Tim Bayne: Why Should Soul-Making Be Necessary?

Tim Bayne, Philosophy of Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018), 68.

Even if advocates of the soul-making theodicy can show that the benefits of soul-making are absorbed by the badness of the evils that give rise to them, one might ask why soul-making is necessary in the first place. Perhaps we must be exposed to pain and suffering in order to become virtuous moral agents, but why didn’t God create creatures who were innately disposed to display moral virtue – creatures that don’t require the kind of moral training that we do?