The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [110]
The soul-making theodicy would argue that in both cases above it’s necessary for evil to be excessive and random. If people knew that evil only occurred as much as was necessary, and no more than that, people would be far less inclined to attempt to overcome evil. Similarly, if evil was not randomly distributed, people would be less inclined to try to overcome it as they would know that evil, really, only happened to people that deserved it. In the end, people would never make an attempt to grow as spiritual and moral beings.
To better understand the soul-making theodicy, we could create a game-making theodicy. If a game was too easy, we’d likely get bored playing it rather quickly and give up, heading to the store for the latest release of Final Fantasy. Not only that, we’d be less inclined to play it several times and improve our playing skills (or buy the next title in the series). Likewise, if a game was too predictable the same thing would probably occur—we’d stop playing and move on to the next title. With the game-making theodicy players need evil to exist in order to continue to grow as players, just as with the soul-making theodicy. Under our game-making theodicy, we could also argue that there is another greater good provided by evil in Hyrule: that a great game series was brought into being (although this would complicate our efforts here since we would need to include ourselves as some sort of intermediary between God, the Goddesses, and Link).
Returning to the soul-making approach, some have put forth the idea that even if excessive amounts of evil are necessary to convince people to undertake moral betterment, isn’t it excessively excessive? In the grand scheme of soul-building, is there a difference between the death of four million people versus ten million? Isn’t Ganon sufficiently evil on his own to convince the people of Hyrule to improve themselves spiritually rather than adding a myriad of level bosses to the world?
While I can’t give an answer to this for the case on Earth, it’s possible to come up with a suitable response for Hyrule. One could argue that the Goddesses actually do consider the amount of evil represented by Ganon and his ilk to be excessive, even for the purposes of soul-making. Why else would they have a chosen hero in the form of Link? As we saw with the free will defense, once free will was created, the Goddesses would not have been able to limit the choices available to people; thus Ganon was free to choose to become evil. Similarly, with the creation of the Triforce to respond to anyone’s desire regardless of how moral or immoral that desire was, they could not limit what the Triforce would do without undoing what they had set out to create in the first place.
If the level of evil in Hyrule was so pronounced that the Goddesses felt it excessive for their purposes, the only way that the Goddesses would be able to deal with it would be under the terms they set out when creating Hyrule in the first place—unless, of course, they wanted to destroy free will. Thus, the Goddesses would have made it possible for a hero to be chosen who was capable of defeating evil and reclaiming the Triforce. Yet the Goddesses also would have ensured that their Hero had sufficient free will so as to be left to choose their own destiny.79 Hence, Link acts as a solution to the problem of evil in Hyrule as an entity enabled by the Goddesses to counteract any excessive amount of evil in the world and return Hyrule to what could be considered a “normal” amount of evil.