Evil and Soul Making by John Hick

• What is the soul making theodicy?

  Natural and moral evil are essential to soul making. An all loving God is therefore justified in making a world such as this and in allowing humanity to perform evil acts. God deliberately left humans imperfect or unfinished to enable us to complete the process of creation ourselves
• What is two stage creation?

  Iranaeus believed that there were two stages to creation - image and likeness
• What was the process of image to Iranaeus?

  An immature being that has to grow and develop. People were created as spiritually and morally immature creatures at the beginning of a long process of further growth and development
• What was the process of likeness to Iranaeus?

  Humans have freedom to search for and develop their own spiritual life. Cannot be forced by God
• What is the value of free will?


  We have to have evil in the world in order for us to develop as free individuals who make our own moral decisions and are responsible for them. If everything went our way we would never learn from our mistakes or grow as individuals
• What does the King and the Maiden highlight?


  We must be free to develop and we cannot be forced into finding God
• What is epistemic distance?

  Distance in knowledge between God and humanity. God remains partially hidden so that we can have a world that is ambiguous so that we can make genuinely free choices. If we have faith in God, that is because we want to
• What is counter factual hypotheses?

  Imagine a world different from the one we live in and try to draw conclusions from it. If we had a world without evil there would be no moral or immoral actions. In a world where no one suffers and experiences pain there is no need to develop compassion, honesty, bravery and love. We can only develop real virtues by overcoming difficulties and temptations
• What is universal salvation?


  Everyone will go to heaven.
• What are three reasons that the afterlife is important?

  1. The process of likeness towards God is rarely completed in this lifetime. 2. Only a supremely good future in heaven can justify the magnitude of suffering endured 3. Evil people are victims of the system. People have been brought up badly and cannot be held responsible for their actions. It would be an injustice to those people. Therefore salvation is universal