Harmony and Beauty, Disease and Suffering: Indeterminacy a Necessary Condition for Free Will

The order and harmony of the universe could be much more easily reconciled with the iniquity of nature (incomprehensible natural calamities) if we were to accept without thought that the universe is accidental and not something responding to a deliberate creative project. The exercise of free will, however, is possible only in the presence of a certain measure of indeterminacy, and this necessarily entails the possibility of unpredictable disaster. It follows, then, in the light of the Anthropic Principle, that, if man is to exist as a subject endowed with free will, the iniquity of nature, pain and suffering must also exist. The latter, it will be argued, are profoundly related to free will, not only because they may stem from an evil use of it, but also because they are the sine qua non for its very existence.