3.1.1 - Hick's soul-making theodicy
Could a world without danger, resistance, or suffering produce mature persons? Drawing on Irenaean themes, John Hick argues that humans develop from the image toward the likeness of God through soul-making under conditions of epistemic distance. You will explain freedom, a stable natural order, and eschatological completion, then evaluate whether these ideas justify natural and moral evil without making suffering merely instrumental.
The problem Hick answers
A theodicy tries to show why belief in God can still be reasonable when the world contains evil and suffering. Hick's soul-making theodicy is not a proof that God exists. It is a response to the challenge that a loving and powerful God would not allow suffering.
Theodicy
A theodicy is an attempt to justify God's goodness and justice in the face of evil and suffering.
Soul-making
Soul-making is Hick's view that human persons are formed into morally and spiritually mature beings through free responses to a challenging world.
Hick shifts the question. Instead of assuming that the best possible world would be a pain-free place of immediate happiness, he asks what kind of world could form mature persons capable of freely chosen goodness, love, trust, courage, and responsibility.
| Scholar/source card | Hick's soul-making theodicy |
|---|---|
| Scholar | John Hick |
| Main work | Evil and the God of Love |
| Core claim | God permits a world containing suffering because it is an environment for moral and spiritual development. |
| Key contrast | Hick looks forward to human completion, rather than backward to a finished perfection that was lost. |
| AO2 pressure | If suffering destroys people rather than develops them, it becomes harder to call it soul-making. |
Hick's answer is therefore teleological: it explains evil by reference to a purpose. The purpose is not comfort, but the making of persons.
The argument chain
Hick's theodicy is often called Irenaean because it treats creation as unfinished. The important point for this lesson is not a detailed study of Irenaeus. It is the direction of Hick's argument: human beings are created with the potential for maturity, and the world is the place where that potential is gradually realised.
The argument can be followed as a chain:
| Step | Hick's reasoning | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | God wants persons capable of freely chosen goodness and relationship with God. | Mature love and goodness cannot be reduced to programming or automatic obedience. |
| 2 | Virtues such as courage, compassion, forgiveness and perseverance require difficulty. | These virtues make sense only where there is danger, need, wrongdoing, loss or temptation. |
| 3 | A world with stable natural laws and real freedom allows meaningful choices and consequences. | People can help or harm, trust or reject, endure or despair, forgive or retaliate. |
| 4 | Evil and suffering can therefore be permitted as conditions within a soul-making environment. | Hick is not calling evil good; he is claiming God may have a justifying reason for permitting a world with evil. |
| 5 | The problem of evil is weakened if the world is not meant to be a pleasure paradise. | Suffering is judged against the aim of person-making, not only against immediate happiness. |
This distinction is crucial. Hick does not say that cruelty, disease or grief are good in themselves. Evil remains evil. His claim is that a world containing real evils can still be consistent with a loving God if those evils belong to the wider environment in which persons are made.
A precise AO1 sentence might be:
Hick argues that God permits evil and suffering because a world of risk, challenge and free response is needed for humans to develop into morally and spiritually mature persons.
Epistemic distance and natural order
Two ideas help Hick explain why the world is the way it is: epistemic distance and natural order.
Epistemic Distance
Epistemic distance means that God is not overwhelmingly obvious to human beings, so belief, trust and love can be freely chosen rather than forced by certainty.
If God were unmistakably present in every moment, human beings might obey from pressure, fear or obvious self-interest. Hick thinks a loving relationship with God must be freely entered. That requires a world in which people can interpret life religiously, but can also live as if the natural world is all there is.
Natural order matters too. A stable world has regular laws: fire burns, bodies are fragile, disease follows biological processes, and gravity does not pause whenever someone falls. These regularities make knowledge, responsibility and moral action possible. If natural laws constantly bent to prevent every harm, humans could not reliably learn consequences, take responsibility, or meaningfully help one another.
This also explains why Hick's theodicy covers more than moral evil. Moral evil can be linked to the misuse of human freedom. Natural evil can be linked to the risks of a regular physical world. Hick's claim is not that God individually sends each disaster. It is that God creates an apparently autonomous world in which real risks, real consequences and real moral responses are possible.
Eschatology and completion
Hick recognises a serious problem: many lives do not look complete. Some people die young. Some suffer in ways that seem to crush rather than develop them. Some wrongdoing is never repaired within earthly life. If soul-making had to be finished before death, the theodicy would look much weaker.
That is why Hick's account needs eschatology, the belief that God's purpose for human beings continues beyond death. Hick's short slogan is "No theodicy without eschatology." The point is not that heaven pays people back for pain, as if suffering were balanced by a reward. Hick's idea is that the whole process of person-making must finally reach fulfilment in a good that makes the journey worthwhile.
This matters for AO1 because Hick is not merely saying that suffering sometimes improves character in this life. He is saying that God's purpose is ultimately completed beyond this life. It also matters for AO2 because the appeal to afterlife is both a strength and a vulnerability.
| Why eschatology helps Hick | Why it can be challenged |
|---|---|
| It answers the objection that earthly life is too short or unequal for complete soul-making. | It depends on a further belief that cannot be straightforwardly verified within ordinary experience. |
| It allows Hick to say that apparently wasted suffering is not the final word. | It can look as if the hardest cases are being moved into a future solution rather than explained now. |
| It fits his hope that God's loving purpose eventually succeeds for all. | Critics may ask why a good God needs such a painful route to that end. |
Strengths and pressures
Hick's theodicy is persuasive to some because it gives suffering a developmental role without saying that evil itself is good. It also gives a more positive account than a bare defence: it does not merely say that God and evil might be logically compatible, but suggests why God would allow a challenging world.
The main evaluation is about proportion and fit. Does the amount, intensity and distribution of suffering fit the aim of soul-making?
| Evaluation point | How it supports or challenges Hick | Possible judgement |
|---|---|---|
| Freely developed virtues | Courage, compassion and forgiveness seem more valuable when they are chosen through difficulty. | This is a strong defence of some suffering, especially ordinary challenge and moral struggle. |
| Stable natural laws | A regular world allows responsibility, prediction, science and meaningful help. | This helps with natural evil, but may not justify the worst scale of suffering. |
| Rejecting a literal fall | Hick does not depend on the claim that humans began perfect and then historically fell. | This can make his view fit better with an evolutionary picture of human development. |
| Horrendous suffering | Some suffering appears to damage people rather than make them mature. | This is one of the strongest objections because it targets the purpose of the theodicy itself. |
| Animal and child suffering | Animals and very young children may suffer without obvious moral or spiritual development. | Hick can appeal to the wider natural order, but the soul-making link is much less direct. |
| Using others as means | One person's suffering might develop another person's compassion. | This risks making victims look like tools for someone else's growth unless Hick stresses resisting evil, not accepting it. |
| Eschatology | Future fulfilment can answer incompleteness and unfairness in earthly life. | It may seem speculative, and critics can ask why an all-good God needs this route at all. |
The best AO2 answers do not simply say "Hick is strong because suffering teaches lessons" or "Hick is weak because suffering is bad." They judge whether the specific features of suffering in the world are proportionate to the kind of soul-making Hick describes.
AO1-to-AO2 bridge
For AQA, Hick should be used as a precise philosophical building block. AO1 explains what Hick claims. AO2 judges whether that claim works.
| AO1 content | AO2 move it supports | Careful limitation or response |
|---|---|---|
| Hick says the world is for soul-making, not immediate comfort. | This supports the view that suffering can have a divine purpose. | The worst suffering may look disproportionate to that purpose. |
| Epistemic distance means God is not overwhelmingly obvious. | This supports the value of free faith and freely chosen love. | Too much hiddenness may make relationship with God harder, not freer. |
| Natural order gives stable consequences. | This supports the need for a regular world in which moral action matters. | Stable laws may explain risk generally, but not every extreme case. |
| Eschatology completes the process beyond death. | This answers the objection that earthly lives are incomplete or unequal. | The appeal to afterlife may look like a future hope rather than a present explanation. |
A basic paragraph might say:
Hick's theodicy is strong because suffering helps people become better. This means God can allow evil because it teaches lessons.
A stronger paragraph keeps the exact philosophical claim visible:
Hick is persuasive when he argues that mature virtues cannot simply be programmed into human beings. Courage, compassion and forgiveness require a world with real danger, need and wrongdoing, so some suffering can be understood as part of a soul-making environment. However, this only justifies suffering if it is proportionate to that purpose. Horrendous suffering that destroys a person rather than develops them puts pressure on Hick's claim that the world is well designed for soul-making.
Why this improves: the stronger paragraph names the logic of Hick's view, gives a concrete reason for its strength, then tests the exact limit of the theodicy. That is the move from AO1 knowledge to AO2 judgement.
For future essays on evil and suffering, this lesson supplies one response. Comparisons with the free will defence, Griffin's process theodicy, or the logical and evidential problem of evil should be made only when those linked topics are in scope.