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Course 15 · Lesson 3.4

Objections to soul-making: excess, injustice and who benefits

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 15 outline

Module 1: Stating the Problem

  1. The ancient problem: Epicurus, the Psalms and Augustine
  2. The logical problem: is God’s existence compatible with evil?
  3. The evidential problem: Rowe, the fawn and gratuitous evil
  4. Defense and theodicy: what each tries to do

Module 2: Moral Evil and the Free-Will Defense

  1. Moral evil and human responsibility
  2. Augustine on evil, privation and the will
  3. Plantinga’s free-will defense
  4. Objections: horrendous evils, determinism and the freedom of the saints

Module 3: Natural Evil and Soul-Making

  1. Natural evil, the laws of nature and animal suffering
  2. Traditional accounts: the fall, fallen powers and the groaning of creation
  3. John Hick and soul-making theodicy
  4. Objections to soul-making: excess, injustice and who benefits

Module 4: Providence and the Limits of Explanation

  1. What providence means: creation, sustaining and governing
  2. Providence in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant thought
  3. Divine sovereignty, human freedom and open theism
  4. Skeptical theism and the limits of human knowledge

Module 5: Job, the Cross and Silence

  1. The Book of Job: Job, his friends and the rejection of easy answers
  2. God’s answer from the whirlwind and the ending of Job
  3. The crucifixion and suffering: Christ’s cry and the meaning of the cross
  4. Divine hiddenness and the silence of God
  5. Unanswered prayer in Scripture and in Christian life

Module 6: Living with Grief and Writing a Response

  1. Lament and the Psalms
  2. Christian accounts of grief: Lewis, Wolterstorff and the tradition of consolation
  3. Caring for those who suffer: presence, patience and what not to say
  4. Writing a reasoned response to the problem of evil

All courses

Program / Course 15: The Problem of Evil and Suffering / Lesson 3.4

What you will learn

  • State the objection from excessive and destructive suffering.
  • Explain the objection from the unequal distribution of suffering and the problem of who benefits.
  • Describe the objection from animals and young children.
  • Say how defenders reply, and what a careful use of soul-making might look like.

The big idea

Soul-making theodicy is attractive, but it meets three heavy objections. First, much suffering seems to crush people, not form them, and it often comes in amounts far beyond what any growth needs. Second, suffering is spread unequally, so some people are tried lightly and others unbearably. Third, many sufferers, such as infants and animals, cannot grow in the way the theory requires. Defenders reply with the afterlife, the mystery of God’s purposes and the claim that the theory is only a partial account. The objections show where care is needed.

Key terms

Dysteleological evil
Evil that seems to serve no purpose, in particular no good for the person who suffers it.
Excess
In this debate, suffering greater in amount or intensity than any good it could produce requires.
Instrumental use
Using a person or their pain as a means to some other end, which many moralists say is wrong when it overrides the person’s good.
Distribution
The way suffering is spread among people, which is often unrelated to their character or merit.
Beneficiary
The one who receives the benefit. In theodicy, the question is whether it is the sufferer or someone else.
Redemptive suffering
The Christian idea that pain, when united with Christ’s, can be given meaning and can bear fruit for the sufferer or for others.
Gratuitous suffering
Suffering not required for any outweighing good.

Background

Soul-making is often offered kindly to people in distress. It is also often resented. A reader who has watched a loved one die slowly of a cruel disease may find the claim that this was for growth insulting. Philosophers who study the theory give those reactions a serious form.

The objections do not show that suffering never forms character. They show that the theory, as a full explanation of evil, goes beyond the evidence, and may offend against justice. A fair account of the debate also records the replies of those who hold the theory in a modest form. The tradition has long taught that God uses trials for good. What it has not always done is to claim to know that each trial has that purpose.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Excess and destruction

The first objection is the simplest. If the aim is growth, a reader should expect a measured amount of difficulty. In fact, the world contains suffering that no one can credibly say was needed: the long dying of a child, the torture of a prisoner, a famine in which thousands starve. In such cases people are often not improved but broken. The person with advanced dementia, or the child who dies at two, does not grow. D. Z. Phillips and other philosophers have argued that this shows the theory to be a way of making cruelty respectable.

Defenders reply in three ways. First, the theory need not say that every pain is educational. It can say that a world with real danger is a good environment for growth, even though some bad outcomes follow. Second, the sufferer’s life continues beyond death, where healing and completion are possible. Third, some defenders, such as Marilyn McCord Adams, say that for horrendous evils God must give a good that outweighs them within the person’s life, not that the evil itself produced the good. Critics find that the first reply loses force when the amount is vast, and that the second and third lean on hope more than argument.

Step 2: Injustice in distribution

The second objection concerns fairness. Some people live to old age in comfort, while others suffer constantly from birth. If suffering is a school, the curriculum seems unjust. The same hardships do not fall on those who need them most. Nor does the cruelty of oppressors seem to improve the oppressed. Those who suffer often do so because others sinned against them, and the theory seems to excuse the wrongdoers by making their victims better.

Defenders make several replies. They say God judges each person with perfect knowledge, so that a hard life may be met with great mercy, and an easy life may be a heavier test. Jesus says that much will be required of those to whom much is given (Luke 12:48). Defenders also point out that Christianity does not teach that wrongdoers are excused: Scripture says that woe is the lot of those through whom offenses come (Matthew 18:7). Still, the question of why suffering is distributed as it is remains open, and many Christians say only that it is a mystery.

Step 3: Who benefits? Infants and animals

The third objection asks who is supposed to benefit. A child who dies of illness at age two has not had time to grow in virtue. A fawn in a forest fire is not a moral agent. If growth is the reason, then in their case the reason fails. Hick answers that infants could grow after death, and he was open to the idea that animals might be included in a greater good. Many Christians are less confident. They suggest that infants are cared for by God in ways the tradition has seldom defined, and that animals have their own place in God’s creation.

A related worry is that the theory seems to make the sufferer a means to an end, even if that end is their own. A parent who deliberately let a child be hurt in order to build character would be condemned. Defenders answer that God differs from a parent in knowledge and in power to heal, and that the comparison fails. Critics find that this response asks the reader to trust what cannot be seen, which brings the discussion back to the problem of the evidential argument.

Step 4: A modest use

Taken together, the objections suggest that soul-making should not be offered as a full explanation. Many Christian thinkers use it in a limited form. They say that God can use suffering for good, and that those who endure may by his grace grow, and that no one can say this of another person’s pain. This is the form that the New Testament uses when Paul writes that God comforts believers in their tribulation so that they can comfort others (2 Corinthians 1:4). He speaks from experience, to people who share it, and does not announce that someone else’s loss has a purpose.

The practical lesson is plain. It may be true, in the end, that God brings good out of a person’s suffering. It is almost never kind or wise to tell the person in the middle of it. The theory may help a person look back on their own history, but it does not help an onlooker to explain.

  1. Is there a point at which suffering is too great to be educational? How would anyone decide?
  2. What does it mean to say that a theodicy makes cruelty respectable?
  3. Is it fair that some people suffer much more than others? What replies are available?
  4. How can the theory be applied to infants and animals, if at all?
  5. Why might it be wrong to tell another person that their suffering has a purpose?
  6. What does Paul’s way of speaking in 2 Corinthians 1:4 suggest about how to use the idea of growth?

Examples

The long illness

A woman in her thirties with a rare disease loses her sight, then her ability to walk, and then her speech. Some who knew her say she became wiser and kinder. Others say she suffered terribly, and that no growth could justify it. Both can be true to what they saw. Soul-making theodicy must hold both.

Two lives

One man is born into a stable and loving family and lives in comfort. Another is born in a war zone and is orphaned young. If both are being formed, the paths are very unlike. A defender says only God can weigh them. A critic says the theory predicts something fairer. (A constructed pair.)

A bad use of the theory

A pastor tells a mother at her child’s funeral that God took the child to teach her faith. Many bereaved people report that such words did lasting harm. The example shows how the theory, spoken in the wrong place, can turn into a claim about God that the speaker cannot know.

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic teaching holds that suffering, united with Christ’s, can have redemptive value, and that God permits trials for the good of his children. But Catholic moral teaching also forbids using people merely as means, and the Church urges care for the sick and dying. Pope John Paul II’s letter Salvifici Doloris is an example of a reflection that affirms the meaning of suffering and also the duty to relieve it.

Orthodox

Orthodox writers speak of suffering borne in Christ as a path to purification, as in the lives of the saints. Yet they also stress that death and disease are enemies, and that the church prays for healing. Many Orthodox thinkers distrust any theory that makes evil a tool of God.

Protestant

Protestants often use the language of refining and testing from 1 Peter 1:6-7. Reformed writers combine this with a strong view of God’s sovereignty over trials. Many Protestant pastors and writers warn against glib use of the idea, and Job’s friends are cited as a warning.

Critical and secular views

Critics such as Rowe and Draper treat the amount and distribution of suffering as strong evidence against any simple growth theory. Some secular writers add that people who say suffering ennobled them are often making sense of what happened in order to bear it, which is human but not a proof.

Why it matters

The objections do not remove the truth in soul-making. They teach the limits of the claim, and they protect sufferers from being told things that are cruel or untrue. A student who can state both the strength and the danger of the idea will speak about it with greater care.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The objections prove that suffering never makes anyone better.

Correction: They do not. Many people report real growth through suffering. The objections concern whether the theory explains the amount, distribution and victims of suffering.

Misunderstanding: A defender of soul-making must say that all suffering is good.

Correction: A modest defender says only that God can bring good out of suffering and that the world is a setting for growth. Evil remains evil, and Christians are called to relieve it.

Misunderstanding: If a theodicy is imperfect it should be thrown away completely.

Correction: Most theories in this subject are partial. Each may be true as far as it goes, and a Christian reply can combine several, as the final module shows.

Knowledge check

What is the objection from excess and destruction?

It says that many cases of suffering are far greater than any growth could require, and that they often crush or kill people instead of improving them. A child’s slow death or the torture of a prisoner shows this. The theory therefore seems to explain a small part of the evidence. Defenders reply with the afterlife and with the claim that God gives goods that outweigh even horrendous evils.

What is the objection from distribution?

It notes that suffering falls unevenly, with no obvious relation to need or merit. Some people live in comfort and others endure agony from birth. If suffering is a school, its assignments seem unjust. Defenders say that God judges each case with full knowledge and that Scripture warns the comfortable, but critics find the reply an appeal to mystery.

Why are infants and animals a difficulty for the theory?

Soul-making depends on moral agents who can develop through choice, but infants and animals cannot grow in that way. Hick suggested that growth for infants could continue after death. For animals no such response is widely accepted. Many Christians simply say that the theory does not explain such cases and should not be made to.

How can soul-making be used responsibly?

It can be used modestly, as the testimony of those who have found that God brought good from their pain, as Paul does in 2 Corinthians 1:4, and as a reason to hope. It should not be used to tell another person that their suffering has a purpose. Care for the sufferer comes before any explanation.

Think it through

  1. When have you heard the idea of growth through suffering used well, and when badly?
  2. Do you think it is possible to affirm that God brings good from suffering without implying that suffering was necessary?
  3. How would you now explain the strengths and limits of soul-making to someone who asked?

Independent assignment

Reply to an objection

In your own notebook, write about 450 words. Pick one of the three objections. State it as forcefully as you can, then give the best reply you can find in this lesson or in your reading. Then say whether the reply is enough, and what you would still want to know. Close with one sentence you would never say to a grieving person, and why. Keep the work private.

Further study