Swinburne also argues that death is essential; it means that the chances for doing good or evil that it contains are finite. If we had infinite chances, then we would never suffer the consequences of our wrong doing. Salvation would be inevitable for all no matter how much evil was permitted. If we have genuine free will of our actions, then we must have a limited span on which to be judged.
Mackie argued however that it is logically possible for a good God to make a world containing only free beings that only perform good actions. He says since this world contains free agents that often fail to act in a morally good manner; it cannot have been created by an all-powerful, all-loving God.
However, Hick claims that this isn’t the case, arguing that God would have to make beings in such a way that he knows they would never choose evil. Although they might appear to be freely choosing good, they would not be and would be no more than robots as actions would have been predetermined. Hick would have to argue that the fact that God does not know how any individual will choose, has no bearing on his omnipotence.
Classical theists accept that free human actions are caused by God, as the occurrence of such actions in the first place depends on His creative power. God is the cause of human existence, and the cause of their continuing existence. God is also the cause of their essential nature. He is the necessary condition of them being and being what they are. If this is true then He is also the cause of human actions. This insistence that God is the cause of free human action leads to a problem. If God is the cause of freely chosen good actions, then He is also the cause of evil actions. If God is the cause of moral evil, then He isn’t good.
He would be the cause of an evil which he could have not created. This is because it might be thought possible for God to create all humans with the disposition to always do moral good without Him actually being at the forefront of each individual freely chosen good act. If this is true then the fact that God has created beings that freely choose evil seems to be irreconcilable with the existence of an all-loving God, since such a God would have created only beings that always freely choose good.
This makes the free will defence lend great weight to Mackie’s conclusion that. If this is correct, and God could have created a world with beings who always freely choose moral good, then there seems to be only one way to relieve God of responsibility for creating an evil which He need not have created. Basically, this is to resurrect the old ‘Monist’ argument that God cannot have created evil since evil is in fact nothing at all.
With further relation to Augustinian Theodicy. It is not easy to identify what kind of reality is involved in there being human moral failure – we do not speak of there being human moral failures in the same way as we speak of there being cats, for example. We do not think of human moral failure as a substance of any sort, in which case it make no sense to say that it was created by God.
To sum up, free will defence can be viewed as an attempt to show that there some kinds of good that even an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God can't bring about without permitting evil.