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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The soul-making theodicy is at best an incomplete answer to the problem of suffering.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Not all of the suffering of the world enters into soul-making.
      ?

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    • 2.The sufferings of lower animals pass without even being remarked by rational beings and seem to serve no purpose whatever.
      ?

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    • 3.Among humans, intense suffering is often followed simply by death and contributes to no apparent moral development.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.John Hick's soul-making framework presupposes that epistemic distance from God is necessary for authentic virtue, yet this assumption leaves vast categories of suffering—animal pain, infant death, catastrophic natural disasters—entirely unaccounted for within the developmental logic he proposes.
      ?

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    • 2.Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov argument establishes that even if soul-making produces net moral benefit, the suffering of a single innocent child cannot be morally justified by any aggregate developmental outcome, exposing a fundamental unit-of-analysis failure in Hick's theodicy.
      ?

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    • 3.A theodicy that requires supplementation by additional theodicies—free will defense, eschatological compensation, skeptical theism—to cover its explanatory gaps concedes by its own structure that it is incomplete as a standalone account.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.D.Z. Phillips argues that the soul-making theodicy commits a category error by treating persons instrumentally—as raw material for virtue production—which itself violates the moral framework any adequate theodicy must presuppose.
      ?

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    • 2.The empirical distribution of suffering is inversely correlated with soul-making utility: those with fewest psychological and social resources to convert suffering into growth receive disproportionately severe suffering, which directly falsifies the theodicy's implied proportionality claim.
      ?

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