ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the concept of love and aims to show in what sense the idea of a loving God, far from contradicting the free will defence, necessarily entails it. Richard Swinburne sets forth his theodicy in the form of a debate between a ‘theodicist’ and an ‘antitheodicist.’ The theodicist claims that it is not morally wrong for God to create or permit the various evils encountered in this world, for in doing so he provides the logically necessary conditions for greater goods. The first moral principle put forward by the antitheodicist is that ‘a creator able to do so ought to create only creatures such that necessarily they do not do evil actions.’ A further argument used by Swinburne to show why a creator should grant human agents the freedom to do evil is ‘that various evils are logically necessary conditions for the occurrence of actions of certain especially good kinds.
