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Don't have a Kindle? Yet he proceeds, and his doing so is a measure of his love for us. See Hasker and Pinnock et. Such a position may appeal to philosophers who find the God of perfect being theology too remote and mysterious to equate with the God of scripture. But this viewpoint faces serious problems. Some are relatively specific. For example, it is hard to see how, if even God does not know what they will be, the actions of free creatures could be the subject of prophecy.
Yet they often are, in scripture Flint , — Also, there will no doubt be many cases where multiple free actions impinge on some outcome God desires. There is always the chance, therefore, that his plans as creator will be utterly dashed, that his overtures to us will be rejected — even to the point, one supposes, of our all being lost — that we will use our freedom and advancing knowledge to wreak ever greater horror, and that creation will turn out to be a disaster.
Willingness to take chances may be laudable in some cases, but surely this level of risk is irresponsible. Moreover, it is completely out of keeping with both scripture and tradition, both of which portray God as above the fray of the world, unperturbed by its mishaps, and governing its course with complete power and assurance. On the Open view, divine governance is a hit or miss affair, in which we can only wait to see whether a somewhat poorly informed God will manage to bootstrap his way to his objectives. Surely, opponents argue, this gives away too much of the traditional notion of providence.
One tactic for preserving omniscience even while accepting the basic open theist view just described is to hold that God cannot be faulted for not knowing in advance how we will exercise our freedom, since until we do there is simply nothing to know. According to views of this kind, not all propositions about the future have a truth value. Some do, of course: Similarly, a proposition concerning the future may have a truth value when its truth is causally determined.
Consider, for example, the proposition that the sun will rise tomorrow. Most likely, it is true. But now consider the claim that I will decide an hour from now to attend a concert this evening.
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If I have free will, there are no conditions presently in place that determine whether I will so decide. This being the case, according to the present view, the proposition that I will decide in an hour to attend the concert is neither true nor false. It has no truth value at all, nor does any other proposition that describes a future free decision or action. But then, the argument runs, it is not a mark against his omniscience that in creating us, God does not know how we will exercise our freedom.
It is logically impossible to know of a proposition that it is true or that it is false if it is neither. A distinct but related view is that all future contingents are in fact false, because there is nothing in the future to make them true, and so the fact that God does not know ahead of time which of them becomes true is not an epistemic failure on his part see Todd If correct, this view would indeed reconcile divine omniscience and creaturely freedom, leaving only the problem of sovereignty to be addressed.
But there are telling arguments against it. Propositions that venture to predict future free decisions and actions do appear to have truth values, and some of them appear to be true. One indication of this is that we believe and disbelieve such propositions, and what is it to believe a proposition but to believe it is true, or to disbelieve it but to believe it is false? Nor does it seem possible to worm our way out of this. Let p be the proposition that I will decide to attend a concert this evening.
It might be protested that for someone to believe I will so decide is only to believe p will become true at the appointed time — i. Similarly, it will not do to claim that to believe p is not to believe it is true but only that it is likely or probable. For to hold these beliefs is just to hold, respectively, that it is likely that p is true, or probable that it is true. In short, there seems no avoiding the fact that to believe p is to be committed to its truth, pure and simple. Moreover, anyone thus committed would, if I later decide to attend the concert, be justified in saying they had been right about what I would decide, that their earlier belief had been correct.
And again, what is it for a belief to be right or correct except for it to be true? For a related argument, see Pruss , to which Rhoda b replies. In any case, the concern remains that open theism leaves the traditional strong view of divine providence in tatters in favor of a risk-taking God. A better solution would be preferable, if one can be had.
A possible way to reconcile libertarian views of freedom with a strong view of divine providence was posed by the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit, Luis de Molina That is, God knows, for any creature he might create, how that creature will behave in whatever circumstances he might be placed. God is able to know this, moreover, even though the creatures in question will, if created, enjoy libertarian freedom.
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This kind of knowledge, which Molina called middle knowledge , [ 4 ] is comprised in what we may call subjunctives of freedom. Consider, for example, the situation in which I will find myself later today, when I deliberate about whether to attend the concert tonight. It is possible to formulate two subjunctive conditional propositions about that situation. The first states that if ever I were placed in the circumstances call them C that will then obtain, I would decide freely to attend the concert; the second states that in those circumstances, I would not so decide.
Finally, God is armed with true subjunctives of freedom for every other set of circumstances in which I might ever have been placed, and the same for every other free individual he has the option of creating, whether he actually chooses to create the creature or not. In effect, then, middle knowledge gives God advance notice of every free decision or action that would ever occur, on the part of any creature he might create Flint , 37— Once armed with information about how such a creature would decide and act in the various circumstances in which he might be placed, God has the option of not creating the creature, or of creating him in whatever circumstances are called for by the subjunctives of freedom God wishes to be realized in the actual world.
Now of course the circumstances in which one creature is placed may depend in part on how others choose to exercise their freedom. But the willings of those others can in turn be providentially arranged, since they too fall under middle knowledge. There may, of course, be much that does not go as God would prefer. It is important to realize that middle knowledge does not restore complete sovereignty to God.
The best he can do is alter my circumstances to fit some true subjunctive of freedom that has another outcome. And the same goes for the subjunctives of freedom that hold of all other creatures God might create. This means there is quite a range of worlds which, though logically possible, are not feasible for God, in that they are beyond his reach as creator Flint , Still, God can know in advance of creation what worlds are feasible, and can plan accordingly, which is a vast improvement over the Boethian view.
The position as regards omniscience is also improved. There is still a kind of transition called for — this time commencing from a point at which God merely contemplates the possibilities of how things might go with creation, to a point at which, having decided what creatures and circumstances will in fact populate the world, he knows how things will go. Again, however, it might be possible to work out a way in which the transition can be understood non-temporally. But is middle knowledge a legitimate notion? Many have thought not. One serious objection against it is that there does not appear to be any way God could come by such knowledge.
Knowledge, as we have seen, is not merely a matter of conceiving a proposition and correctly believing it to be true. But what justification could God have for believing the propositions that are supposed to constitute middle knowledge? The truth of subjunctives of freedom cannot be discerned a priori, for they are contingent. It is not a necessary truth that if placed in circumstances C , I will decide to attend the concert tonight. For God could not make observations like this without also finding out what creative decisions he is actually going to make, which would destroy the whole purpose of middle knowledge.
Instead of being guided in his creative choices by knowing what decisions creatures would make if they were created, God would be presented from the beginning with a fait accompli — with the reality that he was going to create certain creatures, and they were going to behave in certain ways. Furthermore, it seems clear that observation of the actual behavior of creatures could not possibly inform God of the truth of those subjunctives of freedom that delineate the behavior of creatures he will not choose to create, for in their case there is no pertinent reality to consult.
Yet Molinism wishes to allow for the possibility of such creatures. It is apparent, then, that neither conceptual resources nor resources founded in the concrete world will enable God to know in advance of his decisions as creator which counterfactuals of freedom are true. If there is a third resource, no one has said what it is. Thus, while God may firmly believe certain subjunctives of freedom, there appears to be no justification available to him that would allow such beliefs to constitute middle knowledge.
Note that the above objection is not based on the claim some have made, that subjunctives of freedom lack truth values, or that their truth is not properly grounded R. Adams ; Hasker On the usual understanding, a subjunctive of freedom counts as true provided that, among worlds in which its antecedent is satisfied, there is at least one in which the consequent is satisfied as well, and which is more similar to our world than any in which the consequent is not satisfied.
Now no world can be as similar to the actual world as that world is to itself, and we are assuming that C and p are true in the actual world.
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The only way to avoid this outcome is to deny that propositions like p — that is, propositions which describe future free decisions in the actual world — have truth values, and we have already seen that this will not do. The problem is only that it is not grounded in the way it needs to be to serve as middle knowledge.
We have yet to see how God can know as creator what decisions and actions his creatures will engage in, while at the same time upholding the idea that those decisions and actions are manifestations of libertarian freedom. It is commonly supposed that Molinism represents the only middle ground between, on the one hand, a risk-taking God of the sort envisioned by both open theism and simple foreknowledge views like the Boethian view described above according to which whatever foreknowledge God does have is not of much or any providential use, and, on the other hand, full-blown theological determinism.
It has been suggested recently in Kvanvig , chapter 8 , however, that there may be space for views other than Molinism in the area between those two extremes. But there are a number of other sorts of conditionals that might be of use to God in his decision-making. One is a particular type of indicative conditional, an epistemic conditional: He uses his knowledge of the epistemic conditionals to infer what he can, and then supposes further actions on his part, inferring further information. Importantly, some of these conditionals will describe human free decisions, for even on libertarian views of the will it is still possible sometimes to know what someone will freely do on the basis of other information about them.
Such complete plans or stories are the possible worlds that he will be able to ensure actually come about by actualizing all the states of affairs he had supposed throughout the reasoning process ; they are the feasible worlds on this account of providence. So, like Molinism, there are possible worlds that God cannot bring about, but also like Molinism he has quite a bit more control over the ones he can bring about than is allowed by open theism. The limitations on God are subtly different on this view than on Molinism.
On Molinism the limitations are the simple facts about what free beings would do in any given situation, while on the epistemic account the limitations are the availability of evidence with respect to what free beings will do in any given situation. Perhaps the greatest strength of the epistemic account is that it may avoid the central problem of Molinism: If epistemic principles are necessary truths, then God can know a host of epistemic conditionals simply on the basis of his knowledge of necessary truths. One problem with the epistemic account is simply the question of whether there really are sufficient true epistemic conditionals for God to come to know enough about what free beings will do with their freedom to generate a whole history of the world.
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Perhaps the profoundest problem for this view, however, is the question of the infallibility of divine foreknowledge. It is a key feature of the view that the reasoning from antecedent to consequent licensed by the epistemic conditionals is the sort involved in ordinary judgments of knowledge, and so is defeasible subject to overturning by further information and fallible.
See Kvanvig and Hasker for discussion of these objections. Only by so doing is it possible to restore to him complete control over the course of events in the world, and only in this way can he know as creator what world he is creating, and so be omniscient. He can create as he wishes, with full assurance as to the outcome. And he can know how things will go, in particular how we will decide and act, simply by knowing his own intentions as to what our decisions and actions will be.
Clearly, there are respects in which this approach is to be preferred. From the perspective of piety, the versions of the free will defense we have seen so far are all troublesome: One can readily anticipate the response that if complete sovereignty for God and libertarian freedom for his creatures cannot both be had, then the devout not to say Godfearing philosopher would be well served to endorse the former, that anything less is not just out of keeping with the mainstream of theological tradition, but actually borders on blasphemy.
Yet we have seen that free creatures are of greater value than the unfree, if only because their greater likeness to God makes them a desirable enhancement to creation. It may seem obvious that neither can survive: But at least where freedom is concerned, traditional theology asserts the opposite. Augustine, for example, held that God moves our wills, working in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure, as scripture says Phil. Yet he insists that this does not diminish our freedom, for if it did we would not be told in the same passage to work out our salvation in fear and trembling On Grace and Free Will , Similarly, Thomas Aquinas maintains that all of our doings, even those in which we sin, are on a par with the rest of creation in having God as their first cause.
Only the defect of those actions which is their sinfulness derives from us. Sin, he says, is like limping, in which the defective motion arises from the crookedness of the limb, rather than the power of locomotion that impels it Summa Theologica I-II, Q. What to make of these suggestions is, however, less than clear.
With Aquinas, however, the situation is less clear Stump , ch. And it has to be said that Aquinas offers little by way of explanation. There is, however, an interesting suggestion in the Summa Contra Gentiles , where Thomas maintains that if the will were moved by an external principle as agent, the movement would be violent, and then proceeds to the conclusion that God alone is able to move the creaturely will as agent without violence, since he alone is the cause and sustainer of its being, and thus is able to move it from within Book III, Ch.
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There are two things that may be said in favor of this suggestion here see also McCann and , Shanley , and Grant and The first concerns libertarian free agency itself, which is often portrayed as a power by which we cause, or confer existence upon, our own actions. If I confer existence on my decision to attend the concert tonight, I must do so either through some act separate from the decision, or as an aspect of the decision itself. If it is through a separate act, the problem of freedom simply shifts its location.
We have to be convinced that this act in turn receives its existence from me, and we appear headed for a vicious regress. But neither does it seem possible for me to confer existence on my act of deciding as an aspect of the act itself. So whatever agency and voluntariness consist in, it does not appear to be an ability to confer existence on our own actions. That is important, because it means that unless we can find a way to ground libertarian freedom in the creative activity of God, the decisions and actions in which it is manifested are likely to have no cause, no accounting whatever — a situation few philosophers are likely to find satisfying, and which hardly puts me in control of my act of deciding.
We are prone to think of this as an event-causal relation, in which God issues a kind of command, and the command in turn produces the mandated effect. Applied to our example, this would mean that God creatively wills that I decide to attend the concert, and his willing then causes me to decide. And of course this sounds exactly like what Aquinas describes as the violent operation of an external principle.
I am reduced to a puppet manipulated by God, rather than a free agent. Clearly, however, this scenario does not reflect the way Aquinas thinks creation works, and on that score there is reason to think Aquinas is right. Whatever we take this to consist in, it must exist contingently, for causal connections are not necessary beings. But then this supposed causal connection must also be created by God, and if that occurs through another process of command and causation, we would be facing another regress. Rather, we and all that we do have our being in God, and the first manifestation of his creative activity regarding our decisions and actions is nothing short of the acts themselves.
A useful analogy that may be drawn here is to the relationship between the author of a story, and the characters within it. The author does not enter into the story herself, nor does she act upon the characters in such a way as to force them to do the things they do.
Rather, she creates them in their doings, so that they are able to behave freely in the world of the novel. Accordingly, I can still display libertarian freedom. My decision is a spontaneous display of creaturely agency, free in the libertarian sense because it does not occur through event causality, and because in it I am fully and intentionally committed both to deciding and to deciding exactly as I do.
There are no further legitimate requirements for libertarian freedom. There is, of course, something that cannot happen on this view: It is because there is no manifestation of that will regarding my decision short of the decision itself. That suggests two events, and a potential conflict between them. Properly interpreted, however, the traditional view appears to call for only one event, and as far as it is concerned, all the impossibility comes to is that I cannot at once both make a decision and not make it. To be incapable of the logically impossible is not a failure of freedom, libertarian or otherwise.
So far it has been argued that theological determinism, by virtue of the nature of the determination involved which may yield the result that it is even misleading to describe it as determination at all , may well be compatible with a basically libertarian view of free will. An alternative for proponents of theological determinism is to accept a classically compatibilist view of free will, according to which freedom is compatible even with determination by causal factors within the created order, so long as those causal factors are of the right sort. The most famous proponent of such a view is Jonathan Edwards, and such views are common in the contemporary free will literature.
This discussion will proceed by focusing on the libertarian view of the will, but many of the same approaches can be taken by the compatibilist as well. The traditional view is enigmatic, and a lot more would need to be said to make it convincing. But if an account along these lines can be made to work, creaturely freedom is indeed reconcilable with divine sovereignty and omniscience.
As for omniscience, here too there is no difficulty. God knows about our decisions and actions simply by knowing his own intentions, for he wills that they occur. Nor is his will exercised from the fastidious distance preferred by Molinists, in which God creates us knowing what we will do, but has no hand in our actually doing it. Rather, God is as much the cause of our sinful actions as of our virtuous ones, or of any other event. Yet, Augustine and Aquinas would both insist, he remains perfectly good and absolutely holy, a being deserving of our complete reverence and absolute devotion.
How might such a thing be possible? Does not the traditional view entail that God is the author of sin in some objectionable way? This objection must be carefully distinguished from the ordinary axiological problem of evil: The author of sin objection says that the traditional view involves God too intimately in evil even if he has sufficiently good reason for allowing it. Indeed, if it did, if my decision were predicated of God rather than me, his will would fail to achieve its object.
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They remain our own. Consequently, any sin they involve remains ours also. If he is to be faulted, it must be for some other reason. Whether I would decide to go to the concert in the circumstances in which I will find myself tonight is not, according to Molinism, up to God. But it is up to him whether I shall be created in those circumstances, and indeed whether I shall exist at all. On both views, God knowingly and willingly creates a world in which rational creatures sin. The difference is that on the traditional view God does have complete control: This is not a complete answer to the author of sin charge, simply because the author of sin objection is not one objection at all but a family of objections.
It has as many different versions as there are objectionable relations to sin that the traditional view might be thought to entail God bears. It might be argued that the traditional view entails that God is the cause of sin, or that God intends sin, or that God desires that sin occur, or that God fails to love the damned. Each of these charges must be treated individually for a variety of responses, see the collected essays in Alexander and Johnson For instance, as the above author-storyteller model makes clear, theological determinism does not entail that God causes evil in the same way that created agents cause evil, and if the traditional privation theory of evil is true, then theological determinism does not entail that God causes evil at all.
Nor it is clear that, on the correct view of creation, theological determinism entails that God intends any evil at all; perhaps God selects the possible world he wishes to create all at once, so to speak, intending only the good aspects of creation and merely foreseeing as an unintended side effect all the evil that is caught up with it White The question is whether there is such a great good; and this is the ordinary, axiological problem of evil.
If the author of sin objection does not succeed in defeating the traditional view, then what is left is the question of whether God has sufficiently good reason for decreeing the evil that exists. Another free will defense may yet be available McCann For other attempts to modify a variety of free will defenses so as to make them compatible with theological determinism, see Byerly forthcoming and Almeida As such, free creatures are more suited to the kind of fellowship with God that believers understand to be their ultimate destiny.
It may be, however, that the achievement of that destiny inevitably involves sin. In part, this is because to have free will is to have a nature that is incomplete, in the sense that what we are never fully determines what we shall do. Rather, we have to complete our own nature, by establishing an identity for ourselves — that is, by adopting the patterns of behavior and long term objectives that define our lives.
And it may be that in so doing we inevitably find ourselves in rebellion against God, simply because as free beings we are apt to assume we can establish our destiny in a way that escapes providence — that is, entirely by our own choice — and so make that enterprise instead of obedience to God our first priority. Second, it has to be remembered that true friendship is always voluntary. If God only exacts devotion from us, we are reduced to being his subjects. To be friends with him requires a meaningful and responsible decision on our part to accept the offer of friendship he presents to us.
And there is good reason to think such an understanding requires that we sin. Guilt, remorse, a sense of defilement, and the hopeless desolation of being cut off from God cannot be understood in the abstract, because if they are only understood abstractly they are not ours. Only through experience can we understand what it means to be in rebellion against God, and we gain that experience by sinning. By turning away from God we realize what it means to be alone, and we learn that however successful they may be, our own projects cannot satisfy us.
Finally, we must remember the simple fact that if we are to experience a transition that ends in our being united to God, that transition can only begin from a place where we are separated from him. It is plausible to think, however, that there is no morally neutral ground here: In short, if we are to come to God as voluntary agents, it may well be that we can only approach him from a position of sinfulness. If this is correct, there is a great good that God, as a loving creator, is able blamelessly to will for us, but which in its exercise inevitably leads us into blameworthiness.
That good is our autonomy — the thing that makes us most like God, and is the sole means by which we are able to reach friendship with him, but which can be responsibly exercised to enter that friendship only if first employed in a conceit of rebellion, wherein we learn our limitations, and come to appreciate the emptiness of a life based on subjective independence. Only thus are we able to reach a position of moral autonomy from which an authentic choice to enter into fellowship with God is possible.
Thus, freedom is indeed crucial to moral evil: As creator, he is fully involved in those acts in which we sin, for they can occur only through his will. But he incurs no blame for them, for they are our acts, not his, and although they place us in rebellion against him, they do not put God in rebellion against himself. Indeed, no individual can be in rebellion against his own will. So if the essence of sin is rebellion against the will of God, then even though God is the first cause of those acts in which we sin, it is not possible that he himself sin in their occurrence.
It is worth noting, too, that the present view makes it possible to explain what, on the standard free will defense, can only be a mystery — namely, that although all of us possess libertarian freedom, and so have the option of serving God, still all humans sin. The reason for this is not that God suffers a terrible run of bad luck in a grand lottery of his own institution. Rather, it is because only by passing through sin that the saved are able to achieve their destiny. By creating us in our sinfulness, God assures that each individual will develop an authentic moral identity, and, if the theistic tradition concerning divine justice is correct, prepares each for the eternal recompense appropriate to his character.
An objection may be raised at this point. It is not a part of our religious tradition that all are saved. Paul, for example, seems clearly to have believed that some, the elect, are destined from the beginning for salvation, and others not Rom. And it is part of standard theology that, after death, the saved are joined to God in the beatific vision, a state of eternal and indescribable joy. The lost fare far worse. They are condemned to the bitter and devastating frustration of permanent separation from their creator, and on many accounts to a lot of other miseries as well.
Now on the present view, God is as much involved in the rebellion of the reprobate as in the conversion of the saved. And one may well wonder what could justify this. Why should a loving God create creatures destined for damnation? Many have found the idea that some creatures are destined for final reprobation troubling, if not downright incompatible with divine omnibenevolence M. One option here is to reject the concept of reprobation, opting instead for one or another form of universalism — the view that in the end all are saved, or at least that salvation is never completely foreclosed to anyone.
Perhaps in the end the will of those who would reject God is simply overwhelmed, so that they have no choice but to accept him. But universalist views face the twin challenges of apparent unorthodoxy and of seeming to trivialize earthly moral existence, which most religions treat as of paramount importance. For those who find universalism unacceptable the problem is to find adequate justification for the idea that some may be irretrievably lost.
Here it should be pointed out that whatever the sufferings of the lost may be, theologians have always agreed that the greatest evil they sustain is final and irremediable separation from God. Nothing could be worse than to be cut off from the love and friendship of a father whose power extends to every detail of the universe, and who invites us to a share in his very life.
But if this is the greatest evil of damnation, then no one who ends that way is treated unfairly, for this separation is precisely what one chooses by insisting on a life of rebellion rather than seeking reconciliation with God. Indeed, having once created beings destined to be lost, it is hard to see how a loving God could do anything but honor their choice in the matter Kvanvig , ch. What is troubling, rather, is that he should create such beings at all, much less will their performance of the very actions through which they reject him.
He cannot, of course, directly intend the rebellion of sinners, nor the destruction of the finally unrepentant. But the lost are full participants in securing their tragic destiny; and while a life ruined by final rebellion is morally indefensible, it is still morally meaningful. Through their actions, the lost carve out for themselves a character which, though not upright, represents a real option for a free creature.
Thus, the argument runs, to the extent that moral autonomy is a good it can be willed for a creature by God even when it takes this form. Furthermore, it is claimed, it is a mistake to think that God is not lovingly involved in the lives of the reprobate, or that he would have been more loving had he not created them. What is not there cannot be loved. Equally, it is meaningless to think the lost would be better off had they not existed. What is not good for them is the use they make of the opportunity, in choosing to be without God. But that is fully their decision, and its consequences are fully earned.
It is important to see that on such a view, moral evil is not treated as a causal means to the good of our having friendship with God. If that were so, opponents could justly object that God could simply have created us in such friendship from the start, and the defense would fail. Rather, the good on which this kind of theodicy is based is a free and informed choice that can only be made from a position of sinfulness. But that is not all. The very autonomy that the sinner once insisted upon is surrendered to God, thus becoming the foundation for a new understanding and a richer relationship, in which one is able to act as an informed and wholehearted participant in the divine enterprise of working good.
Sin does not function as a causal means in this process, nor is it simply overbalanced by some other good with which it coexists. It encountered and overcome, through the providential operation of God, as manifested in creaturely freedom. The idea that evil is defeasible was developed first by Roderick Chisholm It is an especially useful notion for theodicy, in that when evil is defeated, the usual objections to the presence of evil in the plan of providence are turned aside.
If evil were only a means to good, and were simply outweighed by the goods to which it leads, antitheists could legitimately object that God could have created a better world simply by omitting the evil and creating those goods outright, or obtaining them through means that were not evil. By contrast, when evil is defeated it is caught up in a larger state of affairs that constitutes a far greater good, but not by containing components that might have occurred independent of the evil in question, and simply outweigh it.
Rather, the evil is addressed within the larger state of affairs in such a way that it becomes integral to the good through which it is defeated. The defeat of evil is, moreover, an especially impressive sort of good. That Beethoven should have overcome the natural evil of his deafness to write the music he did, for example, strikes us as an amazing good — one far greater than what would have been accomplished had Beethoven written the same music assuming that to have been possible with good hearing.
Similarly, that moral evil is overcome through the process by which sinners are brought into a right relationship with God may be considered a far greater good than would have been accomplished had he made us a community of spiritual lotus eaters, whose relationship to him, if any, was founded on no meaningful decision, but simply upon our never having had the experience that would make anything else possible. Indeed, given the moral vacuity of such an existence, it is not obvious that such creatures would even be fit for divine friendship, much less able to make the decision through which that relationship is brought to pass.
But of course the same does not occur in the case of any who might be lost. Their rebellion is permanent, and is not overcome through any action of theirs. The antitheist may wish to argue that in this case it is evil that triumphs over good. The character of the lost is permanently corrupted: Thus, it might be claimed, the very existence of the reprobate stands as a gratuitous and unanswered defilement of creation, in which evil is victorious.
Can the theist point to anything that might reverse this verdict? One possibility is that God himself could take action specifically aimed at defeating all moral evil. This, of course is the defining theme of Christian soteriology. Not all sinners may accept the offer, but God is reconciled to all, in the sense that the substitutionary atonement of Christ covers all wrongfulness. For the Christian believer this is a sine qua non: This kind of answer is, however, confined to a particular religious tradition.
Is a more general solution possible? There are at least two lines of response the theist can take up at this point. First, he can argue that the moral evil wrought by unrepentant sinners is defeated through divine justice. Evildoers who refuse reconciliation with God receive a recompense addressed precisely to their offense: The destruction this entails befits their situation, but it is also a destruction the wrongdoer chooses, and his choice is honored by God in the outcome.
Here too, the theist might argue, it is possible for sin to be defeated, by being pointed out and corrected, and above all by being forgiven. In admonishing and forgiving those who sin toward us, we ally ourselves with God in the struggle against moral evil, by refusing to lapse into vengefulness and self-pity, and instead focusing ourselves, and if possible the sinner as well, on the higher things of God.
This also is a good to which sin is integral, rather than constituting a mere causal means, and which makes the world far better than it would be if sin never occurred. The position outlined above depends heavily on the idea that in the plan of providence moral evil is defeated, rather than simply being outweighed by some good to which it is a means. The evil of sinful willing is overcome when autonomy that is wrongfully exercised is surrendered to God in repentance and conversion, or when the sinner is left to the just deserts of willing to be separated from God.
It may fairly be argued, however, that the defeat here pertains primarily to intrinsic moral evil — that is, to sinful willing itself — rather than to the harm caused by it. Both conversion and reprobation may refute the sinful will, but they do not seem to alleviate or otherwise overcome the suffering caused by it. The idea of forgiveness may address the latter to some extent, but it is not entirely clear how. And even so, it may be claimed, much suffering is not, or at least not obviously, the result of wrongdoing.
The pains and anxieties of daily living would doubtless be lessened if wrongful willing did not occur, but there would still be danger and disease, accidents, natural disasters, occasional deprivation, the sufferings of old age, and eventual death. Theodicy has to deal with these evils too, and as in the case of sin, it will not do to claim simply that they lead to some greater good that outweighs them. For as in the case of sin, the antitheist could then argue that God could as easily have created the world so that the resultant good would be achieved by means that did not involve suffering, or would simply appear without any means at all.
How, then, might the theist respond here? Can the concept of defeasibility be developed so as to cover suffering as well as sin? One indication that it can is the disdain we would have for a world in which there were no suffering or hardship to be faced, but instead only endless gratification. As usually formulated, the argument from evil is based on what appears to be a false presumption. It imagines that the ideal world for a loving and compassionate God to create must be what John Hick describes as a hedonistic paradise: Now obviously, that is not the sort of world we have.
But the appropriate conclusion, the theist may argue, is not that the universe is not the creation of a provident God. For consider how we react to people whose lives have little to distinguish them except that they appear — perhaps deceptively — to be filled with enjoyment. But the truth is that we seldom admire those who appear to have a life of ease, nor are we likely to consider that kind of life very well spent. What we admire are lives of courage and sacrifice: How would such lives be possible if natural evil did not exist? For a related view, see Swinburne Still less would we respect an entire world devoted to nothing but enjoyment.
Imagine a society in which everyone has an electrode implanted in their brain, which, when a current is passed through it, causes intense euphoria, unmatched by any other pleasure. One simply needs to be attached to a power source, and the simple push of a button yields ecstasy. And that is all anyone cares about. Agriculture, commerce, government, and social institutions are organized toward but one goal: Individual lives are conducted with the same aim. Work is still necessary, but it is held to a minimum, and contact with fellow human beings has no purpose other than to keep things running smoothly, so that the pleasure of all can be maximized.
Now if the antitheist ideal of creation were correct, this type of society ought to represent a high order of human existence — better by far than the world in which we presently find ourselves. In fact, however, it is beneath contempt, a level of existence so low as to be barely human. The enterprises we value most would shrivel to near nothingness in such a world: Clearly, says the theist, we wish more for ourselves than this. A life without challenge is a life without interest. If theism is correct on these matters, then a God interested in creating the best of worlds cannot have as his top priority the maximization of creaturely pleasure.
Rather, a significant part of the enterprise of creation itself ought to be the confrontation and defeat of evil — an accomplishment far greater than merely guaranteeing the unperturbed pleasure of all. The central role in every human life of the struggle against evil bears this out. The battle is fought within each of us: But for believers that is by no means the end of the matter.
In the wake of repentance there should occur a gradual transformation of the individual, in which the damage wrought by sin is repaired, and the character traits appropriate for friendship with God are nourished.