God could have made a world without evil. On the free will defense, though, he could not have made that world and also made creatures who truly love him, because love that cannot say no is not love. Evil, on this view, comes from free creatures misusing a real choice God gave them. Whether that answer holds up depends on a premise most people pass over: that a relationship of love requires the freedom to refuse it.
Dr. Van Gayton builds his case for the free will defense on that premise. He taught apologetics as principal of a Christian high school, preparing students for secular universities. He also offers an unusual piece of evidence for the premise: his own marriage of 44 years. The premise deserves a hard look. If it fails, the defense fails with it. If it holds, it settles less than its friends sometimes claim, and more than its critics allow.
What argument is the defense answering?
Gayton frames the challenge as a syllogism he credits to the philosopher David Hume. If an all-powerful, all-loving God existed, he would eradicate evil. Evil has not been eradicated. So no such God exists. Gayton accepts that the conclusion follows from the premises. He rejects one of the premises.
His first correction concerns time. In his words, “the premise that I would adjust is that evil is not destroyed yet.” Later he puts it more bluntly: “David Hume should have added evil is not eradicated yet.” The point has real logical force. Evil existing today only refutes a God who intends to remove it today. It does not touch a God who intends to end it at a moment of his choosing, and Christian Scripture plainly holds the second view.
The word “yet” postpones the question rather than answering it, though. A skeptic can grant that God will end evil someday and still ask why he would allow it even for a while. That is where freedom enters the argument.
Why would a God who needs nothing make anyone free?
Gayton starts with God’s motive for creating at all. God was not lonely or lacking, he argues, because God is triune: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He created out of generosity, wanting to share who he is with other creatures and form a relationship with them. Then comes the hinge: “in order for real relationships to exist, as we all know, then those relationships must be voluntary.”
Laid out step by step, the argument runs like this:
- God created in order to have a relationship of love with his creatures.
- A relationship of love must be voluntary.
- A voluntary relationship requires that the creature be able to refuse it.
- A creature able to refuse God is able to do evil.
- So the possibility of evil comes with the kind of world God set out to make.
Gayton adds one more premise, and he is candid that it borrows from another Christian response to evil. He holds that “God deemed that the love relationship that would be established between God and his creation is greater than the evil” done by those who walk away. So the defense depends on two claims. One is that love requires freedom. The other is that such love is worth the risk. Debates usually fight over the second. The first gets assumed, and it is the one doing the structural work.
Lisa Fields states the assumption directly: “Genuine love is not possible without free will.” If that sentence is false, the rest of the argument has nothing to stand on.
What does a 44-year marriage actually prove?
Gayton tests the premise against his own life. “I’ve been married to my wife for 44 years, and what makes it dynamic is that we both voluntarily choose to love each other and grow in that relationship,” he says. He then states the alternative: “if God made us and we had to worship him, then we’re no more than robots now.”
His claim is that part of the worth of his marriage lies in the fact that two people keep choosing it. Try the thought experiment. Imagine a spouse who behaves exactly as a loving spouse behaves, but who could not do otherwise because something was installed in them at the start. The words and the faithfulness would be the same. Most people sense that something essential is gone. Gayton relies on that intuition, and it carries weight because it concerns persons rather than abstract categories.
A fair test needs a counterexample. Some love does not seem chosen at all. A child does not decide to attach to a parent, and people often fall in love without meaning to. Does that sink the premise? Not quite. Gayton’s words are “relationship” and “grow.” His claim concerns mutual love sustained over time, and that kind of love involves repeated choosing even when the feelings arrived on their own. The premise survives in a narrower form. The love God seeks, on this account, is love that is kept.
The illustration also exposes a limit. Forty-four years of faithfulness without betrayal still involved real freedom the whole time. Freedom requires that refusal be possible. It does not require that refusal happen. So the premise explains why evil could enter God’s world. It does not show that evil had to enter. Gayton places the actual entry of evil in human decisions: Adam and Eve’s choice in the garden, then the same pattern repeated by every person since. His conclusion is that “to blame man’s wrong choices is where the blame actually lies.”
Does real freedom mean unlimited freedom?
An obvious objection: nobody chooses their race, their sex or the family they are born into. Those givens shape a person’s options before any choosing begins. Lisa Fields compares this to a child on a playground, free to do many things there but unable to leave it, and Gayton agrees that this is what Christians mean by free will.
Gayton sharpens the point by separating free will from what he calls maximal autonomy, a will that answers to no one. He suspects that many people who reject free will are really rejecting that inflated version. The consequence matters. The premise needs only bounded freedom: real alternatives within real limits. Listing every constraint on human life does not refute it. Love between two people with limited options is still love, provided the “yes” could have been “no.”
Couldn’t God make free people who always choose good?
This is the strongest objection, and Christianity seems to sharpen it. Gayton describes what happened to his own will after he committed his life to Christ: “He has liberated my free will from bondage and then sanctified my free will so that my greater desire is always to choose God.” He also looks ahead to a new heaven and a new earth with all evil removed. If redeemed people in that world are free and do not sin, then free and sinless creatures are possible. Why not start there?
Gayton does not address this objection directly, so any answer has to be marked as inference. One possible reply follows from his own pictures. In his account, sanctification happens to a will that has already responded to God, and desire for God grows over time. His marriage works the same way. The steadiness of 44 years was formed by choosing, again and again, rather than handed over at the wedding. On that reading, the settled goodness of the world to come is the fruit of freedom exercised.
That reply shows the objection is not decisive. It does not show the objection is answered. The argument still has not explained why God allowed this much evil, or these particular evils, along the way. At that point Gayton relies on the weighing premise, that love is worth the cost, and on the promise that evil will end. Those are serious claims, but they rest on more than the logic of freedom.
Does giving humans freedom shrink God’s sovereignty?
Gayton reverses the charge. He describes God’s choice as self limitation and insists that “God is so sovereign that he can allow us to have free will.” Every human refusal, on his view, uses a right only the sovereign God could grant. He also warns about the opposite position. If God determines every thought and event, he says, “then evil is laid at his doorstep, then he not only is responsible for the sin, he becomes the author of it if everything is deterministic.”
Some texts seem to point 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 as Paul describing God choosing the second-born over the firstborn, against the custom of passing the family line through the eldest, so that it concerns specific people rather than everyone’s eternal destiny.
That reading is one of several. As background beyond Gayton’s case, Reformed Christians read Romans 9 as speaking of God’s choice in salvation and deny that their view makes God the author of sin, and this old disagreement among faithful believers remains open. The defense does not have to settle it. Both sides affirm that love for God must be willing. They differ over what makes a will free.
Does the premise carry the argument?
The free will defense has a defined reach. Gayton distinguishes moral evil, which people do, from natural evil such as hurricanes and floods, and his argument from freedom addresses the first. Where it applies, it applies with force. Of violence, drug dealing and human trafficking in real neighborhoods, Gayton says plainly, “none of those actions are God.” The defense refuses to dissolve human responsibility into fate or circumstance.
Nor does it ask the suffering to stop questioning. In Luke 22:42 Jesus prays in Gethsemane for the cup to be removed, then says, “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” Lisa Fields observes that Jesus receives no explanation and submits anyway, and she draws the conclusion for ordinary believers: “I can question, but after my question, I must still submit.” The defense explains where moral evil comes from. It does not promise that any single tragedy will become understandable.
On its central claim, the premise holds. If love requires the real possibility of refusal, then a world built for love is a world where evil can happen. That defeats the strongest form of the challenge, the claim that a perfectly good and powerful God could never allow evil at all. The marriage illustration survives testing, provided freedom means bounded freedom and love means love that is kept over time.
The premise does not, by itself, show that this much evil is worth that much love. That judgment depends on the weighing premise and on the promise that evil’s reign is temporary. Those claims stand or fall with the rest of the Christian story, including the resurrection Gayton points to as the ground of his hope.
One implication remains. If freedom is the reason God permits evil, freedom is also the reason the question cannot stay theoretical. Gayton notes that when people hear the gospel, “every human has to make another choice.” An argument about why God allowed refusal ends by handing the reader the same choice Adam faced.