The Free Will Defense and Its Limits

Today's Scripture

Genesis 2:16-17 — "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.'"

Deuteronomy 30:19 — "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live."

Revelation 22:17 — "The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.' And let the one who hears say, 'Come.' And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price."

The Big Idea

The oldest Christian answer to "why does God allow evil?" is this: God wanted creatures who could love, and love cannot be forced — so God gave us a real choice, and real choice carries real risk. That answer is true and important. Today we take it seriously, and then we are honest about what it cannot do — because the Bible is honest about that too.

Reflection

Why love had to be dangerous

The very first command in the Bible is also the first risk. Genesis 2:16-17 — "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat." There is no point commanding someone who cannot disobey. The command itself tells you what kind of creature Adam is: one who can say no. From its second chapter, the Bible presents a God who made beings free enough to break his heart.

Why would he do that? Try a thought experiment. Program a robot to say "I love you" every morning at 7 a.m. It will never forget, never refuse, never fail. It will also never mean it. Love that cannot be withheld is not love; it is playback. C.S. Lewis drew the conclusion:

"A world of automata — of creatures that worked like machines — would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

But the same door that lets love in lets evil in. That is not a flaw in the design; it is the design's unavoidable cost:

"If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Scripture keeps staging this dangerous dignity. Moses, at the end of his life: Deuteronomy 30:19 — "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life." Joshua, at the end of his: Joshua 24:15 — "choose this day whom you will serve... But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." God pleads, warns, and woos — but he does not rig the vote.

And notice what freedom is for. Galatians 5:13 — "For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another." Freedom was never meant to be a blank check. It is the capacity for love — which is exactly why its misuse can do so much damage. The same hands that can embrace can strike. That is not two designs; it is one.

The strongest version of the argument

In the twentieth century, some philosophers claimed the existence of any evil logically disproves an all-good, all-powerful God. The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga answered with what is now called the free will defense, and even most secular philosophers concede it succeeded:

"A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all." — Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil

Unpack that slowly. A world of free people — with all its betrayals and wars — can still be a better world than a tidy universe of puppets, because only the free world contains actual love, actual courage, actual goodness. If that is even possibly true, then God and evil are not a logical contradiction; God could have a justifying reason. The claim that "evil disproves God" quietly died in the philosophy journals, in large part because of this argument.

So the free will defense is not a Sunday school dodge. It guards something precious: your choices are real, your love matters, and history is not a puppet show. When a classmate or a coworker tells you that the existence of suffering simply proves there is no God, this argument is a fair and honest reply. It has stood up in the hardest rooms philosophy has.

But now watch the Bible do something our arguments rarely do. It tells us where the argument stops.

Where the argument runs out

Whose free will caused the earthquake? Whose choice grew the tumor in a six-year-old's brain? The free will defense explains murder and cruelty — what philosophers call moral evil. It does not, by itself, explain tsunamis, plagues, and genetic disease — what they call natural evil. Scripture hints that creation itself is broken beyond our choosing: Romans 8:22 — "For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now." The world itself is wounded, not just the people in it. Lewis admitted that even a good physical world has edges that can cut:

"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself." — C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

True — and yet say it at a hospital bedside, and hear how it lands. Every argument we have met today has this same limit: it speaks about worlds, while the sufferer is asking about this child, this diagnosis, this Tuesday. The grieving mother does not want to know why God made a universe where loss is possible. She wants to know why her son. Philosophy answers questions at the scale of galaxies. Grief asks them at the scale of one hospital room, and the gap between those two scales is where so much well-meant Christian comfort goes wrong.

Here is the astonishing thing: Jesus faced exactly these questions, and he refused to answer them with formulas. People brought him the news of a massacre — worshipers cut down by Pilate's soldiers — and he raised a second headline himself: Luke 13:1-5 — "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners...? No, I tell you... Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." The tower was natural evil; the massacre was moral evil. In both cases Jesus refuses to explain the victims — and redirects the question to the souls of the living: you are mortal too; be ready to meet God.

He does the same when his disciples meet a man born blind and ask whose sin caused it. John 9:1-3 — "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him." No backstory of blame. Instead, a promise that God will be at work even here — and then Jesus heals him. Notice the pattern: where we demand explanations of suffering, Jesus gives warnings, mercy, and himself.

The freest choice ever made

So is there any deeper word for the suffering no one chose? The church's oldest teachers pointed past the mechanics of freedom to the character of God. Augustine put the conviction in a single sentence:

"God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist." — Augustine, Enchiridion

That is not an explanation. It is a confidence — that God permits nothing he cannot redeem. Joni Eareckson Tada has more right than most to test that claim. Paralyzed from the shoulders down at seventeen in a diving accident, she has lived six decades in a wheelchair, and she compresses everything she has learned into nine words:

"God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves." — Joni Eareckson Tada, When God Weeps

How could she possibly know God hates it? Because of where the logic of freedom finally leads. The free will defense says God respects choices. The gospel says something greater: God used his own freedom to walk into our suffering. Jesus said of his life, John 10:18 — "No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord." The freest choice ever made in this dangerous world was the Son of God choosing the cross. He did not stand outside the risk of creation like an engineer reviewing an acceptable failure rate. He came down into the wreckage and let it fall on him.

After the First World War had buried a generation of young men, the poet Edward Shillito wrote that only this kind of God could still be believed:

"But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, and not a god has wounds, but Thou alone." — Edward Shillito, "Jesus of the Scars"

That is what we bring to the bedside — not the free will defense, true as it is, but the God with scars. And notice how the Bible ends. After every argument, after every catastrophe of misused freedom, the last page is still an invitation, not a command: Revelation 22:17 — "The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.'... let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price." Even at the end, God does not force the door. He stands at it, wounded and alive, and calls.

Going Deeper

Read Luke 13:1-5 again, slowly. Notice that Jesus will not use a tragedy to explain the dead — but he does use it to awaken the living. Then make a short, honest list: one place where the free will defense genuinely helps your faith, and one place where it cannot reach. Bring the second one to the God with scars, and leave it with him rather than with an argument.