The Free Will Defense and Its Limits

Today's Reading

Read Genesis 2:16-17 — the first commandment ever given to a human being. Notice that the commandment presupposes the possibility of disobedience. There would be no point telling the man not to eat from the tree if he could not eat from the tree.

Read Deuteronomy 30:15-19 — Moses' farewell charge: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life."

Read Luke 13:1-5 — Jesus refusing to interpret two notorious disasters as moral verdicts on the victims: "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish."

Read Romans 8:19-22 — Paul's strange claim that the whole physical creation is "groaning together in the pains of childbirth," waiting for liberation.

Read 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." Notice that the last invitation in the Bible is still an invitation — God has not, even at the end, withdrawn the freedom to refuse.

Reflection

The classical Christian defense of God in the face of evil — older than Augustine, older than the philosophers, older than the word theodicy — is the so-called free will defense. It runs like this. God wanted creatures who could love him. Love that is not freely given is not love. So God made creatures who could choose: who could love him or refuse him, who could love each other or hate each other, who could obey or rebel. The risk of moral evil is the necessary cost of the possibility of love. God ran the risk because the prize was worth it.

C.S. Lewis put it as memorably as anyone, in Mere Christianity: "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 in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water." And then the harder edge: "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."

The argument has been around in different forms for centuries. Alvin Plantinga's modern version — in God, Freedom, and Evil — gave it new philosophical rigor in the late twentieth century, against atheist philosophers who had been arguing that the existence of any evil at all is logically incompatible with an all-good, all-powerful God. Plantinga's argument, broadly accepted now even by many of his secular critics, is that the atheist has not, in fact, proved the contradiction. It is not contradictory to say: God could create free creatures, free creatures might choose evil, and an all-good God might prefer a world with free creatures and some evil to a world with no free creatures and no evil. As Plantinga writes: "A world in which there is no free will, but only puppets, would not be a world in which moral good was possible at all. The price of free will is the possibility of moral evil; and God evidently considered the price worth paying."

This is real argument. It is not a Sunday school cliché. It dismantles the strongest version of the atheist's case — that the mere existence of any evil refutes the existence of God. It does not. The whole tradition of Christian thought, from Genesis 2 to Revelation 22, presupposes that God made us with the capacity to choose, and the choosing matters. Deuteronomy 30 stages it as a national vocation — "I have set before you life and death... therefore choose life." Revelation, the last book of the Bible, ends not with a coerced redemption but with an invitation: "Let the one who is thirsty come." Even at the end, even after everything, God will not force the door.

So far, so good. But notice what the free will defense does not do.

It does not address natural evil. The earthquake that killed the village did not require a moral choice from any human being to occur. The cancer growing in the child's brain is not anyone's free decision. The tsunami, the famine, the genetic disorder, the plague — these are not the consequences of someone exercising their will. The free will defense, taken alone, leaves them entirely unanswered.

Lewis was honest about this in The Problem of Pain. He did try to extend the framework: he speculated that the angelic fall corrupted nature itself, that the world we now inhabit is in some sense subject to demonic distortion (Romans 8 is suggestive: the creation "groans," "subjected to futility"). It is one possible reading. It is also frankly speculative, and Lewis knew it. He never claimed the free will defense settled the question of natural evil, only that any plausible Christian account must engage with it. "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." Lewis means: even the natural processes that give us bodies, weather, food, gravity, and time can be sources of pain when they collide with us. To remove all such suffering you would have to remove the natural order itself.

Maybe. But this is colder comfort than Lewis admitted. Tell the parent of the leukemia child that the cancer is the unavoidable side-effect of having a body in a physical world, and you have given a true philosophical statement that bears almost no pastoral weight. The argument is right; it is also, by itself, useless to the bedside.

There is a second limit to the free will defense, and Lewis named it more sharply after his wife died. The argument works, when it works, at the level of worlds — God's choice of which kind of world to create. It does not work at the level of persons. Even granting that God had reasons for creating a world in which free creatures could fall, what reason did he have for permitting this free creature, this fall, this victim, this hour? The free will defense gives a cosmic-scale answer to a question that, for the sufferer, is microscopic. The grieving mother does not want to know why God created a world in which loss was possible. She wants to know why this particular child died.

Jesus himself, when asked about a famous instance of mass death — Pilate's massacre of Galilean worshippers, and the random collapse of a tower in Siloam that killed eighteen — refuses to apply any explanatory framework at all. Luke 13 is one of the most important passages in the New Testament for our subject. People come to Jesus expecting him to interpret the tragedies as God's verdict on the victims. He flatly refuses. The Galileans were not worse sinners. The eighteen who died at Siloam were not worse offenders. The disasters do not, in his teaching, function as windows onto particular divine judgments. They function as universal warnings that life is short and repentance is urgent.

This is striking. Jesus, who could have used the moment to give us a master-class in theodicy, used it instead to redirect the question. He did not say here is why those people died. He said you also will die; what are you doing about it?

Where does this leave the free will defense? In its proper place: as one true thing, useful in the right setting, that does not pretend to be the whole answer. Use it, when reasoning with the skeptic who claims the existence of any evil at all is incompatible with God's existence. Hold it, when you are tempted to think God should have made a world in which our wills were rigged. Set it gently aside, when you are at the bedside of someone whose suffering is not the consequence of any moral choice they or anyone they know has made.

For the bedside, what we have is not the free will defense. What we have is the cross. We will get there in the days ahead.

Going Deeper

Read Luke 13:1-5 again, slowly. Notice how Jesus refuses to use a tragedy as a teaching moment about the victims. Notice that he does, however, use it as a teaching moment about us. Then ask: how often does Christian conversation about disaster focus on explaining the dead, when the Gospel is asking us to examine the living?