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The Free Will Explanation
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As he presents in his overview, Dr. Blehm expresses the problem of evil and suffering in the following way:
If God is all good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, why do we have evil?
If God is all good, you would think he would want to stop evil and suffering. If God is all-knowing, he both knows when evil and suffering will take place and how to stop it. If God is all-powerful, he has the ability to stop evil and suffering.
So why is there evil and suffering?
An answer to this question is called a theodicy, a word that comes from two Greek words meaning “God just?” Dr. Blehm mentions three classic responses to this question: 1) the free will answer, 2) the character-building answer, and 3) the “we don’t know” answer. On this page, we consider the “free will theodicy.”
The “Free Will” Answer
The first answer to the question of evil’s existence is called the “free will theodicy” or the Augustinian theodicy after St. Augustine (AD 354-430), who first presented it in its full form. For Augustine, God created a world in which Satan, Adam, and Eve had the freedom either to choose to obey God or to disobey God. Unfortunately for us, all three chose to disobey God.
The event in which Adam and Eve disobeyed God is called the Fall, and according to Augustine, it had two very serious consequences. The first is that humanity is now born with a sin nature, which means we are born powerless against the temptation to sin. Humanity is now born in sin and inevitably will sin in our default state. In the language of John Calvin (1509-64), our default state is now one of “total depravity.”
The free will theodicy argues that a world in which humanity (and angels) have a free choice between good and evil is a good world. But if God gives us that choice, some will inevitably make the wrong choice. Evil and suffering are a seemingly inevitable result.
For Augustine and Calvin, that was the end of human freedom. However, the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition holds that God continues to give us a choice through the power of the Holy Spirit. In that sense, every human faces the same (God-empowered) choice that Adam and Eve did in the Garden and that Satan did in heaven. We can either choose to move toward God’s grace and the power to rise above temptation (1 Cor. 10:13), or we can remain in our default sinful state and even deteriorate into a worse state of sinfulness.
The free will theodicy argues that a world in which humanity (and angels) have a free choice between good and evil is a good world. But if God gives us that choice, some will inevitably make the wrong choice. Evil and suffering are a seemingly inevitable result. The fall of Satan perhaps was the largest move toward sin in the universe.
If the first consequence was the sinful nature of humanity, the second relates to the consequences of what we would call the natural realm. Nature became subject to corruption and decay (Rom. 8:19-21). Augustine’s theodicy thus not only accounts for moral evil in the world but also what you might call natural evil – earthquakes and paper cuts.