John Harwood Hick (20 January 1922 – 9 February 2012) was an English philosopher and theologian.
Biography[]
John Harwood Hick was born in Scarborough, England in 1922, and he served in the Friends' Ambulance Unit during World War II, having objected to serving in the military on moral grounds. After the war, he began to question his fundamentalism after reading Immanuel Kant, and he served as a professor at Claremont Graduate University in California from 1979 to 1992, also holding teaching positions at Cornell University, the Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University. He moved towards pluralism from evangelicalism and became mostly Kantian, as well as supporting the "soul-making defense" theodicy. Hick argued that the world exists as a "vale of soul-making" (a phrase that he drew from John Keats), and that suffering and evil must therefore occur. He also argued that human goodness develops through the experience of evil and suffering. He died in Birmingham, England in 2012.