Free Will Does Not Cause Earthquakes

The standard answer to suffering is free will. A world with real choice has to allow real harm, the argument runs, and a maker who removed the harm would have removed the choice along with it. As a defense of murder, cruelty and war it has a long history and some force.

It covers a fraction of the ledger. Cruelty needs a perpetrator, and most of what goes wrong in a human life does not have one. Childhood leukemia has no chooser. Neither does a tsunami, a drought, or a wasp that lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar. Free will is the stated explanation for a category these cases do not belong to.

The category has a name, natural evil, and the defense's own supporters concede it needs a separate answer. The usual one is a fall of the first humans that corrupted the whole of nature. That answer requires the suffering to begin after the people did, and the fossil record is not arranged that way. A malignant bone tumor has been found in a dinosaur that died around seventy-six million years ago. Predation, parasitism and disease run through the record for hundreds of millions of years before any creature capable of a moral choice existed. More than ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever lived are gone, and most went by starvation, cold or catastrophe rather than by anyone's decision.

Human history repeats the pattern at smaller scale. For most of it, about half of all children died before reaching adulthood, of causes no parent chose. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck on the morning of All Saints' Day, when the churches were full, and many of them fell with the congregations inside. Europe argued about it for a generation.

The concession is not small. By volume, across all of time and all species, most suffering sits in the uncovered part. An explanation that leaves the majority of the thing unexplained is not an explanation of it, whatever it manages for the remainder.

The test travels. Take any account of why a world with a good and powerful maker contains suffering and run it against a case with no human in it: a young animal, a tumor, a drought a million years before the first farmer. If the account stops working at that case, its scope has been found, and the scope is smaller than the claim.