The free will defence Peter Vardy (The Puzzle of Evil) suggests a parable. “Imagine a king falls in love with a peasant girl. He could simply demand her love. However, love cannot be compelled – it must be earned. Love for God cannot be compelled – it too must come about freely. Richard Swinburne also lends support – he argues that mass-suffering (such as the Holocaust) cannot be prevented by God without compromising the freedom of humanity.

Swinburne also argues that death, the cause of a great deal of suffering, is necessary because without mortality it would not be possible to take genuine responsibility for our actions. If we were immortal there would be no consequence to our actions.

For human beings to have freewill, we have to have a totally free choice. In a free world, a person should be free to act wrongly as well as to act in accordance with a moral code. It is illogical to propose that a person can be ‘infallibly guaranteed always to act rightly’ (J. Hick, Philosophy of Religion) To suggest that God should not have created beings with the capacity to sin is to suggest that God should not have created people.

J. L. Mackie J. L. Mackie suggests that it is possible that a person should choose to do good on every occasion. The choice that faced God was not only between obedient robots and willfully disobedient free agents. Rather, there was also the opportunity to create beings that would act freely but always do right. Mackie held that God’s failure to do this is inconsistent with his being an omnipotent and wholly good God.

John Hick John Hick argues that if human beings appear to be able to make a completely free choice while only choosing good, then they do not have completely free choice. Humans who have their choice limited in this way are no better than robots. This has implications for our ideas about freewill and determinism – if God knows what choice we will make, He is guilty of tolerating evil. If God does not know, it limits His omniscience.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky The most powerful objection to the free will defence comes from the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his book ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ Dostoyevsky catalogued a series of atrocities visited on innocent children. He asked whether human free will is worth the suffering of innocent children, and he suggested that God is responsible for evil. He therefore concluded that if God has created a world in which free will leads to such suffering, then God is not worthy of worship.

‘It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony….. Too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.’