What Is the Free Will Defence for Evil?

Question 2083

The free will defence is the best known Christian answer to the charge that the existence of evil disproves the existence of God. In its simplest form it argues that a world containing free creatures who can genuinely love and obey is more valuable than a world of programmed puppets, and that such freedom necessarily opens the door to the possibility of evil. If that is so, then the presence of evil does not contradict the goodness or the power of God, because not even God can give real freedom and forbid every misuse of it in the same breath.

Many believers have leaned on this argument in a sleepless night, and many sceptics have hurled evil at the faith as their heaviest stone. It is worth understanding the case well, both for what it can do and for what it cannot. We hold Scripture above every human system of philosophy, so we will test the free will defence by the Bible rather than bowing to it as the final word on a matter this heavy.

What the Free Will Defence Claims

The sceptic’s sharpest version of the problem runs like this. If God is all good He would want to abolish evil, and if God is all powerful He would be able to, yet evil plainly exists, so the all good and all powerful God does not. This is what philosophers call the logical problem of evil, and it claims an outright contradiction at the very heart of Christian belief. The reply is that there is no contradiction at all once we add one further truth that the sceptic has left out, namely that God freely chose to create genuinely free beings.

The argument grants that God is able to do anything that is truly possible, then points out that a free creature who cannot possibly choose wrongly is not in fact a free creature at all. To make a person who always freely chooses the good is a contradiction in terms, like drawing a square circle, and not even omnipotence draws square circles. So God could create a world of free agents only by accepting the genuine risk that they would sin and bring evil into it. The evil in the world traces not to a flaw in God but to the misuse of the freedom He gave, and the bare existence of evil therefore proves nothing whatever against Him.

Put positively, the argument holds that a universe of persons able to love, refuse, worship and rebel is a richer and better universe than a clockwork of unfeeling machines, even though the better universe carries within it the possibility of evil. God judged that a world able to give Him real love was worth the risk of a world able to give Him real defiance. The free will defence simply says, on careful reflection, that He judged rightly.

The Biblical Basis for Human Freedom

A philosophical argument is only as good as its footing in Scripture, and here the case stands on solid ground. From the opening chapters of the Bible, God deals with human beings as responsible agents who really do choose. He set before Adam a command that could be kept or broken. Through Moses He said to Israel, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life.” Through Joshua He called the nation to “choose this day whom you will serve.” These are not the words of a God who moves His creatures about like pieces on a board.

They are the appeals of a Lord who has given genuine moral agency and holds people truly accountable for how they use it. We are neither Calvinist nor Arminian in our framing of these things, but Biblicist, letting Scripture set the terms of the discussion, and Scripture everywhere treats the human will as something real. The call to repent, the wide offer of the gospel to all, the warnings and the tender invitations, all of them assume that the hearer is able to respond one way or the other. So the argument is not importing a foreign idea into the faith. It is taking seriously what the Bible assumes on nearly every page, that God made creatures who can say yes or no to Him. Readers who want the fuller picture of how human freedom sits alongside God’s complete knowledge can see our answer to whether we have free will if God knows everything.

How the Argument Answers the Logical Problem

With that biblical footing in place, the free will defence dismantles the claim of contradiction. The sceptic said that a good and powerful God would both want and be able to remove all evil whatsoever. The answer is that God could remove all possibility of evil only by removing all possibility of free love along with it, and that a world stripped bare of free love is not obviously the better world he imagines. So it is simply false that an all good and all powerful God would necessarily abolish evil at any cost. He might well permit it for the sake of a greater good that could not exist at all without the very freedom that also makes evil possible.

Notice carefully what this argument does and does not attempt to do. It does not claim to know God’s every reason for every particular evil that has ever fallen on the earth. It claims something more modest and, for that reason, more durable, that the mere existence of evil is not logically inconsistent with the existence of a good and almighty God. That alone is enough to break the sceptic’s argument, because his charge was strict contradiction, and the defence shows there is none. Many philosophers, believing and unbelieving alike, now freely grant that the logical problem of evil fails for precisely this reason. We explore the wider pastoral question of why God permits wrongdoing at all in our answer to why God allows evil.

It is worth drawing one further distinction that often gets blurred in the heat of debate. Philosophers separate a defence from a theodicy. A theodicy attempts to give God’s actual reasons for permitting evil, a far more ambitious and far more vulnerable project, since it must read the hidden purposes of heaven. A defence attempts only to show that the existence of evil and the existence of God are not contradictory, which is a much smaller and a much firmer claim. The free will defence belongs to this second and humbler category. It does not pretend to account for every dark thread in the long tapestry of history, nor to explain the reason behind any single sorrow. It simply removes the charge that belief in a good and almighty God has become irrational in the face of evil. Keeping this distinction clear protects us from promising more than we can deliver, and it guards the sufferer from the cruelty of a neat explanation pressed upon him where only comfort was wanted.

The Limits of the Free Will Defence

Honesty requires that we mark the boundaries of the argument plainly, because the free will defence is a tool and not a Saviour. It answers the logical charge of contradiction well, but it does not by itself soothe the wound of a particular grief. To a mother standing at a graveside, a philosophical syllogism is cold comfort if it is handed to her as the whole of the reply. The argument explains why evil can exist in God’s world at all. It does not explain why this evil fell upon this child in this house, and we should never pretend to her that it does.

The case also strains badly when it meets natural evil, the earthquake and the disease that no human will appears to cause. Some have stretched it to cover the free choices of fallen angelic powers, but the cleaner biblical answer ties natural evil to the curse that followed the fall, as we have set out in our answer to whether God is responsible for natural evil. So the free will defence is best seen as one part of a larger biblical account rather than the whole of it. We value it for what it actually does, which is to clear away a false charge, and we do not ask it to carry weight it was never built to bear.

There is a further and deeper limit. This is philosophy, and philosophy is the servant of Scripture and never its master. We do not believe in the goodness of God because an argument happens to be tidy. We believe because God has revealed Himself in His word and proved His heart for ever at the cross. The argument may help an honest doubter to see that his objection is far weaker than he had supposed, yet it was never meant to be the rock on which a soul’s faith finally stands or falls.

The Defence and the Foreknowledge of God

A sharp objector will press the matter further still. If God foreknew with perfect certainty that His free creatures would fall, is He not still responsible for the evil He clearly saw coming and went ahead and made the world anyway? The argument does not deny the foreknowledge of God for a moment. The Lord knew that Adam would sin and that the world would be stained by it, and He created that world still. Yet foreknowledge is not the same thing as authorship. To see a free choice in advance is not in any way to make that choice. God’s knowing that a man will sin no more causes the sin than your knowing the sun will rise tomorrow causes the dawn to break.

We hold that faith precedes regeneration and that God’s saving work runs through, and not over the top of, the responsible response of the creature He is saving. Within that frame the argument fits very naturally indeed. God foreknew the misuse of freedom, judged the gift of freedom worth the giving even so, and laid His whole plan of redemption before the foundation of the world to meet the evil He had foreseen. So His foreknowledge does not make Him the guilty cause of evil at all. It shows Him rather as the One who counted the full cost in advance and then chose to pay it Himself rather than cancel the freedom that makes love possible. James reminds us that God “tempts no one,” and the argument honours that truth by laying the choice of evil squarely where it belongs, upon the creature and never upon the Maker.

Where the Argument Meets the Cross

The deepest Christian answer to evil is not finally an argument at all but an event in history. The free will defence can show an unbeliever that his logic does not in fact disprove God, and that is a real and worthwhile service, yet it cannot heal the man who offers it. Only the cross can do that work. At Calvary the God who permitted evil did not stay at a safe and lofty distance from it. He stepped down into the very worst that free creatures could do, was betrayed and beaten and nailed to a Roman gibbet, and there He absorbed the evil of the whole world into His own body and bore it away.

This is where the argument quietly hands the question over to the gospel. Philosophy can clear away a false objection from the doorway, but it cannot dry a single tear or raise one body from a grave. The cross does both at once. It proves that God is not indifferent to the evil His creatures commit, for He bore its full weight Himself rather than wave it aside. It proves too that the freedom which made evil possible is the same freedom by which a guilty sinner may now turn and be saved. The very will that can choose rebellion can, by grace, choose the Saviour instead. So we offer the argument to the doubter as a clearing of the ground, and then we point him past the argument altogether to the Man on the cross, who answers evil not with a neat explanation but with His own poured-out blood.

So, now what?

If you are using the free will defence to steady your own faith, then use it for what it is worth and not for more. Let it free you from the lie that evil somehow disproves God, and then move on quickly from the argument to the Lord Himself. A tidy syllogism has never yet carried a single person through real grief. A living Saviour has carried millions through the very darkness that no argument could ever light, and He will carry you in those same strong and gentle arms.

If you are speaking with a friend who throws evil at the faith as a supposed knockdown blow, the argument is a gracious gift to place gently in his hands. Show him kindly that his objection quietly assumes God could make free creatures who never once sin, and that this very assumption hides a contradiction within it. Then do not stop there, as though winning the point were the goal. Tell him about the cross, where the God he accuses took the evil of the world upon Himself. An argument may open a door in a hard heart, but it is the crucified and risen Jesus who walks a soul all the way through it.

And if you are simply weary of the whole question, hear this and rest. You do not need to win every debate in order to trust a good God. The argument has its place and does its honest work, but your hope does not rest upon it for a single moment, and it was never meant to. It rests upon the One who entered our suffering, conquered it from the inside, and now holds out His wounded hand to every soul that will choose Him. Choose life, as He has always said, and leave the unanswered edges of the mystery resting safely in the hands that were pierced for you.

“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.” Deuteronomy 30:19

For Further Study

Those who wish to study the free will defence further should weigh it carefully against Scripture at every turn. Norman Geisler’s writings on the problem of evil present a thorough evangelical treatment, and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology surveys the argument and its limits fairly and clearly. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Henry Thiessen’s Lectures in Systematic Theology set human responsibility within a sound, non-Calvinist biblical frame, while Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology grounds the whole discussion of freedom and evil in the larger plan of redemption that runs from the gate of Eden to the hill of the cross.