David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

John Hick responds to the problem of evil by offering an interpretation of God’s plan for humanity in which natural evils are person-building obstacles, and moral evils are moralizing vicissitudes, in a developmental process aimed at moral perfection. Hick argues that only by arriving at a state of moral perfection from an initial state of moral imperfection through this developmental process can we freely realize God’s plan.

Hick’s justification of evil in a universe created by an omnipotent, benevolent God consists of a two-stage developmental process through which God’s plan for humanity is realized. In the first stage, humanity evolves from lower forms of life by overcoming natural evils, gradually acquiring three unique features: intelligence, ethical faculties, and the tendency to interpret the world religiously (343). These features unique to man form “a potentiality for knowledge of and relation with one’s Maker” (343). The specification of this stage is supported by our lack of historical evidence for a long-forgotten utopia from which humanity could have “fallen,” and by its consistency with the widely-accepted Darwinian worldview (342). In the second stage of development, we begin as morally immature beings. Using our intelligence, moral faculties, and religious modality, we are able to decide freely to act morally when confronted with moral evils. We are created at a moral distance from God so that we may close that distance by freely choosing to be moral in the face of evil (346), and we are initially morally immature so that our virtues will be “hard-won” and therefore intrinsically more valuable than similar, innate virtues (346). Once we are completely developed, having reached a state of moral perfection, we will have “come freely to know and love the Maker” (346), thus realizing God’s plan. By understanding evil as a necessary catalyst for humanity’s development towards moral perfection, our belief in God is not “rendered irrational by the fact of evil” (341).

Hick’s conception of natural evils as person-building obstacles is reasonable insofar as it requires that we develop to a point of cognitive maturity. Similarly, it is reasonable to suppose that we become morally mature by overcoming moral evils in the second stage, but it is not reasonable to suppose that we can become morally perfect in this way. Towards a contradiction, suppose that a person (John) achieves moral perfection by overcoming a number of moral evils. If there were some moral evil which John had never confronted, John could be morally improved by confronting it and freely making a moral decision about it. This contradicts the assumption that John is morally perfect. Therefore, we must either reject the idea that John can achieve moral perfection by overcoming moral evils, or John must confront all moral evils in order to achieve moral perfection. Positing a continuation of our moral development in a life after death, as Hick does (344), does not increase John’s prospects of confronting all moral evils, so we must reject the possibility of achieving moral perfection by overcoming moral evils.

Perhaps Hick’s claims that “the divine intention…is to create perfect finite beings in filial relationship with their Maker” (349), and that we must freely achieve moral perfection in order to close the distance between ourselves and God are unnecessarily strong statements. Hick’s theodicy, modified to require that humans be morally perfected only to the extent which they are confronted with moral evils, avoids making the unreasonable demand that finite beings become morally perfect. This alternative still offers a conception of evil as a necessary component in a process aimed at coming “freely to know and love the Maker” (346), and it still meets the demands for a theodicy outlined by Hick. In this way, belief in God is made rationally concordant with the fact of evil.