Why would a good God make creatures capable of evil? The free will defense answers that God wanted creatures who could truly love him, and love that cannot refuse is not love. Evil, on this view, came from what free creatures did with that choice. This guide tests that answer step by step, using a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Van Gayton, and then follows it to the place where argument gives way to trust.
Work through it alone over a few sittings, or with a group in one longer session. By the end you should be able to explain the defense in your own words, name the premise it rests on, describe fairly a Christian who reads the hard passages differently, and say what it offers someone who is suffering and what it does not. Each step builds on the one before it, so do the tasks in order.
Before you begin: write down your starting answer
Take two minutes and write one or two sentences in answer to this: If God is good and all-powerful, why is there evil? Write what you actually think, even if it is I don’t know or I’ve never found an answer that works. Keep the paper. You will come back to it at the end.
For groups: Do not ask people to read these out yet. Starting answers often carry real pain, and someone in the room may be grieving. Let everyone keep theirs private until the last section. Anyone in fresh loss is welcome to listen without arguing a position at all.
Step one: get the objection right
A defense only makes sense once you know what it answers. Dr. Van Gayton states the challenge in a classic form he credits to the philosopher David Hume. If God were all-powerful and all-loving, he would eradicate evil. Evil is not eradicated. So no such God exists.
The argument is valid. If both premises are true, the conclusion follows. Gayton does not dispute that evil exists. He disputes the assumption that because God has not ended evil, he will not. He says God “has a moment in history when this will all come to an end.” Near the end of the conversation he compresses the point: “So David Hume should have added evil is not eradicated yet.”
That word yet answers whether God will end evil. It leaves open why God would allow it even for a time. The free will defense takes up that second question.
Step two: see why freedom enters the picture
The defense starts earlier than most people expect, with why God made anything at all. Gayton argues that the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was never lonely and did not create out of need. He created out of generosity, to share himself and form a relationship with his creatures. Then comes the step everything else rests on: “in order for real relationships to exist, as we all know, then those relationships must be voluntary.”
Read three passages slowly and mark every place a choice is offered or required.
- Genesis 2:16-17: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
- Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:”
- Genesis 1:31: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
Check your marks against these observations. In Genesis 2, the garden is full of permission, with one prohibition. The command assumes the man could disobey, or the warning would mean nothing. In Deuteronomy 30, the word “therefore” makes the choice the point of the whole speech. And Genesis 1:31 comes before any disobedience. Gayton draws the conclusion: evil is not part of what God made but part of what creatures did. In his words, “free will is essential if you’re going to have a love relationship.”
Task: Write the defense as a chain of four short sentences, one link per line, starting with God’s reason for creating and ending with the possibility of evil. Then circle the link you think a skeptic would attack first.
Step three: test the premise that carries the weight
Lisa Fields names the load-bearing claim plainly: “Genuine love is not possible without free will.” If that sentence is false, the chain breaks. So test it.
Make two columns on a page. In the first, list things that look like love from the outside: a dog greeting you at the door, a customer service script telling you we value you, a newborn’s grip on a parent’s finger, a spouse’s apology, a friend who drives across town at midnight. In the second column, write whether each response could have been otherwise, and whether that affects how much it means to you.
Now look hard at the cases that do not fit. A parent’s love for a newborn often arrives unchosen. A small child’s attachment is not a decision. People fall in love without meaning to. Mark any item that matters deeply even though nobody chose it, and decide what it does to the premise. Does it refute it, narrow it, or leave it untouched? Notice the words Gayton uses for his own marriage of 44 years: “what makes it dynamic is that we both voluntarily choose to love each other and grow in that relationship.” He contrasts it with the alternative: “if God made us and we had to worship him, then we’re no more than robots now.” Ask whether his claim is about love as a feeling or about love kept over time, and whether that difference rescues the premise.
One common mistake needs correcting. The defense does not claim that evil had to happen. It claims that the possibility of evil comes with a world built for love. A marriage in which neither spouse ever walks out still had that possibility the whole time. Actual refusal is what people chose, and Gayton places the blame there: “to blame man’s wrong choices is where the blame actually lies.”
A thoughtful objector will add that nobody is very free. Lisa Fields raises this herself. No one chooses their race, their sex or the family they are born into, and those facts shape every later choice. Her picture is a playground: a child placed there has many real options but cannot leave its bounds. She describes the free will view as one in which God “gives you free will in that restriction,” and Gayton agrees. The picture shows that limited freedom is still freedom. It breaks down if pushed, because a fence keeps a child in, while the limits of a human life are part of who that person is.
Gayton sharpens the point by separating free will from what he calls maximal autonomy, a will that answers to no one, which he rejects. That changes what a critic has to show. Listing every constraint on human life does not touch the premise. The critic would have to show that within those limits nobody ever faces a real alternative.
Where the defense is hardest to accept
The hardest step concerns God himself. If humans are truly free, does God lose control? Gayton answers that freedom displays God’s sovereignty: “God is so sovereign that he can allow us to have free will.” He calls this self-limitation and points to who grants the freedom: “But notice who gives that ability. Notice who gives that right, the sovereign one.”
Lisa Fields presses him with two passages that seem to pull the other way. Proverbs 16:9 reads, “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.” Romans 9:13 reads, “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” Gayton reads Romans 9 in its setting, arguing that Paul describes God choosing the second-born over the firstborn, against the custom of passing the inheritance through the eldest, and that “it’s not about the destiny of all humanity.” He also warns that if everything is fixed in advance, God “becomes the author of it if everything is deterministic.”
Faithful Christians genuinely disagree here. Many Reformed interpreters read Romans 9 as speaking of God’s sovereign choice in salvation. They hold that God ordains all that happens while humans still make real, responsible choices, and they deny that this makes God the author of sin. Non-Reformed Christians read the passages more as Gayton does. Both readings belong within historic Christian faith, and both agree that love for God must be willing. They differ over what makes a will free and how God’s purposes relate to human choices.
Practice: restate the other side. Choose the reading you find less persuasive. Write a paragraph explaining it so well that someone who holds it would recognize their own view. Leave out your rebuttal. In a group, pair people who lean differently, have each read the other’s paragraph aloud, and ask the original holder what was missed. The goal is accuracy, not winning.
The defense also has limits of its own. Gayton distinguishes moral evil, which people do, from natural evil such as hurricanes and floods. A storm is not a choice, so the argument from freedom speaks only to the first. And the defense explains why evil is possible, not why God has allowed this much of it, or the suffering of children, or the particular loss that hit your family. For that, Gayton leans on a further claim: “God deemed that the love relationship that would be established between God and his creation is greater than the evil” done by those who refuse him. Read that sentence again and ask whether the conversation argues for it or simply states it. Then ask what would have to be true for it to be believable to someone grieving.
From coherence to worship
An argument can hold together and still leave a person cold. Lisa Fields moves from the argument to a person. In Gethsemane, Jesus faced suffering far greater than anything done to us. Luke 22:42 records his prayer: “Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”
The verse has two halves. The first is a real request; Jesus does not pretend he wants the cup. The second is a real surrender. Fields notes that God gives no explanation in that moment, and Jesus submits anyway. Her conclusion for her own life: “I can question, but after my question, I must still submit.”
Here the free will defense turns back on the reader. The freedom that made refusal possible also makes surrender meaningful. Jesus, on Gayton’s account, “chose to obey his father,” and redemption comes through that willing obedience. Worship in this sense means a free creature handing an honest question back to God while the question is still open.
Practice: a prayer in two halves. If you choose to, write a short prayer shaped like Luke 22:42. In the first half, name something specific you wish God would remove or explain, without softening it. In the second half, write only what you can honestly say about trusting him. If all you can write is I want to be able to trust you, that is honest, and it is enough. This prayer stays private; in a group, invite no one to read theirs.
Gayton does not promise that the meantime will feel resolved: “Life is paradoxical, good and bad going on at the same time.” His hope rests on a promise rather than an explanation: “even when certain events happen to us as believers and we don’t understand it, we still have this conviction and hope because of what God promises.”
Discussion questions
- Which item in your two-column list was hardest to place, and did it weaken the claim that love requires freedom or only narrow it?
- Gayton says evil is not eradicated yet. Does that word satisfy you, or does it leave the harder question untouched? Explain why.
- Is Gayton’s claim that the love God sought outweighs the evil an argument, a confession of faith, or both? What would count as evidence for it?
- After restating the reading of Romans 9 you find less persuasive, what did you understand about it that you had missed before?
- The defense speaks to moral evil but not to natural disasters. Does that limit make it less useful to you, or more believable because it claims less?
- Is it possible to question God and submit to him in the same prayer? What would make that difficult for you?
Return to where you started
Take out the sentence you wrote at the beginning and read it beside your four-link chain. Underneath, write one new sentence stating as precisely as you can what you now think the free will defense explains and what it leaves to trust. Then underline the word or phrase in your original answer that has changed, if any has. In a group, this is the one thing worth sharing, and only for those who want to.