On John Hick’s Soul-Making Theodicy

John Hick tackles the problem of evil by first exploring the ideas and thoughts that have become deeply rooted within most of the paths of Christianity due to St. Augustine. Hick’s main objection is to the Augustinian belief of a “fearful and calamitous fall of man long ago in the ‘dark backward and abysm of time,’ and of a subsequent participation by all men in the deadly entail of sin” (213). If one were to agree with the doctrine that Adam and Eve separated humanity from God forever b

Naturally, if one were to believe that God should have created a hedonistic playground for us in which our perfection would not be lost (under the assumption that we were created as such from the very beginning), then Hick’s theodicy does not solve the problem of evil in any way, shape or form. Nevertheless, within Hick’s (and my own) world view, which asserts that humanity was not created perfectly to begin with and we should not be taken care of as pets or playthings because we need to strive and face the challenges in the world around us in order to fulfill the second stage of God’s creation process, then the problem of evil is essentially solved.

However, the second stage, the “more difficult stage of God’s creative work” (214) consists of God trying to lead humanity as completely free persons along the path that He wants them to walk “after his likeness.” This is harder because God can not do this by himself. This stage of the creation process requires our cooperation, because personal life is “essentially free and self-directing” (215). We must willingly cooperate in such a fashion to become the perfected persons that God wants us to become. Here Hick makes an extremely central value judgement which is that goodness that one has worked for is infinitely better than any ready-made goodness that one would otherwise get handed to them on a silver platter. Hick claims that the world in which we were placed, one where evil exists, is a world which is quite conducive to the objective of soul-making.

avoids logical contradictions and if one believes as Hick does, that humanity was not made already perfect, then it does not assault our intuitions either. One of my own reasons for agreeing with Hick is that I think people have a tendency to put themselves apart from and higher than the rest of the life in our world. I see this in the thoughts that humanity was created for the sole purpose of conquering and controlling the world around us. Also, I see this concept revealed in the Augustinian tradition that states that we were created as perfect beings. Likewise, for those people who belie

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