fire and suffering for days before dying, concentrates attention on that difficulty. The case presents suffering for which we can see no proportionate good or prevention of an equally bad or worse evil. Its force depends on whether the absence of an apparent justification gives us reason to think there is none. We cannot inspect every possible consequence or divine purpose. We can still ask whether the suffering we observe is what we should expect if the world is governed by an all-powerful, wholly good being.

God may have reasons beyond our understanding, so our inability to identify a justification places a limit on what we can infer. If we cannot identify the relevant good or say how the suffering is connected to it, we have identified a possibility we cannot assess. Calling that possibility an explanation can make it too easy to move past the very suffering that prompted the question. The stronger the appeal to our inability to judge, the harder it becomes to say how confidently the world displays the moral goodness being attributed to its creator.

A creator might give moral goodness no privileged place among the features of existence it values. A being that valued suffering for its own sake would be difficult to call good in the sense that makes its concern for us intelligible. Invoking divine emotions would not resolve the issue; the assessment concerns what is valued and permitted. Conversely, classical accounts of divine impassibility need not deny care merely because they deny that God is passively changed by events. The relation between that kind of care and preventable suffering still requires an account.

Divine hiddenness raises a related problem about love. J. L. Schellenberg argues that a perfectly loving God would be open to a relationship with any person capable of one whose lack of belief was not caused by resistance. Someone who lacks belief in God's existence cannot participate in a conscious, reciprocal relationship with God. Nonresistant nonbelief therefore puts pressure on that conception of perfect love. Assessing the argument involves asking what relationship requires, whether such nonbelief occurs and what reasons could justify allowing it. Human freedom cannot automatically explain the absence of belief in someone who is willing to relate.

I think free will can form part of a defence of theism, provided we remain clear about what it has accomplished. Showing that freedom might justify permitting some wrongdoing does not explain every constraint under which people act, every consequence they are allowed to impose, or suffering that arises without their choices. The arguments leave room for disagreement about agency, divine purposes and the limits of our knowledge. They also leave a substantial burden on the claim that an all-powerful, wholly good God governs the world we encounter.

Further reading: William L. Rowe (1979), The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism; J. L. Schellenberg (2025), Précis on the hiddenness argument; Soon et al. (2008), Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain; National Institute of Mental Health, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: What You Need to Know.