In his book ‘Evil and the God Love’, John Hick proposes a paradigm that seeks to justify the existence of evil by proving that it is required for the process of soul-making. He claims, “human goodness slowly built up through personal histories of moral effort has a value in the eyes of the Creator which justifies even the long travail of the soul-making process.”[1]Evil, then, has constructive, productive, and positive value: it ultimately benefits each person by enabling human character to develop into divine likeness. This paper is to analyse the formation and theological cogency of Hick’s soul-making theodicy (hereafter SMT).

Hick’s rejection of the Free Will Defence

For centuries, the Free will defence (hereafter FWD) was the central premise through which theologians reflected on the problem of evil. In his SMT, Hick explicitly rejects the “creation-fall myth”[2] since the FWD’s “entrenched” view conflicts with contemporary science and intellectual sensibilities.[3]