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John Harwood Hick (20 January 1922 – 9 February 2012) was an English-born philosopher of religion and theologian who taught in the United States for the larger part of his career. In philosophical theology , he made contributions in the areas of theodicy , eschatology , and Christology , and in the philosophy of religion he contributed to the ...
The key points of a soul-making theodicy begin with its metaphysical foundation: that "(1) The purpose of God in creating the world was soul-making for rational moral agents". [4] (2) Humans choose their responses to the soul-making process thereby developing moral character. (3) This requires that God remain hidden, otherwise freewill would be ...
In the 20th century, John Hick collated the ideas of Irenaeus into a distinct theodicy. He argued that the world exists as a "vale of soul-making" (a phrase that he drew from John Keats), and that suffering and evil must therefore occur. He argued that human goodness develops through the experience of evil and suffering.
The soul-making reconciliation of the problem of evil, states Creegan, fails to explain the need or rationale for evil inflicted on animals and resultant animal suffering, because "there is no evidence at all that suffering improves the character of animals, or is evidence of soul-making in them". [156] Hick differentiates between animal and ...
The Irenaean (or soul-making) theodicy is named after the 2nd-century Greek theologian Irenaeus whose ideas were adopted in Eastern Christianity. [23] It has been modified and advocated in the twenty-first century by John Hick. [23] Irenaen theodicy stands in sharp contrast to the Augustinian.
John Hick used the term "soul-making" in his theodicy Evil and the God of Love to describe the kind of spiritual development that he believes justifies the existence of evil. This defense is employed by Michael Murray, [31] who explains how, in his view, divine hiddenness is essential to soul-making. It may seem that it is not hard to imagine a ...
Its object was to solve the problem of evil, that is, to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful and all-knowing God, who would seem required to prevent it; as such, the name comes from Leibniz's conceiving of the project as the vindication of God's justice, namely against ...
In response to the problem of evil concerning natural evil and animal suffering, Christopher Southgate, a trained research biochemist and Professor of Christian Theodicy at the University of Exeter, has developed a “compound evolutionary theodicy.” [28]: 711 Robert John Russell summarizes it as beginning with an assertion of the goodness of ...