There are certain goods that are only possible if there are evils, and soul-making is one of them. That includes building various virtues, choosing against vices, overcoming hardship, and living a life filled with choices that are meaningful and with high-stakes.
My mom once asked me about the problem of evil. Me being a (struggling) Christian at the time, I gave her the soul-making theodicy. I said that suffering gives us the chance to prove our true character. God wants to know who we are, but there is nothing to know unless we are tested in some way. Without suffering we cannot demonstrate strength, perseverance, sacrificing for others, trust in God, and so on. If life is all good all the time, then we will be spoiled and possess impoverished characters. I think there is something to all that. Like theodicy #5, I think soul-making will be incorporated into the most plausible theodicy.
However, soul-making, by itself, faces predictable problems:
#9a - Soul-making doesn’t apply to evils that outright kill people, or hurt them enough to leave them cynical, pessimistic, or distrusting of the fundamental goodness of reality. Some evils are soul-destroying and cause people to become bitter, hateful, depressed, or traumatized.
#9b - Not only are some evils soul-destroying, but some evils are faith-destroying. If someone experiences religious trauma, especially if they are abused by a person with religious authority, then it’s hard to blame them for losing faith. Insofar as this loss of faith is truly blameless, then presumably God would not punish such loss of faith with damnation. Even still, if Christianity is true, then faith is a great good and the loss of faith is a great evil. If God loves us and if the Father gives us good gifts, like the gift of faith, then it’s highly surprising that God would allow those evils that result in a loss of faith. If God wants us to believe in him, to know him, and to have a personal relationship with him, then God should prevent those evils that result in a loss of faith, and yet God allows such evils.
#9c - Arguably, the goodness of soul-making does not outweigh the badness of some evils. Imagine asking any 9/11 responder what would be better, to have the bravery of the 9/11 responders or to have 9/11 not happen? Obviously, they would say it would be better to have 9/11 not happen. Saving those who died, saving the families from grief, preventing those particularly horrific experiences of the passengers who knew they were going to die, and of those who jumped from the buildings to their death, and preventing all the turmoil in the world that came afterward—this all vastly outweighs whatever goodness we get in the soul-making of the first responders and whoever else. Again the theodical goods here amount only to silver linings, and paltry ones at that. (Could you imagine someone wanting a second 9/11 to happen in case we’re missing out on precious soul-making?)
#9d - It’s not clear why soul-making is a good thing. Insofar as soul-making is good because it allows us to better face the evils of the world, then the value of soul-making is artificial. By way of analogy, a cure to cigarette addiction is good, but its goodness depends on cigarette addiction. It would always be better to have no cigarette addiction and no cure than to have the addiction and the cure. If that’s right, then an evil-free world is not missing out by not having soul-making, as soul-making could only ever be a silver lining.
#9e - Deontic concerns. Let’s say EJ’s dementia produced so much soul-making in those around her that the goodness of that collective soul-making outweighed the enormous badness of everything else. Deontology says it doesn’t matter if goods outweigh evils if those evils treat a person as a means to an end rather than as an end unto themselves. If God loves EJ then he shouldn’t treat her as a tool for the moral improvement of those around her. It’s callous to treat people as if they are pawns in a game of value chess when they are individuals who should be loved and respected as such.[*4]
Like in the 9/11 case, an obvious test is to ask the family whether they want to give up their soul-making to instead have their loved one be healthy. Of course, we would say yes. What kind of a person would I be if I were to prefer my own soul-making to my mom’s flourishing? Ironically, choosing my soul-making over EJ’s flourishing would not be a virtuous choice at all. It would be more virtuous of us to give up our soul-making and heal EJ.
Anti-theodicy #5: Far from giving rise to the good of soul-making, dementia gives rise to the evils of soul destruction and faith destruction. If we consider the soul to be the conscious self, then dementia is quite literally soul-destroying. But if we think of soul-making as referring to the building of those characteristics that make for a more profound, interesting, virtuous person, then certainly dementia destroys that too. I don’t think EJ has become a worse person exactly; she retains her virtues of kindness, tender-heartedness, blamelessness, love, and so on. Rather, virtue ostensibly requires a kind of progression as well as a kind of understanding of things. Dementia certainly destroys one’s ability to understand and to progress. What growth as a person EJ would have achieved, and what virtues she would have exhibited, dementia has made impossible. This is especially true in the case of intellectual virtues. EJ never lost faith as far as I can tell (she called me on the phone once crying, saying over and over, “Hold onto Jesus… that’s the only thing…”).
I can’t speak for anyone else in the family, but EJ’s situation, and God’s ignoring my prayers (and everyone else’s), certainly played a role in my loss of faith. If depression makes one a more profound or interesting person, then I suppose there has been some soul-making ;)
*4 - I’m not sure whether I should consider a “deontic gratuitous evil” to be an additional kind of gratuitous evil. Currently, I think of there being two kinds of gratuitous evils. Recall that, for an evil to not be gratuitous, evil E must produce a good G, and it must be that:
1) G is greater in magnitude than E.
2) It is not the case that God could replace E with a good or a different evil that produces an overall net good that is greater than the net good of G & E.
The first kind of gratuitous evil is one that violates condition 1 (and thus violates condition 2 as well);
The second kind satisfies condition 1 but fails to satisfy condition 2.
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