Preface

There's some overlap between this book and my book on Pilgrim through this barren
land. Both address issues in theodicy. The main difference is that this book treats the
problem of evil more from the standpoint of philosophical theology whereas the other
book treats it more from the standpoint of practical theology. That doesn't mean this
book is impractical, but the point is to provide a philosophical buttress for practical
theology.
Contents
Over Jordan............................................................................................................................................. 8
Second-order theodicies ..................................................................................................................... 14
Serrated theodicy.................................................................................................................................... 16
Tooley on evil .......................................................................................................................................... 21
Where was God? ..................................................................................................................................... 28
Creation and extinction .......................................................................................................................... 29
Premature death ..................................................................................................................................... 33
Living for God .......................................................................................................................................... 34
Did God will the Fall? .............................................................................................................................. 38
Dodging a bullet ...................................................................................................................................... 39
The best of both worlds .......................................................................................................................... 40
Treble tradeoffs ...................................................................................................................................... 42
The wasteful work of nature ................................................................................................................... 44
Risk and reality ........................................................................................................................................ 48
Blood on my hands ................................................................................................................................. 50
Providence and Pointillism...................................................................................................................... 51
Why didn't God create us in heaven? ..................................................................................................... 52
God and Corn Flakes ............................................................................................................................... 53
Reframing the problem of evil ................................................................................................................ 55
Chronological time .................................................................................................................................. 56
Switched at birth ..................................................................................................................................... 57
Is God an evildoer? ................................................................................................................................. 58
Gridlock ................................................................................................................................................... 60
Paradise on earth .................................................................................................................................... 61
A catalogue of evils ................................................................................................................................. 63
Disarming the warrior-God ..................................................................................................................... 73
"If everything happens for a reason, then we don't know what reasons are" ....................................... 76
God and checkers.................................................................................................................................... 81
The invisible security guard .................................................................................................................... 83
Mind-games ............................................................................................................................................ 85
God, evil, and illusion .............................................................................................................................. 86
Is natural evil postlapsarian? .................................................................................................................. 89
Explaining evil, part 1 .............................................................................................................................. 92
Explaining evil, part 2 .............................................................................................................................. 96
Net result .............................................................................................................................................. 100
Anti-theodicy......................................................................................................................................... 103
Gerrymandering naturalism.................................................................................................................. 106
The absurdity of life in a Christian universe.......................................................................................... 109
Benevolence and reciprocity ................................................................................................................ 113
Does life matter?................................................................................................................................... 115
Distrusting God ..................................................................................................................................... 116
Hallmark flowers ................................................................................................................................... 121
Freewill theism and induction .............................................................................................................. 122
The avengers ......................................................................................................................................... 123
Fork in the road..................................................................................................................................... 124
Omniscient chess computer ................................................................................................................. 125
I'm afraid of the dark ............................................................................................................................ 126
Is evil privative? .................................................................................................................................... 128
Preempting God .................................................................................................................................... 129
God in spandex ..................................................................................................................................... 130
Craig shoots a hole in the bottom of his boat ...................................................................................... 131
Hilbert's Hotel ....................................................................................................................................... 133
Moving goal post................................................................................................................................... 135
Jerky theology ....................................................................................................................................... 137
Causing evil ........................................................................................................................................... 139
Shooting themselves in the foot ........................................................................................................... 141
"A God who accepts there are rapists in his universe"......................................................................... 142
Silver lining ............................................................................................................................................ 143
Moral skepticism and Scripture ............................................................................................................ 144
If I knew then what I know now............................................................................................................ 146
Antitheodicy .......................................................................................................................................... 148
Machine Gun Preacher ......................................................................................................................... 158
Wheat and tares ................................................................................................................................... 162
From the whirlwind............................................................................................................................... 166
Why I Am an Atheist: A Conversation with Dr. Stephen Law ............................................................... 167
To be or not to be ................................................................................................................................. 170
For God so loved the worlds ................................................................................................................. 172
Why doesn't God do more? .................................................................................................................. 172
Life is a gift, not a given ........................................................................................................................ 173
Would a good God prevent WWII? ....................................................................................................... 175
City on the edge of forever ................................................................................................................... 177
Dual control........................................................................................................................................... 182
Can God stop evil? ................................................................................................................................ 184
Selective intuition ................................................................................................................................. 185
God, evil, and evidence ......................................................................................................................... 187
Calvinism and the God of love .............................................................................................................. 189
Happy-talk Arminians............................................................................................................................ 200
Newtonian fatalism ............................................................................................................................... 205
Must God make the best?..................................................................................................................... 207
Is the world a brute fact? ...................................................................................................................... 211
Treating people as means ..................................................................................................................... 215
Is God exempt? ..................................................................................................................................... 218
Flying blind ............................................................................................................................................ 221
Changing trains ..................................................................................................................................... 223
Lord of the Flies..................................................................................................................................... 225
Evil dreams ............................................................................................................................................ 228
Are good and evil primary colors or secondary colors?........................................................................ 232
Enter at your own risk ........................................................................................................................... 234
Last plane out of Saigon ........................................................................................................................ 236
The real problem of evil ........................................................................................................................ 241
Where is God?....................................................................................................................................... 243
Yahweh and evil .................................................................................................................................... 245
Falling dominos ..................................................................................................................................... 247
Mantrap ................................................................................................................................................ 258
The divine mind-reader......................................................................................................................... 259
What could God do about evil? ............................................................................................................ 261
If only I had known................................................................................................................................ 265
The Final Countdown ............................................................................................................................ 266
How often does God intervene? ........................................................................................................... 268
Charbroiled Bambi ................................................................................................................................ 270
Is there gratuitous evil? ........................................................................................................................ 272
Is suffering chemotherapy for spiritual cancer? ................................................................................... 272
Unforeseeable consequences ............................................................................................................... 273
Hard truths ............................................................................................................................................ 276
Artificial reality ...................................................................................................................................... 281
God moves in mysterious ways ............................................................................................................ 283
Soul-making theodicy............................................................................................................................ 286
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire....................................................................................................... 290
Cybernetic theology .............................................................................................................................. 292
Is it murder? .......................................................................................................................................... 294
Friendship and the freewill defense ..................................................................................................... 296
Open theism and theodicy .................................................................................................................... 297
Open theism dilemma........................................................................................................................... 299
Does God play dominoes? .................................................................................................................... 301
Tug-of-war............................................................................................................................................. 303
Freedom and stability ........................................................................................................................... 305
Making the world safe for murder ........................................................................................................ 308
A will to damn ....................................................................................................................................... 313
Causing evil and committing evil .......................................................................................................... 318
Distraught parents ................................................................................................................................ 319
Heavenly rewards ................................................................................................................................. 321
The problem of evil is trivial.................................................................................................................. 323
Mercy-killing and Arminian theodicy .................................................................................................... 324
Living death or merciful death? ............................................................................................................ 325
Saving God from himself ....................................................................................................................... 326
Dying young .......................................................................................................................................... 330
Discovering God's goodness ................................................................................................................. 334
Sins of omission .................................................................................................................................... 335
Did God will sin?.................................................................................................................................... 336
Is it evil to decree evil? ......................................................................................................................... 337
Arminian eugenics................................................................................................................................. 340
God and Auschwitz ............................................................................................................................... 342
Child mortality....................................................................................................................................... 346
Doing v. allowing harm ......................................................................................................................... 348
An Arminian bedtime story ................................................................................................................... 351
Riddle me this! ...................................................................................................................................... 353
For better, for worse ............................................................................................................................. 356
Good-bye to God................................................................................................................................... 358
Kill the Indian, save the man ................................................................................................................. 360
"God can't stop it!" ............................................................................................................................... 361
Is the Arminian God a cosmic terrorist? ............................................................................................... 364
Canaanite babies ................................................................................................................................... 370
Over Jordan

Over the years I've done hundreds of posts on the problem of evil. In this post I'd like to
summarize some of that material, as well as arranging it in a logical relationship. The
purpose of this post is not to reargue all my contentions, but state them in compact,
logical fashion. The supporting material is to be found in my many posts on the subject.
It's possible that I've forgotten some of my own arguments.

1. THE PROBLEM OF ATHEISM

Before we think about the problem of evil, we need to think about the problem of
atheism. Too many atheists as well as Christians get off on the wrong foot by beginning
with the problem that evil purportedly poses for the Christian faith. But that's the wrong
starting-point.

We need to consider the implications of the alternative. Atheism provides a point of

contrast. As some hardy atheists concede, their position conduces to moral and
existential nihilism. Human lives are worthless.

The problem of evil induces some professing Christians to renounce the faith. Yet
atheism is irredeemably evil. Apostates are siding with evil when they recant
Christianity. They decry evil, but throw themselves into the arms of evil by embracing
nihilism.

It's crucial to appreciate that atheism can never be a viable fallback position.

2. HOW PROBLEMATIC IS THE PROBLEM OF EVIL ?

Evil can be a serious problem without being a serious problem for the credibility of
Christian theism. We need to distinguish different ways in which evil is a problem. Evil is
a problem in the sense of making life much grimmer. But that's different from claiming
that evil is a problem for the truth of Christianity.

We keep reading that the problem of evil is the main intellectual challenge to the
Christian faith. But does the repetition of that trope artificially condition people to think
that way about evil? Does constantly reading about the problem of evil feed on itself.

Is the trope circular? Does the trope have a cumulative effect? If you hear something a
thousand times, you may be more likely to believe it just because you heard it a
thousand times. Repetition becomes a specious substitute for evidence–like an urban
legend.

3. THE FREEWILL DEFENSE

Not surprisingly, many freewill theists deploy the freewill defense. Obviously, it wouldn't
be possible for someone who isn't a freewill theist to deploy the freewill defense. If he
was a Calvinist, then that theodicy would be inconsistent with his theology.

However, the freewill defense is independent of freewill theism in the sense that even if
libertarian freedom were true, that doesn't automatically mean the value of libertarian
freedom outweighs the disvalue of evil. Just because freewill theism is consistent with
the freewill defense doesn't entail that the good of libertarian freedom is better than the
good of a world without so much pain and suffering. Many freewill theists just assume
that the freewill defense is their default theodicy, but the truth of freewill theism is
separable from whether freedom in itself makes the existence of evil morally
permissible.

4. THE LOGICAL /EVIDENTIAL ARGUMENT

The logical argument from evil is internal to Christianity. It attempts to show that some
key Christian tenets are mutually inconsistent. In principle, an atheist who denies moral
realism can deploy the logical argument from evil.

By contrast, the evidential argument from evil concerns the plausibility of God's
existence in light of evil. That can be a worry for Christians. But unlike the logical
argument from evil, when an atheist deploys the evidential argument from evil, he may
evaluate the issue by resort to his own standards.

Frequently, though, atheists blur these two different arguments. Is the atheist arguing on
his own grounds, or is he arguing on Christian grounds? Oftentimes, atheists are so
controlled by what they think is rational or ethical that they impugn the coherence of
Christian theism when they are covertly interjecting their own criteria into the
assessment.

Moreover, if an atheist deploys the evidential argument from evil, then he shoulders a
burden of proof to justify his own standards, consistent with his naturalism. He's not
entitled to take his criteria for granted.

5. PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY

The argument from evil typically takes the form of an inconsistent tetrad:

i) God is omnipotent

ii) God is omniscient

iii) God is benevolent

iv) Evil exists

An atheist then attempts to show that these are mutually inconsistent, thereby
generating a dilemma for the Christian. To relieve the inconsistency, a Christian must
forfeit at least one of the propositions. If, however, (i-iii) are nonnegotiable, then his
belief-system has no give. As an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it set, if it's inconsistent
at any one point, then you must ditch the whole thing. So goes the argument.

But one problem with the argument from evil is that it attacks a very abstract version of
theism. Something derived from philosophical theology. Classical theism or perfect
being theology.

Typically, the argument from evil isn't formulated in reference to a historic living religion
like OT Judaism or NT Christianity.

For instance, it would be much harder to show that the argument from evil disproves the
existence of Yahweh since Yahweh isn't "benevolent" in the sense that atheists typically
define benevolence when formulating the argument from evil. Indeed, many unbelievers
reject biblical theism because they think Yahweh, Jesus, and/or God the Father is not
benevolent as they see it. They take umbrage at various divine actions, commands, and
prohibitions in Scripture.

But where does that leave the argument from evil? If, by their own admission, biblical
theism doesn't comport with their preconceived notions of benevolence, then the
existence of evil is consonant with the existence of a Deity like that.

On a related note, the existence of evil is a necessary presupposition of biblical theism.

If we were living in a world devoid of moral and natural evil, then the absence rather
than the presence of evil would falsify the Biblical depiction of reality. Bible history is
replete with evil. Eschatological salvation and judgment are the ultimate remedy.

6. THE PARADOX OF PREVENTION

Atheists allege that if God exists, he'd either prevent evil altogether or at least prevent
more evil than he does. However, preemption has the paradoxical consequence of not
only preventing an event but by the same token, preventing any evidence that the event
was preempted. Since it never happened, it had no discernible effects. A nonevent
leaves no trace evidence.

For all we know, God has preempted countless evils, for if he's done so, then in the
nature of the case that's something we will never know.

7. NO BEST WORLD

It's easy for us to imagine ways in which the world could be better. But that's a
shortsighted perspective.
Take time-travel stories in which the protagonist is living in the aftermath of a global
catastrophe. His solution is to avert the catastrophe by changing the past. Changing a
key variable in the past so that the future will fork off into an alternate timeline where
that catastrophe never happened. And he succeeds, only there's an unforeseen cost.
He may simply replace one global catastrophe with another global catastrophe. The
alternate future has a different disaster. Or by preventing the catastrophe, he prevents
many resultant goods.

So he can never strike the right balance. There's no alternative that preserves all the
same goods without the attendant evils. There's no best possible world. Each world may
be better in some respects, but worse in others. Short-term improvements at the
expense of long-term disasters. Every alternate timeline has tradeoffs.

8. DOMINO EFFECT

Apropos (7), although God can and sometimes does intercede to prevent or halt evil,
divine intervention has a disruptive effect on the future. Every divine intervention causes
the future to veer off in a different direction than if God did not intercede.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes that's a good thing. Yet that's offset
by the series of goods which divine intervention eliminated when he diverted the
timeline.

Moreover, there's no optimal number of divine interventions. He could always do it one

more time or one less time. Each intervention or nonintervention has respective
consequences down the line. So the cutoff is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. There's
no intrinsic upper or lower limit.

In a cause-effect world, every action has a domino effect. Divine prevention doesn't
merely swap out one domino with another, but replaces the entire series of falling
dominoes after that point with a different series of falling dominoes.

Atheists act as though God could just rearrange some things to make the world a better
place. But in a world with linear cause-and-effect, it isn't possible to rearrange a few
things without setting the future on a whole new course.

And every alternate timeline has a different set of winners and losers. People who were
heavenbound in one timeline don't exist in another timeline. They miss out on that
incomparable opportunity.

Some people respond by appealing to the Epicurean symmetry between prenatal and
postmortem nonexistence. But that's an intuition which many people don't share.
Arguably, nonexistence is a deprivation.

9. SECOND-ORDER GOODS
There are internal relations where you have an effect of an effect. Nested relations
where the end-result is necessarily contingent on an intervening event. For instance, a
grandfather can't directly father a grandson. Rather, he can indirectly produce a
grandson via the medium of his own son. By the same token, some kinds of goods are
necessarily contingent on some prior evils. Even an omnipotent God can't bypass those
stages to achieve the result directly.

10. SOUL-MAKING VIRTUES

There's a difference between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by

description. A difference between abstract propositional knowledge and firsthand
experience.

Experience is transformative as well as informative. It doesn't just add new information,

but changes you in the process. Let's take two hypothetical examples:

i) Suppose an athletic boy has contempt for a disabled classmate. He taunts and bullies
the boy in the wheelchair.

Then he himself becomes disabled during a sporting event. He now finds out what a
struggle it is to be confined to a wheelchair. To depend on the kindness of strangers. He
acquires compassion through personal, comparable experience.

ii) Suppose some teenagers go hiking. They're best friends, or so they assume. But
that's never been put to the test.

Suppose, due to unexpectedly bad whether, they suddenly find themselves in a survival
situation where the odds of their individual survive are greatly enhanced by leaving an
injured companion behind. Or by murdering a companion.

That life-threatening situation exposes the depth or superficiality of their friendship. Will
they risk their own life and health for the sake of another, or were they fair-weather
friends all along?

Now suppose they never went on that ill-fated hiking trip. In that case, they wouldn't
need to have those sacrificial virtues. Yet that's a grave moral defect, even if
circumstances never force it to the surface.

11. ESCHATOLOGICAL COMPENSATIONS

Compared to eternity, this life is a blink of an eye. However horrifically a Christian may
suffer in this life, once that's past, it's forever behind him. After he dies, the afflictions of
this life are increasingly distant in his consciousness. Although memory is important, we
live in the present, and our mood is powerfully shaped by future expectations.
Indeed, there's a tremendous sense of relief. He made it! The worst is behind him. He's
safe now. Out of harm's way. Nothing more to fear. Nothing more to lose. He can't go
back. And the way ahead is nothing but good.
Second-order theodicies

What may be the two the best theodicies can be consolidated under a single principle:
second-order goods.

What are second-order relations? For instance, you can't die unless you were alive.
Jacob can't be Abraham's grandson unless he was Isaac's son.

Even an omnipotent God can't produce a second-order effect directly. For instance, God
can create Jacob ex nihilo, but God can't make Jacob Abraham's grandson if Abraham
and Isaac never existed.

Or take a second-order evil. Suppose I embezzle company funds, then lie to cover up
my embezzlement. I can't lie about my embezzlement unless I was guilty of
embezzlement.

Take an example of a second-order good. I can't forgive someone unless I've been
wronged. I can't be forgiven unless I've wronged someone.

i) Soul-making

Soul-making virtues are second-order goods. They presume the existence of first-order
natural or moral evils.

Suppose it's better to be a redeemed creature than a sinless creature. If so, that's a
second-order good.

ii) Domino effect

To take an example, some folks marry people they've known for years. But in other
cases, they meet by chance. Some people meet their future spouse because they just
happen to be at a particular place at a particular time. Had they gone to the same place
at a different time, or gone to a different place at the same time, they would have
missed connections.

If you were to change a single variable in the past, that could throw it off. And many
different individual variables could have the same disruptive effect. Had the recent past
been even slightly different, they might end up meeting a different future spouse, and
making a life with that person. A different forking path. A different family tree.

Suppose the weatherman forecast sunny weather, so you didn't dress for rain. But
there's a brief rain shower, forcing you to take cover in a bookstore, where you bump
into your future spouse.
It may be little things like that. Or it may be big things. Take the Holocaust. About 6
million European Jews perished in the Holocaust.

However, one side-effect of the Holocaust was to create a new Jewish Diaspora. There
are Jews living in Israel or America who wouldn't exist if their parents or grandparents
hadn't fled Europe, either in anticipation of the Final Solution, or as blighted survivors.

That's a second-order consequence of the Holocaust. They live because some of their
Jewish ancestors died. (Indeed, were murdered.)

So there are tradeoffs. The Holocaust is a paradigm evil, yet there are resultant goods
that wouldn't have occurred apart from that paradigm evil.

There is no best possible world. There is no single world that combines all the goods of
different possible worlds. There might be a best possible multiverse, but not a best
possible world–in the sense of one actual timeline to the exclusion of others.
Serrated theodicy

Calvinism sounds bad...until you compare it to the alternatives.

On Facebook, Jerry Walls recently plugged a NYT oped attacking Calvinism: "Teaching
Calvin in California".

Jerry fancies himself a Wesleyan Arminian, but just imagine teaching Charles Wesley in
California. How do you think his sermon on earthquakes as divine judgment would go
over in that seismically active part of the world:

http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-
129-the-cause-and-cure-of-earthquakes/

Jerry is an Arminian propagandist first and a philosopher second. Always in that order.
Jerry is a corruptor of critical discourse. A good philosopher practices critical thinking
skills, and cultivates critical thinking skills in his students and listeners. Part of being a
good philosopher is to mentally argue both sides of the issue so that you can defend
your position in the face of the best the competition has to offer. You anticipate
objections. You anticipate counterexamples. In fact, good philosophers will even
improve on the arguments of the opposing position, in order to respond to the strongest
possible objections to their own position.

Jerry never does that. He always gives a one-sided presentation. He picks on weak
opponents. He submits to softball questions by sympathetic interviewers.

I'll be the first to admit that Calvinism has an uncomfortably severe aspect. But I don't
think that's a damaging concession. The Bible often has a severe aspect. Take
"offensive" passages in the OT. Or the "offensive" doctrine of hell. Or graphic and
horrific imagery in the Book of Revelation.

For that matter, extrabiblical historical has an uncomfortably severe aspect. All the
horrific events that happen in the world at large, on a regular basis.

It's unintelligent to assess Calvinism merely on its own terms. You need to put
Calvinism in context. You need to make a comparative judgment. Comparing and
contrasting Calvinism with the alternatives. I'm going to briefly review traditional
religious strategies in response to the problem of evil.

I. INDIAN PHILOSOPHY

i) The law of karma is a traditional Hindu and Buddhist explanation for the problem of
suffering. Why do the innocent suffer? Hinduism and Buddhism cut the knot by denying
the premise. According to Hinduism and Buddhism, there is no such thing as innocent
suffering. If a 5-year-old girl is run over by a drunk driver, she's being punished for
something she did in a past life.
ii) In one strand of Hinduism, evil exists because good and evil exist in the divine, and
every possibility must be realized. In that respect, Hinduism is like Neoplatonism,
Manichean or Zoroastrian dualism, the multiverse, and the principle of plenitude.

On that view, evil is just as ultimate as good. Evil is an ineluctable aspect of bedrock
reality. On that view, evil is not a declension from the way things are supposed to be.
Not a temporary side-effect of something more primary.

iii) Apropos (ii), the solution to the problem of evil is twofold:

a) Cultivate detachment

b) Annihilation. The only escape is to break the vicious cycle of karmic reincarnation by
passing into oblivion.

iv) Apropos (iii), detachment has different aspects:

a) In Buddhism, we suffer because we lose what we love. Everything is fleeting. The

solution is renunciation of human affections. Of course, one could argue that the cure is
worse than the disease. But there are no good options.

b) On a related note, both Hinduism and Buddhism have a doctrine of maya, although
the interpretation varies. In general, this involves a distinction between appearance and
reality. Between the divine and the world or the self and the world.

In one strand of Hinduism, what is ultimately real is the immutable, eternal, preexistent
soul. The world of time and space is illusory. But since that's the world in which evil
occurs, evil is illusory. You need to practice meditation to withdraw psychologically from
the bewitchment of the phenomenal world.

In Buddhism, maya is a delusion that masks the void. In Hinduism, you practice
mediation to realize that your real inner self is untouched by phenomenal evil. In
Buddhism, you practice mediation to realize that you have no real inner self to be
touched by phenomenal evil.

These are very bleak philosophies.

II. ATHEISM

Atheism has some affinities with Buddhism. Indeed, Schopenhauer's nihilistic outlook is
similar to Buddhism.

i) Technically, atheism can't have a theodicy, but it must address the problem of evil.
One intractable difficulty with atheism is that if you're cheated in this life, you don't get a
second chance. In a godless universe, many people suffer irredeemable loss. There are
no eschatological compensations. No reversal of fortunes.

ii) In addition, there are no objective goods. We value certain things because our
evolutionary conditioning has brainwashed us into believing some things are worthwhile,
but when you rip away the mask, there's nothing behind the mask. Just a dumb, pitiless,
amoral process–much like the Buddhist void.

III. UNIVERSALISM

On the face of it, universalism has the most appealing theodicy. But on closer
examination it has some bloody jagged edges.

i) If God is going to save everybody, why put so many people through a hell on earth in
the first place? It's like splashing acid in someone's face, then paying for her skin grafts
and reconstructive surgery. Does universalism really require God to stand by as Nazis
perform human experimentation on Jewish children?

ii) By the same token, the price of universalism is for victims of horrendous evil to share
eternity with their tormenters. Mengele and his victims will be neighbors in paradise.

There's a sense in which the purest form of punishment, pure retribution, is to be denied
a second chance. You crossed a line of no return. Your burned your return ticket.
Despair is the truest form of just deserts. The damned have no hope. That's what
makes hell hellish. If there's no injustice so heinous that it's unforgivable, then is there
any ultimate justice?

IV. MOLINISM

i) Molinism attempts to harmonize freewill with determinism. Possible worlds contain

moral evils caused by human agents with libertarian freedom.

If, however, God instantiates a possible world, that's a package deal. Everything that
happens in the actual world is bound to happen. Even though alternative courses of
action are viable options, those only happen in possible worlds that God did not
instantiate. If a possible world is indeterministic, an actual world is deterministic. By
instantiating that particular world history, every event must unfold accordingly and
inexorably.

It's like a library of DVDs. Some DVDs are unplayable (infeasible). But of the subset of
playable DVDs, God chooses which DVD to play. And the plot is predetermined. From
start to finish, everything happens according to script.

Compare it to instant replay. Even if the original outcome was indeterminate, the replay
is determinate. If we think of possible worlds as abstract objects, then (according to
Molinism), the human agents were free, but these aren't real people. In the ensemble of
possible worlds, they can do otherwise. Indeed, there are possible world where they do
otherwise. But in the real world, where they are real people, with consciousness and
feelings, they can't rewrite the plot. Each possible world has a single history. It can't
combine two or more alternate histories from different possible worlds.

ii) In addition, human agents don't get to choose which possible world will be
instantiated. Suppose there's a feasible world in which Judas is heavenbound. In that
world, he doesn't betray Jesus. That would clearly be a better world for Judas to find
himself within, but he gets stuck in the world where he's hellbound. He is fated to betray
Jesus the moment God instantiates that particular timeline rather than some alternate
timeline. Trapped in a world where he is doomed.

V. ARMINIANISM

Superficially, this seems kinder and gentler than Calvinism. But on closer examination,
you will cut yourself on razor wire.

Arminianism has two basic commitments: God's love and man's freedom. These two
principles tug in opposing directions. The claim is that for love to be genuine, humans
must be at liberty to refrain from reciprocating God's love.

But even if, for the sake of argument, we grant that contention, it's only plausible at an
individual level. Problem is, humans are social creatures who interact with fellow
humans. As a result, God must respect the freedom of Nazi scientists to experiment on
human guinea pigs (to take one example). Protecting the innocent from horrendous
harm is less important than creating a theater in which "true love" is possible.

VI. OPEN THEISM

According to open theism, God is in a situation of diminish responsibility for evil

inasmuch as God is ignorant of the long-term consequences of his creative actions. But
there are problems with that theodicy:

i) If you don't know whether you're inserting innocent people into a dangerous situation,
shouldn't you play it safe? When it doubt, is it not morally incumbent on you to avoid
exposing people to an unforeseeable, but potentially catastrophic risk?

ii) Moreover, even if God can't foresee the outcome a year in advance or a month in
advance, surely he can foresee the outcome a day in advance or an hour in advance.
As events come to a head, the future becomes increasingly predictable, even if the
outcome is not a dead certainty.

In addition, we don't generally think the bare possibility that something might not be
harmful is an excuse to insert innocent people into what is, in all likelihood, a hazardous
situation.
VII. CALVINISM

According to Calvinism, God predestines every event, including evil events. Although
that's a sobering claim, an implication of that claim is that everything happens for a
reason. Indeed, there's a good reason for whatever God ordains.

Especially in cases of evil, we typically demand that there better be a good reason to
justify it. And that's precisely what Calvinism claims.

Compare that to the candid admission of sophisticated freewill theism:

According to the story I have told, there is generally no explanation of why this evil
happened to that person…It means being the playthings of chance. It means living in a
world in which innocent children die horribly, and it means something worse than that: it
means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly for no reason at all. It
means living in a world in which the wicked, through sheer luck, often prosper.
But whether a particular horror is connected with human choices or not, it is evident, at
least in many cases, that God could have prevented the horror without sacrificing any
great good or allowing some even greater horror.
No appeal to considerations in any way involving human free will or future benefits to
human beings can possibly be relevant to the problem with which this case [Auschwitz]
confronts.
There are many horrors, vastly many, from which no discernible good results–and
certainly no good, discernible or not, that an omnipotent being couldn't have achieved
without the horror; in fact, without any suffering at all. P. van Inwagen, The Problem of
Evil (Oxford, 2006), 89,95,97.

Is that clearly preferable to Calvinism? What's disturbing isn't so much the idea that God
predestines horrendous evils, but the fact of horrendous evils. The world has exactly the
same horrendous evils regardless of your theodicy.

It's just immature, as well as deceptive, for Arminians like Walls to constantly attack
Calvinism based on the disagreeable implications of Calvinism while constantly refusing
to compare it with the disagreeable implications of every other theodicy. In our fallen
world, there are no nice theodicies. Every theodicy has serrated edges. There's no
escaping that.
Tooley on evil

Philosopher Michael Tooley has published a new monograph: The Problem of Evil
(Cambridge 2019). He's arguably the most sophisticated atheist on this particular issue,
so it's useful to scrutinize his position. I'll focus on what I take to be his best arguments.

2.6 Allowing Undeserved Suffering Cannot Be Justified by Appealing to the Great

Good of the Existence of Laws of Nature

First, it is generally held that an omnipotent deity could miraculously intervene at

any time and place to alter what happens in the natural world, and this is surely
right, since if God is the creator of everything, all that is needed for God to be able
to intervene in the natural world at any time is to create laws...of the ‘God
willing’ variety. Moreover, they need to be of that variety if, as most theists
believe, God sometimes intervenes miraculously in the natural world.

Let us turn, then, to a second argument, which is that many evils depend upon
precisely what laws the world contains. An omnipotent being could, for example,
easily create a world with the same laws of physics as our world, but with slightly
different laws linking neurophysiological states to qualities of experiences, so that
extremely intense pains either never occur, or else could be turned off by the
sufferer when they served no purpose. Alternatively, God could create additional
physical laws of a rather specialized sort that could, for example, either cause
very harmful viruses to self-destruct, or prevent viruses such as the avian flu virus
from evolving into an airborne form that would have the capacity to kill hundreds
of million people.

I disagree with the facile way atheists like Tooley posit that God could create different
physical laws. There are limitations on what an omnipotent God can do by means of
natural media. While he can often bypass natural processes to produce an outcome
directly (although there are exceptions to that as well), if God is working by means of a
natural cause and effect process, then all laws must be mutually consistent. God can't
just create ad hoc laws at odds with a network of physical processes.

To return to the main argument, given ‘God willing’ laws, God could intervene to
destroy the viruses and bacteria that are responsible for diseases that cause
enormous suffering and millions of deaths each year. These diseases include, in
the case of viruses, AIDS, cervical cancer, dengue fever, Ebola disease, hepatitis,
influenza, Lassa fever, measles, Nipah virus disease, poliomyelitis, rabies,
rotavirus, viral hemorrhagic fever, and West Nile fever. In the case of bacteria,
they include anthrax, bacterial meningitis, bacterial pneumonia, diphtheria,
epidemic typhus, leprosy, leptospirosis, Lyme disease, meningococcal meningitis,
necrotizing fasciitis, pelvic inflammatory disease, rheumatic fever, scarlet fever,
tetanus, toxic shock syndrome, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yaws.
Alternatively, if God preferred, precisely the same result could be achieved by
God’s creating purely physical laws that result in the destruction of harmful
viruses and bacteria as soon they come into being. There would never have been,
then, the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which is estimated to have killed
between 75 and 200 million people, or the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed
between 50 and 100 million people.

God could also intervene whenever it was necessary to prevent great natural
disasters in the form of earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, hurricanes, and so on.
These would include the earthquake in China in 1556 that killed around 800,000
people, or tsunamis, such as the one in 2004 that hit twelve Asian countries and
killed over 200,000 people.

Finally, it is not just natural evils that God could have prevented. Consider great
moral evils such as the Holocaust. A small intervention by an omnipotent,
omniscient, and perfectly good being could have allowed one of the many failed
attempts to assassinate Hitler to succeed, or a small mental nudge could have
resulted in Hitler’s realizing the error of his deadly anti-Semitism.

The irrelevance of an appeal to the claimed desirability of God’s remaining

relatively hidden is also now apparent. Natural disasters like floods, hurricanes,
tornadoes, and droughts all depend upon the weather in ways that involve highly
complex causal processes. Would any human conclude that God must be
intervening if hurricanes never occurred in human history? Would it not require
an unimaginably massive scientific inquiry, if it were even possible, for humans to
arrive at the conclusion that some supernatural being must be intervening to
prevent such occurrences? Or consider earthquakes, which occur at the
boundaries of tectonic plates. If God simply prevented such movement, or
allowed it to occur only very slowly, would any human ever be able to discover
what was happening?

The same is true with regard to the suffering and deaths that result from
diseases, including those listed above, due to viruses and bacteria. An omnipotent
and omniscient being would know, as he watched things evolve, when any new
virus or bacterium that appeared would harm humans or other sentient beings,
and could destroy any such thing immediately. Or he could have created laws that
would do that without any intervention needed on his part. If either were the
case, would any human ever be able to discover that this was happening?
 Finally, the same is true as regards great moral evils. An omniscient being would
know when a Stalin or a Hitler or a Hirohito was about to do something that
would lead to the deaths of millions. If such people died from a stroke, would
anyone know that a deity had intervened?

All that overlooks at least three considerations:

i) Some second-order goods are contingent on evil. The evil can only be eliminated at
the cost of eliminating the corresponding good.

ii) Eliminating moral and natural evil generates a radically different world history. There
are billions of humans whose existence hinges on a particular world history, containing
moral and natural evil. They miss out in a world devoid of moral and natural evil.

Tooley might take a hardline Epicurean view, but it's arguable that nonexistence is a
deprivation. Indeed, the most fundamental deprivation of all. So there are tradeoffs. Not
all goods are compossible in the same timeline.

iii) Since Tooley concedes that divine preemption of evil might be indetectable, then for
all we know, God has in fact preempted evil countless times. However, as I also noted
(ii), preempting evil has a disruptive effect on the future. So the value of divine
intervention must be counterbalanced by taking the unfortunate side-effects into
consideration.

2.8 Part 2 of the Incompatibility Argument from Evil

Condition 2: Allowing the undeserved suffering would lead to an improvement in

the life of the individual undergoing the suffering, an improvement that
otherwise could not be achieved, and where the improvement would outweigh
the badness of the undeserved suffering.

Condition 3: Preventing the undeserved suffering would result in some other

sentient being undergoing even greater undeserved suffering.

Condition 4: Not preventing the undeserved suffering would make possible either
the existence of some intrinsically good state of affairs, or the prevention of some
intrinsically bad state of affairs, which would otherwise be impossible, and which
would outweigh the prima facie wrongness of allowing the undeserved suffering
of the sentient being.
I think those are all justifications for God to refrain from preventing evil in many
situations.

3.3 What Is the Rationale Behind Appealing to Skeptical Theism?

Does skeptical theism at least succeed in refuting incompatibility arguments from

evil? This question will be addressed in Section 3.4. First, however, it is worth
asking why one would appeal to skeptical theism in order to show that
incompatibility arguments from evil cannot succeed. Why not simply appeal to
the skeptical thesis that is part of skeptical theism?

It is hard to see what the answer is other than that skeptical theists think that
belief in the existence of God is rational at least to some extent, thereby lending
weight to the idea that there may be unknown goods that justify the evils found
in the world.

If something like this is the skeptical theist’s underlying line of thought, it is open
to the objection that there is no good reason for believing that theism is true.

Actually, the general principle is independent of theism (considered in isolation). Take

the law of unintended consequences. An event may have both beneficial and
deleterious consequences, in the short-term or the long-term. And these are ultimately
unforeseeable by humans. The future is less predictable the farther out it goes. So
skeptical theists are simply applying that general principle to theodicy.

Or consider arguments from claimed miracles. Such arguments typically focus on

very limited texts, ignoring miracle claims in other texts in the same holy
scripture. For example, in the case of Bible-based arguments, no attention is paid
to the stories of Noah and the great flood, or Joshua and the battle of Jericho,
where we have excellent evidence that the purported and spectacular miracles in
question never took place.

Arguments from miracles also virtually always ignore information both about the
dramatic growth of miracle stories in a short stretch of time. This has been set
out, in a detailed and scholarly way in the case of Francis Xavier, by A. D. White
1896, as well as about the failure of any recent and present-day miracle claims to
survive critical scrutiny – as shown by the work of D. J. West 1957, Louis Rose
1968, William A. Nolen 1974, James Randi 1987, Joe Nickell 1993, and others, as
well as by careful scientific studies, such as the 2005 MANTRA II study (Krucoff et
al. 2005) and the 2006 STEP study (Benson et al. 2006).
1. His appeal to White's antiquated study is naive. It's been roundly critiqued.

2. I presume that he has a global flood in mind. One problem is that modern readers
usually interpret the narrative anachronistically because they construe the descriptions
in light of their knowledge of modern geography. But the original audience never had
that frame of reference. They had a different sense of scale. The narrator may well
intend to describe a flood situated in the middle east. And that's quite realistic. Consider
the work of academic field geologist David Montgomery on Noah's flood.

3. What OT scholars/archeologists has he studied on the battle of Jericho? For

instance, Richard Hess?

4. His references on reported modern miracles are quite dated. He seems unaware of
case-studies amassed by

Craig Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, 2 vols. (Baker,
2011)

Robert Larmer, The Legitimacy of Miracle (Lexington Books, 2013), appendix

Robert Larmer, Dialogues on Miracle (Wipf & Stock, 2015), appendix.

What about appeals to religious experiences, including ones involving visions and
voices, experiences of the ‘numinous’ (Otto 1958), or theistic mystical
experiences? As regards the first, such experiences are strongly tied to the beliefs
of the person: Hindu children do not have visions of, nor receive messages from,
the Virgin Mary, while Catholic children do not have visions of the Hindu deity,
Lord Shiva. As regards the second, numinous experiences do not involve any sense
that one is encountering a being that is perfectly good. Finally, as regards theistic
mystical experiences, the crucial question is whether theistic mystical experiences
have a different ontological basis than the nontheistic introvertive mystical
experiences found in Hinduism and Buddhism, and in Plotinus. That question was
very carefully investigated by Andrew Robison (1962 and 1973), who examined
the descriptions of introvertive mystical experiences given by the monistic mystic
Plotinus and Hindu and Buddhist mystics, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, by the theistic mystics Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa
of Avila. Robison’s conclusion was that, unless one is oneself a mystic, the most
reasonable conclusion, given the total evidence available, is that the references to
God that one finds in the descriptions given by the Christian mystics, rather than
reflecting any ontologically fundamental features of their experiences differing
from those found in nontheistic introvertive mystical experiences, reflect only the
conceptual framework that Christian mystics brought to their experiences.
There's a lot of truth to that, but it's too indiscriminate. Some visions, dreams, and
auditions may have veridical elements. Take a premonitory dream. Take a near-death
experience where you meet a deceased relative you didn't know had died. Take a crisis
apparition where you receive information you didn't know about, which is corroborated
by subsequent experience? Same thing with an audible voice.

3.4 Skeptical Theism and Incompatibility Arguments from Evil: New Work for
Skeptical Theists

Skeptical theists generally appear to believe that if the skeptical thesis that is part
of skeptical theism is true – that is, if probabilities cannot be assigned to certain
propositions about goods and evils beyond our ken – then it follows that no
incompatiblity argument from evil can be sound. That view, however, cannot be
correct, since it is not enough to claim that there could be goods that lie beyond
our ken, the probability of which is unknown: one must also show that those
goods could be connected with the evils found in this world in such a way that an
omnipotent and omniscient being could not obtain those goods without allowing
the evils in question. No skeptical theist, however, has shown that this is so.

i) Many truths that can't be quantified. That's an artificial mathematical standard.

ii) Whether or not skeptical theists have shown the connection, other Christian
philosophers have shown the connection between certain kinds of evil and soul-building
virtues or second-order goods.

4.6.3 Step Two: The Case of Multiple Prima Facie Evils

Next, what happens to the probability that God exists when there is more than
one prima facie evil? Since the existence of even a single all things considered evil
is incompatible with the existence of God, the probability that God exists cannot
be greater than the probability that, of all the prima facie evils found in the
world, not even one of those is an all things considered evil. In addition, given
that the probability that God exists given a single prima facie evil is less than one-
half, and given the extraordinary number of prima facie evils in the world, it
would be quite surprising if it turned out that the probability that God exists,
given the prima facie evils there are in the world, was not very low indeed.
i) The existence of evil is hardly incompatible with biblical theism or Christian theism. To
the contrary, they presuppose the existence of evil. They'd be false if evil didn't exist.

ii) This treats the probability of God's existence in isolation. If we set aside all the
evidence for God, then perhaps the conclusion follows, but that's artificial.

iii) It isn't necessary to justify every evil individually. It will suffice if there are enough
theodicies to cover all the general kinds of evil.
Where was God?

As I've explained before, the problem of evil in general, in the stereotypical formulation,
has no traction for me. But I find certain kinds of examples personally aggravating.
Cases like James Younger are examples where the problem of evil has some emotional
pull for me.

The dilemma is that, in many situations, God doesn't protect the innocent and he
doesn't enable others to protect the innocent. God doesn't use his power to intervene,
and he doesn't empower others to take up the slack. Now this particular case may
eventually get better, but there are other cases like it without any mitigation (in this life).

But having said all that, it's not as if examples like this drive me into the arms of
atheism, or make me even slightly sympathetic to atheism. For one thing, secular
progressives are spearheading this atrocity. Evil can't push me into the arms of atheism
when atheism is itself a major source of evil.

It boils down to three options: God, Satan, or atheism. But atheism is diabolical. And it
hardly makes sense to switch sides from God to the Devil because of evil–when evil is
Satanic. So however vexing the problem of evil can be, God remains the only option,
the only ultimate solution.
Creation and extinction

The late William Provine was a leading evolutionary biologist. More substantive that
Richard Dawkins. Here he explains why he thinks the impression of design in nature is
illusory:

Understanding evolution does not undermine many beliefs in god: deism, gods
that work through natural phenomena, gods invented from tortured arguments
by theologians or academics, and many others. Understanding evolution is,
nevertheless, the most efficient engine of atheism ever discovered by humans. It
challenges the primary, worldwide, observable reason for belief in a deity: the
feeling of intelligent design in biological organisms, including humans.

The feeling of intelligent design disappears in the perspective of evolution…So, of

the 50,000 or so species, all but twenty-five went extinct…Even with all the
exquisite adaptations that smack of an intelligent designer, these vertebrates
were poor survivors.

Natural selection is not a mechanism, does no work, does not act, does not shape,
does not cause anything…Natural selection is the outcome of a very complex
process that basically boils down to heredity, genetic variation, ecology, and
demographics (especially the overproduction of offspring, and constant struggle).
The adaptations that evolve we call "naturally selected"…The process also
virtually guarantees extinction when the environment changes sufficiently, which
it often does. The intelligent design apparent in the adaptations has no inkling of
environmental change. The pattern of extinction, however, is precisely what one
would expect of the causes of natural selection.

Every organism that has become extinct (about 99+ per cent of all species that
have ever lived) was jam-packed with adaptations. Some of those adaptations
became detriments to the organism when the environment changed and caused
the organism to become extinct. The better an organism is adapted to a
particular environment, the more certain it is that it will become instinct when the
environment changes. Adaptations are hopelessly tied with extinction. The
feeling of intelligent design in organisms must thus be tied to extinctions, too.
That is why evolutionists give up on the feeling of intelligent design.

The second reason why understanding evolution precludes the feeling of

intelligent design is that evolution also shows no hint of progress.

Each of these infectious agents has evolved as long as humans have existed. I can
see no hierarchy whatsoever in the productions of evolution. Any deity that would
 work this way seems perfectly awful to me. The process that produced these very
different pathogens and humans just happens, and speaking as if evolution
"cared" about its production is unintelligible.

These two reasons to reject the feeling of intelligent design in biological

organisms are just a sample of compelling reasons. The famous evolutionist
George C. Williams has written an essay on the evolution of social behavior, and
concludes that social behavior in animals is nothing less than ghastly, and any
hope we have as humans to have a decent moral world is to fight fiercely against
the selfishness that evolution has produced in us. "Evolution, Religion, and
Science" The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (2006).

i) On thing that's striking about this is how much is just a variation on the so-called
problem of natural evil or so-called problem of animal suffering. A standard theodicy
which fields that problem will already cover most of this ground. By the same token,
most of this isn't uniquely evolutionary.

ii) In YEC, God creates all the nature kinds at the outset. They diversify from thereon
out. In OEC, God introduces natural kinds is staggered fashion. YEC is more
synchronic, OEC is more diachronic. But in both cases, once made, natural kinds are
subject to adaptation. Creationism allows for adaptation and microevolution.

Mass extinction due to overspecialization and environmental change is not at odds with
YEC or OEC. Even if organisms are divinely designed, they will vulnerable to extinction
if their environment changes too fast or too drastically. Although evolution implies mass
extinction, you can have mass extinction apart from evolution. Absent providential
protection, you can have mass extinction even if evolution is false.

iii) To take a comparison, our hitech civilization is utterly dependent on electricity. Our
technology is junk without electricity. A natural disaster could render our technology
useless. But it would hardly mean our technology wasn't designed.

iv) It's true that there's a tradeoff between specialization and adaptability. It's unclear
why Provine supposes that's inconsistent with design. To be a creature is to have built-
in limitations and inherent vulnerabilities. Even omnipotence can't make an unlimited
creature.

Different organisms exemplify different possibilities. Each design has distinctive

advantages and corresponding disadvantages. That's not a design flaw. That's a
necessary tradeoff.

Variety is not inconsistent with divine design. Indeed, theists who espouse the principle
of the plenum think variety is a virtue. God creates the greatest compossible variety.
v) Perhaps Provine imagines that mass extinction is inconsistent with divine foresight
and/or divine benevolence. To begin with, it is unclear, as a matter of principle, why the
extinction of a species is problematic for theism but the extinction of an individual is not.
A species is just a collection of individuals.

What if most organisms are temporary by design? God never intended for most
organisms to be immortal. And most organisms don't know what they are missing. They
lack consciousness. In Biblical theism, immortality was never the common property of
most lifeforms.

That's only clearly reserved for humans and angels. It's possible that God will resurrect
some animals–perhaps animals dear to sainted Christians.

vi) Perhaps Provine thinks it would be pointless for God to create organisms that
become extinct. But isn't there a sense in which everything at present becomes extinct
when it becomes history? The past is what was, not what is. There's a sense in which
the 19C is now extinct. It went extinct when it slipped into the irretrievable past. It no
longer exists–at least not in our current timeframe. (This could also devolve into a
debate over the A-theory and the B-theory of time.)

But does that mean history is pointless. It wasn't pointless to people at the time. It
wasn't pointless for them.

Is Provine viewing it from a retrospective standpoint? Is he suggesting that looking back

on the past from our vantage-point, it is pointless? If so, what makes our perspective
normative? What privileges the present perspective? Suppose you were to view it from
a prospective standpoint. There's a sense in which the future is irrelevant to me. The
year 2100 is irrelevant to me, if I'm dead by them. But the future is hardly irrelevant to
people living in the future.

vii) If there was no afterlife, then Provine would have a point. But natural history doesn't
speak to that issue.

viii) Provine fails to make allowance for the Fall. Humans are liable to illness, aging,
and death due to the Fall. I agree with him that those conditions always existed in
nature. The world at large was never Edenic. Life inside the garden was sheltered from
those asperities.

Obviously, Provine doesn't believe in the Fall. But my immediate point is one of
consistency. The phenomena he documents don't count as evidence against Biblical
theism, for that's consistent with life outside the Garden.

ix) Yes, the social behavior of animals is often ghastly by human standards, but that's
because different species have different natures. What's morally decent or indecent is,
to some degree, indexed on the nature of the creature.
x) I agree with him that the evolutionary narrative is not progressive. But there's a sense
in which creationism is not progressive. YEC is essentially cyclical. God creates natural
kinds, which thereafter reproduce after their kind. Although there's some progression in
the initial series of creative fiats, once that's complete, once the ecosystem is put in
place, it continues as is. Periodicity rather than progressivity in the natural order. Yet
that's hardly antithetical to divine design.

In OEC, there's some progressivity. Creation occurs in stages. God initiates one stage
at a time. After that plays out, that's replaced by the next stage. That's in part because
they can't all coexist. Some organisms requires a different biospheric conditions.

In OEC, natural history is analogous to human history. Just as you have distinctive
periods in human history, with distinctive successive cultures, natural history is
analogous. In OEC, man is phased in late in the curve, as the culmination of the
process. After than you have the eschaton. It's like a transgenerational novel. If YEC is
more cyclical, OEC is more epochal. In addition, although they diverge on the distant
past, they converge on human history.
Premature death

An argument I often use in my overall theodicy is that no possible world is the best
possible world. While some are definitely worse while others are definitely better, there's
a cut above which no single timeline, no one world history, maximizes all the second-
order goods while eliminating all or most evils. And I often use the example of different
children conceived in different world histories.

A stock objection is the Epicurean principle. Those who never exist have nothing at
stake. You can only exist to have something to lose.

But I've always found that terribly shortsighted. For instance, someone who dies at 40
instead of 60 misses out on an extra 20 years of experience. Someone to dies at 20
instead of 60 misses out on an extra 40 years of experience. We think it's tragic when
someone dies at ten because they lost so much of their potential future. It's an a fortiori
argument from the lesser to the greater. Missing out on more and more.

Or take someone who's blind. That's a deprivation. Or someone who's deaf. What about
someone both blind and deaf? That's a greater deprivation. Or someone with no sense
of taste. Or Nathan Wuornos, the character in Haven who has no tactile sense. Three
sensory deprivations amount to a greater loss than two. They are missing out on
sensory opportunities. The more the worse.

But how is the a fortiori argument suddenly nullified when we move it up to those who
never exist, which is total loss of opportunity? That's the a fortiori argument taken to the
max. How can an argument from the lesser to the greater be solid up to a point, but
peter out when it rises from the greater to the greatest? The principle involves a
continuum. The force of the principle doesn't cease at the extreme end of the
continuum. Rather, that's the limiting case. Other examples implicitly work back from
that benchmark.
Living for God

I’m going to comment on this article:

http://philosophy.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/philosophy/resources/documents/Maitzen_OG
UP.pdf

Craig never defends his claim that nothing temporary has significance or its
implication that all temporary things are equally insignificant. He only repeats it,
many times, as if it should be obvious. But is it true that nothing temporary has
significance?

Has Craig argued that nothing temporary has significance? Or has he argued that
human life lacks significance if we pass into oblivion? I don’t see why Craig’s contention
wouldn't be true unless it's a special case of a general claim about all temporary things.
That would only follow if human lives are analogous to everything else. For instance, a
human being is not a falling leaf.

Think about great music or drama. Does a world-class performance of Tosca or

King Lear lack significance just because it lasts only a few hours? Would it have
more significance if it never ended? Hardly. Its significance in fact depends on its
having a finite arc; it would lose its significance and become unbearably tedious if
it went on forever. Nor does its finite length make it just as insignificant as an
equally long nap. Clearly, then, we need a better measure of significance than
mere duration.

That comparison is simplistic. What if, an hour after the performance, the audience
suffered collective amnesia. No one remembered the performance. What’s the point of
a world-class performance of Tosca or King Lear if it’s instantly forgotten?

There’s a reason we invented recording technology. We think it’s a waste if a great

performance comes and goes without a trace. We try to preserve the past.

Likewise, we record (or photograph) things because we often want to hear or see the
same thing more than once.

We know that people often try to make their lives significant by seeking purposes
“greater than themselves.”...This version of the argument starts with the question
“What’s so great about feeding starving children?” An answer comes pretty
easily: “It relieves suffering by innocents and gives them a chance to flourish.” But
 notice that we can use our imagination to “step back” from that answer: imagine
looking at Earth from a billion miles away or looking back from a billion years in
the future. Having stepped back, we can ask: “What is (or was) so great about
doing that?” Step back far enough and any purpose can begin to look small and
trivial in the vastness of time and space. It’s a familiar enough idea that you can
make something look insignificant, or even reveal its true insignificance, by
stepping back from it. Think of parents who try to convince their tearful child that
an embarrassing incident at school isn’t really a reason to stop living.

The argument exploits our ability to take the long view—to occupy a standpoint
that makes any purpose questionable, no matter how significant it seems: Why
bother pursuing that purpose? It’s not hard to get going down this path, as we’ve
seen, and soon we may find ourselves seeking a purpose that transcends the
limits of our earthly existence. “Our lives can’t have significance,” we may
conclude, “unless their significance goes beyond our time on Earth.”

Several problems with Maitzen’s objection:

i) It isn’t clear how Maitzen went from ultimate significance to greatness. Something
doesn’t have to be great to be good or worthwhile.

ii) Doing something “greater than ourselves” is a way of saying it serves a larger
purpose. “Greater,” not in the sense of excellence, but teleology. What makes it
important is that it’s part of something important. It contributes to something beyond
itself. A part/whole, means/ends relation.

iii) Maitzen overlooks the asymmetry between a secular outlook and a Christian outlook
at this juncture. From his atheistic standpoint, taking the long-range view of any
particular event dilutes the significance of that event: “Step back far enough and any
purpose can begin to look small and trivial in the vastness of time and space.”

But it’s just the opposite from a Christian standpoint: Because our little lives are
purposeful in the great scheme of things, the long-range view enhances rather than
diminishes the significance of our tiny lives and deeds. Even the lives of the damned are
significance.

From a Calvinistic perspective, every life is special, for God wrote the story of
everybody’s life. He wrote the story of your life. And my life. Customized. A unique
narrative for each and every life. God planned every experience you have, down to the
last detail.

And each life-story is part of a larger story. Interlocking stories. Synchronic and
diachronic stories.
The smallness of our lives doesn’t make them insignificant. There can be meaning in
miniature. God made us small. That’s good.

God’s story for the world is like the Mandelbrot set. There are lower scales of meaning
as well as higher scales of meaning. Microscopic meaning as well as macroscopic
meaning. Just what happens in one place on one day is packed with meaning. Higher
resolution discloses ever more detail.

You can’t put an end to those pesky questions, no matter what you do. Any
purpose that we can begin to understand, we can step back from and question.
Consider what theistic religions offer as God’s actual purpose for our lives:
glorifying him and enjoying his presence forever. Surely we can ask—I hereby do
ask—“What’s so great about that?”

i) Even if it weren’t “so great,” something doesn’t have to be the greatest to be

significant.

ii) If we were made to glorify God, if our fulfillment lies in doing what we were designed
to do, then that’s significant.

For instance, a homosexual is physically and emotionally frustrated, for he wasn’t

designed to find sexual fulfillment in another man.

Now, my opponent might offer this proposal: “Sure, we’d be disappointed to

discover that we’re mere CO2 factories, so that can’t be our ultimate purpose. But
if God had made us merely to produce CO2, then we’d find that purpose satisfying
and would feel no inclination to question it. God adjusts our intellects and
aspirations to fit the purpose he gives us.” But this reply is just speculation...

i) There’s a sense in which the whole debate is speculative. So what? That’s what
philosophers do. Maitzen is a philosophy prof.

ii) But what’s so speculative? If, in fact, we were merely designed to produce CO2, then
we’d find that satisfying. Then again, we might lack the intellect to find it either satisfying
or dissatisfying. Does a clam find life satisfying? The question is inapplicable.

Conversely, if we find it boring to merely produce CO2, that’s because we were

designed to find other things interesting. So Maitzen has postulated a false dilemma.
If we seek an absolute stopping point in our quest for purpose and significance, we’ll
inevitably come up empty. Ultimate purpose can’t exist even if God does; it’s a fantasy
that shouldn’t draw anyone to theism.

If human nature was designed by a wise Creator, then doing what we were made to do
is, indeed, ultimately significant.

That’s hardly analogous to atheism, where men are the incidental byproduct of a
mindless amoral process.
Did God will the Fall?

It's common for freewill theists to deny that God willed the Fall. More generally, it's
common for freewill theists to deny that God wills moral and natural evils, viz. war,
famine, murder, disease, natural disaster, fatal accidents. Bad events lie outside God's
will. Bad events are antithetical to God's will. They think it's blasphemous to attribute
bad things to God's will. They think Calvinism is wicked for attributing natural and moral
evils to God's will.

I'd like to consider one aspect of that denial. Take the Fall. If Adam hadn't sinned, world
history would turn out very differently. You and I exist in a fallen world. You and I
wouldn't exist in an unfallen world. You and I are the end-product of a complex chain of
events which includes natural and moral evils at various turns. Procreation is about men
and women meeting and mating at a particular time and place. Even slight changes in
the past ramify into the future so that our would-be ancestors will miss connections. For
instance, WWII killed millions of people, but by the same token, millions of people exist
as a result of the dislocation caused by WWII–who wouldn't be conceived absent that
massive disruption.

So that raises a question: if you're the end-product of an evil event that's inimical to
God's will, then doesn't this imply that your existence is inimical to God's will? If you
exist as the result of some past evil, and if the historical cause of your existence is
antithetical to God's will, then isn't the effect antithetical to God's will?

To put it another way, if you could step into a time machine and erase the results of a
past evil, would do so–even if that meant erasing resultant future generations from the
space-time continuum? Would you erase your own parents, grandparents, siblings,
aunts, uncles, cousins, children, and grandchildren? If the precipitating event that led to
their existence was diametrically opposed to God's will, then doesn't that implicate all
the consequences?
Dodging a bullet

Atheists make breezy claims about how God could make the world a better place by
changing a variable here and there. During this interview, Jonny Somerville illustrates
the hairbreadth difference one variable can make to the future:

My great-grandfather was a soldier. He fought in WWI in the Battle of Somme. One of

the worst battles of our time. You know...like…if a bullet had gone slightly to the left or
right I may not even be here–which is a sobering thought.

https://www.solas-cpc.org/shortanswers57/

Tweaking variables to improve the future has humanly incalculable consequences. Glib
pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding, we're in no position to judge what
changes would be the world a better, worse, or both better and worse in different ways.
The best of both worlds

1. I assume much of the appeal of time-travel scenarios and parallel universe scenarios
lies in the fact that in reality, we can't go through both doors at once. There are
unrealized possibilities we wish we could explore.

There are situations where, with the benefit of hindsight, we'd make a different choice.
At least if we could hang onto the good things. One of the principles that time-travel
stories illustrate is that when you change even one variable, that has a domino effect.
By changing one variable, you change the direction of all the succeeding dominos.

2. In addition, there are situations where, if we had the benefit of hindsight, we wouldn't
change anything despite having the benefit of hindsight, even if the consequences are,
in some respects, undesirable. Because we know the consequences, we'd repeat the
same chain of events in spite of undesirable consequences.

For instance, suppose I have a younger blind brother. We're about a year and a half
apart. Because he's more dependent on me than a sighted brother, I'm closer to him
than if he was sighted. If he was sighted, it would be easier to take him for granted.

Still, there are brotherly things I'd like us to do together that I can't do with him. I can't go
hiking with him because he can't see. I mean, I could still go hiking with him, I could take
him by the hand. But part of the pleasure of hiking is sightseeing, and that's not
something he's in a position to appreciate. So it won't be a shared experience at that
level, yet the point of doing things together is for the shared experience. This leaves me
with three options:

i) Go hiking with friends, and take him along, even though he won't get much out of it.
My friends and I will be talking about things we see on the trail, that he can't see. That's
insensitive.

ii) Go hiking with friends, but leave him behind. Yet that would be mean.

iii) Skip hiking to avoid the dilemma. But in that event we both miss out.

3. Suppose I have access to the proverbial time machine. I don't know the night on
which he was conceived, but I have a rough idea of the time range, and if I travel back
into the past several times, I'll be able to disrupt parential activities on the crucial
evening. Would I do it? Should I do it?

i) Even from a purely selfish standpoint, that might backfire. I might get a sister instead
of a new brother! Not that there's anything wrong with having a sister, but if the problem
is that I'm unable to do the usual brotherly stuff with my blind brother, then I can't very
well do it with a sister. And it would serve me right.
ii) Perhaps, moreover, my mother isn't very fertile. She might have a condition like
polycystic ovarian syndrome. She only had a few babies on tap. By preempting my blind
brother's conception, I don't get a sighted brother in his place–I get nothing. My mother
only had two brothers on tap. Once again, it would serve me right.

4. From a Christian standpoint, sacrificial love is a deeper kind of love. Love that's cost-
free isn't very loving. That's fair-weather love, which is barely love at all. I don't love you
for you, but only for what I might get out of it.

5. Finally, from a Christian standpoint, if my brother and I die in the faith, then in the
world to come we'll be young again, and this time around my brother will be sighted. So
we'll be able to do the brotherly stuff we missed out on in this life. We'll have our
memories from this life, we'll have the special bond that's a carryover from his disability,
but without the disability. Truly the best of both worlds. Two kinds of goods that can't
happen in the same world history, but are now combined as two different world histories
converge in the eschaton.
Treble tradeoffs

I assume most boys naturally look forward to coming of age. At least normal boys who
haven't been brainwashed by LGBT propaganda or disoriented by broken homes and
separated from their fathers. Partly the desire for adult independence–although that has
corresponding responsibilities they may not appreciate at that age. Partly the instinctive
yearning to achieve one's natural telos. Although boyhood is a natural good, precious in
its own right, it is tending towards a goal. To take a particular example, I assume most
boys look forward to the day when their voice breaks and they develop an adult male
voice. That's part of manhood.

However, choirboys can be exceptions. I watched a special about the choirboys at

King's College Chapel choir. Some of them were apprehensive about their voice
breaking. That's because their treble voice makes them special. They get extra
attention. It sets them apart.

But once their voice breaks, they aren't special anymore. They revert to being ordinary
boys. The garden-variety adolescent boy.

So there's a tradeoff. They are becoming men, but they lose what makes them special
in the process.

In the past, some outstanding trebles became castrati. I once read a woman defending
the practice. She treated it as a business decision. She felt some boys had the maturity
to make that decision. To preserve their gift.

Of course, castrati have no idea what they're giving up until it's too late. And even then,
because they don't experience normal manhood, they still lack a full appreciation of
what they lost in the process. That's why responsible adults need to act on behalf of
children to prevent them from making shortsighted, irreversible, catastrophic choices.
But the transgender lobby is doing the opposite.

That invites comparison with other things. There's some correlation between high IQ or
artistic talent and depression. Very smart or talented people are less likely to be happy.
That's the price they pay for their gift. If they had a choice between happiness and
talent, which would they opt for? For instance:

[Jonathan] Winters says he often drew on his Ohio childhood for characters. He
says he was often lonely and his parents either ignored him or belittled him, even
after his success...At the height of his success, in his early 30s, Jonathan Winters
voluntarily committed himself to a private psychiatric hospital...Now he knows his
diagnosis was bipolar disorder, but there were no effective medications for it back
then. Winters says he declined the electroshock treatment that doctors said
 would erase some of the pain he was feeling. "I need that pain — whatever it is
— to call upon it from time to time, no matter how bad it was," he says.

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138822853/jonathan-winters-reflects-on-a-
lifetime-of-laughs

I mention these examples because they illustrate the principle of tradeoffs in theodicy,
between incompatible goods.
The wasteful work of nature

This post is primarily about theodical challenges posed by theistic evolution, but I'll use
Darwin's statement as a convenient frame of reference:

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering,
low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

A. Some apologists respond this type of objection by saying the atheist is illicitly
assuming a God's-eye viewpoint. "If I was God, I'd do it this way instead!"

They counter that you're not God, you're not omniscient, so you're not entitled to
assume a God's-eye perspective. For all you know, God may have lots of reasons that
don't occur to you.

This response is usually deployed in response to the argument from evil. And it has a
grain of truth, but it's too lax and facile to be a general principle. The danger lies in
defending truth by a principle that shields falsehood from scrutiny. A Christian apologist
should avoid recourse to arguments to protect Christianity that have the side-effect of
protecting cults and false religions.

For instance, suppose a Christian apologist says Joseph Smith has all the earmarks of
a charlatan. Suppose a Mormon counters that for all we know, God might choose
someone like Joseph Smith.

Catholics say the church of Rome is the One True Church founded by Jesus Christ.
Evangelicals looks at Rome and exclaim, "Is that the best God could do?" If that's a
church which enjoys special protection from error, what does a church look like that
doesn't enjoy special protection from error?

But the Catholic counters, you're illicitly assuming a God's eye perspective!

Suppose a Christian apologist says it would be deceptive for God to save people
through divergent religions that make contradictory claims. Suppose a universalist or
religious pluralist counters: How presumptuous for you to divine God's mind and speak
on his behalf!

I'll have more to say about the principle further down.

B. However, a qualified version of the principle is legitimate. Take the appeal to

skeptical theism when addressing the problem of evil. But that's more discriminating
than just "You can't assume a God's-eye viewpoint!"
It's a question of where the skepticism is located. It's not located in claiming that we
don't have the faintest idea why God allows a particular evil or certain kind of evil. To
the contrary, the situation is nearly the opposite: based on human analogies, it's easy to
imagine multiple reasons an agent might have to allow the evil in question. The difficulty
is that we have no way to narrow down the field of options to one correct explanation.
That's where the skepticism is located. So we're not at a complete loss by any means.
Rather, there are too many possible reasons to choose from.

C. Moving on to the specifics, what about the "cruelty" of nature. Certainly the animal
kingdom often looks cruel to a human observer, but that involves the danger of
projecting a human viewpoint onto creatures that do not and cannot share our
viewpoint. Likewise, it's necessary to distinguish between the pain threshold and pain
tolerance.

In addition, many organisms lack the reflective self-awareness to register pain in the
sense: "Ouch! That hurts! I'm in pain!"

Take Darwin's classic, clueless illustration:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have
designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding
within the living bodies of caterpillars.

Except that caterpillars lack the first-person viewpoint to think: "I feel pain!" And the
absence of that indexical awareness presumably holds true for lower animals generally.
To be conscious of pain in the human sense, where we can objectify the experience,
may only be something a few higher animals are privy to.

D. What about "wasteful" nature? Is he using "wasteful" as a synonym for "inefficient"?

Poetry is a less efficient means of communication than prose, but that's not an artistic
defect. Efficiency isn't a musical value.

The way God fulfills Joseph's dream is inefficient, but intentionally inefficient. If God
streamlined the process, there'd be less opportunity for divine intervention, to manifest
the God's overruling providence.

E. Then there's "clumsy" and "blundering". Here he may have the evolutionary process
in mind.

1. If so, that's a challenge for a theistic evolutionist. It's not a challenge for a young-
earth creationist or old-earth creationist inasmuch as they reject the presupposition.
They don't think God uses evolution (in the sense of macroevolution and universal
common descent). Of course, they exchange one challenge for another. And the
naturalistic evolutionist has his own challenges.
2. The issue isn't mass extinction, per se. I've discussed this before:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/09/creation-and-extinction.html

Nearly every position (young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, deistic evolution,

theistic evolution, naturalistic evolution) must accommodate mass extinction. A partial
exception is Omphalism, but even that must accommodate modern mass extinction. To
avoid that we must resort to Last Thursdayism.

The issue is whether God uses evolution to create human beings. If that's the goal, it
seems to be a monumentally clumsy, blundering method.

3. A theistic evolutionist might counter that prior stages in natural history are necessary
to develop an ecosystem in which humans can exist. And that might be an adequate
justification at a very broad level. But are all, or even most, of the evolutionary dead-
ends really necessary to achieve that goal?

4. Another issue is that it's important that we be able to differentiate outcomes by design
from outcomes due to dumb luck. That's a way we determine the presence or absence
of intelligent agency. If you shuffle a deck of cards enough times, you will get a royal
flush. If you spin the dial on a locker long enough, you will accidentally hit on the right
combination. If you throw a dart enough times, you will hit the bullseye.

It's theologically important to be able to distinguish random outcomes from intentional

outcomes. That's a way we detect special providence.

Or take the case of prayer. Out of the totality of prayers, (i) a subset go unanswered. In
(ii) another subset, the outcome is consistent with the prayer, but not unmistakably an
answer to prayer. Some apparent answers to prayer might be things that would
naturally happen anyway, given the odds. There there's (iii) a subset where the
outcome is clearly miraculous or supernatural. Finally, there's (iv) a subset where the
outcome is so auspicious and antecedently improbable that while it might be sheer luck,
that's not the most plausible explanation.

But if we were unable to differentiate outcomes by design from outcomes due to dumb
like, then that would make one skeptical about the efficacy of prayer. Given the number
of "misses", did we just get lucky?

5. Apropos (4), a challenge for the theistic evolutionist is whether evolutionary outcomes
can be distinguished from chance. What makes it theistic is that it's a guided process–
perhaps front-loaded to unfold to a programmed conclusion. If, however, the end-
products appear to be the luck of the draw, then where's the evidence that theistic
evolution is true while atheistic evolution is false? Perhaps a theistic evolutionist would
say there is no direct evidence from evolution itself. Rather, that comes from other
theistic arguments.
6. There is, though, a further twist. There's such a thing as programmed dumb luck.
Take how dandelions disseminate. Each puff has a flotilla of hang-gliding seeds carried
by the breeze in all directions. Multiply that by countless puffs releasing their seeds to
the winds, and a fraction are bound to create new dandelions through dumb luck.

However, a human observer can discern a strategy behind that process. So there needs
to be evidence to distinguish between sheer dumb luck and programed dumb luck. Can
the theistic evolutionist furnish that differential evidence?
Risk and reality

The problem of natural evil is a perennial issue in theodicy. There are stock responses. I
think some of them are good. But I'd like to approach it from a different angle.

A fringe benefit of living in a physically dangerous world is that it forces you to take
reality seriously. A hazardous environment weeds out inattentive people.

When life becomes too safe, when people lose their sense of danger because they're
used to having buffers that protect them from harm, it's easy to lose touch with reality.
It's easy to indulge in make-believe and wishful thinking when you don't have the
electric shock of reality to jolt you out of your beautiful delusions and playacting. Take a
few examples in our own time and place:

• Into the Wild. The movie about a young idealist who imagines it would be a swell idea
to spend a winter in the Alaska outback. He goes there unprepared and dies.

• Egotists who die in accidents by taking selfies in dangerous settings. Precariously

preached on a cliff or mountain peak. Or with a rhino, grizzly bear, bison, or bull moose
in the background–as if wild animals are stuffed animals.

• Progressives who insist that "transwomen" have a right to access shelters for battered
women and rape victims.

• Adults who imagine they are animals. And they demand that everyone accommodate
their fantasy.

• The antivaxxer movement

• Open border polices that admit people into the country who haven't been screed for
infectious diseases.

• Replacing solid waste disposal with composting leftover food, which is a magnet for
rats, which, in turn, invites an outbreak of bubonic plague.

• Hikers who only take a cellphone with them. They don't have extra water or overnight
gear. If they get into trouble, they assume they can always call for help and somebody
in a chopper will rescue them.

• Hikers who venture into bear country without a high-powered rifle.

• Private pet collectors with dangerous exotic animals that sometimes kill them.

• Immigration policies that induct Muslims into the country, thereby introducing domestic
terrorism, honor killings, a gang-rape culture &c. into the host country.
• People who get too close to dangerous animals in zoos and animal parks.

• Gun bans/confiscation that leave civilians defenseless against the criminal class.

A false sense of security fosters moral and spiritual insanity. Living in a dangerous
world, where there are no buffers, forces you to be realistic if you expect to survive–
much less to thrive. There's no margin for error.

People who become too insulated from danger are apt to be cocky, arrogant,
presumptuous, and foolhardy. Paradoxically, natural evil can be a corrective to moral
evil. Having beliefs that defy reality is willful lunacy. Real life isn't composed of downy
pillows that cushion your fall. False beliefs can hurt you. That's a disincentive to
cultivating false beliefs.

To become increasingly detached from reality is a form of moral and intellectual

derangement. Natural evil motivates people to take truth seriously. The pain of flouting
reality motivates people to take truth seriously.

In Scripture, idolatry is a paradigm-case of those who've lost contact with reality and
replace it with imaginary constructs. Although the deterrent value of natural evil is
limited–insofar as some people are willfully reckless–it prevents other people from
plunging off the deep end. Without that objective stinger, subjectivity takes over.
Blood on my hands

In theodicy, freewill theists lean on the notion that God merely permits evil to happen.
The intuition is that if an agent directly causes or determines an event, then that makes
him morally complicit in a way that just allowing, or not preventing, an event caused by
another agent does not. A cliché comparison is the distinction between killing a patient
and letting him die, in medical ethics.

And sometimes that's a morally salient distinction. But sometimes not. Suppose I'm a
guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Suppose I secretly despise Hitler and the Third
Reich. I'm not there because I signed up. I was conscripted. I'm there against my will. I
privately hope the Allies will win.

Suppose the commandant has a plan. If it becomes unmistakable that German lost the
war, and the Allies are marching into Germany, the prisoners, including Jews, as well as
Allied war captives, will be executed so that the Allies can't liberate the camp. After
executing all the prisoners, the Nazi personnel will evacuate the camp. Even though the
Nazis lost, they will kill as many Jews and Allied war captives as they can on the way
out. A final act of spiteful revenge.

Suppose I have a choice: I can stand by and let the prisoners be mowed down, or I can
turn my machine gun on my nominal comrades and save the prisoners. Under that
scenario, is inaction morally preferable to action? If I do nothing to prevent the
massacre, does that let me off the hook? Conversely, if I take direct action by shooting
the commandant and his henchmen to prevent them from murdering the prisoners, am I
culpable?
Providence and Pointillism

One of the challenges in theodicy is the seemingly arbitrary nature of providence. Why
the apparently random distribution of blessing and bane? Why is one prayer answered
while another prayer goes unanswered? While is one person healed while another
person is not?

However, the appearance of randomness can be illusory. To take a comparison,

consider Seurat's La Grande Jatte. Seen up close, it appears to be utterly haphazard.
There's no discernible image. But seen from a certain distance, the hidden pattern
emerges. Indeed, Seurat was obsessed with composition. An architectural harmony.
Far from being random, he made many preliminary sketches and drawings. The
painting is the end-result of painstaking forethought. Paradoxically, what seems to be
haphazard can be the end-product of minute design. If anything, the painting suffers
from static precision. A lack of spontaneity.

Yet there is a sense in which, below a certain threshold, it really is random. That's
because the individual constituents weren't meant to be meaningful in isolation. They
only become meaningful in their overall relationships, which can only be perceived at a
higher scale of organization. The pattern lies in the ensemble. By the same token, the
impression that divine providence is arbitrary is in fact consistent with meticulous
planning and execution.
Why didn't God create us in heaven?

Some people ask why God didn't begin at the end. Begin with the goal. The question is
ambiguous.

1. Technically, "heaven" is the intermediate state, a disembodied, postmortem state

between death and the general resurrection. So is the question why didn't God create
us after we died? But of course, God can't create us after we die, inasmuch as we must
already exist in order to die.

2. Is the question why didn't God created us in a disembodied state? But that's not an
ideal condition. There are many benefits to embodied experience.

In that respect, the question suffers from popular confusion by theologically illiterate
people who think heaven is the ultimate goal of human existence. You die, go to
heaven, and live there forever. But that's not Christian eschatology.

3. Is "heaven" being used as a synonym for the final (earthly) state, i.e. the new
Eden/new Jerusalem? But God already created Adam and Eve in an Edenic earthly
state. They fell.

4. Perhaps the question is why didn't God create us perfect? Skip the journey and cut
straight to the destination.

i) If so, that assumes the process is dispensable. And the end-result is achievable
without experience. But is that realistic? Take forgiveness. You can't experience
forgiveness without prior wrongdoing. The sense of guilt, gratitude, and relief. So that
condition can't be directly created. It's a nested effect, internally related to something
prior. An intervening history is necessary prerequisite.

ii) In addition, creating everyone sinless and impeccable would preempt the lives of
many people whose existence is contingent on a fallen world. They are products of
chains of events involving sinful agents.
God and Corn Flakes

One is the question of free will and salvation. Reformed theology is often
identified with determinism—the idea that God determines everything, and we
don’t really have free choice. From my eating Corn Flakes for breakfast to my
having faith in Christ, all of these decisions are determined by God, and if we’re
not automatons or robots at least, my decisions are only free in some very
minimal sense. Well, historical material suggests there is a broader way of
thinking about this within Reformed theology.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/september-web-only/softer-face-of-
calvinism.html

Critics of predestination use examples like one's choice of cereal to belittle

predestination. Does God really predestine what I eat for breakfast? How silly! Surely
God has more important things to predestine. He can leave the little choices up to us.

The problem with that objection is that it's so shortsighted. Small innocuous changes in
the present can generate huge changes in the future. In a case/effect world, changing a
variable in the past can snowball.

Corn Flakes is a Kellogg's product. Kellogg's is headquartered in Battle Creek,

Michigan. That makes it the largest local employer (in Battle Creek). But the primary
production center for Corn Flakes is Manchester, England. In the US, corn production is
centered in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Texas.
Compare that to Wheaties. That's a General Mills' product. General Mills is
headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota. In the US, white wheat production is
centered in Idaho, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Washington.

If more people eat Corn Flakes, that benefits the economies of Battle Creek, Michigan,
Manchester, England, and corn-producing states. If, by contrast, more people eat
Wheaties, that depresses the economies of Battle Creek, Michigan, Manchester,
England, and corn-producing states, but benefits the economies of Golden Valley,
Minnesota and white wheat-producing states.

If Kellogg's is prosperous, that benefits its employees and shareholders. If General Mills
is prosperous, that benefits its employees and shareholders. If Kellogg's does better, it
can hire more people. If General Mills does better, Kellogg's has to lay people off.

People usually live within commuting distance of where they work. As a consumer, you
will patronize local businesses. The local supermarket will benefit from your presence.
And so on and so forth.
Where you live impacts who you meet and mate with. If you grew up in Battle Creek,
Michigan, you will probably have kids by someone else from Michigan. If, by contrast,
you grew up in Golden Valley, Minnesota, you will probably have kids by someone else
from Minnesota. Same thing with corn and wheat producing states.

How many people choose Corn Flakes over Wheaties, or vice versa, affects who will or
will not be born. It affects where various crimes like murder will occur. If affects where–
or whether–you will attend church. That, in turn, can affect whether you go to heaven or
hell.

This generates two diverging timelines. The existence or nonexistence of some humans
in relation to other humans who take their place. Increasingly different events the further
into the future past changes ramify. Alternate histories. What might seem like a trivial
choice in the present has vast, complex consequences down the line–for good and ill.
Reframing the problem of evil

In standard philosophical discussions regarding the problem of evil, the nature and
occurrence of evil is typically held to be prima facie evidence against God's existence,
although that can be offset by other kinds of evidence for God's existence.

Put another way, God's benevolence and existence are linked. If the problem of evil
calls into question God's benevolence, that in turn calls into question God's existence.

It's striking that the stereotypical way of casting the issue is so different from Scripture.
In Scripture, God's existence is never in doubt. However, prophets and psalmists
sometimes express frustrations or misgivings about God's benevolence. To that extent,
God's existence and goodness aren't tightly linked.

To be sure, it's not that God's goodness is questionable from the viewpoint of Scripture.
But there are speakers within Scripture that voice a perceived tension between God's
existence and his benevolence. So that reframes the issue.
Chronological time

1. Readers might find my title redundant. What other kind of time is there? Isn't time
necessarily chronological? Depends on what you mean.

Let's distinguish between chronological time and biological time (or physical time).
According to Christian eschatology, God will rejuvenate believers at the resurrection of
the just. The saints will have youthful, ageless bodies.

Let's say the optimal age of a human body is 20. Strictly speaking, I'm not sure the
human body has an optimal age. From what I've read, different body organs and
systems mature and age at somewhat different rates. In glorification, the optimal age
would have to synchronize these rates. For convenience, let's stimulate age 20.

So an immortal saint could be a billion years old, but have the body of a 20-year-old.
Chronologically he's a billion years old, but biologically he's only twenty years old.
Biologically, he stays the same age while chronologically he continues to age
indefinitely.

2. That parallels a distinction drawn by Philip Henry Gosse. Normally, physical and
chronological time coincide, but Gosse had the insight to appreciate that, in principle
and possibly in practice, these can be split apart. It's a profound insight, equal to
McTaggart's distinction between the A-series and the B-series. The difference is that
McTaggart is hailed as a great philosopher of time because he was an atheist, whereas
Gosse is mocked because he was a creationist who devised and utilized his distinction
to rescue traditional creationism.

3. Finally, this involves a limitation on divine omnipotence. God can create a father who
is biologically younger than his son, but God can't create a father who is chronologically
younger than his son. For instance, God could rejuvenate Abraham, but refrain from
rejuvenating Isaac. If so, Abraham would be biologically younger than his own son.

However, even an omnipotent agent can't make Abraham chronologically younger than
Isaac because chronological time requires relative chronology. A father, to be a father,
must preexist his son. It's a cause/effect relation, and the direction of causality, like
time's arrow, is linear.

I'd add that it's useful to recognize certain limitations on divine omnipotence because
that's an important consideration in theodicy. There are some things even God can't do.
Switched at birth

Suppose I have a 14-year-old son named Jeremy. And he's a really great kid. Then, one
fine day, another 14-year-old boy by the name of Josh turns up at my doorstep, claiming
to be my real son. He says he and Jeremy were switched at birth. Jeremy's mother
found out that her baby had a genetic defect, but it was too late for an abortion. His
mother was a nurse, so she and her husband conspired to swap Jeremy for a heathy
kid in the same maternity ward. They didn't want to raise a special-needs child.

I have to admit that Josh bears an undeniable family resemblance, whereas Jeremy
never did look much like my wife or me. We do a DNA test and confirm that Josh is my
long-lost biological son. As it turned out, Jeremy never had a genetic defect. The test
gave a false positive.

If I could step into the time machine, would I trade Jeremy for Josh? I'm too conflicted to
answer that question. On the one hand I bitterly regret the lost years with Josh. In effect,
having my son kidnaped at birth. I yearn for the years we lost. All things being equal, I
wish that could be undone.

But it's not that simple. I raised Jeremy for the first 14 years of his life. The belated
discovery that he's not my biological son doesn't change my feelings about him. The
paternal instinct is broader than biological offspring. That's why many men volunteer to
coach junior high and high school sports. They like to mentor young guys. It's a natural
extension of the paternal instinct.

I can't stamp "return to sender" on Jeremy's forehead. Although it's not metaphysically
too late to turn back the clock, thanks to the time-machine, it's psychologically too late.
And since his biological parents didn't want him, what kind of parents would they be to
him? I can't do that to him. In all likelihood, he was better off with me. And I can't just
tear him out of my heart.

Conversely, maybe Josh would be a worse son than Jeremy. Kids can be a great
disappointment. Sometimes they don't turn out the way you hope. Then again, for all I
know, maybe the alternate timeline would be just as good.

The point of this thought-experiment is that I don't think there's one best possible world.
Indeed, I don't think there's one best possible life.

Moreover, short-term evils can be a source of long-term goods. Goods that never
happen in a perfect world.
Is God an evildoer?

In theory, there are different ways in which God might relate to evil:

i) Allows

ii) Determines

iii) Causes

iv) Commands

v) Commits

Freewill theists grant that God allows evil. And they say Calvinism makes God "causally
determine" evil, which they set in contrast to their own position. However, they rarely
define their terminology. Some freewill theists think the OT contains "abhorrent
commands" or "texts of terror," and they deny that God issued the commands which the
narrator attributes to him.

Normally, both sides (Calvinists, freewill theists) deny that God commits evil. They strive
to put some kind of buffer between God and evil. To say that God commits evil is
typically discountenanced as wholly unacceptable. On a spectrum from allowing to
committing evil, committing evil is the worst. Of all the theoretical ways God might relate
to evil, that's off the table. That can't be exonerated. If God commits evil, that makes
God evil.

In my experience, that's the usual position. However, in a book review, Michael Almeida
makes the following observation:

Since God has the traditional attributes of perfect beings Rowe concludes that it is
impossible that God should choose to perform an evil action. But it is not at all
clear why Rowe urges that" a being who freely chooses to do what it knows to be
an evil deed thereby ceases to be a perfectly good being"(p. 26). Certainly in
ordinary moral contexts no one would make such a claim. Suppose a being freely
chooses to do what it knows to be an evil deed because it necessarily faces a
moral dilemma. If an agent necessarily faces a moral dilemma then there is
nothing the agent could have done to avoid the dilemma. Indeed there is nothing
that an omnipotent being could have done to avoid the dilemma. The agent must
choose some wrong action or other. It is difficult to see how the agent's choice
might nonetheless be blameworthy or how that choice might reflect poorly on his
character. Since blamelessly choosing to do wrong does not diminish moral
 perfection at all, it cannot be assumed that necessarily a perfect being does not
choose to do wrong. Almeida, Michael (2006) "Book Review: Can God Be Free?,"
Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 23 : Iss.
3 , Article 8.

And that's of more than hypothetical consequence. For the freewill defense is usually
cast in terms of how God's hands are tied. He'd like a better outcome, but he's stymied
by the intractable defiance of free creatures. Given the freewill defense, God is routinely
confronted with moral dilemmas, because human agents remove the best options from
consideration. God stuck with the worst remaining options. So freewill theism leaves
God with no choice but to commit evil, and does so on a regular basis.

In Calvinism, by contrast, creatures never back God into a corner. Ironically, then, the
Calvinist God is never in a position that requires him to be an evildoer–whereas the
freewill theist God often finds himself in that predicament. So their theology and
theodicy commits freewill theists to the most odious position along the continuum–one
which Calvinism escapes.
Gridlock

Why doesn't God stop evil more often? Why doesn't God answer prayer more often?
There's a principle common to the problem of evil and the problem of unanswered
prayer.

When I'm driving in town, it would sure be convenient for me if all the traffic lights were
green in my direction. That would expedite my trip. But what's convenient for me would
be inconvenient for all the drivers waiting at red lights so that I have unimpeded egress.

It would be convenient for me if, instead of waiting for a bus, the bus waited for me.
Suppose I could leave the house at any time, and a bus just happened to be at the bus
stop. But while that would be convenient for me, that would inconvenience all the other
bus riders. It would make the bus schedule totally unpredictable. What's best for me
may not be best for somebody else. What's good for me may be bad for somebody else.

Here's the principle: the more agents there are, the more complicated it is to coordinate
everybody's interests. Adding agents reduces the number of consistent outcomes. What
every agent does must be consistent with every other agent's actions. Only so many
outcomes can be crammed into one time and place.

We can see this in the difference between the past, present, and future. 19C New York
City can't coexist with 21C New York City. WWI can't coexist with the Napoleonic wars.
There's only so much room for different simultaneous events. Everyday may use up all
the space for what can happen that day. Agents form a network of interactions. Adding
or subtracting agents triggers a chain-reaction.

One reason God doesn't answer more prayers is because all answers to prayer must be
compossible. There's potential conflict between acting in the interest of one agent and
acting in the interest of another agent, because each agent's life has a longitudinal
impact that may counteract what's best for another agent.

That seems to limit what even an omnipotent God can do. Even in the case of
Calvinism, where God isn't hindered by the independent freedom of human agents, the
feasible options are not unlimited because it's a question of what's mathematically
possible in terms of spatiotemporal coherence. Some chains of events are incompatible
with other chains of events.
Paradise on earth

Fourthly, what natural evils a world contains depends not just on the laws, but
also on the initial, or boundary conditions. Thus, for example, an omnipotent
being could create ex nihilo a world which had the same laws of nature as our
world, and which contained human beings, but which was devoid of non-human
carnivores. Or the world could be such that there was unlimited room for
populations to expand, and ample natural resources to support such populations.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#NeeForNatLaw

Because Tooley's argument is so terse, I'm not sure how he'd develop it, but the thrust
of his argument appears to be tolerably clear, so I'll operate with what I take to be the
implicit argument.

i) There are limits, even severe limits, on what an omnipotent being can naturally do. An
omnipotent being can often circumvent natural processes to produce an outcome
directly–although there are some limits on that as well–but when it comes to a world that
operates according to physical cause and effect, the finite medium imposes many
constraints on what's feasible consistent with natural forces and processes.

ii) I'm struck by how often atheists who pride themselves on their commitment to hard
science veer off into superficial and unbridled speculations about how nature could be
different. A world with only herbivores would require so many adjustments that it's hard
to imagine in detail.

iii) What does he mean by a world with unlimited room? Does he mean something like
earth scaled up to the size of Jupiter or the Sun or VY Canis Majoris? What about the
Hayashi limit?

Is it naturally possible for a celestial object that size to be a platform for an earth-like
biosphere? Likewise, if you scale up the earth, consider all the adjustments to the solar
system that are necessary to make earth biofriendly.

iv) Or does he mean a planet that's still the size of earth, but where every region is
hospitable? Is it naturally possible for the earth to have a uniformly hospitable climate?
Don't differences in altitude and latitude entail climatic differences? Isn't there a
necessary interplay between hospitable and inhospitable zones? Take the water cycle.
Doesn't that require dramatic zonal contrasts? Take mountain ice caps. What about
wind systems?
v) Part of what makes the earth so interesting is the wide variety of landscapes and
ecological zones. Some magnificent landscape aren't very hospitable. Take the Alps,
the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, &c. Yet these are tourist attractions.

There are people who live in less hospitable regions by choice. Folks who live in
Alaskan outback because they like the wild, the challenge, the out of doors.

You have folks like George and Joy Adamson who move to the Serengeti, which is
loaded with dangerous animals and diseases, because they love wild animals. They
love the out of doors. Take scuba divers. Take mountain-climbers. Take astronauts.

Tooley sounds like a risk-averse city-slicker who spends all his life in climate-controlled
buildings. That's not everybody's idea of paradise.
A catalogue of evils

In his written debate with Alvin Plantinga, secular philosopher Michael Tooley has "A
brief catalogue of some notable evils", Knowledge of God (Blackwell 2008), 109-15.
Since Tooley is a high-level atheist, and this is an impressive list, I'd like to interact with
his examples.

First, there are extreme moral evils [Hitler, Stalin, genocide].

Secondly, there is the suffering endured by innocent children, including the

suffering caused by lack of food in many parts of the world, by diseases such as
muscular dystrophy, leukemia, cerebral palsy, and so on, and by abuse inflicted
upon children by adults…

Thirdly, there is the suffering that adults endure as a result of terrible diseases–
such as cancer, mental illness, Alzheimer's disease and so on.

Fourthly, there is the suffering of animals.

All of the types of evils just mentioned could be prevented by a very powerful and
knowledgeable person. But the God of theism, if he exists, is not just a being who
now has the power to intervene: he is also a being who created everything else
that exists. Consequently, one can also raise the question of how satisfactory the
world is. When one does this, it appears, for example, that there are a number of
"design faults" in human beings that contribute greatly to human suffering and
unhappiness, and where either no benefits at all are apparent, or else no benefits
sufficient to counterbalance the negative effects.

(1) The sinuses are misdesigned: the lower sinuses open upward, and thus they do
not drain properly, with the result that they may become infected and cause, in
some cases, severe headaches.

Evolution, of course, provides and explanation of both good "design" and bad
"design". Thus, for example, our sinuses would be fine if we were four-legged
animals,, rather than two-legged ones. But this explanation is not available to the
creationist, and if the theist who is not a creationist attempts to appeal to this
idea, he or she needs to say why an omnipotent, omniscience, and morally perfect
being would employ evolution as a way of designing different species. Why leave
things at the mercy of a morally unguided process that has had, as one would
have expected, a number of bad results?
(2) As in the case of sinuses, so with the human spine: while its design is not too
bad in the case of four-legged animals, it is a very unsatisfactory piece of
engineering in the case of two-edged animals. This bad design, in turn, means
that many humans suffer from back problems…

(3) Another example of what would seem to be an easily correctable "design

fault" is the presence of wisdom teeth…impacted wisdom teeth, by becoming
infected, could then lead not only to considerable pain, but to septicemia, and to
death.

(4) A fourth illustration is provided by childbirth. The size of the human head
relative to the size of the birth canal has three unfortunate consequences. First,
humans are born in a much more underdeveloped, and therefore more vulnerable
state than newborns of other species. Secondly, childbirth is often a very painful
experience. Thirdly, childbirth is potentially a very dangerous event for the
woman…In the past, many women died in childbirth and many continue to do so
in less affluent countries.

(5) Men and women differ in various ways…women [are] more likely to develop
lung cancer than men, without smoking more…So greater susceptibility to lung
cancer is programmed into women.

(6). Another striking source of considerable suffering is declining hormone levels

as one grows older [osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease].

(7-8) The body is equipped with sensors that detect injury, and announce the
presence of bodily damage via painful sensations. these injury-detectors are
badly designed, in at least four ways. First, they are not sensitive to the presence
of many life-threatening bodily changes [e.g. cancer].

Secondly, these injury-detectors often produce high levels of pain when there is
no condition that poses a serious health risk [e.g. migraines].

Thirdly, there is no way of shutting down these injury-detectors in situations

where, rather than providing the individual with a useful warning of bodily
damage, they only contribute to the person's misery by producing ongoing pain
sensations.
Fourthly, the injury-detection system produces levels of pain that are often
unbearably intense and that are in no way needed to serve the purpose of
alerting one to bodily damage.

When some part of the body is being damaged, the injury-detectors, rather than
giving rise to pain associated with that part of the body, could, where possible,
immediately generate an automatic withdrawal response…

(9) When people become overweight, there is no reduction in appetite, nor is the
mechanism that enables one to make use of stored fat an effective and well-
designed one. Nor does the body cease extracting and storing calorie-rich
compounds, such as fat, from the foot that it is processing.

(10) The body contains a variety of defense mechanisms to deal with the threats
posed by bacteria, viruses, toxins, and so on. But viruses are often capable of
countermeasures–sometimes of quite a sophisticated sort–that enable them to
foil the body's defense mechanisms. A better designed defense system would not
be thwarted by such countermeasures.

(11) Malaria, sickle cell anemia.

(12) Humans are sexually mature some time before they exhibit significant
emotional maturity, with the upshot that quite young girls can bear children long
before they have developed the emotional responsibility and commitment needed
to care for children satisfactorily.

(13) The association of intense pleasure with sexual activity also appears to be a
design fault. For while sexual pleasure can certainly contribute to human
happiness, it appears that when everything is taken into account, the world might
well be better off if people reproduced simply because they wanted to have
children, and if people were not seduced by the very great pleasure associated
with sexual activity into actions that have far-reaching and often quite disastrous
consequences.

(14) Conscience seems to be quite a fragile thing, and many people seem to have
a very weak sense of right and wrong…Would not such a stronger and clearer
sense of right and wrong make the world a better place?
 (15) Humans are subject to aging, a decline in physical functioning…arthritis…the
deterioration of one's mental capacities, sometimes including the complete
destruction of those capacities that make one human.

(16) The mind can be damaged not only by processes connected with aging, but
by strokes and other injuries to the brain…If mental faculties, rather than being
dependent upon the brain, were instead faculties of an immaterial soul, such
unwelcome occurrences would be totally absent from the world.

(17) More radically, embodied persons could be constructed of tougher stuff, so

that all bodily injury was ruled out: they could be supermen and superwomen, in
a world without kryptonite.

(18) Finally, there is the brief span of human life, and the inevitability of bodily
death. This feature of human life seems very unsatisfactory from a moral point of
view, as it both places a severe limit upon the possibilities for personal growth
and intellectual development, and ends relationships between people that are
often deep and enduring. In a well designed world, surely, the lives of people, and
the relationships between them, would be completely open-ended, free to
develop indefinitely, with no terminus imposed from without.

"Design faults" are not limited, however, to human beings…thus, in the first
place, the earth is misdesigned in many ways that give rise to natural disasters
resulting in enormous suffering and loss of life, for both humans an animals. This
includes earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods,
tidal waves, and epidemics.

Secondly, the world contains bacteria and viruses that cause very great suffering
and death.

Thirdly, there is the enormous suffering that results from the existence of
carnivorous animals.

Fourthly, the world is one where the resources that exist are too limited to
provide for populations of humans and other animals that are expanding at
natural rates. The world could instead have been an infinite plane, or have had
inhabitable planets that were easily accessible.

That's quite a litany! I imagine something like that might be devastating to the proverbial
young man raised in the proverbial fundamentalist, anti-intellectual church, who's never
been exposed to the objections of a sophisticated atheist.
I'll begin by making some general observations, followed by some specific observations.

A. Tooley seems to be attacking generic theism. That's a typical target among

philosophical atheists. However, hardly any theist is a generic theist. Theists are nearly
always adherents of a specific historical religion. So the custom of attacking generic
theism misses the target.

I say that because Christian theism, for one, has explanatory resources lacking in
generic theism. Even if generic theism falls prey to some of these objections, Christian
theism may not.

B. Apropos (A), Tooley fails to take a doctrine of providence into account. The fact that
the human body is vulnerable in different ways isn't ipso facto a design flaw if God
protected humans from harm. In other words, Tooley isolates the body from external
factors, as if the only consideration is whether the body in itself has the internal capacity
to repel pain and harm. But the body needn't be impregnable to avoid physical suffering
if God providentially protected humans from physical harm.

C. Apropos (B), Tooley fails to take the doctrine of the Fall into account. An unfallen
world might contain many natural hazards, but God could intervene by warning humans
of dangers or by directly stepping in to prevent or deflect a looming danger to humans.
For instance, take the role of angels in Scripture. And that's in a fallen world. Suppose
humans had guardian angels in an unfallen world.

On that view, humans suffer from some physical maladies, not due to design flaws, but
because God withdrew his providential protection after the fall. Humans were never
designed to have autonomous bodies. In addition to the body's natural defense
mechanisms, we'd always need God to look out for us. And such special providences
would make us mindful of him.

D. Perhaps Tooley would object that the Fall is in itself part of the problem of evil. The
Fall requires special justification. Why would a benevolent God expose us to the perils
of life in a fallen world?

No doubt a Christian philosopher or apologist needs to respond to that. One issue is

whether an unfallen world is better than a redeemed world. An unfallen world is better in
some respects than a fallen world, but a redeemed world is arguably better in other
respects than an unfallen world. I've discussed that on multiple occasions.

E. Tooley fails to take eschatological compensations into consideration, like the

Christian doctrine of heaven and the resurrection of the just. But that blunts the force of
some of his objections.

F. There are standard theodical strategies to address some of Tooley's examples.

G. Assuming that some of his examples are genuine cases of physical defects, why
presume that these are design flaws rather than subsequent maladaptations? In other
words, he takes for granted that a physical defect must be part of the original design.
But does he have any way to distinguish design flaws from maladaptations? For
instance, even in an unfallen world, genetic copying errors might still arise. Random
mistakes in a natural process. The human organism is fiendishly complex, and so there
are many opportunities for genetic defects to creep in.

In an unfallen world, God might prevent these or fix these, but in a fallen world they
begin to pile up. Cumulative maladaptations transmitted to humans generally.

Or, to take a different example, suppose, in mate selection, men prefer women who look
like Catherine Deneuve. But perhaps that petite face, with a short jawline, is prone to
impacted wisdom teeth. Natural selection magnifies mate selection. More offspring by
such mothers will inherit a jawline prone to impacted wisdom teeth. That wouldn't be a
design flaw, as if Eve was the prototype.

H. There's a certain irony when atheists discuss perceived design flaws. Dysteleology
presumes a teleological standard of comparison. But where did atheists derive their
concept of proper function in the first place?

I. Another irony is that when atheists attribute purported design flaws to the blind
watchmaker, that's a "science-stopper". They give up on looking for a deeper
explanation.

Moving from general to specific:

(1) Here's an explanation for sinuses:

https://evolutionnews.org/2018/05/nathan-lents-science-with-the-parking-brake-on/

https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/nathan-lents-is-back-still-wrong-about-sinuses/

(2) To my knowledge, backaches are generally due to sport injuries, a sedentary

lifestyle, and the aging process.

It's not a design flaw that a body part isn't indestructible. The fact that many humans
have an unhealthy lifestyle is not a design flaw. The human spine works just fine in
one's physical prime.

Indeed, it's quite impressive what athletes can do. If anything, the spine exceeds design
specifications. Athletes often do things that exceed what's required for survival in the
wild.

(3) Here's an explanation of wisdom teeth:

https://creation.com/oh-my-aching-wisdom-teeth

(4) The size of the human head involves tradeoffs:

i) If humans had smaller heads, we'd be dumber.

ii) Childhood is often a source of joy for kids and parents alike. If humans could fast-
forward from birth to adulthood–like the Jem'Hadar, or In Vitros in Space: Above and
Beyond–we'd miss out on so many life-enriching experiences and memories.

(5) Yes, men and women are different:

i) If female smokers are at higher risk of lung cancer than male smokers, then that's an
another reason for women not to smoke. Smoking is an elective behavior.

ii) You can't just assess a particular risk factor in isolation. For instance, women
generally live longer than men. So a liability in one respect may be offset in another
respect.

(6) Liabilities due to the aging process are not design flaws. Senescence is a
consequence of the Fall.

(7-8) Regarding pain receptors:

i) Although life in an unfallen world might not be pain-free, it's quite likely that liability to
excruciating pain is a consequence of the Fall. For one thing, we'd be providentially
protected from many causes of excruciating pain in an unfallen world.

ii) Prior to advances in medical science, it wouldn't matter if the body could detect
cancer at early stages. It would still be untreatable.

(9) Regarding obesity:

i) I believe that's generally associated with a sedentary lifestyle as well as the aging
process. That's not a design flaw.

ii) Mild obesity might confer a survival advantage when you can't count on eating every
day. Consider hunter-gatherers.

(10) Regarding the immune system:

i) Once again, that's a consequence of a fallen world rather than design flaws.

ii) It may be that in an unfallen world, the body would have greater resistance.
iii) That said, is it even naturally possible for the body to be immune to every possible
toxin and pathogen? Seems unrealistic to me. In a cause-effect world, bodies have
limitations, no matter how-well engineered.

(11) Once more, that's not a design flaw but a consequence of the Fall.

(12) Regarding adolescent moms:

i) That assumes a nuclear family in which mothers raise their young singlehandedly. But
traditionally, humans belong to extended families where young mothers had mature
female relatives to help out.

ii) To my knowledge, the age at which females reach the childbearing years is variable.

(13) It's funny to see an atheist complain that sex is a design flaw because it's too much
fun.

i) The fact that sex is so compelling is what contributed to the historic replacement rate.
In the age of abortion and contraception, many countries have fallen below replacement
rates.

ii) Physical attraction isn't just what brings couples together but what keeps couples
together. If men and women weren't attracted to each other, they'd live apart. Human
social life would be radically different. More like bears that impregnate she-bears or
leopards that impregnate a leopardess, then the female raises the cubs single-
handedly.

Physical attraction provides an incentive to stick around as well as the opportunity to

form emotional bonds that outlast sexual passion. Has Tooley thought through the
implications of his alternative?

(14) Many moral dilemmas are artificial, so that even if we our moral intuitions were
more reliable or discriminating, we'd still be stumped by hypothetical scenarios.

(15) Yet again, senescence is a consequence of the Fall. This is a systematic failure in
Tooley's analysis. It vitiates so many of his examples at one stroke.

That said, it's impressive that humans can still function and live so long after their
physical prime. The body has built-in redundancy. That's a tribute to fine engineering.
They have so much in reserve.

(16) Regarding traumatic brain injury:

i) Tooley keeps making the same mistake. Liability to traumatic brain injury is a result of
the Fall.
ii) Mental faculties are, indeed, faculties of an immaterial soul. However, living humans
are embodied souls, so that damage to the brain impairs cognition, just as damage to a
receiver impairs communication.

(17) Regarding superheroes:

i) That's science fiction. Superheroes are imaginary characters. All surface. There are
no technical schematics for superheroes. There's no reason to think that postulate is
naturally feasible. In a cause/effect world, there are physical constraints on what's
possible.

ii) Suppose (arguendo) humans were made of "tougher stuff". Is that better or worse?
Consider how important the sense of touch is in human bonding. Or walking barefoot on
a sandy beach. Or taking a hot bath or shower. Or feeling a warm breeze on your bare
back. For that matter, our skin is basically one big erogenous zone.

Would we really be happier or better adjusted if we were made of "tougher stuff"? We'd
suffer from tactile deprivation.

(18) Regarding mortality:

i) This goes back to Tooley's central oversight. He fails to take the Fall into account.

ii) Why isn't mortality a problem for atheism rather than (Christian) theism? His objection
is a backdoor admission that naturalism reduces to existential nihilism. Ironically, that's
a reason he should ditch atheism.

(19) Moral and natural evils are addressed in standard Christian theodicies. In fairness,
he wrote the entry on the problem of evil for SEP, so he does attempt to evaluate those
responses. And I agree with him that some theodicies are unsatisfactory. However, not
all theodicies are susceptible to his formulations, and he neglects some promising
theodicies.

(20) Frankly, I can't get worked up over the alleged problem of animal pain. To my
knowledge, that's not a traditional element of the argument from evil. Rather, that's
something effete pet owners fret over.

I've discussed the issue on multiple occasions. Don't care to repeat myself here.

(21) Regarding natural disasters:

i) Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, &c., aren't design flaws but
ways to restore the balance of nature–like safety valves that release pressure.
Does Tooley have any detailed idea whether a world without those mechanisms is
naturally feasible? He's mentally removing natural disasters, as if you can leave all the
good things in place.

ii) Natural disasters are only disastrous if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Once again, that's a consequence of life in a fallen world.

(22) Bacteria and viruses play a necessary ecological role. They're not gratuitous evils.
Insofar as they are harmful to humans, that's due to the Fall.

(23) To postulate that the world could be an infinite plane is science fiction rather than a
physically realistic proposal. And even if that's psychically realistic, what makes an
infinite plane hospitable to life? Is an infinite plane consistent with all the other
requirements for organic life?

(24) In what sense would inhabitable planets be easily accessible? Not naturally. Does
he mean supernaturally?
Disarming the warrior-God

In vol. 1, chap. 7 of Greg Boyd's The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, the author
catalogues what he takes to be biblical representations of divine violence. That's
foundational to his thesis.

1. In his reading of the OT, he explicitly takes the side of militant atheists and outspoken
enemies of the faith like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. He
cites them in a footnote, in positive agreement. Boyd is a fifth column within Christianity.
An ally with those who seek to destroy biblical theism.

2. His examples aren't all of a piece. On the one hand, I agree with him that some of his
examples depict divine violence: holy war commands, the Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah,
plague of the firstborn, David's census, God sending "evil/lying spirits". I agree with him
on what those passages represent.

3. That said, the specific problem is generated by Boyd's idiosyncratic, "cruciform"

pacifism. Divine violence is a problem for his theology. It runs counter to his theological
paradigm. He devotes 1500 pages to solving an artificial problem that he created.

If you don't think retributive justice is wrong, then these passages aren't at odds with
divine benevolence. A good God is a just God. A just God is a punitive God.

I'm not saying that observation dissolves all the difficulties. But Boyd's objection to the
OT (and parts of the NT) is predicated on his preconceived notion that God must be
nonviolent. At that level, the contradiction is not internal to Scripture, but superimposed
by his eccentric theology. He filters Scripture through his "cruciform" prism. In that
respect, the problem isn't located in the text; rather, that's projected onto the text by his
theological paradigm.

4. Over and above that are general difficulties not distinctive to his peculiar theology.
I've dealt with this before. Because humans are social creatures, collective judgment
inevitably harms the innocent as well as the guilty, the righteous as well as the wicked.
Collective judgment doesn't imply collective guilt.

There is, however, a sorting out process in the afterlife. God's rough justice in this life is
more discriminating in the afterlife. There's a reversal of fortunes. Eschatological
compensations.

5. In addition, as I've noted on more than one occasion, everyone dies sooner or later.
Whether people die by divine command or divine providence makes no moral difference
that I can see. Either both are consistent with divine benevolence or inconsistent with
divine benevolence.

6. Moreover, as I've said on other occasions, biblical judgments and atrocities don't
create a special problem. They don't really add anything to the theodical issue. That's
because atrocities and natural disasters occur outside the text of Scripture. Even if
Scripture didn't record any of this material, the theodical issue would remain because
the same difficulties are paralleled in divine providence. Conversely, if we have
theodical resources adequate to exonerate divine providence in the face of atrocities
and natural disasters outside Bible history, then these are adequate to exonerate divine
benevolence in the face of analogous examples within Bible history.

Sure, the OT is full of grisly stuff. But that's true of human history in general. There's
nothing in the OT to uniquely shock our moral sensibilities. Nothing that doesn't have
analogue in human history generally. Eliminating the horrors of OT history does nothing
to eliminate the horrors of secular history. The problem of evil is basically the same
inside and outside of Scripture.

A Christian is somebody who already knows that morally hideous things happen in the
world, but continues to believe in God in spite of that. Evil is a given, not a newfound
discovery. And it's not as if atheism represents an improvement.

7. On the other hand, Boyd includes other examples that reflect a malicious reading of
Scripture. It's as though he goes out of his way to make it harder than it really is so that
his alternative wins by default. He gerrymanders an intolerable view of divine action in
the OT as leverage to his preferred alternative.

i) He says Exod 22:29-30 & Ezk 20:25-26 teach divinely mandated child sacrifice.

a) Regarding Exod 22:29-30, he willfully construes the command out of context. But as
the law code already stated, provision is made to redeem firstborn sons (13:13-15).

Likewise, "devoting" someone to God doesn't entail human sacrifice (e.g. Num 8:16; 1
Sam 1:11).

b) Regarding Ezk 20:25-26, I agree with one commentator's observation that:

this whole chapter [is] creating a rhetorical parody of Israel's history in order to
highlight its worst side. In a context of such sustained sarcasm and irony, we
cannot suddenly take a verse like this as a face-value doctrinal or historical
affirmation. It is impossible to imagine, in the light of his overwhelming emphasis
on the goodness and importance of God's law and on the horrific evil of child
sacrifice, that Ezekiel could have seriously meant that Yahweh himself gave bad
laws and commanded human sacrifice. Christopher Wright, The Message of
Ezekiel (IVP 2001), 160.
ii) He says some passages (Lev 26:29; Jer 19:9; Lam 2:20; Ezk 5:9-10; cf. Deut 28:53-
57) "instigate" parents to cannibalize their kids. But four of the five passages are
predictive or descriptive.

Only Jer 19:9 attributes that to direct divine action, but in context that's shorthand for the
fact that by withdrawing his protection, God made Israel vulnerable to military
depravation by her enemies.

iii) He says God "caused" soldiers to rip babies from womb, according to Hos 13:16 (cf.
Isa 13:16). But that passage is predictive and descriptive. Moreover, Amos 1:13 says
that outrage provokes divine judgment.

iv) He cites historical atrocities and massacres (Gen 34; Judges 19-21), yet there's no
presumption that narrators condone whatever they record. In his zeal to tarnish
Scripture, Boyd commits elementary hermeneutical blunders.

v) He takes offense at the admittedly parabolic depiction in (Ezk 16:39-41), but that's
written for shock value.

vi) He trots out Ps 137:9, but even liberal commentators like Goldingay regard that as
figurative.

vii) He considers some OT depictions of God to be capricious. He makes no effort to

interpret them charitably.
"If everything happens for a reason, then we don't know what reasons are"

In this post I'm going to comment on an essay by Sharon Street: “If ‘Everything
Happens for a Reason,’ then We Don’t Know What Reasons Are: Why the Price of
Theism is Normative Skepticism.” In Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief:
Disagreement and Evolution, eds. Michael Bergmann and Patrick Kain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), chap. 9.

Sweet is an atheist philosopher, and her essay is a variation on the argument from evil.
Here's a sample:

Given the way atheists are often stereotyped in the culture at large, it is worth
drawing attention to the fact that arguments from evil against the existence of
God start from a place of moral conviction and moral common sense. More
importantly, as I will try to bring out, they refuse to leave that place in the face of
skeptical challenges from the theist. In the exact reverse of what is often
supposed, it is the atheist who insists on taking moral appearances at face value
until given a strong reason to do otherwise, and the theist who pushes a deeply
skeptical hypothesis according to which moral reality is very different from what
it appears to be.

Let us begin with some moral common sense…One among endless possible
examples of horrific real-life evil is a drunk-driving accident…In the crash, a seven-
year-old girl, who had been a flower girl at the wedding, was decapitated…The
mother picked it up and clung to it, screaming to her husband that "Katie is
dead." In spite of repeated requests by emergency personnel, the mother refused
to give up her daughter's head, holding onto it for nearly an hour as she watched
the rest of her family being cut from the wreckage.

The idea that there was a good moral reason to permit this scene of
unimaginable horror to take place defies every last shred of moral common sense.
This is so in the sense that if there was such a reason, then the moral reality of the
world is very different from what our everyday moral and factual capacities are
capable of discerning. I assume that no one among the likely readership of this
essay would seriously entertain the thought that any of the parties deserved this.
What, then? When we examine the world as we might have thought we knew it,
we can find no circumstance–moral, empirical, or otherwise–that would seem to
supply any good reason to permit such an event to occur. Importantly, for our
purposes, this is not to say that there couldn't be a morally good reason to permit
such an event to occur. Of course there could be. There could be a morally good
reason to permit anything. But it is to suggest that cleaving to the view that there
was a morally good reason to permit this crash to happen–which, as I will argue,
belief in God entails–might come at a very high price. It might come, in particular,
at the price of our ability to trust our own faculty of moral judgment going
forward. If there was a morally good reason to permit this to happen, in other
words, then we are hopeless judges of moral reasons.

Presumably we can all agree that in such circumstance it would be morally

depraved not to prevent the accident…Suppose that one day you see the man
from across the street standing there and watching impassively while one of his
children drowns in front of him in the family swimming pool. The natural response
to this factual observation would be to revise one's view that the man from across
the street is a good man…Another logically available option is to hold fixed the
moral idea that the man from across the street is a good man, and instead revise
one's view that "A good man does not stand by and watch while his child
drowns." If, for some reason, one was unshakably convinced that the man from
across the street was a good man, then even if one had no idea the man's reason
for standing there impassively and watching while his child drowned, one might
opt to revise one's commitment to the general moral principle about what a good
man does, and conclude that "There can sometimes be a good moral reason for a
man to stand by and watch his child drown, and this is one of those cases, even
though I don't know what the reason was."

But everything we have seen so far is that moral common sense is no guide
whatsoever to what God would or wouldn't do with regard to any matter. Moral
common sense would have suggested that God would prevent a flower girl's
decapitation, that he would not permit tsunamis that kill tens of thousands of
innocent people at a time…But in every case without exception, moral common
sense has turned out to be no guide at all to what God will or won't do. This
assumption is eviscerated on a daily basis by every horrendous evil that God
permits to happen for reasons that are completely opaque to us.
 If we simply pay attention to how things appear to us–both morally and
factually–then the [drunk driver] accident would appear to be an utterly
unmitigated evil. It would appear that there is nothing redeeming about its
having happened, that there is nothing in the world that makes it okay that it
happened. These are appearances that I think we should take at face value until
we find an extremely good reason to do otherwise. To go with theism is to deny
these appearances. It is to claim that, contrary to how things look, such horrors
are not unmitigated after all–that in spite of how it might seem, there is
something redeeming about this thing having happened, and there is something
that makes it okay that this happened. To my mind, this is not only a radical
denial of the appearances, but also a moral disservice to the people who were
involved. It furthermore seems to me a disservice to any force at work in the
universe that is worthy of the name "God". Nothing makes it okay that this
accident happened.

Her argument is powerfully expressed. She makes about as strong a case for atheism
(from the problem of evil) as can be made.

1. I take issue with her contention that Christian theism exacts an extra cost on morality.
Both Christians and atheists live in the same world. A world where horrendous things
happen. In that respect, Christians and atheists have both been dealt the same hand.
And it's a hard hand to play, for Christian and atheist alike. If I were the dealer, if I was a
cardsharp, my inclination would be to reshuffle the deck, to yield an easier hand.

However, Christian theism doesn't impose a moral surcharge, in contrast to naturalism.

To the contrary, Christian theism offsets the moral predicament. By contrast, naturalism
is the counselor despair.

2. Her allegation that the atheist takes moral common sense seriously whereas it is the
Christian who's the moral skeptic is tactically adroit, but deceptive. For instance, in the
very same book, fellow atheist Walter Sinnott-Armstrong mentions that some
philosophers are moral nihilists. And, of course, those are naturalists.

Moreover, he discusses psychopaths. These are statistically deviant, standing outside

the normal moral community. If, however, their viewpoint is rational, that poses a
challenge to moral realism. Here's a precis of his chapter:

Despite disagreements on some moral issues, almost all individuals and cultures
agree on certain basic moral judgments, such as that theft, rape, and murder of
peers for personal gain are immoral. Psychopaths seem to be an exception. To
test this common assumption, this chapter surveys research on moral judgments
in psychopaths. The evidence is less clear than many assume, but probably some
 psychopaths disagree with our fundamental moral judgments. Does this
disagreement support the skeptical conclusion that our fundamental moral
judgments are not epistemically justified? Not if psychopaths are irrational, but
the argument is that they are not irrational in any way that would justify
dismissing their views as irrelevant to moral epistemology. These conclusions
have radical implications within many theories, but contrastivist moral
epistemology is shown to handle these surprising facts.

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669776.001.0001/a
cprof-9780199669776-chapter-3

So her insinuation that the popular view of atheists is a caricature is misleading.

3. More to the point, the fact that many atheists take moral common sense for granted
when mounting the argument from evil doesn't mean their assumption is warranted.
Indeed, I'd say that cuts against the grain of naturalism. They lack the courage of their
convictions. Many atheists blink at the grim implications of their worldview. And that's
not just my opinion. As I've often documented, there are secular thinkers who admit that
naturalism conduces to moral and/or existential nihilism.

4. Sweet constantly appeals to taking "moral appearances at face value". But that's a
category confusion. Good and evil don't lie on the surface of events. Moral properties
aren't empirical properties. You can't directly perceive right and wrong, good and evil.
Rather, moral judgments are something we bring to events. We evaluate events in
relation to a moral frame of reference that's physically imperceptible. This doesn't mean
events lack moral qualities, but that's not something you can simply read off the events,
like shapes and colors.

5. In addition, it's demonstrably false that atheists, or at least thoughtful atheists, take
"moral appearances at face value". To the contrary, many atheists peel back the moral
impressions to explain what lies behind the moral impressions. Take the distraught
mother, clutching the dismembered head of her young daughter. From a cold hard
Darwinian perspective, that's the conditioned response of a higher mammalian mother.
Natural selection has programmed female animals to be protective of their young, and
feel distress when their young are killed. That confers a survival advantage. From a
Darwinian perspective, maternal instinct isn't moral or immoral but amoral.

Likewise, Sharon Sweet is a higher female mammal, and her reaction to the accident
reflects the same evolutionary conditioning. Yet there's nothing objectively moral about
it. That's how the mad scientist of naturalistic evolution wired their brains. But while their
brains are wired for empathy, the brains of psychopaths are wired for indifference or
cruelty.
6. In addition, her appeal to moral common sense is confused. The same event can be
bad in one respect but good in another. Take science fiction scenarios where a time-
traveler struggles to make the future a better place. And he may succeed in his
immediate objective, by eliminating a particular evil. The problem, though, is that
changing one variable in the past changes multiple variables in the future. He's unable
to control the side-effects. Unable to eliminate the bad variables while leaving the good
variables in place. And moral common sense can acknowledge such trade-offs.

7. It's appropriate for human moral agents to prioritize the needs of those closer to us in
time and space. Real human beings, whose situations we know best. Compared to
hypothetical humans in the future. Real people can suffer real harm, and the future is
largely beyond our control. Becomes less predictable the farther out we go.

8. It's a wild overgeneralization for Sweet to claim that:

But in every case without exception, moral common sense has turned out to be no
guide at all to what God will or won't do. This assumption is eviscerated on a
daily basis by every horrendous evil that God permits to happen for reasons that
are completely opaque to us.

To the contrary, many Christians experience tragedies that seem inexplicable at the
time, but in retrospect they come to see how good came of it. What appears to be
inscrutable when it happens may be seen to have unexpected value in hindsight:

Cardinal Newman remarks, though, that when people argue for atheism from
evil, they focus on evil happening to others. When people connect the evil to first-
person experience, he thinks they find it much more difficult to argue for atheism,
because they see how that evil fits into their life. So if Newman is right, the
argument from evil has a certain disconnect from experience, too.

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2017/03/heaven.html?showComment=1489672662
565#c8201255170735155270

9. Sweet's indignant repudiation of Christian theism is ironically subversive to the very

thing she cherishes. If naturalism is true, then human lives are worthless. There's
nothing of consequence to salvage. Her empathy and moralism are fatally misplaced.
Assuming naturalism is true, value is a mental projection on valueless people and
things. An illusion foisted on us by evolutionary brainwashing.
God and checkers

One version of the argument from natural evil that I sometimes run across goes like this:
since the laws of nature are contingent rather than necessary, God could dispense with
natural evils by making a universe with different laws.

There's a grain of truth to that, but the reality is a good deal more complicated and
imponderable. It's simpler for God to bypass natural laws than for God to change natural
laws. When God circumvents a nature law to perform a miracle, God is accessing his
omnipotence to product the result directly.

But if he alters the laws of physics, it's not just a case of changing one law or another
law in piecemeal fashion. For in a cause/effect universe, all the laws must be mutually
consistent. One law can't be changed while leaving all other laws in place. Rather,
changing one law requires a systematic adjustment in other laws, for them to cooperate.

The hypothetical alternative is so different from our own that we have no idea what such
a universe would be like. And there may be few coherent alternatives. Compare it to a
game of checkers:

Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada formally announced that they had
finally solved the centuries-old game of checkers. Specifically: they had a file which
contained full information on every legal position that can arise during the game, and
which move, if any, will lead to a win or a draw in that position.

The conclusion to be drawn from the completion of the database: with perfect play by
both sides checkers cannot be won or lost. The game will inevitably end in a draw. This
means that even the most skilled player cannot beat a computer which has access to
the database. The computer can't win either – it can only do so if the human opponent
makes a mistake that leads to position that is classified as a loss in the database.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/500-billion-billion-moves-later-computers-solve-checkers

Actually, there aren't an unlimited number of combinations. It turns out, there are a mere
500,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations (500 quintillion) that can be made over the
course of a game of checkers...now the system knows the perfect series of plays to win
the game at any point. A perfect opponent matched against Chinook can never hope to
beat it; even if they play a perfect game, their best result is a draw.

https://www.wired.com/2007/07/the-game-of-che/

If God plays by the rules, that imposes a severe restriction on his field of action (a self-
imposed limitation, to be sure).
If he plays checkers, he's not assuming the role of an omnipotent player. He's bracketed
his omnipotence. He's an omniscient player, but not an omnipotent player, because he's
not taking advantage of his omnipotence. That's available, but kept in reserve.

God cannot achieve a result by law without imposing a self-limitation on his field of
action. God can achieve a result by acting outside a network of natural laws, but if he's
operating within a network of natural laws, if he employs that medium to achieve the
result, then there are many things he cannot do.

If God plays checkers with a computer, God can't beat the computer. Even though God
is omnipotent and the computer is finite, if God confines himself to the rules of the
game, then he can only play to a draw. There are only so many ways to win and lose.
The program has that information. That's all it needs to be invincible. God isn't bound by
the rules, but it ceases to be a game of checkers if he breaks the rules or overrides the
computer.
The invisible security guard

Imagine you are a woman who is told your apartment [is] protected by an
invisible security guard. An intruder breaks into your apartment and rapes you.
The guard is nowhere to be found. You ask the landlord, "Where as your security
guard? Either he doesn't exist or is weak or evil or incompetent."

One of your neighbors studies 'invisible scrutiny guard apologetics'. He overhears

your conversation. He says, "But if a-guardism is true, there is no security guard.
You can't consistently argue against the guard's existence without presupposing
his existence."

If you understood why his answer to you completely misses the point, you'll
understand why it misses the point for theists to claim that the atheistic
argument from evil presupposes theism".

https://twitter.com/SecularOutpost/status/999507572947173376

i) This is a hobbyhorse of Jeff Lowder. His point is that an atheist can deploy the
argument from evil even if the atheist denies moral realism. In that case, the argument
from evil will take the form of an internal critique. Showing that theism or Christianity in
particular is inconsistent on its own grounds.

ii) That's technically true, but there's the question of why a moral nihilist cares about the
problem of evil. If there are no epistemic duties, why is it important to disprove
Christianity?

iii) In addition, an atheist who deploys the argument from evil assumes a burden of
proof. Since he's raising the objection, he shoulders a burden of proof to make an
argument. Moreover, he needs to take standard Christian theodicies into consideration,
and show how those are wanting. It's up to him to make the first move. It's not
incumbent on the Christian to recycle standard Christian theodicies. Since those are
already on the table, an atheist needs to build that into his initial formulation.

In fairness, that doesn't mean a Christian apologist has no corresponding burden of

proof. But an atheist can't shift the burden of proof onto the Christian by simply
exclaiming, "How can an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God permit evil!" Atheists
are often lazy in that regard.

iv) The parallel is ill-conceived. If you posit that the apartment is protected by an
invisible security guard, then that's his sole job, so if the tenant is attacked, then on the
face of it "either he doesn't exist or is weak or evil or incompetent." But the comparison
breaks down since protecting humans from harm is not God's only job. Unlike the
security guard, God may have a number of priorities. So the analogy is vitiated by
disanalogies.

v) And even on its own terms, maybe the security guard was sick that day. Maybe his
car broke down. Maybe the landlord failed to get a temporary substitute. Or maybe the
security guard had a family crisis which took precedence over his day job. Invisibility
doesn't make him omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent. So that's a very poor
example to illustrate the point.
Mind-games

A recent exchange I had with an atheist:

There are a few issues here, first a pedantic one, calling the apparent evils
"mysterious" somewhat begs the question, as on many hypotheses said evils are
not mysterious at all, but instead exactly what one would expect, e.g. an evil god
hypothesis, or an amoral natural universe hypothesis etc.

On your amoral natural universe hypothesis, what's the basis for calling anything
morally "evil"?

then Evil doesn't magically become inconsistent with the hypothesis, instead Evil
is just the observation of something people subjectively judge as evil, i.e.
apparent evil, or evil by convention etc.

i) In which case, atheists can't deploy the argument from evil on their own grounds. At
best, they can try to show that it's inconsistent on theistic grounds. But that's the very
question at issue.

ii) Since no one believes in a perfectly evil god, whether Christian or atheist, that's a
diversionary tactic. Why should we take the evil God hypothetical any more seriously
than brain-in-vat hypotheticals? Suppose we couldn't disprove the evil God
hypothetical? So what? What makes that any more significant than the inability of
philosophers to disprove other skeptical thought-experiments? It's just a mind-game.

how about you engage in the argument/rebuttal

What argument in particular? The evil god hypothesis? That's just a poor man's version
of the Cartesian demon. Steven Law didn't bring anything new to the table.

If the evil god existed, that would be a defeater for atheism no less than Christian
theism, so assuming we're supposed to take that thought-experiment seriously, the
onus lies on the atheist as much as the Christian.

If the evil god exists, there's nothing anyone can do about it. Arguments are futile in that
event. If the evil god doesn't exist, arguments are unnecessary in that regard.
God, evil, and illusion

The argument from evil is usually cast in terms of an allegedly inconsistent tetrad:

i) God is omnipotent

ii) God is omniscient

iii) God is benevolent

iv) Evil exists

One solution is to deny a horn of the proposed dilemma. Some freewill theists tweak (i)
by stressing God's self-imposed limitations. But there's not much milage to be had in
tweaking (i). Even if God doesn't exercise his omnipotence, he's capable of stopping or
preventing evil. Moreover, even if one denies (i), that hardly refutes the argument. As
John Piper noted, in response to Rabbi Kushner:

God does not need to be “all-powerful” to keep people from being hurt in the
collapse of a bridge. He doesn’t even need to be as powerful as a man. He only
needs to show up and use a little bit of his power (say, on the level of Spiderman,
or Jason Bourne)—he did create the universe, the Rabbi concedes—and (for
example) cause some tremor a half-hour early to cause the workers to leave the
bridge, and the traffic to be halted. This intervention would be something less
spectacular than a world-wide flood, or a burning bush, or plague of frogs, or a
divided Red Sea, or manna in the wilderness, or the walls of a city falling down—
just a little tremor to get everybody off the bridge before it fell.

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/response-to-rabbi-kushner

Roger Olson was outraged by Piper's response, but he didn't attempt to directly rebut
Piper's observation, which is irrefutable.

Some freewill theists deny or minimize (ii). But that's unsuccessful. Even if (ex
hypothesi) God doesn't know the future, a moral agent needn't be 100% certain about a
ripening outcome to see what's highly likely to transpire unless he intervenes. Suppose
a mother loses control of her baby stroller, which goes careening down the hill, heading
straight into a busy intersection. A pedestrian halfway up the hill is in a position to
intercept the stroller just in time. All he has to do to ensure a tragic outcome is to do
nothing. Inaction, in combination with gravity, terrain, wheels, &c., guarantees the
outcome.
The hypothetical pedestrian didn't create the situation. Didn't cause the mother to lose
control. Didn't put the baby in danger. He's far less responsible than the God of freewill
theism (be it Molinism, open theism, or simple foreknowledge Arminianism). Yet the
pedestrian's nonintervention is culpable.

Or suppose the tragic outcome isn't a dead certainty if he fails to intercept the stroller.
Suppose there's only a 40% chance the baby will die in a collision. But even so, we'd
consider the pedestrian to be blameworthy.

Or a Christian could challenge how the atheist defines (iii). What if God is not
benevolent in the way we wish or hope? Isn't Yahweh pretty hard-nosed? And the harsh
events we read about in Bible history are no different in kind than the harsh events we
read about in the newspaper or secular history books. So why not adjust your view of
God's goodness to the Bible and reality?

Finally, a person can deny (iv). And that isn't just hypothetical. Take Mary Baker Eddy or
John McTaggart–as well as strands of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy that say the
sensible world is Maya (illusory or delusive).

Freewill theists tend to operate with a priori notions of what God must be like. This
comes out clearly when attacking Calvinism. So they may appeal to perfect being
theology (as they construe it) to preemptively discount Reformed theism.

On a related note, John Wesley famously said that whatever the Bible means, it can't be
that!–in reference to Calvinism (specifically, reprobation). Roger Olson takes the
position that Reformed theism can't be true because it would make God untrustworthy.

Some freewill theists (e.g. Randal Rauser) take the next step by denying that God did
some of the things attributed to him in the Bible, viz. "abhorrent" commands, like the
command to sacrifice Isaac or the command to execute the Canaanites. Once again,
this conflicts with their preconception of God's goodness.

The pattern here is to begin with a preconceived notion of what kind of evil is
permissible in a world made by a benevolent God. But the dilemma for the freewill theist
is that given the existence of horrific evil, that limits their explanatory options.

Considering their scruples, if evil didn't exist, it's hard to envision their conceding that a
benevolent God would allow such evil to exist. If evil didn't exist, don't you imagine
they'd rail against a philosophical theologian who proposed the possibility of God
making a world in which atrocities like the Holocaust, child murder, &c., happen?
Wouldn't they accuse the philosophical theologian of blasphemy for even entertaining
that impious speculation?

But the existence of evil forces their hand. So they struggle, because it stands in deep-
seated tension with their moral intuitions regarding what ought to be the case, given
their expectations regarding what a benevolent God should disallow. If they had their
druthers, if they were coming to this issue from scratch, in a world devoid of evil, certain
evils would be incompatible with the only kind of God that can exist–from their
viewpoint. As it is, they are stymied by the horrific and apparently gratuitous evils in the
real world. And it makes they resort to hairsplitting distinctions when attacking Calvinism
while exempting their own position.

Considering the way in which many freewill theists lay down a priori strictures regarding
what a benevolent God would or wouldn't do, it would be more consistent for them to go
whole hog with thinkers who say evil is illusory. That really does let God off the hook.

In fact, idealism is making something of a comeback in Christian philosophical circles.

For instance, Robert Adams, "Idealism Vindicated," Peter van Inwagen & Dean
Zimmerman, eds. Persons: Human and Divine. (Oxford, (2007), 35-54; J. Farris, S.
Hamilton, & J. Spiegel, eds. Idealism and Christian Theology: Idealism and Christianity •
Volume 1 (Bloomsbury, 2016); S. Cowan &. J. Spiegel, eds. Idealism and Christian
Philosophy: Idealism and Christianity • Volume 2 (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Mind you, I find that wholly implausible. But given their theological priorities and moral
presuppositions, if they were really serious, the most consistent theodicy for freewill
theism is to reclassify evil as a massive illusion. That way they don't have to squirm over
God allowing horrors which would be culpable for a human agent in his position.
Is natural evil postlapsarian?

Although Dr. Welty discusses various objections to his theodicy, he regrettably

omits any mention its greatest challenge: the widespread conviction that it has
been decisively disproven by science.

Mainstream science has no place for the Biblical Adam & Eve in an idyllic Garden
of Eden. Allegedly, humans evolved, via a cruel quest for survival, in a group of at
least several thousand; there never were two humans from whom all other
humans descend.

Even worse, fossils indicating natural evil (animal suffering from predation,
disease, etc.) are allegedly dated millions of years older than the earliest humans,
in blatant contrast with the notion that natural evil was caused by Adam's Fall.

Clearly, the view that natural evil comes only after Adam's Fall entails rejecting
mainstream fossil dates, and thus essentially embracing Young Earth Creationism
(YEC).

Unhappily, the bulk of Christian Academia has largely accepted mainstream

science, and hence disdains YEC. Some Christian scholars do uphold the traditional
natural evil theodicy, while at the same time explicitly rejecting YEC, seemingly
unaware of any inconsistency (e.g., Wayne Grudem, Douglas Groothuis). Most,
however, embrace alternative theodicies that are more in tune with mainstream
science.

http://bylogos.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-so-much-evil.html

That raises a number of issues:

1. In historical theology, what phenomena did Reformed theologians classify as natural

evils? Natural evil is a very broad category, with many examples.
i) Wildfires are a natural evil, caused by lightning. Does Byl think there was no lightning
or fire before the Fall?

Campfires can start a wildfire. Was everything fireproof before the Fall?

ii) Flooding is classified as a natural evil. Does that mean the Nile river couldn't/didn't
flood before the Fall? The annual flooding of the Nile river is beneficial to Egyptian
farmers.

iii) If a tsunami sweeps over an island that has no fauna, is that a natural evil? It doesn't
kill anything. Is a tsunami intrinsically a natural evil, or only in conjunction with other
factors?

iv) An avalanche is classified as a natural disaster. Were avalanches impossible before

the Fall? If you have mountains and precipitation, that produces snowpacks that
produce avalanches.

2. This all goes to the ambiguity of "natural evil". "Natural evil" is a term of art. Many
natural evils are natural goods. They are necessary to maintain the balance of nature.
They are only evil if a human being is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

3. It's not as if the Bible has a list of labeled natural evils. Is it a biblical presupposition
that animal death is evil? Was the sacrificial system evil?

4. I've always thought the YEC claim that natural evil must be a result of the Fall is
philosophically and exegetically naive:

i) YECs assume that natural evil is incompatible with the creation as originally "good" or
"very good". That, however, is not an exegetical conclusion. Gen 1 doesn't define the
goodness of creation in contrast to so-called natural evil. It doesn't speak to that issue
one way or the other.

ii) The standard objection to animal suffering is not that it happened before the Fall.
What atheist frames the objection that way? If we say animal suffering is a
postlapsarian development, that's irrelevant to the argument from animal suffering.
Atheists will say animal suffering is incompatible with divine benevolence or wisdom
regardless of whether that is deemed to be a prelapsarian or postlapsarian
phenomenon. God is still complicit in predation, parasitism, and disease even if that's
indexed to the Fall. So it's a failed theodicy.

iii) In addition, Byl is a Calvinist, so he believes that God predestined all natural (and
moral evils) and implements his blueprint via meticulous providence.

iv) Even within an Edenic setting, it doesn't follow that there was no predation or animal
death. Although the animals are tame in relation to Adam and Eve, that carries no
presumption that they are nonviolent in relation to other animals.
v) Apropos (iv), Gen 2-3 implies animal mortality, for the tree of life is reserved for
humans. And it only existed in the garden, not outside the garden.

5. YEC, if true, entails the falsity of the evolutionary narrative. However, the converse
doesn't follow. The falsity of YEC doesn't entail the evolutionary narrative.

6. Allowing for natural evils before the Fall doesn't mean innocent Adam and Eve were
exposed to natural evils. God could providentially shield them from natural evils.

7. Byl is both a geocentrist as well as a young-earth creationist. From his viewpoint,

they share a common hermeneutic. The same hermeneutic yields young-earth
creationism and geocentrism.

The dilemma that generates is that I don't see how he can draw a hermeneutical line
between geocentrism and flat-earthism. He's scornful of Enns doe arguing that Scripture
teaches a three-story universe, but it sure looks to me like the same hermeneutic that
yields a geocentric cosmography yields a flat-earth cosmography as well. And the
reasoning is reversible. They rise and fall together.
Explaining evil, part 1

I plan to do a series of posts on yet another book on the problem of evil: W. Paul
Franks, ed., Explaining Evil: Four Views (Bloomsbury 2019). Here's a description:

https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAEEF-2

I think the problem of evil is overemphasized in atheism and Christian apologetics. If we

were starting from scratch, would the problem of evil receive so much attention? I think
it's like a social contagion or reinforcing loop where, if you keep saying the problem of
evil is the main objection to belief in God, that's the effect of constant repetition. It feeds
back into itself in a circular, self-conditioned dynamic.

Strictly speaking, the book isn't about the problem of evil but the preliminary question of
how, why, and whether evil exists. For a Christian respondent, that's intertwined with the
problem of evil. Christian theology takes the existence of evil for granted, but that's not a
given in atheism. Are pain and suffering evil? What is evil from a secular standpoint? Is
there such a thing?

I bought the book primary for the contributions of Paul Helm and Erik Wielenberg. Helm
is the preeminent Reformed philosopher of his generation while Wielenberg is one of
the best atheist philosophers.

Here is Wielenberg's response to Helm's felix culpa theodicy:

(ii) The atonement of sin is so good that it is better that there be atoned-for sin
than that there be no sin in the first place (73).

Although that may be how the felix culpa theodicy is usually formulated, I disagree that
God's permission/ordination of evil is only justified if a redeemed world is better overall
than an unfallen world. Suppose there's a better world than the world in which my loved
ones exist. If so, it's a cause for gratitude that God created a lesser world in which my
loved ones exist rather than an upscale world in which they don't. God isn't elitist. We
should be grateful that our existence is not in competition with "the best". What if we
wouldn't make the cut? What if God picks losers rather than winners because he loves
the underdog? Existence isn't a meritocracy. Salvation isn't theological eugenics.

Accordingly, it seems that atonement can at best cancel the evil of sin, turning the
overall balance of good and evil to zero; I don't see a plausible basis for holding
that atonement–as distinguished from divine incarnation–could make the overall
combination of sin and atonement into good (74).
To be a redeemed creature, to experience reconciliation and restoration, is a richer
experience than never failing in the first place. Which Wielenberg considers:

Diller considers the thought that "there is a special excellence to the quality of
relationship that can be known by those once lost who are redeemed"…However,
it is hard to see how to justify (ii) on such grounds without thereby committing
oneself to such implausible claims as "the strongest marriages are those that
have involved a period of divorce, or that the deepest mother-daughter
relationship is enabled once the daughter commits patricide" (74).

It's not implausible that the strongest marriages are marriages that weather crisis and
conflict, but survive the ordeal. There is, moreover, the interesting phenomenon of
divorced couples who reconsider and remarry the original spouse. At the time they were
too immature to appreciate each other. But in retrospect they came to realize they were
right the first time around. The time apart gave them perspective.

Furthermore, such grounds for (ii) suggest that greater degrees of alienation
make possible more valuable goods of reconciliation later on. In the case of isn,
that line of thinking appears to lead to the following problem: “If sin is the
occasioning cause of grace…then shouldn't the upright man try to overcome his
repugnance to sin, and commit still more sins?" Acceptance of (ii) and the felix
culpa theodicy suggests that more sin enhances the overall value of the world, all
things considered–a dubious implication (74).

1. That doesn't follow. For one thing, it's not as if humans are morally pristine agents
who must devise creative ways to experiment with evil so that we know what it's like.
Rather, we're already born with a propensity for evil, and the question is how to break
free. I have plenty of regrets without having to devise and explore novel exercises in
sinning.

2. Moreover, it's not as if you need to be repeatedly lost and found to have insight into
what it's like to be lost and found. Indeed, if you were constantly rescued, it would
become blasé and expected. If a hiker is lost in the forest, part of what makes rescue
such a relief is the fear that he may not be found. He's in a state of desperate suspense.
Waiting in hope and fear.

Michael Peterson writes, "God's original purpose…[thus the highest good for
creation is available without creation's descent into sin and evil" (74).
Is that supposed to mean God was blindsided by events and had to scramble to salvage
his nearsighted plans?

"agency that is hardened and biochemically twisted (serial killers, child sex
murderers, schizophrenics)"…Adam's worry is that God would be insufficiently
loving and merciful toward such wrecked and ruined human agents were he to
create them in order to display his perfection through divine atonement.

i) I'll bracket the "display his perfection through divine atonement" for another
installment.

ii) What exactly is Wielenberg's responding to? Is he saying that's inconsistent with a
felix culpa theodicy? If so, how does a felix culpa theodicy require God to be loving and
merciful towards serial killers and child sex murderers?

iii) Is he saying that's inconsistent with Helm's Calvinism? If so, does Calvinism require
God to be loving and merciful towards serial killers and child sex murderers? In
Calvinism God loves the elect. It's not a presupposition of Calvinism that God is merciful
to everyone. Indeed, there's a fundamental sense in which God is unmerciful to the
reprobate.

iv) Is he saying that's inconsistent with what it means for God to be a benevolent being,
from Wielendberg's perspective? Is Wielenberg supposing that to be good, God must be
loving and merciful towards serial killers and child sex murderers? If he's operating from
his own standards, then the onus lies on him to make a case for why divine goodness
demands that.

Psychopaths lack "the shackles of a nagging conscience"…for psychopaths,

"moral…rules are annoying restrictions to be manipulated or ignored. None of
these rules have any normative force for them". Psychopaths lack the emotional
capacity to grasp the weight of morality and because they are devoid of guilt, see
no need for any of their actions to be atoned for. It is hard to see why the
existence of a particular sort of damaged agency is necessary for the great good
of divine atonement. God could have omitted psychopaths from his grand plan
without sacrificing the need for atonement (75).

i) Once again, what exactly is Wielenberg responding to? Since Helm is a Calvinist, he
doesn't think everyone is redeemed.
ii) Perhaps Wielenberg would say there's a point of tension between a felix culpa
theodicy and limited atonement. If so, it's up to Wielenberg to explain why psychopaths,
serial killers, and child sex murders must be redeemed for a redeemed world to be
better overall than an unfallen world–even assuming that all psychos, serial killers, and
child sex murderers are reprobate.

iii) Finally, if, according to Calvinism, God regenerates, sanctifies, and glorifies a
psychopath, then he will come to perceive how his actions were blameworthy and
desperately in need of atonement. Perhaps that discernment will be incomplete in this
life. It may only be in heaven that his "wrecked and ruined agency" is fully repaired,
although grace can enable him to gain some insight even in this life. Christian apologist
David Wood appears to be a real-life example.
Explaining evil, part 2

Now I'll comment on some aspects of Helm's presentation.

An important feature of this contribution to the questions raised by evils is that

such a theism is monistic….Some contrasting systems are dualistic, positing two
equally ultimate sources of good and evil, Light and Darkness, engaged in an
everlasting wrestling match, and so on. Judeo-Christianity is not like this. God is
the creator and purposer of all that is. So the question, "Why evil?" when posed
of this God, becomes at least two questions (50).

In that regard, freewill theism is dualistic. Although the forces of good and evil aren't
equally ultimate, they are independent of each other.

"What is God's purpose in permitting/ordaining evil?" The fulfilling of what end

or ends required evil?…This is a question that is teleological in character. I don't
think an atheist has a place for this question, because any atheistic system has
only one set of sources of evil, namely uncreated matter. A theist may reply to our
question by recognizing that he does not have a clue as to why there is evil in
God's world. But the question nevertheless makes sense: God must have a ground
or grounds. The second question is, "Granted that God is the ordainer of evil, how
does evil occur?" (50).

In this monism there are two categories of players: God the creator and human
beings his creatures, with the use of their own minds and wills…In materialist
atheism, there is only one set of players, configurations of matter more or less
complicated. Some of these posses agency, others do not (50).

How such configurations get to ask anything is a major problem in such an

outlook…Atheists, like theists, may resort to anthropomorphism. Perhaps these
evils are bound up with the self-preservation of some species, or of species
generally. Maybe evils and pains are spurs to good: to maternal care, or the
development of clothing for a covering against heat and cold, or as a sign of the
onset of serious sickness…They arise from our penchant for imputing functions or
purposes to some of the natural order that does not having anything like human
intentions a we experience these…And if we are thorough-going materialists, we
 also have the task of explaining how those arrangements of matter that are you
and me come to have the capacity to impute good and evil to other chunks of
matter. Good and evil are ultimately epiphenomena of physical changes (51).

Useful contrast.

The fault, the incarnation, and the offering of the Incarnate One is needed, for the
display of the glory of God in the redemption of men and women. The point here
is not simply that the incarnation was necessary, but that an evil world in which
God himself came and suffered for us is incommensurably better than one in
which there was no evil, but also that there was no incarnation (53).

The problem is that Helm never gets around to explaining what makes a redeemed
world incommensurably better than an unfallen world. He never gets much beyond the
bare assertion.

In fairness, he isn't presenting a full-blown theodicy since the topic of the book has a
different emphasis than the problem of evil. Still, for a Christian, to ask why there's any
evil at all is necessarily bound up with the problem of evil and theodical considerations.

The theist must end his explanatory narrative by invoking the will of God; it was
the good pleasure of God that this is so. Why is it the good pleasure of God that
this is so? This is a question that cannot be answered, not because there is no
answer, but that there is no answer apart from the will of God (55).

I don't know what that means. Sure, the answer can't be detached from God's will, but
God has reasons for what he wills, so a Christian can explore the possible reasons.
God's bare will is not the ultimate explanation. I don't think Helm is a theological
voluntarist. God's will is characterized by his wisdom and benevolence. There's a
rationale for whatever God wills.

Given the immaculate and necessary perfection of God, moral evil can only arise
from the creature. It is a logical consequence of the monistic character of the
Creator-creature distinction that God is the only source of good and that moral
evil has its source according to orthodox Christianity in the creature (55).
i) I don't think that's an option for a Calvinist. Predestination is the ultimate source of
evil.

Now there are different aspects to that. To take a comparison, in Perelandra, why
doesn't the Queen succumb to the Un-man? At one level, that's because everything that
happens was plotted by the novelist, who exists outside the narrative. At another level,
the Un-man would eventually wear down her resistance but Ransom finally gives up on
trying to outargue the Un-man and kills him. So there's an explanation within the
narrative as well as an explanation outside the narrative.

By the same token, there was a plot in God's imagination. In the plot, Lucifer fell, then
successfully tempted Adam and Eve to follow suit. God instantiates his mental narrative
in real space and time, with conscious agents. Lucifer fell in the real world because that
necessarily corresponds to the plot in God's mind.

ii) However, that doesn't rule out factors or motivations within the plot. For instance,
although Adam sinned, perhaps he didn't perceive his action as evil. Perhaps he
misperceived his action as virtuous.

There is about evil a deficiency or loss of negativity. Augustine, influenced

somewhat by the neo-platonists at this point, called evil a privation. Hence it
could not be the direct action of God who is only capable of creating not of
destroying. Blindness (say) is not a positive property, but a negative property
(56).

i) As I understand it, the motivation for the privative theory of evil is that if evil is nothing,
then God didn't create evil–since nothing can't be a creative object. An agent, even an
omnipotent agent, can't create nothing. Nothing isn't the effect or result of anything. So
that let's God off the hook–or does it?

ii) Even if we grant that technical distinction, does it really hold up? For instance,
suppose you say the empty spaces in a snowflake are nothing. Yet those specific empty
spaces, those particular shapes, are caused by the lattice pattern of the snowflake. The
configuration of the empty spaces wouldn't exist apart from the crystalline structure. So
even though the empty spaces aren't directly created, they are caused.

Likewise, even if we say blindness is a privative property, blindness is caused by certain

factors. Even if you say blindness isn't directly created, it is indirectly created by
whatever conditions give rise to blindness, viz. disease, accident, genetic defect. So I
don't see how you get any theodical mileage out of that distinction.

In fairness, Helm isn't necessary trying to justify the ordination of evil at this juncture, but
explain its origin. How rather than why. But it still reflects the limitations of that theodical
strategy.
 Someone who is compatibilistically free may go through stages in which, until he
makes up his mind, he is as ignorant of his future as is any open theist who hold
that God is ignorant of some libertarian future (31).

Corrects the popular misconception that the experience of deliberation implies

libertarian freedom. Also, useful comparison with open theism.
Net result

A few comments on this:

https://selfwire.org/article/explaining-god-evil

Second, certain heinous evils do not have a “net” good.

On the face of it, even heinous evils can yield a net good. Events are causes of further
events down the line. Everything adds up, for better or worse. In principle, that can be
good overall. Whether the net effect is better rather than worse depends on whether
God has orchestrated history so that countervailing goods offset evils so that on
balance, the final result is better.

This is otherwise called “The theological problem of trauma.” There is no “net

good” of a little girl being raped. One might contrive a philosophical situation in
which one had to choose between one person being raped vs. 1,000 people being
raped—in which case the single rape was the relative good.

Not a relative good but a lesser evil.

But there are two problems with this—even if this is conceived as a relative good,
it still doesn’t posit a net good. This argument fails to distinguish between what
philosophers call the utilitarian good and the inherent good. The saving of 1,000
lives was a utilitarian good, but still failed to undo or justify the inherent evil of
the one rape which the saving cost. This leads to the third problem.

i) Christians can only play the hand they were dealt. Any theodicy will be wince-
inducing. But if you believe in God and evil, then that severely limits the logical options.
Reality dictates the available options. If reality was kinder, we wouldn't have the
problem of evil in the first place. So any theistic explanation will have a hard aspect.
And an atheistic explanation is harsher.

ii) It's true that if an action is intrinsically wrong, then beneficial consequences don't
convert it into something good or moral. Likewise, beneficial consequences can't justify
intrinsic wrongdoing.

However, while wrongdoing can't be justified, to permit wrongdoing can sometimes be

justified. There is sometimes a morally salient difference between committing evil and
not preventing evil. I might not intervene to preempt an impending evil or step in to
arrest an evil in progress if the effect of my intervention is to replace one evil with other
evils further down the line, or eliminate some compensatory goods.

Third, this theodicy does not solve the originative problem of evil. Let’s take the
problem of having to choose between 1,000 people being raped and 1 person
being raped. The argument which states that the greatest of all possible worlds
necessarily includes the heinous evil of our world silently implies that God was in
a Sophie’s Choice scenario before he created the world. In the novel Sophie’s
Choice, the protagonist was sent to a Nazi concentration camp and was forced to
choose between the murder of her daughter and her son. She chose her son. She
can hardly be blamed for the death of her son.

The Calvinist use of this Leibnizian theodicy attempts to apply the same
justification to God by implying that God was in a similar situation before his free
decision to create the world. Of course, if Calvin was right, God’s hand wasn’t
forced in any way, and his free decision to create was not in the context of a
Sophie’s Choice scenario. Therefore, the question, “Why did God allow sin in the
world?” remains unanswered, and the place of a successful theodicy for Christian
theology remains unanswered.

i) I don't think there's a greatest possible world. There are greater good worlds, lesser
good worlds–as well as worlds containing evil with no redeeming values. No single
world history captures all the goods. Not all possibilities are compossible. By definition,
every possible world has a different world history. Some goods inevitably depend on
how a particular timeline unfolds.

ii) Likewise, second-order goods necessarily presuppose evil. You can't have one
without the other.

iii) Apropos (i-ii), there are some restrictions on God's field of action. However, I don't
think there's any antecedent restriction on God's ability to create more than one
possible world. Perhaps God made a multiverse in which some alternate scenarios play
out. That will realize a greater number of goods.

iv) Maxwell's retreat into mystery just kicks the can down the street. God can't be
absolved of responsibility for evil or complicity in evil, although he can be absolved of
culpability for evil.
v) As for Wolterstorff, if you indulge in high-risk behavior and your luck runs out, there's
nothing inexplicable about the tragic result. That doesn't require a special explanation.
His judgment is understandably clouded by grief, but his reaction is illogical.
Anti-theodicy

I'm going to quote and comment on this essay: N. N. Trakakis, "Anti-Theodicy", The
Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue (Cambridge 2018), chap 4. Trakakis is a
protégé of atheist philosopher Graham Oppy, and they often collaborate. In the essay
Trakakis indicates that at one point the problem of evil pushed him into the atheist
camp, but he now has an alternative position: anti-theodicy.

I first encountered the anti-theodicy position in Cornelius Berkouwer. David Bentley Hart
is another exponent of anti-theodicy:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

It may not be coincidental that Trakakis and Hart both have a Greek Orthodox frame of
reference.

The problem of evil often strikes people as irresolvable. No adequate or

convincing solution to the problem seems forthcoming, and this despite numerous
and often sophisticated attempts over the centuries and from highly trained and
gifted philosophers and theologians. As John Cottingham recognizes, "The
opponents of theism may devise ever more dramatic presentations of the
problem of evil, and its defenders construct ever more ingenious rebuttals, but
one has the sense that neither side in the argument has any real expectation of
changing their opponent's mind, and that in the end they are succeeding in doing
little more than upsetting each other".

But, of course, that's hardly unique to debates over theodicy. That holds true for the
whole range of philosophy. Typically, opposing positions in philosophy are constantly
retooled rather than eliminated.

It is also sometimes held that the theodicist's position of rejecting even the
possibility of gratuitous evil–of holding, in other words, that every evil is always
connected to a greater good and that we ought to believe (or can come to know)
this to be so–has the objectionable consequence of reducing us to an attitude of
passivity and fatalism in the face of evil. For why fight to eradicate evil if evil is a
necessary or unavoidable part or byproduct of God's providential plan for the
world.

But that's dumb, for the second-order goods include the defeat of evil. Goods that derive
from the struggle against evil. It's like saying that because challenges are built into
sports and games, that reduces players to an attitude of passivity and fatalism in the
face of challenges. But the obstacles exist to be overcome. They don't exist for their
own sake.

The teleological or instrumentalist conception of evil presupposed in theodicies,

where evil is permitted by God for the sake of some higher end, is also open to the
Kantian criticism that it negates the inherent world and dignity of persons by
treating them as mere means to some end, rather than as ends in themselves.

i) But Kantian strictures are not an unquestionable given. The onus lies on the Kantian
deontologist to argue for his scruples. That's not something he can simply foist on
others.

ii) While, moreover, there's a floor to human rights, below which we shouldn't go, that
doesn't mean everyone is entitled to the same treatment regardless of their behavior.
People can forfeit their presumptive right not to be treated in certain ways. If a suicide
bomber has designs on a kindergarten, he ought be stopped by any means necessary.

I arrived at the conclusion that various recent theistic attempts to resolve the
problem–including the skeptical theist response, and freewill and soul-making
theodicies–fail to provide a satisfactory answer (at least with respect to certain
types of evil). Absent any countervailing evidence in support of theistic belief, or
without any good reason for continuing to uphold theism, "the only rational
course of action left for the theist to take is to abandon theism and convert to
atheism."

i) But there's enormous countervailing evidence.

ii) Evil is only a meaningful category within a Christian paradigm.

iii) Even if some theodicies fail to provide a satisfactory answer to certain types of evil,
that hardly means they should be discounted for the types of evil they do explain. And
what if a combination of theodicies suffices to cover all bases?

iv) Most philosophical positions face some recalcitrant objections. That's not unique to
the problem of evil. If we jettison every philosophical position that has loose ends,
there'd little left to believe. Although it's a bad sign when someone must introduce ad
hoc loopholes to salvage his position, if you have good evidence that your position
basically true, you should keep refining it.
 [Rowe] In the light of our own experience and knowledge of the variety and scale
of human and animal suffering in our world, the idea that none of this suffering
could have been prevented by an omnipotent being without thereby losing a
greater good or permitting an evil at least as bad seems an extraordinary, absurd
idea, quite beyond belief.

Rowe's plausibility structure isn't something he can impose on everyone else. If he find
it absurd, beyond belief, that's his opinion, but not everyone shares his impression.

It may not be coincidental that Rowe was an apostate. Ironically, Christian idealism
leads some professing Christians to abandon their faith, yet they wouldn't have that
idealism were it not for the faith they abandoned. Their conclusion negates their
premise. So many apostates are like time-travelers in the Grandfather paradox, who
wouldn't exist in the first place because they erase the future in which they originate.

Rowe's almost instinctive reaction of incredulity about the claims of theodicists

are wont to make (we might dub it, after Harry Frankfurt, a "bullshit detector")
has proven to be an invaluable resource in my journey through the thickets of
evil. What Rowe is contesting, and I with him still, is the strategy of reconciling
God with evil by making appeal to greater goods, whether known or known, said
to be yoked some necessary but unfortunate way to the myriad evils of the world.
Even if some evils can be accounted for, what almost always gets placed in the
mystery category are the "hard cases"...

I, for one, don't think the hard cases must be relegated to the mystery box.
Gerrymandering naturalism

Ultimately, determination of the comparative theoretical virtues of theories is a

global matter: what counts is which theory does better overall, on an appropriate
weighting of theoretical commitment, explanation of data, predictive accuracy,
fit with established knowledge, and so forth. In particular, then, when it comes to
questions about data, what matters is which theory does better at explaining
total data.

Roughly speaking, it seems to me that, while there are no particular theoretical

commitments of naturalism that are keyed to data concerning the distribution of
suffering and flourishing in our universe, there may be particular theoretical
commitments of theism that are keyed to data concerning the distribution of
suffering and flourishing in our universe.

On the one hand, there is no natural–non-gerrymandered–sub-theory of

naturalism that prompts questions, or worries, or issues related to the
distribution of suffering or flourishing in our universe. On naturalistic accounts of
the origins and evolution of life on earth, there is nothing surprising about the
distribution of suffering and flourishing across the surface of the earth. In
particular, there are no theoretical commitments of naturalism–no ontological or
ideological commitments of naturalism–that are keyed to the data about the
distribution of suffering and flourishing across the surface of the earth; there are
no special hypotheses that naturalists introduce to accommodate or to explain
the distribution of suffering and flourishing across the surface of the earth.

On the other hand, it is pretty much universally recognized that the same is not
true for theism. In this case, there many be natural–non-gerrymandered–sub-
theories that do prompt questions, or worries, or issues that are related to the
distribution of suffering and flourishing in our universe, and, in particular, to the
distribution of suffering and flourishing across the surface of the earth. If we
suppose–as theists typically do, that, in the beginning, there was nothing but a
perfect being–omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and so forth–and if
everything else is the creation of that perfect being, then what explains the
presence of evil in our universe? If we suppose–as theists typically do–that God
 exercises strong providential control over everything that happens and that God
would prefer that we do not suffer, then why is it that we suffer as we do?

Furthermore, it is pretty much universally recognized that there may be

theoretical commitments of theistic worldviews that are keyed to the distribution
of suffering in our universe. Some theists suppose that the distribution of
horrendous natural evil is a consequence of the activities of demons and other
malign supernatural agents; and, for these theists, the main reason for supposing
that there are demons and other malign supernatural agents is that this
supposition explains the distribution of horrendous natural evil in our universe.
Some theists suppose that God's permission of the distribution of horrendous
moral evil that is found in our universe is, in part, due to God's recognition that
there are goods beyond our ken whose obtaining depends upon there being at
least relevantly similar distribution of horrendous moral evil; and, for these
theists, the main reason for supposing that there are goods beyond our ken
whose obtaining depends upon there being an at least relevantly similar
distribution of horrendous moral evil is that this supposition explains God's
permission of the distribution of horrendous moral evil in our universe. Graham
Oppy, "The Problems of Evil," N. N. Trakakis, ed. The Problem of Evil: Eight Views
in Dialogue (Cambridge 2018), chap. 3.

i) Oppy's basic strategy, which he's expressed in numerous venues, is to use simplicity
as a criterion to eliminate philosophical contenders. Yet he admits that while a particular
position may be simpler in one respect, the final grade relies on the overall explanatory
power of competing worldviews, rather than isolated cases of superior simplicity.

ii) The immediate objection is that naturalism requires no special explanation for the
distribution of evil or suffering in the world. Naturalism is, in itself, an explanation. An
atheist doesn't believe in naturalism in spite of suffering and evil. Rather, that
phenomenon is easily accounted for given naturalism. By contrast, a Christian believes
in Christian theism despite suffering and evil. A Christian is forced to posit additional
hypotheses to save their religious theory from falsification. Naturalism doesn't need
these epicycles. In naturalism, nothing extra is needed over and above naturalism itself
to account for the distribution of suffering and evil.

iii) One problem with Oppy's analysis is the way he uses "suffering" and "evil" as
synonyms. But "evil" has ethical and teleological connotations that "suffering" does not.
For instance, suffering in the sense of "moral evil" is irreducibly ethical or teleological.
Something went wrong.
iv) You can take naturalism or atheism as a starting-point, but move to Christian theism
from that secular starting-point. Many atheists act as if the world is not the way it's
supposed to be. So that's not just a point of tension generated by a Christian outlook.
Many atheists are profoundly disturbed by the world as they find it.

Likewise, consider Buddhism. That's a useful frame of reference because Buddhism is

pre-Christian and naturalistic. It wasn't influenced by Christianity and Judaism. Yet it
reflects a fundamental disaffection with the world as it stands. Life is so irredeemably
bad that we must practice radical emotional detachment.

Ironically, most atheists, even though they think this world is all there is, are alienated
from the world as it is. And they often turn to utopian schemes to rectify the problem.
Therefore, Oppy's contrast between Christianity and naturalism is deceptive.

v) Then there's the question of whether physical organisms are even capable of
suffering. Eliminative materialists argue that an arrangement of particles can't generate
psychological states. So naturalists like Oppy do posit something extra ("suffering") to
accommodate phenomena. That's not a feature of naturalism, but a grudging
concession in spite of naturalism. Hence, many naturalists are guilty of gerrymandering
to accommodate recalcitrant data consistent with their physicalism.

vi) Which theists attribute natural evils to demonic agency? Unless I'm
misremembering, Plantinga floated that in response to the logical problem of evil. But
that's a question of consistency rather than plausibility. In folk theology it's common to
attribute natural evils to vindictive gods or demons.

However, belief in demonic agency isn't primarily an apologetic postulate to explain the
distribution of horrendous natural evil on earth. Rather, many people claim to
experience the activity of malevolent spirits. Belief in evil spirits has, in the first instance,
an evidential basis. Indeed, that's well-documented. Sometimes it is then pressed into
service as an apologetic explanation for certain natural evils–yet theologians don't
appeal to demonic agency to explain natural evils in general, but only limited range of
natural evils whose specific characteristics invite that supernatural diagnosis.

vii) The reason for believing there are second-order goods is religious in one respect
but independent of religion in another. It is dependent on religion in the sense that good
and evil are normative concepts which make no sense in a naturalistic paradigm.
However, the principle of nested relations isn't essentially religious, but a matter of
logically inclusive paired relations, viz. you can't be somebody's grandson unless you're
somebody's son.
The absurdity of life in a Christian universe

I believe Erik Wielenberg is regarded as a highly competent atheist philosopher. A few

years ago he gave a talk:

https://ryecast.ryerson.ca/67/Watch/9422.aspx

"The Absurdity of Life in a Christian Universe as a Reason to Prefer that God Not
Exist" is meant to be a parody of an existential argument for God's existence.
Many Christian philosophers and apologists contend that atheism entails moral
nihilism, and a few atheists admit that or come close to that admission.
Wielenberg is laboring to turn the tables on that allegation. Here's "the Absurdity
Argument":

Claim C makes life absurd = df. Claim C's truth makes (or would make) true at
least one claim C1 such that most (actual) human beings are such that if they
were to accept C1 they would experience negative psychological consequences
that would make it difficult or impossible for them to be happy (without also
failing to accept at least one entailment of C).

1. Necessarily, if God exists, then whenever a person P experiences undeserved

involuntary suffering, P is better off overall than P would have been without the
suffering.

2. So: Necessarily, if God exists, then whenever a person A causes another person
B to experience undeserved involuntary suffering, B is better off overall than B
would have been without the suffering (from 1).

3. God's existence makes it true (or would make it true) that each of us is morally
obligated to pursue the good of others.
 4. Necessarily, if (i) A is morally obligated to pursue B's good and (ii) A's
performing act X would make B better off overall, then (iii) A has a fact-relative
reason to perform X.

5. So, God's existence makes it true (or would make it true) that C: each of us has
a fact-relative reason to cause others to experience undeserved involuntary
suffering (from 2, 3, and 4).

6. Most human beings are such that if they were to accept (C), they would
experience negative psychological consequences that would make it difficult or
impossible for them to be happy (without also failing to accept at least one
entailment of (C)).

7. Therefore, the claim that God exists makes life absurd (from 5 and 6)

Let's examine some of the premises:

PREMISE #1

is based on the principle "that a morally perfect God would not permit the existence of
any gratuitous evil, evil that is not necessary in order to prevent an equal or worse evil
or necessary to produce some great good."

1) Of course, that's just the argument from evil. So the onus lies on Wielenberg to
demonstrate the existence of gratuitous evil. That requires him to refute theodicies
which deny it.

2) Even assuming the existence of gratuitous evil, there are Christian philosophers like
Peter van Inwagen who argue that gratuitous evil is consistent with God's existence. So
Wielenberg needs to refute that as well.

"the further claim that if God permits a certain evil to befall a particular
individual, God's moral perfection requires not merely that the evil be
compensated for somewhere in the universe but…in the life of the very person
who endures that evil…compensated, only if that suffering ultimately makes that
person better off overall than she would have been otherwise. To treat the
 sufferer merely as a means to an end, which is incompatible with God's moral
perfection."

1) Once again, Wielenberg can't just stipulate that to be the case. He needs to argue for
his claims. So his syllogism isn't a free-standing argument, but requires subsidiary
arguments to justify the premises.

2) Another problem is that Wielenberg has given different definitions of what constitutes
gratuitous evil: "undeserved involuntary suffering," "evil that is not necessary in order to
prevent an equal or worse evil or necessary to produce some great good."

But those aren't equivalent concepts. Perhaps that's shorthand for: a morally perfect
God won't permit undeserved involuntary suffering unless the sufferer is compensated
(i.e. ultimately better off than he'd otherwise be). But it's up to Wielenberg to clarify how
these claims go together.

1) Is it self-evident that a morally perfect God won't use anyone merely as a means to
an end or expose them to uncompensated unmerited suffering?

i) What if there's a prima facie obligation not to be used merely as a means to an end,
but an agent may forfeit that immunity through wrongdoing?

ii) What constitutes undeserved suffering? Suppose Pablo Escobar is punished for a
crime he didn't commit. Although his suffering for that particular crime is undeserved, he
richly deserves to suffer for his many other crimes, so is a morally perfect God required
to shield Escobar from unmerited suffering whatsoever? What if Escobar's unmerited
suffering in one case makes up for suffering he merits in other cases–which he evaded?
Does his general culpability create a liability to suffer justly, even in cases where there's
no direct correspondence between his suffering and a particular crime? Does his guilt in
general waive the right not to suffer in situations where there's no guilty action in
particular?

PREMISE #3

"Love your neighbor as yourself"–an obligation to promote/persue what is genuinely

good for others. However, commenting on

PREMISE #4

Wielenberg admits that #3 is a defeasible, prima facie obligation. Other features in the
situation may override that obligation, viz. breaking a promise, benefiting one party at
the cost of harming other parties. So you have to take the "net benefit" into account.

Suppose you see two neighbors in a violent altercation. You may obligated to take sides
if you know that one is acting in self-defense while the other is an unprovoked assailant.
PREMISE #6

fails to distinguish between making someone suffer and allowing them to suffer. But
surely those are morally different in at least some situations. For instance, there's a
great deal of suffering I can't prevent. But that's different from the infliction of suffering
on my part.

As it stands, Wielenberg's attempt to counter the existential argument for God is grossly
underdeveloped and comically tendentious.
Benevolence and reciprocity

The divine hiddenness argument is a newer argument in the atheist arsenal. Atheists
don't have many new arguments. John Schellenberg put this on the map in 1993. Other
atheists have tweaked the argument, and his argument has undergone various
permutations at his own hands. But his core argument remains the "canonical" version,
the frame of reference for most discussions. Here's a recent formulation:

Suppose God perfectly loves Anna. That love would minimally involve
benevolence, caring for Anna’s well-being. But it would also involve aiming “at
relationship—a conscious and reciprocal relationship that is positively
meaningful, allowing for a deep sharing” between them. Moreover, it would
involve valuing that relationship for its own sake, and not merely for the sake of
something else. Furthermore, it would never cease, and so God would always
value, seek, desire, promote, or preserve personal relationship with Anna,
although God would not force himself on her. At the very least, says Schellenberg,
all this requires that God will always be open to personal relationship with
her...even if one does not actively seek or promote personal relationship with
another person capable of participating in such relationship…, one makes sure
that there is nothing one ever does (in a broad sense including omissions) that
would have the result of making such relationship unavailable to the other,
preventing her from being able to relate personally to one, even should she then
try. So for God to always be open to personal relationship with a relevantly
capable created person such as Anna in a manner expressing unsurpassable love
is for God to ensure that there is never something God does that prevents her
from being able, just by trying, to participate in personal relationship with God...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-hiddenness/#ArguNonrNonb

1. As I've often remarked, the hiddenness argument is primarily an argument against

freewill theism. Calvinism isn't committed to the proposition that God aims at having a
reciprocal relationship with every human being.

2. In addition, the whole notion of reciprocity between God and man is peculiar given
the extreme disparity between God and man. It's not analogous to friendship in the
usual sense. God has something to share with us but we have nothing to share with
him.

3. Finally, consider the elements of the divine hiddenness argument:

i) Love would minimally involve benevolence, caring for another's well-being

 ii) Seeking a reciprocal relationship, characterized by mutual sharing

iii) Remaining open and available to such a relationship

But these are separable. As I mentioned in the past, there are two kinds of friendship:
unilateral and bilateral. An anonymous benefactor is an example of unilateral friendship.
He befriends someone for their own sake. He isn't cultivating their friendship. He seeks
nothing in return. That's in contrast to a bilateral friendship, based on mutuality. So (i) is
independent of (ii-iii). (ii) and (iii) are not entailed by (i).

Suppose, before the fall of the Berlin wall, parents living in E. Berlin want a better life for
their newborn child. So they give their child up for adoption, by entrusting him to
someone who has free passage between E. Berlin and W. Berlin. Perhaps that
individual is just a conduit who will convey the newborn to a loving but infertile couple in
W. Berlin. The child will never know the identity of its biological parents, yet their action
was an expression of sacrificial love.

In principle, God could be benevolent towards somebody, caring for their well-being–
without aiming to be known or loved in return. After all, God doesn't benefit from such
an arrangement. He has nothing to gain by their gratitude. So the syllogism, as it
stands, requires more argument for each premise as well as more argument for how (ii)
and (iii) follow from (i).
Does life matter?

Does life matter? Surely there's no more important question in ethics.

1. According to nihilism, including antinatalism (which is a paradigm version of nihilism),

it's better not to exist in the first place. And that's not just a hypothetical position to fill
out the logical continuum of possible views, but a live option. Nihilism regards human
existence is irredeemably tragic.

2. According to Epicureanism, existence and nonexistence are equivalent. Prenatal and

postmortem nonexistence are interchangeable. Although nominally heathen, the
Epicurean view of life and death, as well as the nihilist, are essentially atheistic. We're
on our own.

It would be interesting to see a debate between an Epicurean and a Christian

annihilationist! An Epicurean doesn't think oblivion is bad.

There are some people who say postmortem nonexistence is significant in a way that
prenatal nonexistence is not. They only agree with one side of the Epicurean
comparison.

3. Here's one way to view the issue: Suppose you're the proud father of a teenage son.
I offer you $10 million to step into a time machine and contracept his existence. If you
take the offer, you will travel back to point shortly before he was conceived, and do
something to preempt his conception.

I doubt most fathers would accept the offer. For one thing, they couldn't stand to lose
their son. But over and above that, they couldn't bring themselves to do that to their own
son. To deprive him of existence.

Yet on the time-travel scenario, by taking that preemptive and retroactive action, the
father made it the case that his son had no existence to begin with, for the new timeline
replaces the original timeline. It's as if he never existed. He has no counterpart in the
new timeline. And the father may or may not remember the original timeline (depending
on how we detail the thought-experiment).

On Epicurean grounds, his nonexistence is insignificant. Yet I expect most fathers

would balk at the prospect.

And that's germane to the question of whether God, if there is a God, ought to intervene
more often to prevent evil. Is that a reasonable expectation?

Problem is, whenever God intervenes, that's analogous to a time-traveler who changes
the past to change the future. Which doesn't mean that God never intervenes. But there
are tradeoffs. When people imagine a better world, an improvement over the status quo,
they men
Distrusting God

I'm going to comment on an essay by the late Richard Gale. He was one of the more
competent philosophical atheist. In this essay his primary target is freewill theism: R.
Gale, "Evil as Evidence Against God", J. P. Moreland, C. Meister, & K. Sweis eds.
Debating Christian Theism (Oxford 2013), chap. 15.

What, in general, is an evil and what are the different types of evil? An evil is
something that, taken by itself in isolation, is an ought-not-to-be, an "Oh, no!"
Examples are physical and mental suffering by a sentient being, including lower
animals, immoral action, bad character, and a privation in which something fails
to measure up to what it ought to be, such as a human being born blind. The
qualification "taken by itself" is important, since some evils are justified because
they are so-called a blessing in disguise, being necessary for the realization of an
outweighing good or prevention of an even greater evil. As members of such a
larger whole, they are not an ought-not-to-be.

In some respects that's a good definition. However:

i) To say congenital blindness is a natural evil is a teleological judgment. But naturalistic

evolution rejects final causes. If there's no telos, there's no dysteleology. Congenital
blindness is only a natural evil if the eyes were designed to see. But naturalistic
evolution is a nondirective process rather than a goal-oriented process. Eyes have no
purpose in naturalistic evolution.

ii) How much mental and physical suffering do lower animals experience? And is that a
natural evil? Notice how some animals deliberately seek out what looks like a painful
experience. Like lions fighting for control of the tribe. If it's excruciating, why don't they
avoid it?

Some theists refuse to call anything but moral evil or wickedness evil, thereby
eliminating natural evils as challenges to theism. This linguistic maneuver,
however, accomplishes nothing, for the problem still remains as to how God could
be justified in permitting suffering that is not attributable to the misuse of free
will by finite creatures.

While that's ultimately true, it's imprecise when the same word ("evil") is used to cover
two very different kinds of phenomena.
 According to Alvin Plantinga, God knows in advance of his creating a free person
what actions this person will freewill perform; however, he does not determine
that they will so act, for, were he to do so, he would, according to the libertarian
theory of freedom, render these actions unfree. The problem for this version of
the FWT is that by having God act with foreknowledge of what will result from his
action, he determines the result. Thus Plantinga's God determines every
creaturely free action. and this is freedom canceling.

That's a legitimate criticism of freewill theism.

In his Providence and the Problem of Evil [Swinburne] writes that "fairly clearly to
do good out of very serious free will despite strong contrary temptation is the
best exercise of choice….The sufferings and deaths in the concentration camps
made possible serious heroic choices and they make possible reactions of courage
(by the victims), of compassion, sympathy, penitence, reforms…[Slavery] made
possible innumerable opportunities for very large numbers of people to
contribute or not to contribute to the development of this culture…It would have
been our misfortune if there had been no starving…All the ways in which the
suffering of A is beneficial for B are also beneficial for A–because A is privileged to
be of use".

Van Inwagen adds yet another seeming moral horror to his fundamentalist
theodicy…Horrors happen to people without any relation to desert. They happen
as a matter of chance.

Although freewill theists routinely castigate the harshness of Calvinism, it's striking how
ruthlessly hardbitten the theodicies of high-level freewill theists like Craig, Swinburne,
Stump, and Inwagen can be.

Swinburne's theodicies read like a parody of the greater good theodicy, being on
par with "if he hadn't burned down his house in a drunken stupor, killing his wife
and five children, he never would have given up drinking"…It is good that there is
consumption [i.e. TB], for it there weren't, Verdi never would have written La
Traviata and Puccini La Boehme.
That's a witty takedown of Swinburne. But it depends on the example. Consider two
brothers, in their upper teens or lower twenties. They don't hate each other but they lack
rapport. Don't hang out. Have different interests. Lead parallel lives.

Suppose the older brother is temporarily disabled in a sporting accident. He requires

months of recuperation to recover. He's unable to drive, make his own food, feed
himself, bathe himself, dress himself, use the bathroom by himself. His convalescent
care falls to the younger brother. Because the younger brother nurses the older brother
back to health, that cements a bond that didn't exist prior to the accident.

Or take an elderly couple where one cares for the other. The sexual passion is gone.
Health is gone. Good looks are gone. All that's left is love. And that shines through in
the indignities of old age.

Another misbegotten theodicy is the significant contrast one, according to which

we humans would not be able to notice and appreciate good unless we had
contrastive experiences for evil…[God] could have satisfied the need for
significant contrast by showing us a video of unreal evils.

But he overlooks the conspicuous fact that abstract knowledge isn't the same thing as
experience. For many people, it's not until something becomes personal that it sinks in.

The whole idea of a deity who is so vain that if his children do not choose to love
and obey him will bring down all sorts of horrible evils on them and their innocent
descendants…

That does raise questions about freewill theism.

Because our imaginative and cognitive powers are so radically limited, we are not
warranted in inferring that there are not or probably are not God-justifying
reasons for evils…The most serious problem for theistic skepticism is that it seems
to require that we become complete moral skeptics…should we have tried to
prevent it or take steps to prevent similar incidents in the future? Who knows?!
For all we can tell it might be a blessing in disguise or serve some "God-justifying
reason that is too "deep" for us to access.

i) But I think that's seriously overstated. Not knowing why God permits a particular evil
doesn't mean we're clueless about possible reasons. It's easy to come up with
hypothetical examples as well as real life examples in which something turns out to be a
blessing in disguise. So it's not totally inscrutable. Although we may be in the dark about
the actual reason, many kinds of explanations are available for our consideration.

ii) In Calvinism, what we do or refrain from doing was predestined for the overall good,
so the dilemma does not arise. We don't have to know. God knows best, and we do
God's will without seeing the big picture.

But that may be a genuine moral dilemma in freewill theism, if everything doesn't
happen according to a master plan, or if God is stymied by human intransigence so that
he can't achieve a good result.

Another objection concerns whether theistic skepticism allows for there to be a

meaningful personal love relation with God. The problem concerns whether we
humans can have such a relation with a being whose mind completely transcends
ours, who is so inscrutable with respect to his values, reasons, and intentions…We
can hardly love someone who intentionally hurts us and keeps his reasons a
secret unless for the most part we know his reasons for affecting us as he does
and moreover know that they are benevolent…The sort of personal relationship
we are supposed to have with God according to theism requires that God does
not leave us in the dark with respect to these kinds of evils; for in a personal
relationship one person should not bring harm to the other without informing him
or her of the reason for doing so.

Whether God is trustworthy and whether we trust him are two distinct issues. To take a
comparison, suppose you're the caregiver for someone who's senile or mentally ill.
Suppose you're utterly trustworthy. You always act in their best interests. But paranoia
is a symptom of their senility or mental illness. They are suspicious of everything you do
for them. They mistrust your motives and actions. They assume the worst. But
ultimately it makes no difference. You treat them with love and consideration despite
their lack of trust.

Likewise, a trustworthy God can provide for people who find it hard to trust him. Those
two things are independent of each other. He can still look out for them even if they
doubt his benevolence.

It needn't be a two-way relationship. There are bilateral friendships involving mutuality,

but in addition, there are unilateral friendships in which a benefactor acts on behalf of
another, receiving nothing in return. The whole notion of "relational" theology in freewill
theism is overblown.

Christians sometimes exaggerate the importance of faith. Consider an atheist who

converts to Christianity as an adult. From a Calvinistic perspective, God was working all
along behind-the-scenes to do him good even though he had no faith in God. God was
faithful to the faithless.

If we do not have good evidence that God exists because he has chosen to remain
hidden, this constitutes good evidence against his existence.

That's a valid inference, but the conclusion is only as good as the premise.

By not allowing known evils to count against God's existence, not even allowing it
to lower the probability that he exists, the skeptical theist might be draining the
theistic hypothesis of all meaning. If the known evils are not the least bit
probability lowering, then it would appear that for theistic skeptics no amount of
evil would be.

i) Except that we live in a world where evil is often offset by good. It's not all barbed
wire.

ii) Moreover, the notion of evil is a moral or teleological concept. But how can that count
against God's existence if the alternative is a world without a morality or teleology?
Before evil can count against God's existence, it must count as evil. What's the frame of
reference?
Hallmark flowers

It came not long after Lisa and her husband visited Auschwitz, the infamous
concentration camp in Poland and were feeling especially aggrieved over the
sheer amount of evil in the world.

https://relevantmagazine.com/issues/issue-94/the-evolving-faith-of-lisa-gungor/

Did they never read the Book of Judges? Why do they act like encountering evil is
surprising?

The OT is a common target for atheists. But one reason Christians need to read the OT
is to disabuse themselves of a Hallmark card version of Christianity. Life is not a Disney
Princess movie.

It's not as if the Bible presents a sanitized view of the world, then there's the shocking
contrast when you compare the Bible to what really happens. There's nothing slightly
inconsistent about Auschwitz in light of Bible history. That's to be expected. The world is
a jarring mix of awesome beauty and horrifying ugliness.
Freewill theism and induction

A natural law theodicy is a standard theodicy in freewill theism. According to that

theodicy, moral agents require a stable environment for their deliberations and choices
to have predictable consequences. Absent that, they can't be held responsible for their
actions.

I'd mention in passing that Calvinism can use that theodicy, too. Calvinism has a
doctrine of ordinary providence. And there's value in having a world where actions
generally have predictable choices. That's not unique to freewill theism.

If true, a natural law theodicy has the fringe benefit of grounding induction. On this view,
God made a world in which, all things being equal (ceteris paribus proviso), the future
resembles the past. That makes it possible to justifiably extrapolate from the past to the
future.

But here's a snag: a standard definition of libertarian freedom is leeway freedom: an

agent can opt for two or more courses of action under the exact same circumstances.
So there are ever so many different and divergent ways to complete the future. Given
the same past, and billions of free agents, there are countless ways the future might
turn out. Moreover, the choices of multiple free agents interact with each other or
counteract each other. In addition, this impacts natural events inasmuch as humans
often manipulate natural process to yield desired results.

On the face of it, this renders the future utterly unpredictable, and destroys any basis for
induction. Anything that's naturally possible could happen.

In Calvinism, by contrast, although God had the freedom to choose between alternate
timelines, yet having settled on a particular outcome (predestination), the outcome is
fixed. By virtue of the decree, there's only one pathway from past to future.
The avengers

One objection to Calvinism goes like this: the Calvinist God is like a Mafia Don who puts
out a hit on a rival. He doesn't pull the trigger. Rather, he hires a triggerman to do it. Yet
the Don is just as blameworthy, if not more so, than the triggerman.

And it's true that the distinction between proximate and remote causation isn't
necessarily exculpatory, as this example illustrates. So this seems to be the principle: if
it's murder for me to kill someone directly, then it's murder for me to facilitate their
death. That sounds plausible, but is it true?

As I've often said, what we find intuitively plausible usually depends on the example.
Changing the example can change the intuition.

Let's take a morally complex example. After WWII, some Nazi's become fugitives from
justice. I don't mean Nazis in the sense of forced conscripts, but zealots who were
devoted to the cause, viz. Josef Mengele, Walter Rauff. Some of them fled to Latin
America, where they hid out or found safe haven.

This gave rise to Nazi hunters. But some Jews to it a step further, becoming assassins
(rather like the OT avenger of blood). They were called the Nakam.

Now, it might be possible to argue that their actions were just reprisal. But for discussion
purposes, let's stipulate that assassinating Nazi war criminals is murder.

Suppose I'm living in Latin America. I recognize one of my neighbors as a Nazi war
criminal.

Suppose the Nakam are hot on the trail of my Nazi neighbor. They come knocking,
show me photos, ask me if I know him by name or by sight.

I realize that these are Jewish assassins. If I give them accurate directions, they will
murder him. Does that make me complicit in murder, if I accede to their request?

Although it would be murder if I killed him, surely I have no duty to protect him. I have
no duty to lie to the Nakam to shield him from retribution. It's his fault that he's at risk.
He brought it on himself.

This seems to be a case where a second party could facilitate murder without his own
action being tantamount to murder. Even if their action is blameworthy, and my action
wittingly facilitates their action, that doesn't make my action blameworthy in a case like
this.
Fork in the road

i) A popular theodicy is the greater-good defense. While that has an element of truth, I
don't think there needs to be a greater good to justify the existence of evil.

ii) Suppose a man gets married, fathers two sons by his wife, then she has an affair and
leaves him for the other man. In addition, she leaves the kids behind.

Suppose he has a time-machine in the basement. He could travel back into the past
and obliterate the original timeline. In the replacement timeline, he has a successful
marriage. He has different sons.

In a sense, this is better than the first time around. It has the advantages of the first
timeline without the disadvantages of the first timeline. Admittedly, it's not better for the
sons in the first timeline, since they don't exist in the second timeline.

However, even though there's a sense in which the alternate timeline is better, it's too
late for him to consider that. Although it's possible for him to start from scratch by
stepping into the time machine, he is now far too invested in the original timeline to
erase it and start over from scratch. He's too attached to his actual sons to trade up for
a better life. It's inconceivable that he'd zap them out of existence to be dealt a better
hand.

If he was standing at the fork in the road before turning right or left, and if he had
foreknowledge or counterfactual knowledge of where each led, he'd opt for the greater
good. But having already gone down one road, if he had a chance to go back in time,
knowing the outcome, he'd decline. Emotionally speaking, he's crossed a line of no
return. He can't make a dispassionate choice. Despite the fact that he never wanted to
be a single dad and divorcé, that's offset by the actual good of having a life with those
two sons in particular. For him, the anguish of marital betrayal is offset by the sons he
had by that marriage. Even though the package of a happy marriage is a better good
overall, he will opt for the lesser good, because that's what he's actually experienced.

iii) Finally, from a Christian standpoint, there's the hope of eschatological compensation
for missed opportunities in this life.
Omniscient chess computer

Freewill theists typically think "theological determinism" (i.e. absolute predestination,

meticulous providence) makes God blameworthy and human agents blameless. Many
or most freewill theists define libertarian freedom as access to alternative possibilities.
Let's go with that definition.

Suppose I'm playing computer chess. Suppose the computer is omniscient. It can
predict which move I'll make even before I decided what to do next. As a result, the
computer doesn't wait for me to make up my mind. Rather, it moves the chess piece to
the square I was going to select.

Once a move is made, it can't be unmade. Once a move is made, it's too late for me to
make a different move. I now lack the freedom to choose an alternate course of action.
The computer took that out of my hands. Yet it always makes the same move I was
going to make. If I lose the match, whose to blame–the computer...or me?

Suppose the computer always wins because it knows in advance what I will do in every
situation, then takes advantage of that information to stay three steps ahead of me. Is
that cheating? Does that nullify the value of my libertarian freedom?
I'm afraid of the dark

One of the challenges of theodicy is that different people seem to be wired differently.
Some people take comfort in knowing that everything, including–or especially–the bad
things are inside God's will, while other people find that utterly appalling and take
comfort in the belief that bad things are outside God's will. Some Christians find
Calvinism the most consoling theology while others find it the most repellant. I wonder
to what extent that's a temperamental. Take the freewill defense or Boyd's cosmic
warfare theodicy. Compare it to this reaction:

My experiences in life and in medicine have not always reinforced religious faith.
For many years, I had difficulty believing that God even exists, much less pays
attention to the human condition. Although I now believe that it is "more likely
than not" that there is a God, my doubts regarding his involvement in the world
are legion, often oppressive.

The most serious barrier to belief, for me, remains the problem of pain, especially
as I have seen it in the suffering of children. For a long time after my first
leukemia patient died–she was a beautiful, frightened, four-year-old redhead
named Amy–I had difficulty believing in God. One night in the hospital, she held
my hand tightly and asked, "Am I going to die"? Perhaps sensing the affirmative
in my hesitation, she added, "But Doctor C., I don't want to die. I'm afraid of the
dark".

The answers of my theologian friends–that freedom is the highest good, that

divine self-restraint is of paramount importance in the celestial controversy
between good and evil, that it is our response to suffering, not the pain itself, that
matters–ring hollow within the echoing walls of a morgue at the autopsy of a
child. Donna Carlson, "My Journey of Faith in Medicine", R. Rice, Suffering and the
Search for Meaning (IVP 2014), 126-27.

Many freewill theists act as though the assumptions of the freewill defense or cosmic
warfare are self-evident, but to outsiders, these are deeply implausible. My point is not
that this disproves freewill theism singlehandedly, but it punctures the facile, intuitive
appeal. You can see how impatient Dr. Carson is with that those bromides and
platitudes.
We also need to distinguish between theodicies which people adopt in the abstract, and
what happens when they experience evil and suffering up close and personal. Certain
theodicies logically pair off with certain theological traditions. If you espouse that
tradition, you automatically espouse the attendant theodicy. But that may be before
you've had occasion to put it to the test in your own experience. Some people revise
their theology and theodicy when evil comes knocking. They may revise it for the better
or the worse.

In some cases, there are knee-jerk objections to a particular theodicy by people who
haven't thought it through. If their objections were subjected to probing analysis, they
might reconsider.

In addition, people work with what's available to them. Take Rabbi Kushner's finite
theism. But he's Jewish, and what is more, he's on the more liberal end of the spectrum,
so given his starting-point, does Judaism, or his brand of Judaism in particular, even
have the resources to furnish a better theodicy?
Is evil privative?

1. The privative theory of evil used to be a fixture in Christian theodicy, but it's fallen on
hard times. A function of the privative theory was to insulate God from complicity in evil
by claiming that God didn't create evil, but good. Since evil is not a thing or substance,
but the absence ,loss, or negation of something, it couldn't be an object of divine
creation.

I think the reasoning goes something like this. If you create a donut, you indirectly
create a donut hole. But the donut hole isn't a thing. If you create light, you indirectly
create shadow. You produce the conditions for the contrast. You make a boundary. But
only one side of the boundary has positive existence. Dropping the metaphor, sickness
is the absence of health.

2. The privative theory is ingenuous, but unsatisfactory. To begin with, while some evils
might be categorized as negations or relations, the privative theory overextends the
classification. For instance, pain isn't just the absence of pleasure, but a positive
sensation in its own right. It's not a relation between something and nothing.

By the same token, while we might say cancer represents loss of well-being, cancer is
very much a thing or substance. It has a real, positive existence. Same thing with
pathogens generally.

Likewise, in what sense is the evil of raping a little girl privative or not a thing? That's a
real event, not a nonevent.

A malevolent attitude has the same psychological status as a benevolent attitude. If one
is real, the other is real.

If we were starting with some paradigm examples of evil, we wouldn't classify them as
privations or relations. Rather, the traditional position begins with an a priori theory of
evil, then jams everything into that classification. The result is very artificial.

3. Perhaps even more to the point, the privation theory fails to exonerate God. For even
if we define evil in privative terms, there's still the question of why God allows that harm.
Just to call it privative fails to justify divine permission. Even if evil is a side-effect of
making something good, God is responsible for the necessary, albeit incidental,
consequences of his creative fiat.

Conversely, if God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil or generating
deleterious, but "unintended" side-effects, then the privative theory is superfluous. A
morally sufficient reason will suffice with or without the privative theory of evil. If, say, a
theodicist appeals to the double effect principle, assuming that distinction is an
adequate justification, that will suffice independent of any privative theory of evil.
Preempting God

According to open theist William Hasker:

If we really, seriously believed that God would prevent any evil that did not have
a greater good as its result, this would significantly undermine our own
motivation to prevent or mitigate such evils. If I prevent some serious evil from
occurring, I will actually prevent the greater good that, absent my interference,
God would have brought about as a result of the evil in question. If, on the
contrary, the evil would have no such good result, then God will not permit it,
regardless of what I do or don't do. The failsafe option, then, is to do nothing, C.
Meister & J. Dew, eds. God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views (IVP 2017), 160.

i) I don't think God permits evil only for the sake of greater goods. An alternate good will
suffice.

ii) If I was a consistent open theist, I'd be more risk-averse. On that view, God is less
likely to override the laws of nature or override the freedom of perpetrators. So why
should I stick my neck out? The world of open theism is sufficiently hazardous,
sufficiently random, without me further endangering myself for the sake of others.

iii) I don't see how Hasker's alternative solves the problem he poses. If an open theist
prevents, or endeavors to prevent, an evil that God would otherwise permit, then isn't
the open theist acting as though he's wiser or better than God?

iv) From a predestinarian standpoint, if I intervene to prevent an evil, then that didn't
frustrate God's plan. To the contrary, God intended me to intervene in that situation.
God intended the consequences of my intervention. God intended the goods that flow
from my intervention. So there's no tension. No need to second-guess my actions.
God in spandex

William Lane Craig holds Calvinism in great disdain. In light of that it's striking to see
how similar their responses are to open theism/finite theism:

PIPER:

There are two reasons why this is pastorally short-sighted and unsatisfying. One
is that it is built on a falsehood. God does not need to be “all-powerful” to keep
people from being hurt in the collapse of a bridge. He doesn’t even need to be as
powerful as a man. He only needs to show up and use a little bit of his power (say,
on the level of Spiderman, or Jason Bourne)—he did create the universe, the
Rabbi concedes—and (for example) cause some tremor a half-hour early to cause
the workers to leave the bridge, and the traffic to be halted. This intervention
would be something less spectacular than a world-wide flood, or a burning bush,
or plague of frogs, or a divided Red Sea, or manna in the wilderness, or the walls
of a city falling down—just a little tremor to get everybody off the bridge before it
fell.

https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/response-to-rabbi-kushner

CRAIG:

Some open theists report that certain people find genuine comfort in the thought
that God is not providentially in control of the world and so cannot be held
responsible for planning the evils that have befallen them. I can understand why
some people would be comforted by the thought that there is a cognitively
limited Superman on their side who is aligned with them in the struggle against
evil and suffering and who cannot be blamed for the bad things that he did not
see coming. But I wonder if such people have really thought through the open
theist alternative. It doesn't take a genius to see that certain terrible moral or
natural evils are about to happen, and a cognitively limited Superman would
often seem blameworthy for not preventing or stopping them. C. Meister & J.
Dew, eds. God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views (IVP 2017), 54.
Craig shoots a hole in the bottom of his boat

Craig reserves his ire for Tom Oord's deism. What's striking is that Craig's objections to
Oord's position invite parallel objections to the freewill defense:

Such a view is manifestly unbiblical. To give just one small example of God's
apparently nonmiraculous intervention, consider how God prevented Jesus'
falling victim to King Herod's murderous intentions following the departure of the
magi (Mt 2:13). This was not a miraculous angelic appearance, interrupting or
interfering with the law-like regularities of existence. Joseph merely had a
dream…God is frequently described in Scripture as interacting with human agents
to direct the course of events. If it is not an infringement of human freedom, then
Oord's view does nothing to explain why God did not similarly warn the other
parents in Bethlehem, whose children perished by Herod's sword or act to prevent
innumerable other evils.

As for God's miraculous interaction with human people, consider the following
scene from Jesus' arrest in the garden (Lk 22:49-51). Here Jesus interferes with a
law-like regularity to undo an evil freely perpetrated by one of his disciples. It
would be easy to multiple such biblical examples of God's miraculous activity,
with or without human intermediaries.

God, on Oord's view, refuses to get involved in human affairs so as to warn

people of impeding dangers or to move someone to prevent or rescue another
person from suffering. He stands idly by, doing nothing to help, with no good
reason for his noninterference.

Even if God is incapable of interfering with nature's law-like regularities,

presumably he at least freely chose in the first place the laws of nature that are in
force. But then Oord's deity must bear responsibility for choosing laws that would
issue in creatures so vulnerable to natural evil, rather than choosing other laws or
refraining altogether from creation.
 But any deity that is essentially such that it values the regularity of the laws of
nature above the well-being of human people cannot in any recognizable sense
be called good. Oord's God does not love Amy Monroe enough to interfere with
the regularities of nature as she is raped and strangled. In the US criminal justice
system Oord's deity, due to his "depraved indifference" and "reckless
endangerment," would be guilt of crimes such as manslaughter and even murder,
C. Meister & J. Dew, eds. God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views (IVP 2017), 145-
47.

It's odd that Craig is oblivious to the fact that freewill theists make all the same appeals.
So where does that leave his own theodicy? He's generated a dilemma for his own
position.
Hilbert's Hotel

Supralapsarian Calvinism is sometimes classified as a felix culpa theology. Conversely,

you have atheists who say, Why did God create Satan, knowing what would happen?

Suppose Adam and Eve never fell. What would the world be like? Would it be better,
worse, or both better and worse?

Minimally, Adam's posterity wouldn't die of old age. Perhaps, if Adam and Eve ate from
the tree of life, their immortality would be transmitted to their posterity. Or perhaps their
posterity would need to eat from the tree of life. Or perhaps, as they colonized the earth,
they'd take seeds from the tree of life and plant it elsewhere.

Or maybe God would simply confer immortality on Adam's posterity, apart from the tree
of life. It's unlikely that fruit from the tree of life had chemical properties that conveyed
biological immortality. How is that naturally possible? Rather, it's more likely that God
simply attached a blessing to that object.

In theory, Adam's posterity might still be vulnerable to death by causes other than
senescence. Perhaps God might providentially protect them from death by other
causes. Or perhaps God would let them die, but miraculously restore them to life.

It seems unlikely that an intermediate state would exist in an unfallen world. In a fallen
world, the intermediate state exists because people die at different times over the
millennia, but at the Parousia, death will cease, and all the dead will restored to life all at
once. (According to amil eschatology. Premil eschatology is more complex, but the net
effect will be the same.)

But in an unfallen world, there wouldn't be that cutoff. So there wouldn't be any point in
people dying, then passing into an intermediate state.

The upshot is that in an unfallen world, the human race would continue to reproduce
until it reached an optimum population level. In theory, that might be confined to the
garden of Eden. If so, that would be a small population.

Or perhaps Adam's posterity would outgrow the garden and proceed to colonize the
more hospitable regions of the globe. But to avoid the detrimental effects of
overpopulation (e.g. famine, starvation), it would have to plateau. Suppose at that point
God made the women infertile.

Reproduction would terminate with a stable, unchanging population. However many

generations of Adam's posterity until it hit the optimum population threshold. That would
be the last generation. Frozen in place. Further procreation would be unnecessary to
maintain a replacement rate, since no one would die–or if they died, they'd be restored
to life.
That would be a good world. Better in some respects than a fallen world. However, the
overall population would be far smaller. An absolutely static, invariant population.

One fringe benefit of mortality is that it frees up time and space for far more humans to
exist. Some of them are hellbound but some of them are heavenbound. Yet the
heavenbound humans wouldn't exist in a world where there's a final generation once
reproduction reaches the optimum population size. There's no more room for additional
generations. The cutoff comes early in human history.

In one respect, a fallen world is worse because it contains hellbound individuals. But
that's offset by the greater number of heavenbound individuals, since they don't have to
coexist at the same time and place. Because they exist diachronically rather than
synchronically in the same place, procreation can continue indefinitely.

God might still decree a terminus, but it will be very far out compared to an unfallen
world. The cumulative population will be vastly larger. Eventually, they all exist
simultaneously, but not at the same location.

Heaven is more capacious than Hilbert's Hotel. Never runs out of guest rooms. Always
a vacancy!
Moving goal post

Here's another village atheist question I'll respond to:

Why are there so many starving people in our world?

Doesn’t God answer their prayers? God has received uncountably many prayers both
from the desperate people in the world and from healthy Westerners who are concerned
about strangers in need.

There are different ways of responding:

1. People starve for a variety of reasons. They may live in a part of the world that lacks
the natural resources to sustain that population density. Or they may live in a famine
prone region. Or they live under an oppressive regime. And so on and so forth.

2. It's not always a bad thing for people to starve to death. Depends on the people. If
ISIS fighters were starving to death, good riddance!

Of course, that's an extreme example, but I say it to make a point of principle.

3. Suppose God miraculously fed everyone. Would atheists who pose this accusatory
question recant and become devout believers?

4. The basic problem with a question like this is that even if starvation was taken off the
table, a militant atheist would then point to something else. Why does God allow natural
disasters? Why does God allow people to die in house fires? Why does God allow
people to die of cancer? Why does God allow people to die in traffic accidents? And so
on and so forth. Every time you kick the football through the goalpost, the very same
atheist will move the goalpost.

So the problem with a question like this is where to draw the line. Short of a perfect,
ouchless painless world, won't an atheist complain about any remaining evil–or
perceived evil?

But in that event, this is really about the problem of evil in general. If God exists, why
isn't the current world free of moral and natural evils?

Yet if that's the question behind the question, then Christians don't need to run down a
checklist of every kind of evil, offering a specific explanation for each and every kind
evil. Rather, there are preexisting theodicies that cover that ground in general. And it's
possible to combine two or more stock theodicies to give greater coverage.

We don't need to give separate explanations for every kind of evil. By providing a
theological justification for certain kinds of evil, a theodicy already deals with all the
particular evils in kind.
It's not so much a question of why God makes a world containing a variety of evils, but
why God makes a world containing any evils. If you have theodicy that can justify evil at
all, or paradigm evils, then it isn't necessary to give independent answers for every
instance. So long as those are representative examples, the theodicy already provides
a general rationale. Different samples don't change the explanation.

5. However, the larger point our atheist is laboring to make is that there's one
economical explanation for the existence of all these different kinds of evils: God doesn't
exist! But there are two basic problem with that alternative:

i) A Christian doesn't need to "cobble together individual reasons for each of these
questions" if it only takes a few theodicies to cover all the bases. We just classify
objections by category. Theodicies offer categorical explanations. There's a common
type of explanation for a common type of objection.

ii) It's deceptively simple to say God's nonexistence explains them all, for God's
existence has enormous explanatory power. God's existence is a unifying principle. An
atheist has to cobble together individual reasons to replace the explanatory power of
one God.
Jerky theology

An exchange I had with an unbeliever on Facebook:

"I guess I shouldn't have entered this conversation at all, since I don't believe in
God or sin ... so your questions don't make sense to me except as hypotheticals."

Since "sin" is a theological category, we could temporarily substitute a generic category

like "evil". "Sin" is an interpersonal evil, between creatures and God or creatures and
their fellow creatures. Presumably you believe in interpersonal evil.

"God's a jerk for creating the situation that we need to be saved from and then
wanting to be adored for offering a rescue to some people and not others."

Even on a merely human level, it's easy to consider a scenario in which a powerful
human being puts another human in a situation where the other human then needs to
be saved from that situation, if that's a morally enlightening experience. Suppose a
teenage boy has contempt for the disabled. Suppose there's a classmate in a
wheelchair whom the teenage boy taunts and bullies. Makes his life a living hell.

Suppose the country is run by a benign dictator who finds out. Suppose, as remedial
punishment, he has physicians administer nerve blockers, causing the abusive teenage
boy to become temporarily disabled. For a year, the teenage boy will be confined to a
wheelchair, to find out firsthand what it's like to be disabled, defenseless, and
dependent on the kindness of strangers.

After a year, he's restored to normal. But he's now acquired the virtue of compassion,
because he knows from personal experience what it's like to be in that trying situation.

"and then wanting to be adored"

God doesn't want to be adored for his own sake. He doesn't need our adoration. It is,
however, virtuous to revere what is good.

"for offering a rescue to some people and not others"

i) Actually, the offer of salvation is indiscriminate.

ii) If two people are guilty of evil, there's no obligation to pardon either one, much less
both.

"... and I just don't see any reason to believe that this fantastical story is the
truth"

What about evidence for the historicity of the Gospels?

"I do think morality can be built around promoting happiness and alleviating
suffering, and that makes way more sense that the God hypothesis"

In this life, many people can and do experience irreparable harm. If there is no afterlife,
then their situation is hopeless. And even if they have a happy life, that's zeroed out at
death. How does that make way more sense than the "God hypothesis"?

"I'm sure some of the events in the gospels actually happened, but that doesn't
make them entirely true, or their base hypothesis true. I write fiction myself,
expressing things I believe are true in a fabricated story."

To write accurate historical fiction requires one of two things:

i) If you're writing about a time and place of which you have firsthand experience. But
that would mean the Gospels are based on eyewitness information.

ii) If you do extensive research on a time and place in the past. But people in the 1C
didn't have our historical reference works.

So it won't work for you to classify the Gospels as historical fiction.

Causing evil

A stock objection to Calvinism goes something like this: it is evil to cause evil. But the
God of Calvinism causes evil (or determines evil, which amounts to the same thing).
Indeed, the God of Calvinism causes human agents to commit evil. Yet making
someone else do evil is at least as bad if not worse than doing it yourself.

Let's examine that objection. Take the ticking timebomb scenario. Many people think
torturing a terrorist to find out where the bomb is hidden, to save innocent lives, is
immoral.

Why is that immoral? Presumably, they think torture is wrong because they think
excruciating pain is evil. If so, then it's evil to cause excruciating pain.

If they don't think excruciating pain is evil, then it's unclear why they think torture is
wrong. They might not think that's the only reason torture is wrong. They might think
torture is wrong in part because coercion is wrong. But presumably they think the evil of
excruciating pain is a necessary condition of what makes torture wrong, in cases where
torture utilizes pain. Indeed, pain is coercive. The two are inseparable in that scenario.

The justification for torturing the terrorist is to save innocent lives. But since they regard
torture as intrinsically wrong, the goal, however noble, can't justify that expedient. So
goes the argument.

But let's vary the illustration. Take a field medic during the Civil War who operates
without anesthetic, because none is available. If excruciating pain is evil, then it's evil for
the medic to inflict excruciating pain on his patients. Yet most of us think his action is
justified. He must amputate the arms and legs of gunshot victims to prevent the greater
evil of death by gangrene. Yet in that event, there are situations in which causing evil
isn't evil.

In addition, suppose there's a patient he's loathe to save. It may be the enemy. But the
field commander orders him to operate on that patient because the field commander
wants to pump the enemy soldier for information. He may force the unwilling medic to
operate at gunpoint if need be.

That would mean he's causing an agent to commit evil, assuming that pain is evil. If, on
the other hand, we grant that it's not inherently evil to cause the evil of inflicting pain,
then it's not evil to cause an agent to cause evil, in that respect. At least, that seems to
break the chain of inference.

Although that's a hypothetical comparison, it has a real-world counterpart. We

experience physical pain because God designed the human body to have that
sensitivity. But if excruciating pain is evil, then that means God causes evil by designing
and making bodies with sensitivity.
Let's consider some objections to my argument:

i) Pain isn't good or bad in itself. Rather, it's context-dependent. For instance, pain can
be a warning sign to avert or avoid greater harm. The painful sensation of burning
deters us from taking chances with fire. Temporary pain protects us from greater harm.

One potential problem with that reply is that it makes it harder to oppose torture in the
ticking timebomb scenario. In both cases, you have an ends-means justification. If the
deterrent value of pain to avoid death or serious injury by fire justifies pain, then why not
torturing a terrorist to save innocent lives? Both utilize temporary pain. Both justify harm
for a greater good.

ii) We absolve the field medic because he lacked access to anesthetics. But the
analogy breaks down in application to God, who doesn't suffer from analogous
limitations.

Up to a point that's true, but I'm testing the principle. The objection makes blanket
statement: it is evil to cause evil. Or it is evil to cause another agent to cause evil.

If, however, there are exceptions, then that isn't wrong in principle. It depends on the
situation. If something is intrinsically wrong, that precludes exceptions. But if in fact it's
permissible in some cases, then the objection can't be a special case of a universal
principle.
Shooting themselves in the foot

Here is another way of putting my point. The reply I have been considering, which
skeptical theists might make in response to the charge that their skeptical theses
undermine ordinary moral deliberation and action, is that “what is wrong for a
person depends only on what… she knows” (McBreyer 2010)—or at least, what
she thinks she knows. But the divine determinist thinks she knows something that
those not committed to divine determinism do not think they know: and that is,
that God has determined every event that occurs in the world. But then, this
additional knowledge must factor into the divine determinist’s moral
deliberation. The divine determinist must reason that if some horrific evil was
divinely determined, then it was necessary for some greater good. But then, it
must have been good, all things considered, that such an evil occurred. And so it
would have been bad, all things considered, if someone had prevented its
occurrence. So, no one should have prevented its occurrence. Leigh C. Vicens,
Divine Determinism: A Critical Consideration. PhD. diss. University of Wisconsin-
Madison (2012), 240-41.

What's ironic about this objection is how it overlooks a parallel objection:

The freewill theist must reason that if some horrific evil was divinely permitted,
then it was necessary for some greater good. But then, it must have been good,
all things considered, that such an evil occurred. And so it would have been bad,
all things considered, if someone had prevented its occurrence. So, no one should
have prevented its occurrence.
"A God who accepts there are rapists in his universe"

He’d much rather have a God who sovereignly decrees a person be raped, than
have a God who accepts there are rapists in his universe.

http://evangelicalarminians.org/ff171201/

That comparison is supposed to make Arminianism look good in contrast to Calvinism.

Suppose the alternatives were between an Arminian world in which God doesn't allow
rapists into his universe and a Calvinistic world in which "God sovereignly decrees a
person be raped". If that was the choice, then Arminianism would certainly be more
prima facie appealing than Calvinism.

But when it comes to the fact of evil, Arminians are in the same boat as Calvinists.

A God who "accepts" there are rapists in his universe. How euphemistic. The Arminian
God has an open border policy on rapists?

In law enforcement, we tolerate a certain level of criminality because we lack the

resources to prevent every crime. The best we can do is to keep crime at manageable
levels. Keep crime from spiraling out of control. But the Arminian God doesn't suffer
from the same limitations.

It's easy for the Arminian God to accept that there are rapists in his universe since the
Arminian God will never be a raped. It's a whole lot easier to accept a hazardous
situation from a position of safety. When you yourself are invulnerable. But that's sorry
consolation to the rape victim. Evils that would be intolerable if they threatened me or
my family are not as urgent when we're out of harm's way. And yet it's often virtuous to
endanger yourself to save others.

I'm struck by moral smugness of the SEA contributor, as if his alternative is obviously
superior.
Silver lining

Jonathan is one of the few truly admirable people in OT history. OT history is full of
villains. And even some of those on God's side have glaring character flaws. In one
respect, it's tragic that he died so young.

But suppose an alternate history played out. Had he assumed the throne, Jonathan
might have been corrupted.

Or if he was David's righthand man, would their friendship sour? Over the long-haul,
would he find it grating to play second-fiddle?

And even if that didn't happen, his sons and David's sons would be rivals to the throne.
One or more of his sons would probably think David was a usurper. That Saul's lineage
was the rightful lineage. I can imagine one of Jonathan's sons murdering one of David's
sons to snuff out the competition. Consider the strain it would put Jonathan and David's
friendship.

Or what if Jonathan was still alive when the Gibeonites demanded scapegoats to even
the score for Saul's effort to extirpate the Gibeonites. Jonathan would be at the top of
their hit list. Since Saul was dead, Jonathan would be the next best thing.

Presumably, David would refuse to hand over his best friend. Even so, what would
Jonathan's reaction be when David delivered seven of Jonathan's nephews into the
hands of the Gibeonites, to play fall guys for Saul's misdeeds? Once again, imagine the
strain that would place on Jonathan and David's friendship.

Jonathan died before the friendship had a chance to fall apart.

Moral skepticism and Scripture

From an exchange I had with an unbeliever on Facebook:

I have no theory as to why God predestines a particular hurricane to strike a particular

area. In general, hurricanes are natural forces which restore the balance of nature.

It's not as if hurricanes are targeted to hit population centers. That's an incidental
consequence of humans living in hurricane zones. In general, humans die in natural
disasters as a side-effect of living where natural disasters happen to strike.

God created a world with natural mechanisms. And everything happens according to his
master plan for the world. In that respect, even bad things happen for a good reason.
And this life is not the ultimate frame of reference.

When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue
her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and
seizes him by the private parts, 12 then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall
have no pity (Deut 25:11-12).

i) To begin with, who started the fight? Who threw the first punch? Who's at fault?

ii) You also disregard the nature of the offense. Grabbing the genitals risks rendering
the man impotent. A harsh penalty for a harsh crime. The penalty is completely
avoidable by avoiding the crime.

18 If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his
father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to
them, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out
to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, 20 and they shall
say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not
obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ 21 Then all the men of the city
shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst,
and all Israel shall hear, and fear (Deut 21:18-21).

i) I didn't say if that was the thing to do now. Not everything that God commanded
ancient Israel to do is a direct command to or for Christians.

ii) You fail to grasp the nature of the Mosaic penalty structure. As various scholars
contend, the death penalty was generally a maximum penalty, not a mandatory penalty
(first degree murder might be a notable exception).
iii) The fact that the legislator invokes the purgation formula in the case of the
incorrigible son indicates to me that in this case (and other cases in kind), the penalty is
indexed to the cultic holiness of Israel. If so, that doesn't carry over into the new
covenant era. By contrast, the penalty for murder antedates the Mosaic covenant. The
penalty for murder is indexed to the image of God rather than holy land.

Deuteronomy has a refrain about "purging evil" (Cf. Deut 13:5/6; 17:7,12; 19:13,19;
21:9,21; 22:21-22,24; 24:7). A dramatic illustration is the ceremony to cleanse the land
of blood guilt (21:1-9). These penalties operate within a framework of ritual holiness,
where the land is culturally holy, and transgressions defile the land, necessitating
punitive actions that reconsecrate the land. But that principle doesn't carry over into the
new covenant, because the holy land category is defunct.

iv) Your position suffers from self-referential incoherence. On the one hand, you appeal
to stock arguments for moral skepticism. If I was born at a different place and time, I'd
have different views.

On the other hand, you attack OT ethics. But your moral skepticism neutralizes your
ability to attack OT ethics. You can't say that's wrong. At best, you can only say that's
not right–in the sense that nothing is right or wrong.

Ironically, I agree with moral skeptics that moral intuition is unreliable, given the fact that
different cultures have different taboos. What's admirable in one culture is abominable
in another, and vice versa. So we need something over and above moral intuition to
correct or corroborate our moral intuitions.

You attack OT ethics, but obviously the Pentateuchal legislator didn't share your
outlook. You have your convictions and he had his. So what brokers the disagreement?
Who's the referee? What makes your moral opinion superior to the viewpoint of the
Pentateuchal narrator? You're using the same argument John Loftus employs, but it
disqualifies you from assuming the posture of a moralist.
If I knew then what I know now

That's a common sentiment. It's good for people to reflect on the wrong turns they've
made in life. Sometimes that's due to impetuous, foolhardy choices. This can be a
source of contrition. Learning wisdom through sorry experience. But sometimes things
turn out badly through no fault of their own. If only we had the benefit of hindsight at the
time we were at that fork in the road, we'd opt for the road not taken.

However, we can flip that around. Sometimes we might make the same choice, despite
painful or frustrating consequences, even though, or even because we had the benefit
of hindsight.

For instance, suppose a man is a conscientious husband, yet in spite of that, his wife
deserts him. Suppose the angel Gabriel appears to him and offers him a chance to go
back in time and make a different choice. This time around, forearmed with the
knowledge of how that marriage would turn out, he now has a second chance to finally
have the life he planned and wanted. Wouldn't you jump at the offer?

But let's complicate the offer. Suppose he fathered two sons by that ill-fated marriage.
When his wife walked out on the marriage, she left him with his two sons.

Would he still take God up on the offer? Would he exchange his two sons for an
alternate timeline with a happy marriage, and, perhaps, sons by a different wife? Let's
say he won't even recall the troubled marriage. God will erase his memory. He will start
from scratch, as if that never happened.

Yet I suspect most men would refuse. Although that alternative might be hypothetically
preferable, you've formed an unbreakable bond with your actual sons, and you wouldn't
trade that experience for anything. The ill-fated marriage was worth it on their account.

By the same token, consider mothers who've had abortions. But suppose, instead, that
at the last minute, they changed their mind and raised the child. Suppose they decided
to keep the child for a perfectly frivolous reason. But having raised the child, suppose
Mephistopheles appears to them and offers them a chance to step into the time
machine and have the abortion they originally contemplated. I suspect most mothers
would refuse. Because they didn't go through with an abortion, they formed a unique
maternal bond with their child.

Abortion is like shooting someone with a sack over his head. That makes it easier to
shoot the victim. An anonymous victim. Can't even see his face. Can't see his pleading
eyes.

But suppose, after pulling the trigger, you remove the sack over their head and see that
you just shot your father or mother or brother.
When we say, "If I knew then what I know now," we usually mean that given a chance,
we'd make a different choice. Yet there are situations in which we wouldn't make a
different choice. For retrospection cuts both ways. Paradoxically, we may come to
appreciate the outcome, even though it's not the choice we would have made if, at the
time, we were better informed about the consequences of the choice. For the
consequences may be both good and bad. The good consequences may outweigh the
bad consequences. Depends on whether we're privy to the good consequences as well
as the bad consequences. And it depends on actual experience.
Antitheodicy

I'm going to comment on this essay:

Trakakis, N.N. (2013) Antitheodicy, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil
(eds J. P. McBrayer and D. Howard-Snyder), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Oxford, UK.ch25

Trakakis takes the same antitheodical position as David Bentley Hart:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

Perhaps that's a reflection of the apophatic orientation in Eastern Orthodox theology.

What's interesting about this is how antitheodicy is the polar opposite of Calvinism. In
Calvinism, everything happens for a particular reason. Every event makes a contribution
to the whole. There's a blueprint for history, where each event is coordinated in a
part/whole, means/ends relation.

Even though most freewill theists believe in theodicy, there's a tension in their position,
because they wish to avoid making God complicit in evil. Carried to a logical extreme,
this results in the antitheodicy.

Although he doesn't mention him, Berkouwer is a good illustration of this outlook. Early
Berkouwer was a Reformed theologian, but he drifted. Late Berkouwer was a modernist
theologian and antitheodicist. As I recall, Philip E. Hughes reacted in the same way.
There are informative parallels between objections to Calvinism and objections to
theodicy. The position of Trakakis et al. is a reductio ad absurdum of freewill theism.

Essentially the problem resides with the “teleology of suffering” adopted by

theodicists in their justifications of evil. In other words, theodicists invariably
propose a teleological framework wherein suffering has some (God-given) point
or purpose (a telos)

The teleological justification for evil is problematic for freewill theism because it
implicates God in evil, in a way that freewill theism labors to avoid.

Various moral criticisms can be leveled against such a teleological or instrumental

understanding of evil. One such criticism concerns the category of unjustified or
inexplicable evil. Is such evil so much as (logically or metaphysically) possible, on
the theodicist’s view? The answer is clearly “no”, and this gives rise to the charge
of “moral blindness”: theodicies turn a blind eye to what seems obvious and clear
 to everyone else – that it is at least possible, if not the sad truth of the matter,
that there is much evil and suffering in our world that is gratuitous, pointless, or
unnecessary with respect to the fulfillment of God’s purposes. One of the
fundamental givens of our moral experience, it seems, is that there are evils that
strike us as unredeemable, incomprehensible, and inexplicable – not in the
(skeptical theist) sense that there are evils that may have some point that we
cannot uncover, but rather that many evils are such that they have absolutely no
point at all (see Chapter 29). (Colloquially put: “Life is not fair.”) Theodicy,
therefore, amounts to the denial of morally surd realities which, as Kenneth Surin
puts it, “halt the tongue, afflict the mind with blankness,”3 and which infuse us
with the tragic sense of life where notions of “blame,” “responsibility,” and
“explanation” are entirely out of place. (This is perhaps why theodicy flourishes in
our blame-driven, litigious culture where playing the victim and looking for a
scapegoat is commonplace.)

I can imagine, however, the theodicist replying: “Appearances are just that:
appearances, not reality. So, although some evils appear gratuitous to us, this
does not necessarily mean that they are in fact gratuitous. A good reason is
required to support this inference from appearance to reality (this “noseeum
inference,” as Stephen Wykstra calls it), and you have yet to produce such a
reason.”

i) I disagree with Trakakis. There's nothing probative about people's superficial

impressions.

ii) Moreover, people are conflicted on this issue. On the one hand, some events appear
to be pointless and unredeemable. On the other hand, people demand a moral
justification for the occurrence of evil–which presumes that there is, or ought to be, a
rationale for evil. So the appeal of Trakakis is selective and one-sided.

iii) Furthermore, the Bible gives examples of events that initially seem to be chaotic, yet
in hindsight the reader can seen an emerging pattern.

The first thing to note about such a reply is that it is in effect making the Principle
of Sufficient Reason – reformulated as the idea that there is a morally sufficient
reason (or cause) for everything that happens (or that there is a theistic
explanation for every fact) – the default position. But why should we make this
our default position? In light of our moral experience, which (as even the
theodicist admits) attests to the seeming gratuitousness of much evil, would it not
 be more reasonable to presume that there is in fact gratuitous evil unless we are
given good reason to think otherwise? The onus, therefore, may be placed on the
theodicist, who has the burden of showing that our initial presumptions are
misleading.

i) At best, that makes some sense from the standpoint of atheism or deism. It makes
little sense from the standpoint of Christian theism. A fundamental problem with the
antitheodicy is why somebody who takes that position should continue to believe in
God's wisdom and benevolence, or believe in God at all. That issue cannot be evaded.
A Christian philosopher or theologian can hardly bypass that pressing question.

ii) Moreover, something may appear to be pointless in the short-term, but purposeful in
the long-term. That's something we can only assess in retrospect, as we see how the
story plays out. How the story ends. To be in medias res is a poor vantage-point to
assess the situation.

iii) Goods and evils are causally intertwined. How can God have a causal or purposive
role in the occurrence of good, but no causal or purposive role in the occurrence of evil–
when evils generate goods and goods generate some evils? The dichotomy is
metaphysically ad hoc.

iv) If evil is pointless, yet human experience is riddled with evil, then doesn't that render
much of human life meaningless?

But the real problem with the theodicist’s reply is not one concerning
argumentative strategies and burden-of-proof considerations. The more
intractable problem, rather, lies with the consequences of denying gratuitous evil.
First, if every evil is somehow connected to a greater good and we believe (or
know) this to be so, then would we not be reduced to an attitude of passivity and
fatalism in the face of evil and suffering? (see Chapter 30) Why should I fight
against the devastating plague if I believe this to be, say, God’s just punishment
of sin? Why would I fight against a genocidal regime if I held that only by giving
humans the freedom to perform these kinds of terrible evils can God secure
certain greater goods? Morality, and specifically our motivation to do what is
right, would be undermined if we thought that there is no genuinely gratuitous
evil.

i) I'm inclined to avoid a greater-good theodicy. I prefer to recast the issue in terms of
second-order goods. Goods that are unobtainable apart from evil. Alternate goods.
Incommensurable goods. No one possible world contains every good.
ii) Trakakis overlooks the fact that overcoming evil may be one of the major goods
which this set-up enables and encourages. Evil is not good in itself, but it can be a
source of good. Overcoming evil is good.

iii) Contrary to Trakakis, belief in gratuitous evil logically saps the incentive to combat
evil. It makes one cynical. Why should I be that upset about evil if God is so indifferent
to evil? Why should I be better than God? Minimally, I'd just do enough to protect myself
and my loved ones. If, moreover, God is that indifferent to evil, then combating evil in
general is futile. We're on our own, so the best we can hope for is to look out for
ourselves. In a dog-eat-dog world, individual self-interest takes precedence.

If we know that no evil is genuinely gratuitous, then when faced with a case of
genocide, we would know that it will lead to a greater good whether we
intervene or not, and so we are not morally obliged to help the victims. This, in
other words, is to say that whatever goods transpire from our intervention in evil,
there is no necessary (but only a contingent) connection between these goods and
the evil in question.

i) Even on his own terms, there's a problem with his position, for not only is genocide a
gratuitous evil, but intervention will spawn gratuitous evils. Attempting to prevent one
gratuitous evil may generate another gratuitous evil. Since, on his view, many events
are aimless and arbitrary, your well-meaning effort to halt or preempt evil may cause
other random evils.

ii) It's just a fact that action and inaction alike will likely have both good and bad long-
range consequences. But since that's unforeseeable and uncontrollable, our duty is to
act on the best information we have at the time. We leave the end-results in God's
hands.

iii) From a predestinarian perspective, when we intervene in some situations, we

unwittingly carry out a plan that's wiser than ourselves. Same thing when we don't
intervene in other situations. And it's not a choice between intervention or
nonintervention in the same situation, for our actions are predestined. We end up doing
precisely what God intended for us to do. And so we end up doing what is for the best–
from God's viewpoint–regardless of our personal motivations.

O’Connor responds (in O’Connor 1995, 385) by saying that there may be other
things that we know that would make it our moral duty to help – as examples, he
gives our knowledge that the victims would be happy and less miserable if we
helped them than otherwise; our knowledge that a world in which we turn a blind
eye to genocide is one that contains more evil overall than a world in which we
intervene; and our knowledge that God wishes us to be morally virtuous people
 who act charitably and compassionately in circumstances such as those under
consideration.

But I wonder how far such knowledge would go in providing strong moral
motivation, the kind which would compel someone to lay down their life for their
neighbor. For even though we would be naturally disposed to alleviate or end the
harm someone is suffering, we would also know (in the theodicist’s world) that
this suffering is connected (and necessarily connected, not merely contingently) to
some greater good – and so to prevent the suffering is tantamount to preventing
the greater good. This would at least seriously diminish the force of the reasons
O’Connor thinks we would have for acting morally to help such victims. And a
morality greatly diminished is not much better than a morality entirely
undermined.

Trakakis overlooks the fact that intervention may be instrumental to the good, rather
than counterproductive to the good. Intervention facilitates the good rather than
circumventing the greater good.

Lerner goes on to argue that even in cases of divinely ordained suffering or

punishment, we may have a duty to interfere with God’s plans and to help the
sufferer.

That's confused. Human intervention wouldn't be interfering with God's plan; rather, that
would be a planned intervention. God scripted human intervention into the original plot.

That is why, I might add, the theodicist’s teleological framework of goods

outweighing evils has been criticized for “not taking suffering seriously”: one
cannot take horrific evil seriously if one refuses to acknowledge the very qualities
that make such evil so repulsive and shocking.

Trakakis needs to turn that into an argument.

Davis makes a similar point in a later paper, where he initially concedes that “the
Holocaust of the World War II era was genuinely evil. The world would have been
better – much better! – had it never occurred,” and then immediately after writes
 that “The Holocaust, like all other evils (so I believe), will be redeemed in the
sense that some day it will no longer be a source of suffering (even in memory); it
will fade away, pale into insignificance” (Davis 2004, 272, emphasis mine).

Actually, I think it's simplistic to say the world would be better had the Holocaust never
occurred. It would be better in some respects, but worse in others. That's the necessary
tradeoff between evil and second-order goods.

Theodicies of this sort flout the Kantian imperative, even if it is further stipulated
by the theodicist that the sufferer in the relevant cases is duly compensated by
(e.g.) being granted a heavenly afterlife. And this is because the individuals in
question (in this case, the infants) are treated as wholly expendable – their worth
and dignity, their well-being and interests, are sacrificed for some greater good
that bears no relation to them.8

It is for reasons such as this that a consensus has emerged among contemporary
philosophers of religion that a theodicy, if it is to be morally adequate, must hold
instead that God has the right to allow person A to suffer evil E for the sake of
some greater good G only if G is something which A can share or experience.
William Rowe (1986, 244) has expressed this view as follows:

Unless we are excessively utilitarian, it is reasonable to believe that the goods for
the sake of which O [i.e., the theistic God] permits much intense human suffering
are goods that either are or include good experiences of the humans that endure
the suffering. I say this because we normally would not regard someone as
morally justified in permitting intense, involuntary suffering on the part of
another, if that other were not to figure significantly in the good for which that
suffering was necessary.

If you think this is incorrect and that compensation is sufficient, then the morally
counterintuitive result that follows is that God could deliberately inflict serious
harm on someone for the sake of some good shared only by others, and yet God,
simply by granting the sufferer a heavenly afterlife as compensation, has done all
that is required to treat that person with the kind of basic dignity and respect that
is consistent with treating them as an end-in-themselves.
 To treat an individual as an end-in-themselves is to respect and protect their
interests and well- being at all times and at all costs – and this means that the
dignity and worth of a person cannot simply be sacrificed or traded off for the
sake of some greater good (the “system,” the Cause, God’s master plan, etc.).

For in that case, the individual’s suffering is merely useful, but not necessary, for
bringing about the greater good, and so the individual becomes an expendable
pawn in a system with goals and purposes larger than and alien to those he has
chosen for himself.

i) But he gives no reason to accept the Kantian imperative. And it's simplistic. For one
thing, it fails to distinguish between innocence and guilty. Even if it's wrong to treat an
innocent person as an expendable pawn, it doesn't follow that it's wrong to treat an evil
person as an expendable pawn. Moral agents can forfeit the "dignity" to which they are
prima facie entitled. Once they cross that line, there's nothing necessarily wrong with
trading them off for the good of others. It is amoral for Trakakis to isolate human dignity
from the moral character of the agents in question. Why not sacrifice an evil agent for
the sake of the innocent? Take a security guard who kills a schoolyard sniper to protect
the kids. The Kantian imperative sounds inspirational so long as you leave it
conveniently abstract. But concrete illustrations expose the moral vacuity and fatuity of
the principle.

ii) Of course, that doesn't address the case of babies, but that's where eschatological
compensations can be germane. He's dismissive of eschatological compensations, but
that's due to his amoral absolutization of human "dignity".

iii) I'd also add that in the case of those who die young, we never see how they'd turned
out if they had a normal lifespan. But if we were privy to that counterfactual
retrospective insight, we might view their fate very differently. Sometimes premature
death is for the best. Once again, that's the difference between a God's-eye viewpoint
and human shortsightedness.

The greater good in this case is human happiness, and we are asked to imagine
that this is a good that could only be achieved through the torture and death of a
child. Let us assume also, in line with SCR, that the greater good of human
happiness is one that even the child who has been victimized will partake of (even
though Ivan himself does not explicitly make this concession). Nevertheless, this
remains a cheap-and-easy way of treating the humanity of persons. Even if the
 child is compensated in this way for its suffering, we would continue to doubt that
the architect of this system is really seeing the child as an end-in-themselves, as a
human being whose humanity has an unconditional and absolute worth and
sanctity. I gather that we would, instead, respond in disgust and revulsion at the
way the child is being viewed and treated. This is why Alyosha, a devout monk,
answers Ivan’s invitation by refusing “to be the architect on those conditions.”

Put somewhat differently, the problem lies with the very way in which the
objector (like Ivan) sets up his imaginary scenario in terms of a dilemma: either
the child suffers and everyone is saved, or the child does not suffer and no one is
saved. When Alyosha answers with a “No,” he is rejecting the entire setup that
Ivan has constructed. Similarly, the objector’s dilemma should be rejected as a
false one – and it is false because it already assumes what is being contested,
namely, the teleological framework wherein God permits or inflicts evils for the
sake of greater goods.

It's easy to dream up intractable moral dilemmas where we are at a loss. Hypothetical
scenarios that leave us stumped. But it's not our responsibility to answer all those
imponderables or act on those artificial predicaments. We can opt-out. Go on strike. It's
up to God to make some determinations. That's not our call, one way or the other.

Relevant here is the customary distinction between the “theoretical problem of

evil” and the “practical problem of evil,” where the theoretical problem is the
intellectual matter of determining the rationality or truth of theistic belief in the
light of the facts about evil, while the practical problem concerns the existential
and experiential difficulties evil creates for love and trust toward God (or the
difficulties in combating evil and alleviating suffering). Theodicists tend to uphold
a distinction of this sort, and they typically see themselves as addressing the
theoretical problem of evil only – the practical problem is regarded as the
business of priests and social workers.

Emotion clouds judgment. Moral clarity requires intellectual clarity. Critical detachment
or critical sympathy are necessary to properly assess some claims. To adopt the
viewpoint of the position under review to assess it on its own grounds.

Another consequence of denying gratuitous evil is that this inevitably leads to the
denial of evil per se. This is perhaps most obvious when theodicists say (in
 imitation of Romans 8:18; cf. 2 Corinthians 4:17) that the sufferings experienced
now are trivial in comparison with the glorification to be experienced in heaven,
or when they say that whatever sufferings we undergo in this life will be more
than compensated for (or “outweighed”, or “defeated”) in the afterlife. When
such things are said – and unfortunately such things are often said blithely and
casually without much thought having gone into exactly what is being proposed
and implied – a subtle but definite shift in moral perspective is taking place. This
is a shift so significant that the very reality or at least the horror of much evil
comes under doubt.

i) Is Trakakis rejecting Rom 8:18 and 2 Cor 4:17?

ii) Hope is the basic way people survive horrendous evils. The hope that this will end.
They will put it behind them. If they tough it out, the future will be better than the
present. Does Trakakis reject that?

iii) He fails to explain how belief that evil can be offset by good leads to the denial of evil
per se. He asserts that, but all we get his vague, inarticulate intuition. He gestures at
what he feels is wrong with that perspective, but he fails to explicate what, precisely,
makes that the case.

Then any such hard-and-fast demarcation between the theoretical and practical
problems of evil will seem dubious and artificial.

True, but a clear-thinking theodicy can be of pastoral value. People who suffer want
reasons.

Consider, for example, the view (commonly upheld by anthropomorphites) that

God shares a moral community with us – which is to say that God’s morality is
essentially the same as our morality, and so there are moral principles that are
universally applicable, that is, applicable to both human beings and any divine
beings there are. But let us suppose that the assumption that God shares a moral
community with us is false. Various reasons may be given for rejecting this
assumption. One may defer, for example, to the doctrine of divine simplicity,
according to which God has no parts or composition, and so is absolutely simple.
On this view, God is not so much as good but goodness itself, or the standard of
goodness. But in that case, there are no moral standards independent of God that
could be relied upon to pass judgment on God, as the theodicist is wont to do.
Alternatively, one may argue that God’s goodness is metaphysical and not moral
 in nature – in which case, once more, God is not subject to moral evaluation or
criticism (see Davies 2004, 226–230). As this indicates, the theodical project can
be undermined not merely by exposing its moral failings, but also – and possibly
more potently – by questioning its theological foundations.

i) Isn't his explanation a theodicy?

ii) In Scripture, there's a sense in which God is subject to moral evaluation. But he's not
subject to humanistic moral evaluation. The God of biblical theism is a God who invites
his people to judge him according to his fidelity to his promises.

iii) Trakakis has erected a false dichotomy. It's not a choice between God's morality
coinciding with human morality or God's morality having nothing in common with human
morality. There can be some universally applicable overlapping points of contact.

iv) His alternative seems to imply that God is so alien as to be beyond good and evil.
He could do anything to human beings, and it wouldn't be evil. His antitheodicy devolves
into theological nihilism.

The foregoing, however, are only some objections that could be made against
theodicy. Other problems, worthy of further exploration, include the difficulty
theodicies have in allowing for – and indeed emphasizing the importance of –
certain reactive attitudes in the face of great suffering. When undergoing or
witnessing a particularly heinous instance of evil or injustice, we assume we have
the “right to grieve,” to be sad and disappointed, if not also to be angry and
raised to revolt and indignation, even to be angry and cry out against God. But
protesting against evil in this way seems to be ruled out in advance by theodicy.
For in holding that everything is permitted or ordained by God for a good reason,
theodicy recasts reactions such as grief and protest as (at best) natural but short-
sighted or (at worst) sinful and blasphemous.

Humans can have feelings that are appropriate to their humanity. We are creatures.
Since God isn't human, there's no inherent tension when there's a discrepancy between
divine providence and our "reactive attitudes". Providence can be wise and just even if it
rubs us the wrong way. It still hurts.
Machine Gun Preacher

I'm going to comment on this essay:

Oppy, G. (2013) Rowe's Evidential Arguments from Evil, in The Blackwell Companion to
the Problem of Evil (eds J. P. McBrayer and D. Howard-Snyder), John Wiley & Sons,
Ltd, Oxford, UK, ch4.

Oppy's argument centers on this real life example:

The girl’s mother was living with her boyfriend, another man who was
unemployed, her two children, and her 9 -month old infant fathered by the
boyfriend. On new Year’s Eve all three adults were drinking at a bar near the
woman’s home. The boyfriend had been taking drugs and drinking heavily. He
was asked to leave the bar at 8:00 p.m. After several reappearances he finally
stayed away for good at about 9:30 p.m. The woman and the unemployed man
remained at the bar until 2:00 a.m. at which time the woman went home and the
man to a party at a neighbour’s home. Perhaps out of jealousy, the boyfriend
attacked the woman when she walked into the house. Her brother was there and
broke up the fight by hitting the boy- friend who was passed out and slumped
over a table when the brother left. later the boyfriend attacked the woman again,
and this time she knocked him unconscious. After checking the children, she went
to bed. later, the woman’s 5­ year old girl went downstairs to go to the
bathroom. The unemployed man returned from the party at 3:45 a.m. and found
the 5--year-old dead. She had been raped, severely beaten over most of her body
and strangled to death by the boyfriend. (Russell 1989, 123, drawing on a report
from the Detroit Free Press, January 3, 1986)

Before delving into the details, I'd like to make some general observations:

i) Cases like this pose a psychological dilemma for Christian philosophers and
apologists. A clinically detached philosophical response seems to be heartless. Yet
that's the nature of philosophical analysis. It requires critical detachment. If you're going
to throw these examples at Christians, don't turn around and blame us for presenting an
unemotional analysis of a heart-wrenching case.

ii) In addition, they pose a prima facie dilemma. To present a justification of divine
permission might seem to justify the evil itself. Yet condoning divine permission is not
condoning the permitted evil.

However, atheism has a corollary dilemma. Atheism must say these things happen for
no good reason. Tough luck, kid! That's the kind of world we live in. Deal with it!
iii) A male philosopher or apologist is at a disadvantage when discussing female victims
of horrendous crimes. Where the perp is male and the victim is female, it looks bad
when a male philosopher or apologist presents a theodicy. It would be better for male
philosophers and apologists to substitute male-on-male examples, and female
philosophers or apologist to use female examples.

iv) Although Oppy's example is appalling, and intentionally so, it doesn't budge me an
inch towards atheism. In a godless universe, human life is worthless. The alternative to
Christian theism is moral and existential nihilism. Whatever the difficulties posed by the
problem of evil, atheism is hardly the answer. Indeed, atheism is evil.

If there is to be a justification for the suffering of the five--year--old girl, that

justification surely must be in terms of goods for her.

As I noted earlier, if there were to be a justification for the permission, by an

omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good god, of the rape, torture, and murder
of five--year-old girls (if there were an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good
god), that justification would surely have to be in terms of goods for the five--year-
-old girls in question.

Unfortunately, Oppy never bothers to explain why any justification must be in terms of
goods for the victim. Is that a general principle? Or does Oppy have other, unstated
caveats in mind, such as the innocence of the victim?

For instance, suppose Pol Pot was brutally murdered when he was five years old.
Would justification for divine permission have to be in terms of goods for little Pol Pot?
I'm not directly comparing the little girl to Pol Pot. I'm just probing Oppy's rationale. Is
this meant to be a sufficient, universal principle–or does it require other qualifications for
the argument to go through?

However, if squaring Theism with the distribution of intense suffering in our

universe is taken to require the postulation of an afterlife in which there is
compensation for that intense suffering, or the postulation of fallen angels who
inflict that intense suffering upon us, or the postulation of goods beyond our ken
that provide justification for permission of the distribution of intense suffering in
our universe by an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good god, or the like,
then, the distribution of intense suffering in our universe does turn out to favor
naturalism over Theism, since this increase in the theoretical commitments of
 Theism merely adds to the initial advantage that naturalism has over Theism on
account of theoretical commitments.

It's unclear why Oppy is so dismissive regarding the relevance of eschatological

compensations. He's appealing to simplicity. But if eschatological compensations are
required for a moral universe, then that's a necessary increase in theoretical
commitments. An amoral universe may be ontologically simpler, but that has no
category for moral evils.

Yes, we have come to recognize that slavery is intrinsically wrong, and that
homosexuality is not intrinsically wrong, and so forth

Does this mean Oppy's argument is predicated on moral realism? If so, the onus is on
him to explain how naturalism can underwrite moral realism.

I think that nothing could justify rape, torture, and murder of five--year--old girls;
and I think that nothing could justify inaction in the face of rape, torture, and
murder of five-year-old girls other than inability (on grounds of lack of power, or
knowledge, or the like).

i) He's bundled two distinct propositions into one claim, but how does the proposition
that nothing could justify rape, torture, and murder of five--year--old girls entail the
additional proposition that nothing could justify inaction in the face of rape, torture, and
murder of five--year--old girls other than inability (on grounds of lack of power, or
knowledge, or the like)? Or is that meant to be an entailment relation? How are those
two propositions logically related? Clearly he thinks they are inseparable in some sense.

ii) On the face of it, it's hard to take him seriously. There are many hotspots around the
world where child abuse is rampant. But Oppy isn't jetting around the globe to protect
kids from rape, torture, and murder. There are many opportunities for him to do so.
Take the movie Machine Gun Preacher, based on a true story:

http://godawa.com/machine-gun-preacher/

If Oppy really believes that inaction is unjustifiable in the face of horrendous crimes
against children, why does he sit behind the safety of his laptop?

iii) Suppose I take the position that the action of the machine-gun preacher was
admirable. This doesn't imply that I think it's obligatory for everyone who's able to
intervene in the same way. We have a variety of social duties which must be
counterbalanced against each other.

Oppy might object that God doesn't have the same limitations. However, much of his
argument is predicated on his presumptive analogy between what's permissible for man
and what's permissible for God.

Howard ­Snyder says: “Given that intervention and non­intervention have

massive and inscrutable causal ramifications, and given that the unforeseeable
consequences swamp the foreseeable ones, we have just as much reason to
believe that the total consequences of non-intervention outweigh the total
consequences of intervention as we have to believe that the total consequences
of intervention outweigh the total consequences of non-intervention. Thus, we
should be in doubt about whether we should intervene” (Howard ­Snyder 2009,
38)

Synder makes a very important point, although it seems to jumble together

considerations that need to be sorted out:

i) Divine intervention to prevent evil has massive, causal ramifications.

ii) These are divinely foreseeable (unless Snyder is an open theist), but humanly
unforeseeable. Therefore, it's reasonable for Christians to make allowance for the fact
that God may very well have good reason not to intervene more often, for reasons
inscrutable to shortsighted humans.

iii) But by the same token, because human agents are necessarily shortsighted, we
don't have the same responsibility to take unforeseeable consequences into account.
For that matter, both action and inaction have unforeseeable consequences. Our duty is
to act on the best available information.

As Howard -Snyder (2009, 43f.) observes, Theists may well suppose, for example,
that God has instructed humankind to prevent suffering in general, and that God
permits a lot of it precisely because he intends for us to try to prevent it. (So,
somehow, I would not stand between the five- year -old girl and her deepest
union with God were I to intervene to prevent her rape, torture, and murder.)

There are situations where, if I had foreknowledge or counterfactual knowledge, I might

refrain from intervention if my action, while beneficial in the short-term, did greater harm
in the long-term.
Wheat and tares

A recent exchange I had with an unbeliever on Facebook:

Its impossible to explain away unnecessary suffering like child cancer without
appealing to unsatisfying answers like 'its a mystery' or 'child cancer is part of
God's plan'. We can all imagine a world in which unnecessary suffering like child
cancer does not exist yet freewill does. Thus such suffering is gratuitous and
unnecessary.

I don't subscribe to the freewill defense. That said, your objection is superficial. Sure, we
can all imagine a world without children dying of cancer. The problem is that people who
imagine a better world mentally eliminate the evils while leaving everything else in
place, including the goods. But removing some evils removes second-order goods that
are contingent on the existence of the underlying evils. So that's the dilemma.

To take your own example, childhood cancer is an opportunity to develop certain virtues
which would never exist in an idyllic world.

Likewise, if a couple had a child who dies of cancer, they may have a replacement child
to compensate. And the replacement child may have kids of his own, and grandkids.

That compensatory good would not exist if the older child hadn't died. So it's a tradeoff
between one life and another, or one set of lives and another. Moreover, the cancer
created the opportunity for two children to exist instead of one.

How is it NECESSARY that we need unnecessary suffering to have goodness?

That's a loaded question since you smuggled your own assumption into the formulation
of the question. Sure, it's tautology to say unnecessary suffering is unnecessary, but
that simply begs the question regarding the existence of gratuitous suffering.

but i'm saying CUT OUT THE MIDDLE MAN. Have the good without the tragedy.

But it wouldn't be the same good. Evil is gratuitous if God could prevent it without losing
some distinctive good or permitting some equally grave or greater evil.
 Once again, the cancer analogy. You are saying we shouldn't eliminate cancer or
polio because of all the secondary good it has. Why can't that good happen
without the cancer or polio?

i) The argument from evil is not about what humans should do but about what God
(allegedly) should do. God and humans don't have the same responsibilities. God has
foreknowledge and counterfactual knowledge. We don't. Therefore–unlike God–we're in
no position to consider long-term outcomes.

Likewise, as social creatures, we have emotional investments that God does not.

There's some overlap between divine goodness and human goodness, but they don't
overlap.

ii) Would a world in which children never die be a better world? Better in some respects.
But better for whom?

If humans were immortal from the outset, then humans would have to stop reproducing
after a few generations. That means most humans who exist in a world with infant
morality wouldn't exist. Is it better for them never to have the opportunity to enjoy the gift
of life?

It may be better for the children who don't die, but it's hardly better for the children
whose existence is edged out under that alternate scenario.

Every child is unique. Those are incommensurable goods.

iii) Moreover, a world in which no one died from illness or senescence would be a world
chockfull of selfish people who'd never risk their life or health to save someone else
from, say, a house fire. There'd be too much to lose.

iv) A future without childhood cancer might be better, but a past without childhood
cancer wouldn't be better for the people you care about, since they wouldn't exist. Better
relative to whom? It is better for your loved ones if the past is the same up to their birth
and maturity, then diverges after they have their prime of life.

v) Unfortunately, there's a human tendency to take friends and family for granted. We
act as though they will always be available. There are so many lost opportunities.

When, however, a friend or family member gets cancer, we make up for lost time. That
intensifies the remaining time we have with them.

vi) Regarding polio, many healthy people squander the gift of life. To be disabled can
prompt people to make the most of fewer opportunities.
vii) Suppose one teenage boy has polio while another teenage boy from the same
general vicinity is a football star. He comes from a dirty poor family. He's counting on a
football scholarship to pay his way through college and make a better life for himself.

Now let's change a variable. Suppose the other boy doesn't have polio, and he's a
better athlete. The boy from the poor family who was banking on a football scholarship
loses that opportunity.

In each of these scenarios, there are tradeoffs. Each scenario has second-order goods.
By eliminating the evil, you eliminate a distinctive good. Evil can be both beneficial and
harmful.

vii) In general, it's good for humans to work to eradicate polio. But there are situations
where we wouldn't eliminate a short-term evil if we knew the end-result. Normal people
will avoid actions that harm their loves ones. Yet what is good for my beloved may be
bad for your beloved, or vice versa.

I have greater responsibilities for my family than I have for your family. By contrast, God
doesn't have greater responsibilities for any particular family.

How God balances out good and evil is different from how a conscientious human
might.

You've got a hidden assumption in there. Its like the old cliche of you can't have
joy without suffering. Well yes, yes you can.

Since I didn't use that in my argument, you're objection misses the target.

but must appeal to a mystery (God knows all counterfactuals but we don't so it
must be hiding in that knowledge!) and have no reason to believe it besides the
fact that rejecting it is really damaging to your view on God.

Responsible humans would sometimes make difference choices if they knew the long-
terms consequences of their actions. There's nothing mysterious about that principle.
Naturally, God has a different perspective. The proverbial God's-eye view.

Well I can easily imagine a world identical to ours WITHOUT child cancer.

Actually, you can't. A world without childhood cancer would not be identical to ours. A
world without childhood cancer with have different genealogies.
It's like the parable of the wheat and the tares (Mt 13:24-30,36-43). Human lives are
mutually entangled. It isn't possible to uproot the tares without uprooting some of the
wheat. Pull out the evil and you pull out some of the good that's intertwined with the evil.
From the whirlwind

Preachers and commentators often remark on how Job never got an answer to his
question. And that's true.

However, that observation is somewhat misleading. Although his question went

unanswered, he had a personal audience with God. An overwhelming token of God's
presence and power. A storm theophany. Probably like Ezk 1. As well as an audible
voice from God.

Many believers suffer ordeals that seem to be inexplicable. But they'd be comforted to
at least have a sign from God that he's aware, that he's there, that he cares. But what
they get is…nothing. Nothing at all. Dead silence.

Even though Job got less than he was asking for, he got more than many believers ask
for. God came to him. Spoke to him. He knew that God was in control. God had a
reason, however inscrutable.

Which brings me to a second point. Consider how little the patriarchs knew about God
and God's purposes. King David knew much more than Abraham. Isaiah, Ezekiel, and
Daniel knew far more than King David. And Christians know far more than Isaiah,
Ezekiel, and Daniel.

We have many unanswered questions about divine providence. Yet we know far more
about his designs than OT Jews. Imagine how much clearer things will be in heaven.
Why I Am an Atheist: A Conversation with Dr. Stephen Law

Jonathan McLatchie recently did a webinar with militant atheist philosopher Stephen
Law

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Tp1Gn6Gag

Some comments I made about Law's conversation:

In his presentation, Law compared theistic explanations to gremlins. That, however,

reduces the discussion to hypothetical entities and hypothetical comparisons. It
presumes that God is analogous to gremlins. And that's a diversion from having to study
or investigate actual, specific evidence for Christianity in particular.

Out of curiosity, what literature, if any, has Law read on miracles? For instance, Craig
Keener has compiled many case-studies in his two-volume monograph on miracles
(Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts). Likewise, Robert Larmer
has written two recent books on miracles that contain case studies in the appendices
(cf. The Legitimacy of Miracle; Dialogues on Miracle).

How, if at all, does Law propose to address that ostensible evidence for divine action in
the world?

Law appealed to the evidential problem of evil as one reason he's an atheist. In
particular, he cited human suffering (and animal suffering) on an "industrial scale".

However, his alternative seems to be that those humans (or animals) would be better off
if they never existed in the first place. Better not to live at all then have a short, poor,
nasty brutish life.

After all, in a nicer world, you won't have the same set of people. Different people will be
born into a nicer world than would be born into a harsher world. A world with high infant
mortality will have a different history than a world with low infant mortality.

If that's what he means, what's his frame of reference? Is he saying they'd be better off
if they never had a chance to live from their perspective or his perspective?

One issue that came up towards the end of the presentation was whether Law can
justify objective morality, given atheism. Law said he didn't need to present a secular
justification. He could appeal to intuition. He could "feel in his bones" that torturing
children for fun is morally wrong.

One problem with his response is that it's not merely a question of not having a secular
justification, but whether atheism (or naturalism) generates undercutters or defeaters for
belief in objective morality. And that isn't just a Christian view of atheism. Many atheist
thinkers reject moral realism.
Another problem is that early in the presentation, Law expressed distain for Christians
who say they cannot or need not provide arguments for their position. They simply know
in their heart that it's true.

But isn't that the same appeal to intuition that Law is resorting to? Why is it legitimate for
Law to fall back on intuition rather than argumentation in defense of his belief in secular
ethics, but illegitimate for some Christians to fall back on intuition rather than
argumentation in defense of their faith? Law seems to be operating with a double
standard?

Blake Giunta, who was pressed for time, used the following argument. (He has ten
theodicies at his fingertips). He said suffering induces humans to seek God while having
it too easy breeds religious apathy and indifference.

Parenthetically, that might be why Christian miracles are reported more often in Third
World countries. For one thing, places like Africa are very hazardous. Worn-torn areas,
famine, tropical disease, many dangerous animals, limited access to good medical care.
That's an incentive to prayer!

Law's appeal to the argument from evil appears to be circular. At the outset, he said,
first of all, that he doesn't think the theistic proofs are good evidence for God's
existence. And he said, secondly, that the problem of evil is good evidence against
God's existence.

But towards the end of the presentation, when he was challenged to justify his belief in
moral realism from a secular standpoint, he said he didn't need to provide a justification
because he'd already ruled out a theistic grounding for ethics, and you don't need to be
able to provide an alternative explanation to know that the opposing position is false.

But the only positive reason he's given for disbelieving in God is the problem of evil. If
he excuses his failure to justify moral realism on secular grounds because he's ruled out
a theistic alternative, and if his rationale for ruling out the theistic alternative is the
problem of evil, then his argument appears to be viciously circular. The existence of evil
disproves God, and God's nonexistence relieves him of the onus to show that evil really
exists!

To take another stab at Law's apparently circular argument: the positive reason he gives
for his belief in God's nonexistence is contingent on the problem of evil. And the reason
he gives for why he has no burden to prove moral realism on secular grounds is
contingent on having ruled out the existence of God, which is, in turn, contingent on the
problem of evil, which is, in turn, contingent on the reality of evil, which is, in turn,
contingent on moral realism…
So his positive reason for disbelief in God is dependent on the problem of evil, while his
reason for not having to justify moral realism on secular grounds is dependent on God's
nonexistence, given the problem of evil. So he's spinning in a circle.

Q: Why don't you believe in God's existence?

A: The problem of evil.
Q: How does an atheist justify moral realism?
A: It's not incumbent on me to do so because I've ruled out God's existence.
Q: How did you rule out God's existence?
A: The problem of evil.

He hasn't provided any independent reason to establish moral realism. Yet his appeal to
the problem of evil presumes moral realism. He says "It's wrong to make people suffer".

In addition, his argument is a false dichotomy. Even if (ex hypothesi) you can't ground
moral realism in God, the logical alternative isn't secular moral realism. The alternative
might be nihilism. Indeed, many secular thinkers deny moral realism.

Technically, it's possible for someone who denies moral realism to present the
argument from evil. The strategy is to show that Christian theism is internally
inconsistent. That the triad of divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence,
benevolence) is mutually inconsistent.

But when he was questioned on his own position, Law said he inclined to moral realism
(although there are days when he has serious doubts). He used the example of torturing
children for fun.

Mind you, there's a price atheists pay if they go that route. Many atheists derive great
satisfaction from indulging in moralistic tirades about Biblical theism. Adopting the
viewpoint of moral realism merely for the sake of argument deprives them of that
satisfaction.

Generally, atheists want to be able to say that their position is morally superior to
Christianity. They have a lot to lose if they ditch moral realism.

Indeed, if an atheist is a moral nihilist, what's the motivation for attacking Christianity?
Why would you can what anyone does or believes? Why the passion?

My point is that it's illogical for someone who denies moral realism to attack Christianity.
Even though they think Christianity is false, they don't believe people have a duty to
believe what is true and disbelieve what is false. So why are they on a mission to
dissuade folks from believing in Christianity? It can't be because they disapprove of
Christian ethics, for if they deny moral realism, why would they care?
To be or not to be

I've used variations on the same idea in two different contexts (abortion, theodicy). Now
I'd like to combine them in reference to theodicy. When atheists raise the problem of
evil, the unspoken assumption is that a better world is possible. They can imagine
various ways of improving the world we inhabit. If, therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent,
and benevolent God really exists, the actual world would correspond to the better world
an atheist imagines. Or so goes the argument.

But as I've often pointed out, that's shortsighted. There is no best possible world. For
alternate timelines have unique goods. Some goods are contingent on prior evils.
Preventing the evil prevents the resultant good.

Just about every human life produces a chain reaction. Whether or not a particular
individual exists will affect the course of history in complex ways. If he exists, history will
go one way. If he doesn't exist, history will go another way. Time-travel stories illustrate
the principle of tradeoffs in that regard. Our individual lives may seem insignificant, but
lives have long-range consequences–as does their absence, counterfactually speaking.
The upshot is that when an atheist imagines a better possible world, there are losers in
that scenario. Indeed, people who are winners in one possible world may well miss out
in the "superior" alternative. It's no improvement for them.

One objection I encounter to this observation is that people who never exist in the first
place have nothing to lose. That may be true given the status quo, but the objection is
superficial and misses the point. Nonexistence is the greatest conceivable deprivation.
Every lesser deprivation is a matter of degree. But this is a lost opportunity in the most
absolute sense.

If, for some odd reason, it just isn't possible for someone to exist, then there's nothing to
lose. There was no alternative. If, however, the alternatives are existence and
nonexistence, and those are both live possibilities, then to be denied the opportunity to
exist when that was feasible is a genuine loss.

To take a comparison, when a teenager dies, we consider that an "untimely" death. He

"died before his time". We lament the death of the young because they had their "whole
life ahead of them".

The sense of loss is based on wasted potential. Lost opportunities. The future he never
had. He missed out on so much.

But if that's valid for a teenager, we can extend the same principle back in time. If a 16-
year-old has so much to lose, doesn't a 6-year-old have at least as much to lose, if not
more? What about a 2-year-old? Or a 6th-month old baby? Or a 3-month-old baby in
utero? At each stage of premature death, there's lost potential. And the further back you
go, the greater the deprivation. The greater the unrealized potential.
What about a minute before conception compared to a minute after conception? If that
really different in kind? You may say that prior to conception, he doesn't exist, but isn't
one minute's difference either way rather arbitrary? Since the principle concerns
potential futures, it ranges along a continuum. There's no intrinsic cutoff at any point
along the continuum. Suppose you make the cut at 20. But you could just as easily
make cut at 19. You could make the cut a moment earlier, or an hour earlier, or a day
earlier, or a week earlier, or a month earlier, or a year earlier. The sooner the cut-off, the
more there is to lose. The lost opportunity is that much more extensive.

Notice, I'm not saying that possible people who never exist were wronged or harmed by
never existing. But there's a weighty sense in which some people are better off existing
than not existing. Given the opportunity, they'd enjoy that.

Before an atheist complains about how God could make a better world, the atheist
needs to think several moves deep. Like a chess game, changing one move changes
subsequent moves.
For God so loved the worlds

In general, Christian philosophers and apologists are hostile to the multiverse, because
that appeal is often used to nullify the fine-tuning argument or the strong anthropic
principle. Two notable exceptions are Don Page and Jeff Zweerink.

I don't object to the idea of a multiverse. By that I mean I don't think there's anything
antecedently unfitting about God creating an ensemble in which alternate timelines play
out.

The problem is when a multiverse is derived from a particular interpretation of quantum

mechanics. The theological problem with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics is that rather than having a selection of parallel worlds based on divine
wisdom and benevolence, you have an indiscriminate totality based on physical
determinism. The result is that many parallel worlds will suffer from pervasive gratuitous
evil. If every physical possibility happens, then there will be actual universes in which
everybody is damned. Fallen worlds without redemption. Fallen worlds with no
compensatory goods. I think that's incompatible with divine wisdom and benevolence.

Why doesn't God do more?

An issue in theodicy is how often God should intervene. In principle, that ranges along a
continuum from absolute nonintervention to constant intervention to prevent evil or
make the situation better.

Here's the basic argument: if it's not good for God to intervene all the time, then the
degree of divine intervention is bound to be arbitrary. Like the sorites paradox. Unless
God ought to intervene constantly, he could step in one more time or one less time, and
the cut off is arbitrary. Anything short of constant intervention will be arbitrary. Yes, he
could have done it one more time, but where does that stop. If he could step in one
more time, he could step in two more times, or one less time, or two less times. There is
no logical tipping point where a little less is too little and a little more is just enough.

Now, I think that's somewhat simplistic. Just about every intervention or nonintervention
will cause a chain reaction. It makes a difference in terms of what future eventuates. It's
not arbitrary in that respect. But it is arbitrary in the other respect.
Life is a gift, not a given

Yesterday, on Facebook, Gregory Shane Morris posted the following back to back
quotes:

[If I met God] I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you?
How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault.
It’s not right, it’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-
minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?

– Stephen Fry

[When I was an atheist] my argument against God was that the universe seemed
so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does
not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I
comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad
and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of
the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he
falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of
course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a
private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed
too-- for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not
simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of
trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality
was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my
idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has
no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no
creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without
meaning.

– C. S. Lewis

To which I responded:

i) Lewis is using a good transcendental argument.

ii) That said, there's a more direct response. It's true that God could eliminate cancer.
Problem is, eliminating certain natural evils eliminates certain people in the process–
whose existence is dependence on the existence of natural evils.

Just about every life has a snowball effect. Take a child who dies of cancer. Say he
goes to heaven. Say the parents create a "replacement" child. The replacement child
wouldn't exist if his older sibling hadn't died young. So his untimely death results in two
lives–his own life and the life of his sibling. That's a good that wouldn't happen in a
cancer-free world. Tragedies can be a source of good.

A child dying of cancer is undeniably tragic, but atheists consider that in artificial
isolation, yet human lives aren't compartmentalized. Consider a few alternate timelines.
In one timeline a boy doesn't die of cancer. He grows up, marries a girl, and fathers
three children by his wife. And they in turn marry when they grow up, and have kids.

Conversely, suppose he dies from cancer at age 10. That girl doesn't marry him. She
marries someone else, and has kids by a different husband. So there are winners and
losers on either scenario.

Or suppose the boy doesn't die of cancer. He has a great-grandson who kills a
pedestrian in a drunk driving accident. Had the boy died in childhood, that person four
generations down the line wouldn't be killed by a drunk driver who was the boy's
descendent.

In a fallen world, you have goods that are nested in evils. For God to remove that evil
removes the attendant good. That may be a better world in one or more respects, but a
worse world in one or more respects.

iii) Untimely death underscores the fact, as nothing else can, that life is a gift, not a
given.
Would a good God prevent WWII?

As I discuss from time to time, atheists raise contradictory objections to Christianity.

Here's another example:

i) On the one hand, atheists say that if there were an omniscient, omnipotent, and
benevolent God, no child would ever die of cancer (or whatever).

ii) On the other hand, atheists say that if there were an omniscient, omnipotent, and
benevolent God, then horrendous evils like WWII would never occur.

But let's think about that for a moment. What would be the simplest way to prevent
WWII? If Hitler died as a child, or his would-be mother or his would-be grandmother,
then there'd be no Hitler, no Third Reich, no WWII. The death of Hitler as an infant, or
any of his linear ancestors as infants, would preempt WWII at one stroke.

So, if you think God ought to prevent WWII, then God ought to let children die of cancer
(or whatever). Namely, children whose existence will be a necessary condition for WWII
to eventuate. That's the most economical preventive measure. One death to save
millions.

(I'm not endorsing consequentialism. I'm just responding to the atheist on his own
grounds.)

And while that's just one example, the same can be said for genocidal dictators
generally. Therefore, a consistent atheist can't object in principle to the death of
children. They can't object to God permitting atrocities whose occurrence depends on
the perpetrator or one of his lineal forebears surviving to adulthood while they
simultaneously object to God permitting the death of children in principle.

Conversely, we could turn that around. Suppose Hitler (or one of his lineal ancestors)
had a life-threatening illness as a child. And suppose God let the child die. That would
forestall WWII.

Would the world be better off in that event? That depends. From what I've read, the
reason we developed the bomb was fear that Germany would get the bomb first.
Indeed, they had a head start. As it turns out, their experiments were a dead-end, but
we didn't know that at the time. Because we were afraid they might beat us to the
punch, FDR authorized the Manhattan Project.

Suppose, though, Hitler never existed because he or one of his lineal forebears died in
childhood. That would sap the urgency for us to develop the bomb. Absent that catalyst,
what if Russia or China got the bomb before we did. They could then use that as
nuclear blackmail to impose Maoism or Stalinism worldwide. And that would be even
worse that WWII.
For atheists, if children die, that's evidence for the nonexistence of God. Yet if some
children don't die (e.g. baby Mao, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin)–resulting in
massive, horrific evils–that's evidence for the nonexistence of God. But in that case,
atheists have contradictory objections. Letting children die disproves his existence while
not letting children die disproves his existence!

There's the further paradox that if God preempted some massive atrocity by permitting
the perpetrator (or a lineal forebear) to die in childhood, there'd be no evidence that God
preempted that eventuality. God never gets credit for a nonevent. For all we know, God
has, in fact, prevented many a Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot from rising to power because
they died in childhood. No one remembers because they didn't live to do anything
memorable.
City on the edge of forever

To set the stage, let's begin with a definition:

Skeptical theism is the view that God exists but that we should be skeptical of our
ability to discern God’s reasons for acting or refraining from acting in any
particular instance. In particular, says the skeptical theist, we should not grant
that our inability to think of a good reason for doing or allowing something is
indicative of whether or not God might have a good reason for doing or allowing
something. If there is a God, he knows much more than we do about the relevant
facts, and thus it would not be surprising at all if he has reasons for doing or
allowing something that we cannot fathom.

If skeptical theism is true, it appears to undercut the primary argument for

atheism, namely the argument from evil. This is because skeptical theism
provides a reason to be skeptical of a crucial premise in the argument from evil,
namely the premise that asserts that at least some of the evils in our world are
gratuitous. If we are not in a position to tell whether God has a reason for
allowing any particular instance of evil, then we are not in a position to judge
whether any of the evils in our world are gratuitous. And if we cannot tell
whether any of the evils in our world are gratuitous, then we cannot appeal to
the existence of gratuitous evil to conclude that God does not exist.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/skept-th/#H1

Now let's quote an atheist:

Jason Thibodeau

We make judgements about the value of things; i.e., that something is good or
that it is bad. And we make judgements about the relative value of pairs of things
or groups of things; that one thing is better (or worse) than something else.

In this case, I don't see how we can believe that the suffering of a child who is
dying of leukemia can be either good or necessary for some greater purpose; a
purpose which, incidentally, is unknown to us. One of the judgments that we
make is that each human life is of infinite value. What greater purpose could the
suffering and death of a child be necessary for the realization of? Our conviction
that such suffering would be a tragedy is a manifestation of our judgement that it
serves no greater purpose.
 Suppose such judgments are by and large accurate. When we judge that suffering
is bad, we are correct; when we say that happiness is good, we are correct. When
we judge that the loss of a life is worse than the loss of a wedding ring, we are
correct.

Suppose, on the other hand, that such judgements are not, by and large,
accurate. When we judge that something is bad, we are often wrong; when we
judge that something is good, we are often wrong. This might be true because
there are valuable things the existence and magnitude of which we are ignorant.
The existence of such valuable things might provide God with morally sufficient
reasons to allow the occurrence of things that we judge to be horrors (such as a
child dying of leukemia). But if this is true, then obviously we cannot trust our
judgements about which things are good and which are bad and which things are
better or worse than other things. It follows that, for all we would know, the
death and suffering of children is good. For all we would know, war is good. For
all we would know, famine is good.

http://randalrauser.com/2016/12/god-answered-prayer-response-justin-
schieber/#comment-3066351441

This goes awry in so many different ways:

i) There's absolutely no basis in secularism for the claim that "each human life is of
infinite value". For that matter, I don't think that's true from a Christian perspective,
either. You can say each human life is valuable without saying each human life is
infinitely valuable. What does that even mean? Moreover, what's wrong with saying
some lives are less valuable than others? What about the possibility that some people
devalue their lives through their misconduct? Take serial killers.

ii) On the one hand, Thibodeau says "When we judge that the loss of a life is worse
than the loss of a wedding ring, we are correct." On the other hand, he said "we make
judgements about the relative value of groups of things; that one thing is better (or
worse) than something else." Notice that his denial is inconsistent with his prefatory
observation. It's not, in the first instance, a question of comparing a lost life with a lost
wedding ring, but by his own admission, making comparative judgments about "groups
of things." Not an isolated comparison between a life and a ring, but comparing the
connected goods and evils between different chains of events. Sure, taken by itself, a
wedding ring may be of trivial value compared to a human life, but what other things are
linked to the respective chains of events?

iii) And while, in general, a human life is more valuable than a wedding ring, some
people can forfeit their prima facie right to life. Take serial killers.
iv) Likewise, it can be simplistic to say something is either good or evil. Sometimes
that's a false dichotomy. Once again, we need to distinguish between discrete events
and chains of events. A child dying of cancer is generally evil in and of itself. I say
"generally" because, if the child is Stalin, we might judge that differently.

However, something evil can be a source of something good. But the fact that it
produces a second-order good doesn't make the evil good. Rather, it means we're
assessing the good of the whole as well as the good (or evil) of the parts. It's not merely
an atomistic assessment of each particular incident, but judging the package. The
package may have goods while some individual elements are evil. And some of those
goods may be contingent on some of those evils. So you're rendering a collective
judgment.

And a collective judgment can be a qualified judgment. The resultant goods don't make
the evils good. But it isn't just evil. Rather it's a combination of goods and evils. And
their interdependent. You don't say it's better than it is. But it has an overall value that's
distinct from the individual elements.

Take marriage. Even in good marriages, bad things happen. Couples say and do
inconsiderate things. But that doesn't mean it can't be a good marriage.

v) We can judge a bad thing to be bad in itself. But our judgment may be shortsighted if
what's bad leads to a future good, of which we're ignorant. It's possible to have
trustworthy judgments about the present qua present, but have untrustworthy judgments
about the future in relation to the present.

vi) By the same token, retrospective judgments can be very different from how we
viewed events at the time. Take people whose plans fall through. At the time, that may
seem to be disastrous. But in some cases, looking back on the incident 10 years later,
they realize that it would have been disastrous if their plans hadn't fallen through.

vii) Thibodeau asserts that "Our conviction that such suffering would be a tragedy is a
manifestation of our judgement that it serves no greater purpose." But that's a non
sequitur. An incident can be tragic for some people, but benefit others.

viii) There's nothing esoteric about the notion that, for all we know, something which
seems to have no redeeming value at present may generate unforeseen goods in the
future. It's not unique to theodicy or skeptical theism to point out that because we're in
the dark about future consequences, we lack the necessary perspective to predict and
assess what good may come of some event. It isn't special pleading for a Christian
apologist to make that observation, for that's a general truth.

ix) Take a famous episode from Star Trek: "The City on the Edge of Forever". In that
episode, the Enterprise investigates a planet that's emitting time waves. One wave
rocks the ship, causing Dr. McCoy to accidentally inject himself, making him psychotic.
He beams down to the planet, with Spock and Kirk in hot pursuit. But they fail to
intercept him before he steps into a time portal. At that point they lose contact with the
Enterprise, because McCoy did something in the past that erased the timeline from
which they came. So they step into the time portal, and come out the other end in New
York City, during the Depression. They must figure out what McCoy did to change the
future, and prevent it, to restore the original timeline.

They go to a soup kitchen and befriend a pretty, idealistic social worker. Tweaking his
tricorder, Spock discovers that in the future, she will lead a pacifist movement which will
keep the US out of WWII, resulting in the Nazi conquest of the world. In the original
timeline, she died before that happened. So they must prevent McCoy from saving her
life, to avert that dire outcome, and restore the original timeline.

When Kirk sees that she's about to be run over, not only does he not intervene to stop
it, but he prevents McCoy from intervening to stop it. To an onlooker, his behavior is
unconscionable. She was an admirable woman. What possible justification could there
be for letting her die in a traffic accident? To McCoy, Kirk's behavior is inexcusable. But
the audience knows something McCoy doesn't.

x) In attempting to save her life, McCoy did the right thing, given the information
available to him. In refusing to save her life, Kirk did the right thing, given the
information available to him. McCoy acted on his prima facie duty, but that was morally
overridden by Kirk's superior viewpoint.

That principle isn't distinctive to theodicy or skeptical theism. In making morally

responsible decisions, we must often take into account the impact of our actions. That
interjects an element of uncertainty into decision-making, for the future is unpredictable
to some degree, and increasingly unpredictable the further it proceeds.

This doesn't mean results are the sole consideration in decision-making. But it's often a
morally salient consideration.

xi) Some time-travel scenarios may seem to be fatalistic. Was it McCoy's temporal
incursion that changed the timeline, or was it the temporal incursion of Spock and Kirk
that changed the timeline? Should they do something or nothing? If they follow him into
the past, is that what changes the past? What if their effort to rectify the problem is the
very thing that instigates the problem in the first place? (In the actual episode, that's
made clear, but it's easy to imagine a variation in which it's not.)

If they don't know in advance, they must make their decision based on the information
at hand. In the nature of the case, we can't take unknown variables into consideration.
So that doesn't figure in our deliberations.

That's analogous to the duties of human agents. By contrast, God has the entire context
in view. In that respect, what's right for God might be wrong for you and me, or vice
versa.
xii) In addition, because God isn't human, he can do some things that might be morally
or psychological harmful if humans did it. Suppose a house burglar breaks into my
home. I shoot him in self-defense. I can live with that.

By contrast, suppose my teenage son, through no fault of his own, is prone to psychotic
episodes. During one of these, he comes at me with a butcher knife. Suppose I'm
armed. I could shoot him in self-defense, but I can't bring myself to risk killing my son. I
could never live with myself if that happened. So I take the risk of being killed rather
than taking the risk of killing him.

Suppose, though, I have a friend with me who's armed. He shoots him instead. Because
my friend doesn't have the same emotional investment in my son that I have, he can do
something I can't face up to in that situation.
Dual control

I'd like to expand on an illustration that atheist Richard Gale used in his debate with
Alvin Plantinga on the problem of evil. Plantinga made a number of good points during
the debate, but he's committed to the freewill defense. I think some of his insights are
separable from the freewill defense. But I share Gale's view that the freewill defense is
implausible.

Before my time, training cars for driver's ed had two steering wheels. But that's an
expensive modification, so by the time I took driver's ed, a million years ago, the car had
just an extra brake pedal on the passenger side.

Suppose a car had both two steering wheels and two brake pedals. What is more, the
occupant in the passenger seat could override the driver. So the car has dual control.
Normally, the driver is in control, but the passenger can take control. In that case, the
driving instructor shares responsibility for whatever happens.

Now, we could develop that illustration in either a Calvinist direction or freewill theist
direction. From a Calvinist standpoint, the driver would be in control in the sense of
ordinary providence. Natural agents and agencies doing what they were predestined to
do. Natural agents and agencies having genuine causal powers within the world.
Intramundane causality. Of course, God would still be ultimately responsible for
everything that happens. But God doesn't directly control everything that happens.
Rather, he normally exerts control through intervening media.

From a freewill theist standpoint, the driver would either be the ultimate source of his
own actions, or able to choose an alternate course of action in exactly the same
situation, or both. The future is indeterminate.

(Mind you, I don't think the future is indeterminate on either Molinism or simple
foreknowledge versions of freewill theism, but that's an argument for another day.)

Suppose the student is approaching a red light, but he's not slowing down. Maybe he's
distracted.

However, because the instructor has an unobstructed view of the intersection, he can
see that there are no other cars or pedestrians approaching the intersection, so it's safe
to let the student run a red light. He could prevent the student from doing so, but the
student needs to learn from his own mistakes, since the instructor won't always be by
his side to direct him or warn him.

And that's analogous to God "allowing" evil. If God constantly prevented us from having
to experience the consequences of our own actions, we'd be very thoughtless, aimless,
and inconsiderate. We couldn't ever be harmed or harm others. That would stultify our
moral development. Make life too easy.
And that's consistent with predestination, for predestination isn't fatalism. Humans are
genuine agents. We have minds. We deliberate. We made decisions based on reasons
and desires. A "deterministic" world is a cause-and-effect world.

Let's resume the illustration. Suppose the student is approaching a red light, but he's
not slowing down. Only this time, the instructor can see that pedestrians are in the
crosswalk. Yet he lets the student run over a pedestrian.

Although the instructor wasn't technically driving at the time, because he wasn't
steering, because he didn't have his foot on the gas pedal, we'd normally say he was
blameworthy for his failure to prevent the accident. Indeed, he was more blameworthy
than the actual driver, since the driver was an inexperienced student.

Moreover, by failing to intervene, the instructor ensured the accident–just as if he

personally took the wheel and deliberately ran over the pedestrian. And even if it wasn't
a sure thing, it was highly likely to happen, so he can't use uncertainty as an excuse.

Just to say he let it happen is not a moral justification. Indeed, the prima facie problem
is precisely that he just let it happen, even though it laywithin his power to prevent it.
That illustrates the inadequacy of a freewill defense that acts as if permission alone is a
sufficient exculpatory condition.

Suppose, though, there was more to his inaction that meets the eye. Suppose the
pedestrian was a suicide bomber or a schoolyard sniper, just a block away from his
target. That changes everything. Yet to an outside observer, the instructor's failure to
stop the car appears to be morally inexcusable.

Dropping the picturesque illustration, the fact that God doesn't intercede to avert some
tragedy or catastrophe may inscrutable and reprehensible to an onlooker. Perhaps he
can't imagine what good reason God might have to refrain. Yet that's because the
observer is judging the event from his own timeframe, rather than the future.
Can God stop evil?

Christianity teaches that whenever evil is done, God had ample warning. He could
have prevented it, but He didn’t. He could have stopped it midway, but He didn’t.
He could have rescued the victims of the evil, but - at least in many cases - He
didn’t. In short, God is an accessory before, during, and after the fact to countless
evil deeds, great and small.

http://www.andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Evil_Freedoms_Sake.pdf

There's a difference between preventing an event and stopping an event in progress. In

predestinarian traditions (e.g. Thomism, Augustinianism, Jansenism, Calvinism), there's
a sense in which God cannot stop evil midway. In predestinarian traditions, everything
happens according to plan. Once God implements a particular plan for the world, the
series of events is unstoppable.

In that sense, although God can't stop a chain of events in midstream, God can prevent
the outcome by implementing a different master plan. But once that plan is in place,
everything happens like falling dominoes. (The same holds true for Molinism.)

This doesn't rule out petitionary prayer, for that, too, figures in the master plan.
Selective intuition

In addition to Jerry Walls, I recently responded to another commenter on his blog. To

quote myself:

Although the Holocaust is a cliché, it's a convenient example of a paradigm-evil. But I

could easily use a different example. Take a refugee camp for Cambodians. What if
Jerry tells that God would not be good unless he loves the Khmer Rouge?

My point is not that this necessarily disproves the universality of God's love. My point,
rather, is that Jerry's facile appeal to "fundamental moral intuitions" is context-
dependent and person-variable. What seems to be morally intuitive often turns on the
particular example we use to illustrate the claim. Change the audience, change the
illustration, you may get a radically different reaction.

Jerry himself presumes to speak on behalf of others when he appeals to moral intuition.
He acts as though everyone naturally shares his intuition, and it's only prior commitment
to Calvinism (why not Thomism?) that forces some people to deny what in their hear of
hearts they know to be true. But that's trivially easy to counterexample.

"Let Jerry explain to Orthodox Jews that he believes God did not want the Nazis to
do what they did because He loves all people and does not want the Nazis to do
evil or their victims to suffer evil."

And let Jerry explain to Orthodox Jews why the Arminian God did so much less than
Dietrich Bonhoeffer to stop the Nazis.

"Let Steve Hays then explain to them that God willed that the Nazis should be evil
and go to hell, and that they should do to Jews the evil things that they did, and
that God also willed those Jews who did not believe in Jesus to go to hell after
enduring hell on earth from the Nazis."

i) There are no nice theodicies. The problem of evil isn't, in the first instance, with any
particular theodicy of evil, but with the fact of evil.

ii) It's not willing evil for its own sake, as an end in itself. Rather, willing evil to achieve
certain second-order goods. Goods unobtainable apart from evil. In a fallen world, just
about everyone exists as a direct or indirect result of evil. Remove the evil and you
remove everyone whose existence is the side-effect or end-result of some evil or evils in
the past. In a sinless world, other people would take their place. So there are tradeoffs.
iii) Your final objection is not to Calvinism in particular, but Christian exclusivism in
general.

iv) There's an asymmetry between my position and Jerry's. Unlike Jerry's glib, selective
appeal to "fundamental moral intuitions," I haven't predicated my own position on
allegedly universal moral intuitions. Therefore, the fact that Jewish listeners might take
umbrage at my theological alternative doesn't turn the tables on my own position.

v) We walk a tightrope when we present a theodicy. On the one hand, some

theologians like Cornelius Berkouwer and David Bentley Hart find the very notion of a
theodicy blasphemous. For them, any justification for the existence of evil makes evil
justifiable. There's no evil, however horrendous, that can't be excused. It can't be as bad
as it seems. They think that sanctifies evil.

Mind you, the implication of their position renders the occurrence of evil inherently
inexcusable. God had no justification for what happened. But the logic of that position is
to either deny God's existence or God's goodness. So that's clearly unacceptable from a
Christian standpoint. It's a question of locating ourselves on the right side of the knife
edge when we formulate a theodicy.

vi) Keep in mind that, in some measure, the complaint cuts both ways. Maimonides
thought Christians were heretics and idolaters (due to their belief in the Trinity, divine
Incarnation, and deity of Christ). Those are damnable sins. Just as you have Christian
exclusivism, you can have Jewish exclusivism.

vii) Although it may offend some listeners to say that everything happens for a reason,
the alternative is to say that some things, especially the very worst things, happen for no
good reason whatsoever.

Yet that makes the suffering and death of victims meaningless. But if they think about it,
how is that any consolation to the survivors?

People are often conflicted about evil. It may seem pointless, yet they want to know why
it happened. Well, it can't be both. Either it has some ultimate purpose or not.
God, evil, and evidence

Nick Trakakis and Graham Oppy raise the same objection:

Firstly, the theist may agree that Rowe’s argument provides some evidence
against theism, but she may go on to argue that there is independent evidence in
support of theism which outweighs the evidence against theism. In fact, if the
theist thinks that the evidence in support of theism is quite strong, she may
employ what Rowe (1979: 339) calls "the G.E. Moore shift" (compare Moore
1953: ch.6). This involves turning the opponent’s argument on its head, so that
one begins by denying the very conclusion of the opponent’s argument. The
theist’s counter-argument would then proceed as follows:

Although this strategy has been welcomed by many theists as an appropriate way
of responding to evidential arguments from evil (for example, Mavrodes 1970: 95-
97, Evans 1982: 138-39, Davis 1987: 86-87, Basinger 1996: 100-103) – indeed, it is
considered by Rowe to be “the theist’s best response” (1979: 339) – it is deeply
problematic in a way that is often overlooked. The G.E. Moore shift, when
employed by the theist, will be effective only if the grounds for accepting not-(3)
[the existence of the theistic God] are more compelling than the grounds for
accepting not-(1) [the existence of gratuitous evil]. The problem here is that the
kind of evidence that is typically invoked by theists in order to substantiate the
existence of God – for example, the cosmological and design arguments, appeals
to religious experience – does not even aim to establish the existence of a
perfectly good being, or else, if it does have such an aim, it faces formidable
difficulties in fulfilling it. But if this is so, then the theist may well be unable to
offer any evidence at all in support of not-(3), or at least any evidence of a
sufficiently strong or cogent nature in support of not-(3). The G.E. Moore shift,
therefore, is not as straightforward a strategy as it initially seems.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/evil-evi/#H5

…it becomes clear that the vast majority of considerations that have been offered
as reasons for believing in God can be of little assistance to the person who is
trying to resist the argument from evil. For most of them provide, at best, very
tenuous grounds for any conclusion concerning the moral character of any
omnipotent and omniscient being who may happen to exist, and almost none of
them provides any support for the hypothesis that there is an omnipotent and
omniscient being who is also morally perfect.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#AppPosEviForExiGod

I find their objection rather odd:

i) The argument from evil is primarily an argument against God's existence, not God's
benevolence. So evidence of God's existence, apart from the question of evil, certainly
seems germane to the overall force of the argument from evil.

ii) Perhaps the objection is that in the argument from evil, the concept of God is the
concept of a benevolent God. Therefore, the argument targets that particular concept of
God. Unless he's benevolent, he doesn't exist.

a) But although that distinction may be useful for analytical clarity, it artificially separates
evidence for God's existence from alleged counterevidence based on evil, as if the latter
discounts the former. It's not as if atheists believe in God, only they think he's evil. It's
not as if they think there's evidence that counts for God's existence, as well as evidence
that counts against his benevolence, so they affirm the existence of a malevolent God.
Hence, they can't use the alleged evidence of unjustifiable evils to simply cancel out
evidence for God's existence.

b) Assuming that God's existence and benevolence are inseparable, isn't that
reversible? If there's evidence for God's existence, then this might indicate that evil,
even if it constitutes some prima facie evidence against God's existence, must be
counterbalanced by other lines of evidence. Put another way, the incongruity is only
apparent.

c) Apropos (a-b), evidence for God's existence could be combined with skepticism
theism to circumvent the argument from evil. Even if (ex hypothesi), evil constitutes
prima facie evidence against God's benevolence, if there's positive evidence for God's
existence, then why not take that to indicate that God is, in fact, benevolent, God has a
morally sufficient reason for evil, even if we can't discern it?
Calvinism and the God of love

Jerry Walls did a lecture several weeks ago on "Calvinism and the God of Love":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IBUtF8EtAo

He and I then had an impromptu Facebook debate about his lecture.

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, you quoted the WSC, and noted that it omits to mention the attribute of divine
love. Why didn't you quote the WCF, which, among other things, says God is "most
loving" (as well as "gracious" and "merciful," "abundant in goodness")? I hope you
weren't attempting to deceive your audience by selectively quoting from Reformed
documents. So how can we account for your conspicuous oversight?

There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a
most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense,
eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute;
working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous
will, for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in
goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that
diligently seek him; and withal, most just, and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin,
and who will by no means clear the guilty (WCF 2:1).

I'm struck by Jerry's insinuation that Calvin can't bring himself to affirm God's love.
Certainly that's the impression that Jerry fosters through his selection quotations. Jerry
makes a big deal about the fact that Calvin doesn't quote 1 Jn 4:8,16 in the Institutes.
Keep in mind that there are about 55,000 verses in the Bible, so it's hardly surprising or
suspect if even a systematic theology omits many verses. But in addition, consider what
Calvin does say, which Jerry conveniently leaves out:

Thus he is moved by pure and freely given love of us to receive us into

grace…Therefore, by his love God the Father goes before and anticipates our
reconciliation in Christ. Indeed, 'because he first loved us' (1 Jn 4:19), he afterward
reconciles us to himself.
For this reason, Paul says that the love with which God embraced us "before the
creation of the world" was established and grounded in Christ [Eph 1:4-5]…God
declared his love toward us in giving his only begotten-Son to die [Jn 3:16]…I shall
quote a passage of Augustine where the very thing is taught: ''God's love," says he, "is
incomprehensible and unchangeable. For it was not after we were reconciled to him
through the blood of his Son that he began to love us. Rather, he has loved us before
the world was created"…"God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners
Christ died for us" [Rom 5:8]" Institutes 16.2.3-4 [Ford Lewis Battles trans.].

JERRY WALLS
It is not a comprehensive list of all Reformed sources, and I said it is only suggestive.
The fact that love did not make the short list is suggestive since the NT explicitly says
"God is love," unlike some of the other things that made the list. My claim that it is
suggestive of Calvinist priorities is a modest claim, and my case hardly hinges on it.

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, you said a consistent Calvinist may only deny #1 or #3 of your six-point argument.
But that's not the case. A consistent Calvinist may also deny #5. According to that
proposition, "God could (properly) give all persons irresistible grace and thereby
determine all persons to be saved."

Problem with that proposition is that "all persons" is indefinite. A world in which
everyone has irresistible grace will not have the same set of people as a world in which
only some people have irresistible grace. I can spell that out if you need me to.

In that event, "all persons" is an ambiguous or shifting referent. The Calvinist God
cannot determine all the same persons to be saved.

So you're implicitly comparing and contrasting two different possible worlds with
different sets of people in each. It's not a case of God either saving all the same people
or God only saving some of the same people. For if God gives everyone in the past
irresistible grace, that will produce a different future than if God refrains from giving
everyone in the past irresistible grace.

JERRY WALLS
Did you not listen to the whole lecture before criticizing? I discussed at length the
Calvinist option to deny #5.

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, the shoe is on the other foot. Note that I'm raising a different objection to #5 that
you discussed at length. You discussed Piper's position. I'm not using Piper's argument.
The difference isn't hard to see.

JERRY WALLS
I also discussed Hart,who says: "In short, if Calvinism is true, it seems perfectly easy for
God to create a world in which universalism is true--a world in which everyone accepts
God's offer of salvation and goes to heaven." Indeed, many Calvinists think that is the
actual world, that all will be saved, that in the long run God will break the resistance of
all persons. No reason God could not give postmortem irresistible grace to those who
did not receive it in this life.

STEVE HAYS
Jerry's you're still not following the argument. I didn't deny that God could save
"everybody". But it's not the same "everybody".
Suppose God gives everyone in the world irresistible grace. That will affect how they
behave. For instance, there will be far less promiscuity, fornication, adultery, war,
murder.

Giving everyone irresistible grace begins in the past. That affects who will be conceived.
Conception is about who mates with whom. Conception is about timing. A different day
or hour, and a different person is conceived. If everyone in the past had irresistible
grace, that would impact mating patterns, among other things.

Moreover, little changes in the past generate big changes in the future. Changing past
variables has a snowball effect.

Therefore, it's inaccurate to suggest a comparison in which you have two possible
worlds with the same set of people, where God saves only some in one possible world
but everyone in the other possible world. That's incompossible.

JERRY WALLS
My only concern is the actual world, and in the actual world, a God who determines all
things and has infinite power and creative resources could eventually determine the
salvation of all, in something like the way Talbott or Marilyn Adams have argued. Or if
not that, he could have determined a different set of people, all to be saved in the
course of this life. Those in this world who are not included in that world would have
been none the poorer since they would ever have existed.

STEVE HAYS
You say your only concern is the actual world, but you're comparing alternate outcomes:
one in which everybody is saved in contrast to one in which only some are saved. That's
not just about the actual world, but which possible world will become actual.

STEVE HAYS
So you take the Epicurean position that nonexistence is not a deprivation?

JERRY WALLS
It is not a deprivation for those who have never existed at all.

STEVE HAYS
If nonexistence is not a deprivation, does that mean a world in which a billion people
exist, all of whom are saved, is no better than a world in which only 10 people exist, all
of whom are saved?

Given Jerry's Epicurean view of nonexistence, I wonder how, if at all, he'd be able to
argue against the antinatalistic position of David Benatar.

JERRY WALLS
Those in this world who are not included in that world would have been none the poorer
since they would ever have existed.
STEVE HAYS
i) Once again, Jerry, you seem to have a bad habit of failing to distinguish between an
external critique and an internal critique. When you say the Calvinist God could save
everyone, that implies that you're attempting to assess Calvinism on its own terms.

But when you turn around and say "it is not a deprivation for those who have never
existed at all," or "those in this world who are not included in that world would have
been none the poorer since they would ever have existed," you suddenly shift gears to
assessing the issue by your own standards. Yet that's confused.

If you going to say the Calvinist God could save everyone, the question at issue isn't, in
the first instance, whether you think nonexistence is a deprivation, but whether you've
made an accurate statement about the implications of Calvinism.

ii) Apropos (i), let's revert to my illustration. The time-traveler wants to save his
contemporaries from disaster, but try as he might, he can't, since changing the past
erases the future in which they exist. He can never save just those people. At best, he
can takes actions that will replace them. A future without that disaster. A future without
those particular people.

By the same token, the Calvinist God can't save everyone is the sense of saving the
very same people. Rather, in order for the Calvinist God to save everyone, he must
cancel out the world in which he only saves some people, and substitute a different
world with different people. For if God grants everyone irresistible grace, that produces
a different alternate future. At the very least, you need to introduce that distinction into
your argument.

iii) That said, let's consider the issue from your own perspective. Your dismissive
attitude regarding nonexistence is odd coming from a proud granddad. Are you
prepared to look your granddaughters in the eye and say to them, "If the world didn't
include you, if you never existed, you'd be none the poorer!" Are you prepared to tell
your mother that?

iv) Likewise, your dismissive attitude is odd for someone who treats divine love as
God's most important attribute. Suppose God knows that if he creates this or that
possible person, they will enjoy eternal bliss. (And that's a supposition of classical
theism.) And no overriding good will be lost if he does so.

Is it not more loving for God to create them so that they will experience eternal bliss that
not to create them? If you don't think that's an expression of divine love, why do you
think God created heavenbound humans in the first place?

v) One problem with your Epicurean view of nonexistence is your failure to distinguish
between the perspective of a nonentity and the perspective of an outside observer.
Even though the nonentity has no viewpoint at the time, an outside observer can have a
viewpoint regarding what would be beneficial for the nonentity if it were to exist.
To take a comparison: a patient in a coma may have no viewpoint, no awareness of
what's good for him, but an outside observer can act in the patient's best interest.
Conversely, a rock exists, but lacks even a potential viewpoint. So existence, per se, is
not the salient differential factor.

Surely you appreciate the fact that lost opportunities can be a deprivation. Not just
losing what you had, but what you might have had.

JERRY WALLS
Yes, lost opportunities for actual people is a deprivation, which is why it makes no
sense to be indifferent to the hope of heaven as a future possibility on the ground that
there were goods you missed out on before you ever existed. But those who never exist
at all cannot regret either missing out on future goods or past ones. Actual people could,
in a sense, have regrets on their behalf I suppose, like a married couple without children
might mourn children who "might have been." But those possible children themselves
suffer no loss because merely possible people suffer nothing.

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, a comatose patient may have no regrets. He lacks the presence of mind to
entertain regrets. A person with senile dementia may have no regrets for the same
reason.

You're confusing subjective awareness of missing out on future goods with the objective
fact of missing out on future goods. Those are separate issues. You can't collapse one
into the other.

A lost opportunity is a loss. A counterfactual loss. Not to exist in the first place, if
existence resulted in eternal bliss, is total loss. Not just a particular missed opportunity,
but missing out on any and all opportunities for future goods.

Your position is at war with your claim that God was justified in creating people he knew
were hellbound for the benefit of people he knew were heavenbound. Your cost/benefit
analysis is based on possible persons and hypothetical outcomes.

JERRY WALLS
Not all possible, all feasible, or creatible....which worlds are feasible depends on which
free choices we would make if the world was actualized.

STEVE HAYS
You say it as if that's an established fact. But wasn't the notion of infeasible worlds just
a postulate that Plantinga floated to deflect the logical problem of evil? The fact that his
postulate is conceivable doesn't make it true or even plausible. It's not entailed by
freewill theism.

JERRY WALLS
If Calvinism is true, it seems perfectly easy for God to create a world in which
universalism is true."

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, even if (ex hypothesi) some possible worlds are infeasible, yet given the infinite
number of possible worlds, it seems antecedently improbable in the extreme that there's
not a single feasible world in which everyone freely goes to heaven. So why doesn't
your own position suffer from the same objection you raise to Calvinism?

EDWIN WOODRUFF TAIT

Steve Hays, help me out with what you're saying about conception. It sounds as if you
are saying that there are some people whom, once conceived, God cannot save. You
surely aren't suggesting that whether one accepts or rejects God's grace is determined
by genetics, are you? Or do you hold to a libertarian view of freedom--i.e., a kind of
Molinist Calvinism in which some people would choose to accept grace in all possible
worlds and others would reject it in all possible worlds? (This seems, as far as I
understand it, to be Plantinga's position, but Jerry can correct me if I'm wrong.)

STEVE HAYS
No, I'm saying that in a world where God granted everyone irresistible grace, many
people won't be conceived in the first place–who'd otherwise be conceived in a world
where God withholds universal irresistible grace.

A world in which everyone has irresistible grace has an alternate history. As a result of
irresistible grace, people have different motivations. Do different things. That changes
who mates with whom. That changes the timing of events. It produces different family
trees.

The situation is analogous to time-travel stories. At present, the human race has been
decimated by some catastrophe. It might be a natural disaster or man-made disaster. In
order to save the human race from this catastrophe, the protagonist travels back in time
to change some past variable in order to advert the catastrophe. He changes the past to
change the future.

He succeeds, but there are unintended consequences. By altering the past, his action
radically alters the future. His action erases the future from which he came. His action
erases millions or billions of people at present by erasing the timeline in which they
exist(ed).

In one scenario, he keeps returning to the past in a vain quest to fine-tune the scope of
his action, but preempting the future catastrophe always has the drastic side-effect of
eliminating millions or billions of human lives. The dilemma is that he can't save the
same people in the present by changing the past. Rather, he saves the human race by
replacing the human race in the devastated timeline by a different human race in some
alternate timeline.
That illustrates the equivocation in proposition #5 of Jerry's argument. There's an
implicit bait-n-switch in Jerry's scenario about God saving "everybody".

EDWIN WOODRUFF TAIT

This is actually very close to my own thinking on the problem of evil. The question, of
course, is what it would mean for there to be people who 'already' exist from God's point
of view prior to any decision by God to give or withhold some particular kind of grace or
other help. I don't think a traditional Calvinist model--or for that matter a Thomist model--
can make sense of that.

STEVE HAYS
It would be a divine ideas model in which possible persons already exist in God's mind
in the way fictional characters and alternate plot endings exist in the mind of a novelist.
God can imagine infinitely many world histories. They exist as concepts in God's infinite,
timeless mind.

If there's only one actual world, God chooses one of those possible world histories to
instantiate. Or if there's something like a multiverse, then God chooses to instantiate
many different timelines. Some would have some of the same people doing different
things. Some would have an entirely different cast of characters.

STEVE HAYS
Another issue: in the lecture you (Jerry Walls) appeal to "fundamental moral intuitions".
You said reprobation is nothing like justice".

Let's bracket reprobation for the moment and consider a different example. Suppose
you were speaking in an Orthodox synagogue. Suppose Holocaust survivors were in
attendance. You say God can't be good unless he loves everybody.

How do you think that would go over with an audience member like Simon Wiesenthal?
Would Holocaust survivors share your "fundamental moral intuition" that God can't be
good unless he loves Himmler or the Gestapo? Or would they say your position is
nothing like justice?

EDWIN WOODRUFF TAIT

Actually, let's not bracket reprobation, or any other relevant consideration.
Do you, Steve Hays, believe that the Jews who died in the Holocaust, who did not
believe in Jesus, went to heaven or hell?
If you believe the latter, then how the hell, quite literally, are you in a position to make
any argument predicated on what would be offensive to Orthodox Jews?

STEVE HAYS
Would you direct the same question to Messianic Jews like Michael Brown, Steve
Schlissel, and Charles Lee Feinberg?

It's possible for Orthodox Jews to be offended by more than one thing. Do I really need
to point that out?
The fact that many Orthodox Jews might be offended by Christian exclusivism hardly
negates the question of whether they'd be offended at the Arminian stipulation that to be
truly good, God must love the Gestapo.

And, yes, I'm entitled to raise the question since Jerry was appealing to "fundamental
moral intuitions".

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, You said if Jesus died for everybody, why does anyone need to be punished.
Does that mean you're now a universalist?

JERRY WALLS
If you know anything about me, you know I am not a universalist, but I would be happy if
it turns out that I am wrong.

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, I was pursuing the logic of your statement. You said You said if Jesus died for
everybody, why does anyone need to be punished. Since you believe in universal
atonement, do you still believe in eschatological punishment? The question follows from
the thrust of your own statement.

JERRY WALLS
The atonement makes the forgiveness of sins and the gift of salvation available for all
persons, conditional on repentance, faith, and ultimately our cooperation in
sanctification. Some, of course, may freely refuse the gift and refuse to meet the
conditions.

STEVE HAYS
Didn't you imply that universal atonement renders eschatological punishment
unnecessary?

JERRY WALLS
According to the Calvinist view that if Christ died for you, all your sins, past, present and
future, are thereby cancelled. On THAT view, if Christ died for all, then all would be
saved. But on the conditional view, his dying for all does not entail that. But you already
know this.

STEVE HAYS
Jerry, there's an elementary distinction between salvation and punishment. Even if
according to freewill theism, God can't save everyone, how does it follow that God must
punish the lost? Again, you're the one who raised this point of tension, not me. Punting
to Calvinism doesn't resolve the tension in relation to your own position.

JERRY WALLS
Their punishment consists in the misery and unhappiness that is inherent in remaining
separated from the only source of happiness that exists. So long as they choose to
remain separated from God, they remain unhappy.

STEVE HAYS
Let's briefly comment on some of Jerry's prooftexts.

He cited a verse from Jn 17. But Jn 17 repeatedly refers to those whom the Father
chose, and gave to Son, before the world began. And that is set in contrast to those
whom the Father never chose.

Jerry cited the following verses to show that God is "working toward the salvation of all"

Ezk 18:23,32; 33:11

But those passages are to, for, and about Israel and not humanity in general. So Jerry is
citing them out of context.

2 Pet 3:9

But as Richard Bauckham notes, in his landmark commentary:

God's patience with his own people, delaying the final judgment to give them the
opportunity of repentance, provides at least a partial answer to the problem of
eschatological delay. The author remains close to his Jewish source, for in Jewish
thought it was usually for the sake of the repentance of his own people that God
delayed judgment. R. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 312-13.

In context, it's not referring to humans in general, but God's people (Jews, Christians) in
particular. Members of the new covenant community, as the counterpart to members of
the old covenant community.

As, moreover, Jerry's fellow freewill theist, Gregory Boyd points out:

Why would God strive to the point of frustration to get people to do what he was
certain they would never do before they were even born; namely, believe in him?
Doesn't God's sincere effort to get all people to believe in him imply that it is not a
foregone conclusion to God that certain people would not believe in him when he
created them? Indeed, doesn't the fact that the Lord delays his return imply that
neither the date of his return nor the identities of who will and will not believe are
settled in God's mind ahead of time?…If this isn't what 2 Pet 3:9 explicitly teaches,
what does it teach? If it is difficult for the classical view to explain why God strives
 with people he is certain will not be saved, it is evil more difficult to explain why
God would create these people in the first place…why a God who loves all epode
and who wants no one to perish would give freedom to people he is certain are
going to use it to damn themselves to hell. G. Boyd," "The Open-Theist View,
Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, 29.

1 Tim 2:4-6; Tit 2:11

i) Why does Jerry think those are Arminian prooftexts rather than universalist
prooftexts?

ii) In addition, consider what these scholars say:

The purpose of the reference to "all people," which continues the them of
universality in this passage, is sometimes misconstrued. The reference is made
mainly with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles in mind (v7). But the reason
behind Paul's justification of this universal mission is almost certainly the false
teaching, with its Torah-centered approach to life that included either an
exclusivist bent or a downplaying of the Gentile mission…Paul's focus is on
building a people of God who incorporate all people regardless of ethnic, social,
or economic backgrounds… P. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 177-178.

It may be that they [false teachers] were consumed with genealogies because
they restricted salvation along certain ethnic lines (1 Tim 1:4)…When Paul says
that God desires all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4) and that Christ was the random for all
(1 Tim 2:6), he may be responding to some who excluded Gentiles from salvation
for genealogical reasons…Paul counters Jewish teachers (Tit 10:10,14-15; 3:9)
who construct genealogies to exclude some from salvation. T. Schreiner, Paul:
Apostle of God's Glory in Christ, 184-85.

These problems disappear if we accept the other possible translation, "to be

precise, namely, I mean." "All" is thus limited here to believers, I. H. Marshall,
Pastoral Epistles, 556.

STEVE HAYS
A final point: you quote Matthew Hart saying the reprobate are instrumentally useful.
But you yourself think the damned are instrumentally useful.

Among feasible worlds, God must accept some hellbound sinners for the benefit of
heavenbound sinners. The damned shouldn't cheat others out of the opportunity to go
to heaven.
Happy-talk Arminians

I recently got into an impromptu debate with Jerry Walls on Facebook. He and I rarely
interact directly:

JERRY WALLS Next thing you know you are going to be telling us God loves all the little
children...

STEVE HAYS Well, Jerry, there are countless children around the world who don't have
loving parents. So you can't very well extrapolate from happy families to neglected or
abused children.

JERRY WALLS Yeah, I don't think God's love is contingent on whether or not parents are
loving. I think he desires and will enable their ultimate well being and happiness whether
they have warm hearted parents or not.

STEVE HAYS In which case you can't analogize from one example.

It's my impression that Jerry has led a pretty charmed life. So it seems self-evident to
him that God loves everyone. He acts as though no one can really doubt God's
universal love. If they deny it, they must be faking.

That reflects a profound lack of empathy on Jerry's part. There are countless people
whose lives have been devastated by horrendous tragedy. It's not intuitively obvious to
them that there's an all-loving God.

Now, I'm not suggesting that that settles the issue. But it certainly figures in one's
plausibility structure.

JERRY WALLS Not so on several accounts. I can easily see why some people's experience
would make it hard to believe God loves all persons. But what I cannot see if Christ
reveals the heart of God, and if God is love in his essential nature, and is perfectly
good, how he could not love all the little children, and everyone else for that matter. As
John Wesley frankly acknowledged, (and I agree) it is hard to believe that God is
perfectly loving to all, based on empirical observation of the suffering in the world. See
opening paragraphs of "The General Deliverance."

STEVE HAYS But you always coast along with the same glib happy-talk message, like a
motivational speaker. Never once have I seen you seriously attempt to put yourself in
the shoes of someone's whose experience is radically different from your own. You
presume to speak on behalf of everyone. That deep down, everyone sees things the
same way you do ("In your heart you know he's right").

So are you now admitting that your ubiquitous appeals to intuition are bogus? That your
real position isn't based on intuition, but your interpretation of the Gospel?
JERRY WALLS And I very much realize Calvinists do NOT see things like I do.

STEVE HAYS Jerry, I'm not just talking about Calvinists.

"But what I cannot see if Christ reveals the heart of God…"

Well, when Christ was here on earth he did a whole lot more for some people than
others, so that appeal is a two-edged sword.

BTW, love is not God's only essential attribute.

"how he could not love all the little children."

Stalin used to be a cute little kid. Mao used to be a cute little kid. Attila the Hun used to
be a cute little kid. Genghis Khan used to be a cute little kid. Idi Amin used to be a cute
little kid. Pol Pot used to be a cute little kid. Ted Bundy used to be a cute little kid. And
so on and so forth.

JERRY WALLS And God could have given them all irresistible grace and determined them to
have been persons we would celebrate as heroes of the faith..but instead he
determined them to be the sort of persons you cite in a litany of humanity at its worst...

STEVE HAYS Jerry, the God of freewill theism could have determined them not to become
mass murderers. According to freewill theism, it's not that God is unable to do so, but
that he refuses to do so.

So how does the God of freewill theism love everyone when he fails to protect innocent
people (including children) from humanity at its worst? If you knew that a psychopath
had designs on one of your granddaughters, would you stand by and do nothing to
protect her?

STEVE HAYS

"And God could have given them all irresistible grace and determined them to
have been persons we would celebrate as heroes of the faith..but instead he
determined them to be the sort of persons you cite in a litany of humanity at its
worst..."
Jerry, for a philosopher, that's a very shortsighted criticism of Calvinism. If God gave
everyone irresistible grace, you'd have a very different kind of world with a different set
of people. Your proposal creates an alternate timeline. Suppose, in 5000 BC (to pick a
figure out of the hat), God gives everyone irresistible grace. That has a snowball effect.
Different people will be born as a result.

All the people who were born as a consequence of living in a world where God doesn't
give everyone irresistible grace will be denied existence on your alternate timeline. So
there are billions of losers in your alternative. Billions of men and women who miss out
because they can only exist in a world where God doesn't give everyone irresistible
grace. How would that be loving to the billions of people who never got a shot at
existing in the first place?

JERRY WALLS Only actual people can be wronged. A world where everyone loves and
honors God would be a good thing.

STEVE HAYS I didn't say that God was wronging them. But unless you're an Epicurean,
there's a sense in which deprivation of existence is harm.

Take antinatalists who refuse to have children. That deprives people of the opportunity
to exist in the first place. That's the most radical deprivation there can be.

Yes, a world in which everyone is virtuous is a good thing. What you're overlooking is
competing goods. A world in which everyone is virtuous comes at the expense of
billions of people who don't get to share in the good of existence. It's a tradeoff between
one set of goods and another set of goods. Your alternative eliminates some goods to
make room for other goods. The winners win at the expense of the losers.

STEVE HAYS I also notice you dodge my point that in Calvinism and freewill theism alike,
God could determine humanity at its worst not to commit atrocities. There's no
difference between Calvinism and freewill theism in that respect. In both cases, God is
able, but unwilling. What's different is the reasons or priorities that God has for
refraining to exercise his omnipotence in that regard.

JERRY WALLS Bottom line: on the Calvinist view, God could determine all persons "freely"
to love him; on the Arminian view, he could not. Yet God prefers many people "freely" to
sin and do treacherous things rather than "freely" to love him and each other according
to the Calvinist view. We have fundamentally different views of the love and goodness
of God, and it is clear that neither one of us are likely to change our views. So l will
leave it at that.

STEVE HAYS Jerry, you're ignoring the fact that it isn't possible to be equally loving to
everybody if one person is harming another person. How can the God of freewill theism
be equally loving to the murderer and the murder victim? The more he loves the
murderer, the less he loves the victim–by failing to protect her. Isn't protecting her from
murder the loving thing to do? There are disguised tensions in your position.
JERRY WALLS P.S. No one can refuse to have children on the Calvinist view unless God
determines them. On the Calvinist view, God can determine anyone he wants "freely" to
have as many children as he wants. And as for the murderer and murder victim: on my
view he can give them both optimal grace and every opportunity for final salvation and
perfect happiness. On the Calvinist view, he can determine things so that no one ever
murders anyone. Rather, all "freely" love and respect each other. But again, we have
gone over this all before, and we just have radically different views of love and
goodness.

STEVE HAYS

"P.S. No one can refuse to have children on the Calvinist view unless God
determines them. On the Calvinist view, God can determine anyone he wants
'freely' to have as many children as he wants."

True, but a red herring.

"And as for the murderer and murder victim: on my view he can give them both
optimal grace and every opportunity for final salvation and perfect happiness."

God allowing the murderer to kill her is hardly the most loving option for her. That's not
acting in her best interests.

To say we have "radically" or "fundamentally" different views of the love and goodness
of God is another dodge. It's also a question of consistency.

Jerry, you're smart enough to realize that your responses are evasive. I find that ironic
since you routinely accuse Calvinists of lowballing the unattractive consequences of
Calvinism, yet you camouflage the unattractive consequences of freewill theism by
staying safely vague.

STEVE HAYS There are several problems with Jerry's postmortem saving grace postulate:

i) It has no basis in revelation

ii) It bears a startling resemblance to Hick's eschatological verification, which makes it

conveniently unfalsifiable in this life. If Jerry's wrong, the lost won't find out until it's too
late to do anything about it.

iii) It's like seeing a woman in a burning building. I could rescue her, but I don't. She
survives, but suffers excruciating chronic pain from third-degree burns. I pay her
medical bills, including years of painful skin grafts. At the end of that process she's
finally restored to what she was like before the fire. But surely it would be better not to
put her through that agonizing ordeal in the first place.

STEVE HAYS

"Only actual people can be wronged."

I'd like to revisit that claim:

i) Suppose I'm privy to the counterfactual knowledge that if my parents go on vacation

at a romantic resort, they will conceive another son. Suppose I'm also privy to the fact
that he'd have a happy childhood and a wonderful life.

However, I resent the prospect of having a kid brother. I like being the only child. I like
having my parents undivided affection and attention. I don't want to share my bedroom
with someone else. I don't want a kid brother making demands on me and co-opting my
time. Therefore, I dissuade my parents from taking that vacation, as a result of which
that brother is never conceived.

Isn't there something deeply wrong with that? Not just my selfish attitude, but the fact
that I denied my would-be kid brother the opportunity to exist and have a wonderful life.

ii) Furthermore, in Jerry's "Pharaoh’s Magicians Foiled Again: Reply to Cowan and
Welty," he takes the position that would-be hellbound persons shouldn't be in a position
to prevent other would-be persons from going to heaven. So Walls does seem to think
that would-be saints have a big stake in this issue.
Newtonian fatalism

I'd like to employ another example to illustrate a theodicy I often use. I don't think there's
one silver bullet theodicy. But by combining several, we cover most-every situation.

Before getting to that, I often talk about the problem of evil in fairly clinical terms. That's
because I'm discussing the intellectual problem of evil rather than the emotional
problem of evil. There's really not much you can say about the emotional problem of
evil. That's not generally something that can be handled at a distance. It requires face-
to-face contact. Grieving with those who grieve (Rom 12:15).

It's like a doctor who has to break terrible news to a patient. Tell the patient that he has
terminal cancer or a degenerative illness. Suppose the patient asks why that happened
to him? Well, in some cases, the doctor has an answer. He can say that due to your
family history, you have a genetic predisposition to develop gastric cancer or
Huntington's disease (or whatever). That's the right answer to the question. But, of
course, it doesn't make the diagnosis less any less bleak.

Mind you, even that can sometimes be helpful. The patient knows there's nothing he
could have done to prevent it. Early diagnosis wouldn't help. Change of diet wouldn't
help.

In the nature of the case, an answer to the intellectual problem of evil will be somewhat
dry. That's because we're addressing the philosophical aspect of the problem. I myself
have seen the problem of evil up close and personal. Although I often write about it with
critical detachment, that doesn't mean I'm a brain-in-a-vat. It just means I don't discuss
family tragedies in public.

Now for the illustration. To my knowledge, there are two tropes about fatalism in the
horror genre:

I. DELAYED FATALISM

According to this trope, you can never cheat fate. At best, you can postpone the
inevitable. But sooner or later, fate will find you. It will sneak back around and get you
when you least expect it. You may temporarily outwit your fate, but eventually it will
catch you off-guard.

II. NEWTONIAN FATALISM

According to this trope, you can cheat fate…but there's a catch! You can cheat fate, but
someone else will have to take your place. Fate demands a substitute. In this version, if
someone could elude fate, and there's nothing to compensate his evasion, that throws
the natural order out of whack. In order to maintain cosmic equilibrium, it's life for life
and death for death. You can only escape your fate if that's offset by a fall guy.
This has great dramatic potential in cheesy horror films where you volunteer your best
friend. For some inexplicable reason, he suddenly finds himself in near-miss freak
accidents. One close call after another. Little does he know you gave him up to save
your own skin. And when he finds out…

Although this is fiction, it has a real-world counterpart. In a world that's overwhelmingly

governed by cause and effect, every action has a reaction. So Newton's third law has
implications for the problem of evil.

If you think about it, it's a sobering fact that saving one life may come at the expense of
another life. Someone may die in an accident because of something someone else did
a 100 years earlier. A perfectly innocent action in the past may result in future calamity.
Thankfully, most of us don't know the future. Even we did, it would be petrifying to see
some of the long-term consequences of our benign actions.

Likewise, if your father had married a different woman, or your mother had married a
different man, you wouldn't be here. Someone else would be here instead. And so on
and so forth.

So when we ask, why didn't God do this instead of that, we need to consider how one
thing leads to another. It isn't cost-free. Someone's ill-fortune may pay the price for your
good fortune, or vice versa.
Must God make the best?

This post is a sequel to my previous post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/09/is-world-brute-fact.html

In Describing Gods: An Investigation of Divine Attributes, Graham Oppy expands on the

question of whether God is a free agent. The motivation is to attack theism by posing a
dilemma for the theist, viz. positing tensions between two or more divine attributes. In
addition, there's the question of whether God is still praiseworthy if he cannot do
otherwise.

To his credit, Oppy realizes that the question is ambiguous. The answer depends in part
on whether we define freedom in compatibilist or incompatibilist terms. So he says:

Suppose, first, that motives are causes. In this case, we suppose – at least roughly
– that an agent acts freely just in case she acts on appropriate motives in the
absence of relevant defeating conditions; and that an agent chooses freely just in
case she chooses on appropriate motives in the absence of relevant defeating
conditions. On this conception of freedom it seems unproblematic that God’s
actions and choices will be free: after all, there are no external constraints on
God’s initial actions and choices, and only irrelevant constraints on God’s
subsequent actions and choices; and there are no defeating conditions that could
apply to God’s acquisition of motives; and there can be nothing deviant about the
connection between God’s actions or choices and God’s motives (258).

Clearly, Rowe’s argument depends upon the assumption that an agent acts freely
just in case she causes her actions, and hence upon denial of the competing
assumption that an agent acts freely just in case her motives cause her actions. If
we suppose that an agent acts freely just in case she acts on appropriate motives
in the absence of relevant defeating conditions (concerning acquisition of motives
and external constraint), then we shall have no difficulty with the idea that God
acts freely in creating the best possible universe that God can make, or one
among the best possible universes that God can make, even if it is true that God
could not have had motives other than the ones that God actually possesses. It is
only if we suppose that an agent acts freely just in case she is, but her motives are
not, the non-deviant cause of her action in the absence of relevant internal and
external defeating conditions – and, in particular, if we suppose that it follows
from this view that an agent acts freely just in case that agent could have acted
differently in the very circumstances in which she acted – that we shall suppose
that God cannot act freely in creating the best possible universe that God can
make if it is necessary that God should perform this action (261).
However, even if compatibilism is a satisfactory model for creaturely freedom, it is not a
good satisfactory for divine freedom. Although Calvinism is deterministic, it is typically
defined in terms of conditional necessity rather than absolute necessity. Given
predestination, the outcome cannot be otherwise; however, predestination might be
otherwise, had God chosen to predestine a different outcome. Typically, Calvinism does
grant that God chooses between alternate possibilities. So Calvinism doesn't have that
out.

If, for any possible universe that God can make, there is a better possible universe
that God can make, then, necessarily, there is a ‘cut- off’ on the goodness of
universes that God can make below which God cannot stray, and necessarily, God
creates one of the universes above this ‘cut-off’ (262).

I think there's some truth to that, although I'd put it differently:

Possible worlds range along a continuum from very good to very bad. For reasons I
gave in the previous post, I don't think there's a best possible world. Rather, there are
better worlds and worse worlds. A "collection" of better possible words from which to
choose. A good God will not create a world with no redeeming values. That's the cut off.
A wise and benevolent God isn't free to act contrary to his wisdom and benevolence. It
would be defect if God were free in that respect. A God who was free in that sense
would be imperfect.

[Premise #5] is perhaps not quite so compelling, but there is quite a bit to be said
in defence of it. If there is an infinite collection of actions, any one of which God
can perform if God arbitrarily selects it from the collection, and the best meta-
action that God can perform is to arbitrarily select an action from the collection in
question, and God is essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient and
essentially perfectly good, then how could God fail to arbitrarily select one of the
actions from the collection, and then perform it? (264).

A problem with that premise is Oppy's failure to explain why God's selection must be
arbitrary. Since different possible worlds are different, having alternate histories–like
stories with different plots and characters–there's no reason to assume God's selection
must be indiscriminate.

Either there is a best possible universe that God can make, or there is a collection of best possible
universes that God can make, or for any possible universe that God can make, there is a better
possible universe that God can make. If there is a best possible universe that God can make, then God
must create it, and hence is not free with respect to creating it. If there is a collection of best possible
universes that God can make, then God must create one of them, and hence is not significantly free
with respect to the creation of universes. If, for any universe that God can make, there is a better
possible universe that God can make, then, whatever God does, God is not perfectly good. So either
God is not perfectly good, or God is not significantly free to create a universe other than ours (260-61).

First, can theists reject one or more of the principles that are assumed in the reasoning?…[Premise #1]
seems compelling. If there is a unique best possible action that God can perform, and God is
essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient and essentially perfectly good, then how could God fail
to perform that action? (263).

That's the key assumption. Unfortunately for his argument, Oppy fails to defend his key
assumption. He gives the reader no reason to believe that God must select a better
world rather than a lesser world. He says that seems "compelling". By contrast, I don't
find that assumption even plausible. I don't find it theologically or intuitively plausible.
Indeed, I find it highly implausible.

i) I think the assumption is persuasive to people like Leibniz, Rowe, and Oppy based on
a specious but appealing parallel between divine perfection and his handiwork as a
counterpart to divine perfection. If God is perfect, then whatever God does is perfect. I
suspect that's the unspoken intuition, but it's vitiated by equivocation. Given the
categorical disparity between the Creator and the creature, the world can't be perfect in
the same sense, or even similar sense, that God is perfect. Anything God makes will be
incomparably inferior to God himself. That doesn't make it morally bad or defective. It's
not a flaw for a creature to be creaturely. But there's no parity between the Creator and
the creature.

ii) There's another equivocation. Suppose you have two good possible worlds, but one
is better overall. Nevertheless, it isn't absolutely better. Indeed, in some respects, the
better world is worse than the lesser world. Suppose the lesser world has heavenbound
people who don't exist in the better world. So the better world isn't better for them. If
God creates the better world, he does so at the expense of people who were left out. So
we have to ask, better in relation to whom? And there is no single answer, since that's
relative to the winners and losers, depending on the world in question. There's no
uniform standard of comparison that's applicable to both scenarios, because different
possible worlds have different people with different destinies.

iii) In addition, the whole notion that God must create "the best" is actually inimical to
Christian theology. In Christian theology, God deliberately creates messed up people,
then redeems them. The notion that a good God must create "the best" reminds me of
those utopian science fiction stories about a world populated by "perfect" men and
women. In that world, parents don't make children the old fashioned way. For that would
run the risk of making ordinary or defective kids. Rather, you have reproductive
technologies to ensure the production of kids without congenital disease. Indeed,
genetically enhanced offspring. In this utopian world, no one has birth defects. In fact,
no one is "ordinary". Everyone is a specimen of physical perfection. Smart. Pretty.
Handsome. Athletic. Good at chess. Artistically talented. Everyone has perfect hygiene.
Perfect teeth. Moreover, people are euthanized when they pass their prime, because
imperfection is intolerable in utopia.

The notion that God must create "the best" implicitly operates with a eugenic criterion of
excellence that's antithetical to Christian theology. Moreover, in utopian stories of this
genre, perfection comes at the cost of moral development. You only have to put these
"perfect" people in a survival situation to expose their lack of character. Because
everything comes so easily to them, because they lead an ouchless, painless existence,
they have no altruism. They are selfish spoiled people who can't be inconvenienced by
others. They will leave an injured friend behind because he slows them down. The
notion of personal sacrifice for the benefit of others is alien to their psychological
makeup. It's a perfect world so long as their nonexistent virtue isn't put to the test.

And this isn't just hypothetical. Abortion, "after-birth abortion," euthanasia, and
transhumanism reflect this eugenic notion of "the best". Frankly, you have to wonder
how people like Oppy would perform in a lifeboat situation.
Is the world a brute fact?

Graham Oppy is a cream of the crop atheist philosopher. His book The Best Argument
Against God (Palgrave Pivot, 2013) is a state of the art attack on theism. I'd like to
evaluate one of his arguments.

…the initial causal state might have been other than it actually was–even though
God could not have failed to exist–because God's initial disposition to make other
things could have been other than it actually was (either because God could have
failed to have an initial disposition to create, or because God could have had
initial dispositions to create that differed from the particular initial dispositions to
create that he actually had in the initial state.) (13).

The first piece of data that we introduce is the observation that there is a global
causal structure: the world is a network of causal relations. One of the standard
philosophical questions is, "why is there something rather than nothing?" In the
present context we interpret this question to mean "why is there causal stuff,
rather than complete absence of causal stuff"?

How Theist answers this question depends upon the view that Theist takes of the
scope of possibility. If Theist supposes that every possible world is one in which
God engages in causal activity, then Theist can say: it was impossible for there to
be complete absence of causal stuff. In other words: there is causal stuff because
there had to be causal stuff. If Theist has a more relaxed view of the scope of
possibilities–and, in particular, if Theist supposes that it is possible that God
might have engaged in no causal activity–then Theist will say: there is no reason
why there is causal stuff rather than complete absence of causal stuff–it is a brute
fact that there is causal stuff (23-24).

…there is a serious problem for proponents of cosmological arguments that arise

with the question "from whence came the causal order?" Once we focus our
attention on the global causal order–and not on the question whether the natural
causal order itself has a cause–we see clearly that considerations about the shape
of the global causal order do not differentially support either Theism or
Naturalism (26).

Could God have chosen to make a universe that lasts for less than a second?
Could God have chosen to make a universe that blows apart so rapidly that it is
mostly empty space? If we suppose that the answer to either of these questions is
affirmative, then we cannot also say that God must have all-things-considered
reason to prefer a "life-permitting" universe to one of these "non-life-permitting"
 alternatives. But, if God needn't have all-things-considered reason to prefer a
"life-permitting" universe to one of these "non-life-permitting" alternates, then,
on the assumption that God's choosing is a brute fact, it surely does turn out that
Theist has no better explanation that Naturalist for why it is that relevant cosmic
parameters take the values that they do (29-30).

i) Broadly speaking, I think Oppy is saying both theism and atheism must admit that
reality is ultimately arbitrary. You run out of explanations. You bottom out with brute
factuality. Therefore, theism has no greater explanatory power than atheism–although it
may have less explanatory power, given other considerations. In addition, Oppy is
targeting the fine-tuning argument in particular, as well as cosmological arguments
generally.

ii) I think that much is clear. However, the detailed reasoning by which he attempts to
justify his conclusion is obscure. What makes him think "why is there something rather
than nothing?" is synonymous with "why is there causal stuff, rather than complete
absence of causal stuff"? The phrase "causal stuff" is hardly self-explanatory. Indeed,
that's a good deal less clear than the Leibnizian question.

iii) It's unclear what he means by "every possible world is one in which God engages in
causal activity". Does he mean the metaphysical relationship between God and possible
worlds? If so, a standard theistic explanation is that possible worlds are divine ideas.
God's compete concept of possible world history. Possible worlds are constituted by the
mind of God. By God's infinite imagination. And in that respect, possible worlds are
necessary ideas.

On that construction, possible worlds aren't brute facts. Rather, there's an underlying
explanation for their existence. A dependence-relation. They exist because God exists.

iv) However, the point he seems to be driving at isn't the ontology of possible worlds,
but why some possibilities are reified while other possibilities remain unexemplified. Not
so much, why are there possible worlds, what's the explanation for possible worlds–but
what caused this set of possibilities to be actual rather than another?

That's certainly where Leibniz is coming from. When Leibniz asks, "why is there
something rather than nothing," what he has in mind is more specific. Not just in general
why is there something rather than nothing, but why does this particular something exist
rather than something else. Why does the real world exemplify this set of possibilities
rather than an alternative set of possibilities? What selects for that when other
possibilities were available?

For Leibniz, this implies personal agency. Someone (i.e. God) had to make that
selection. Given the number of possible worlds, God had to choose which possible
world to instantiate.
v) Now, Oppy's contention seems to be that if the real world is contingent rather than
necessary–contingent because it might have been otherwise–then God's choice (if there
is a God) is arbitrary. A brute fact. Like rolling the dice. And in that event, theism has no
more explanatory power than atheism.

But if that's what Oppy has in mind, then his comparison is fallacious. God could have a
reason for preferring one possible world over another because different possible worlds
are…different. Different possible worlds have different histories. God opts for one rather
than another because one world history is more interesting than another. Has greater
values. The way some novels and movies have more interesting characters and more
meaningful plots than other novels and movies.

vi) Perhaps, though, hovering in the background of Oppy's discussion is a point of

tension in Leibniz. For Leibniz, God had sufficient reason to instantiate this world
because this is the best possible world. That's why God chose this world over some
other world. But that seems to be necessitarian. God had to choose the best. His hands
were tied.

But of that's what underlies Oppy's argument, I'd make two observations:

vii) We can deny that there is one best possible world. Different possible worlds have
different histories. Different histories have different goods. No one possible world
combines all goods because no one possible world combines different histories. Each
possible world exemplifies a single history. There is no best possible world, for each
possible world has some goods absent from another possible world. (There may be
some possible words devoid of good, but God wouldn't choose one of those.)

viii) In addition, it isn't clear that God is confronted with a binary choice, where he must
choose just one option to the exclusion of others. In principle, God could create a
multiverse that exemplifies many alternate histories.

Finally, let's consider Oppy's view of what possible worlds are:

I think that the best position for Naturalist to adopt is one according to which
theism is impossible. All possible worlds share an initial segment in the actual
world. All possible worlds evolve according to the same laws as the actual world.
It is impossible that the actual laws could oversee a transition from a purely
natural state to a state in which there are supernatural entities. There have never
been any supernatural entities. So supernatural entities are impossible; and
hence, in particular, gods are impossible. Graham Oppy, "Arguments for
Atheism," S. Bullivant & M. Ruse, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (OUP,
2013), 57-58.
i) I agree with him that "it is impossible that the actual laws could oversee a transition
from a purely natural state to a state in which there are supernatural entities." But, of
course, that only follows from a naturalistic definition of possible worlds.

ii) It's unclear what he means by evolving possible worlds. If, say, we view possible
worlds as abstract objects (or divine ideas), then they are static. Each possible world
has a complete history. Perhaps, though, Oppy is using "evolve" as a synonym for the
succession of events.

It's like shooting a movie. Once you shoot the movie (and edit the movie), the movie is
complete. It has a complete plot. But that allows for plot developments within the movie.
Likewise, viewing the movie takes time.

iii) Why does Oppy think "all possible worlds share an initial segment in the actual
world"? Maybe because, as an atheist, he thinks the physical universe is all there is.
That's the whole of reality. So possibilities must be variations on the physical universe
or actual world.

Mind you, that fails to solve the problem that possible worlds were invoked to explain in
the first place. In the nature of the case, what might have been didn't happen in the
actual world. So what makes counterfactuals true? It can't be a fact in the actual world.
For that alternate course of events never took place in the actual world.

iv) From the standpoint of Christian metaphysics, the actual world is not the standard of
comparison for possible worlds. The actual world is just one possible world among
many. It's is simply distinguished from other possible worlds by actuality. God chooses
to objectify that particular idea in time and space.

Some possible worlds have overlapping histories. Up to a point they have the same
past, then split off in different directions. Other possible worlds have histories that don't
intersect. A different past as well as a different future. So they have nothing in common.
Treating people as means

I'll respond to a statement by a commenter on my blog:

A related objection that you (and others) might want to respond to is the claim
that Christianity (and especially Calvinism) is evil because its God accepts the
principle that "the ends justify the means" and that therefore the Christian God
apparently practices a consequentialist morality. Finally, it seems to me that as
Calvinists we can't evade the conclusion that God purposes to ultimately bless the
elect at the expense of the non-elect/reprobate…How can we Calvinists respond
to the charge made by atheists and Arminians (et al.) that that's immoral for God
to do that?

i) Since many atheists subscribe to consequentialism, it's hard to see how an atheist is
in any position to say Calvinism is evil because it (allegedly) operates with a
consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is compatible with atheism. Those are not
opposing positions. Peter Singer is a secular consequentialist. Indeed, the most
influential secular bioethicist of his generation. Even if an atheist rejects
consequentialism, that's independent of atheism. So that goes to an intramural debate
within atheism.

ii) Consider some standard definitions of consequentialism:

Consequentialism is the view that morality is all about producing the right kinds
of overall consequences [IEP].

Whether an act is morally right depends only on consequences (as opposed to the
circumstances or the intrinsic nature of the act or anything that happens before
the act) [SEP].

A critic has to show that according to Calvinism, God's actions are solely justified by the
consequences. The fact that Calvinism has a teleological component doesn't make that
the only consideration in Reformed theodicy.

iii) The onus is on the critic to defend Kantian deontologism. We can reject the
proposition that the end always justifies the means without taking the polar opposite
position that the end never justifies the means. That's a false dichotomy. Surely we can
stake out a mediating position between those two extremes, viz. some ends justify
some means.

For instance, suppose I'm morbidly obese. That's detrimental to my health, so I go on a

diet. Doesn't the goal of lowering the risk to my health justify dieting as a means to that
end?

iv) Perhaps, though, a critic will say he's not objecting to the principle in general, but to
the specific case of using people as means rather than ends. But even on that
restriction, is there something inherently wrong with using people as means? If I break
my ankle skateboarding and go to the doctor for medical treatment, my aim is to repair
the damage and receive painkillers, and I'm using the physician as a means to that end.
But surely that's not immoral. So the critic will have to present a much narrower
objection.

v) Perhaps his objection is that we should refrain from using people merely as means.
Or we shouldn't use people without their consent.

If so, why should I accept that claim? For instance, even if (ex hypothesi) it's wrong to
use innocent people as a means to an end, what about evil people? What if, by their
evil, they have forfeited their prima facie immunity from harm? For instance, suppose a
terror master uses couriers to send and receive messages. Suppose, unbeknownst to
the courier, a counterterrorist organization plants a remote-control bomb on the courier
so that when he visits the terror master, the bomb is detonated, killing the terrorist and
thereby saving hundreds or thousands of innocent lives. That's using the courier as a
means to an end, but so what? The courier is culpable for working with the notorious
terrorist.

Likewise, what if a country is dominated by two drug cartels. The authorities lack the
wherewithal to defeat the cartels directly. Instead, they stage a hit on one cartel to make
it look like it was attacked by the other cartel. That foments a war between the two
cartels. They destroy each other. Although that's a ruthless tactic, since both cartels are
evil, what's wrong with using them against each other to destroy each other?

vi) Finally, freewill theists like Jerry Walls and William Lane Craig resort to an end-
justifies-the-means theodicy, in which God creates a minority of hellbound humans as a
means of producing a majority of heavenbound humans. The salvation of the many
comes on the backs of the damned. So they're in no position to attack Calvinism for
utilizing a principle which they themselves utilize:

Indeed, God did not have to create and in doing so he clearly thought it was
“worth it.” So if my view entails that God did not do all he could have done to
prevent the damnation of the lost simply because he did not refrain from creating
at all, I plead guilty…Given that God does not control the counterfactuals of
freedom, perhaps there are no actualizable worlds in which he can save all free
 persons. Indeed, if part of our freedom includes the freedom to choose whom to
marry, and with whom to procreate, perhaps we play a significant role in
determining which persons will be born, and thus which persons God can
actualize. In that case, God actualizes the world in which he can save many
people while minimizing the number of the damned. Perhaps God was faced with
the choice between this sort of world and none at all, and he judged it “worth it”
to create. I think this is not merely possible, but plausible.

http://evangelicalarminians.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Walls.-Pharoaohs-
Magicians.-Response-to-Cowan-and-Welty.pdf

Moreover, it is far from obvious that God's being all-loving compels Him to prefer
a world in which no one goes to hell over a world in which some people do.
Suppose that God could create a world in which everyone is freely saved, but
there is only one problem: all such worlds have only one person in them! Does
God's being all-loving compel Him to prefer one of these underpopulated worlds
over a world in which multitudes are saved, even though some people freely go to
hell? I don't think so. God's being all-loving implies that in any world He creates
He desires and strives for the salvation of every person in that world. But people
who would freely reject God's every effort to save them shouldn't be allowed to
have some sort of veto power over what worlds God is free to create. Why should
the joy and the blessedness of those who would freely accept God's salvation be
precluded because of those who would stubbornly and freely reject it? It seems to
me that God's being all-loving would at the very most require Him to create a
world having an optimal balance between saved and lost, a world where as many
as possible freely accept salvation and as few as possible freely reject it.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/can-a-loving-god-send-people-to-hell-the-

craig-bradley-debate#ixzz4FXAqTPTD
Is God exempt?

I'll respond to a statement that a commenter left on my blog:

I'm not sure how to answer the atheist objection that it's special pleading and ad
hoc to appeal to God's special prerogatives (as God) to get out of the dilemma
that the types of evils God allows/permits (and ordains in the case of Calvinism)
would be evil on our part if we allowed or planned them but somehow not evil for
God if He allows or plans/ordains them.

I believe that by faith, but I'm not sure how to rationally defend that to an atheist
(though, it's much easier against an Arminian who accepts Biblical authority).
Especially if I include in the problem of evil the uniquely Calvinistic view of
reprobation (and pre-damnation as some Calvinists make a distinction).

The atheist question is "How does appealing to God's superior ontology and
status as Creator, the most perfect and supreme being and who is allegedly the
standard of goodness exempt Him from being guilty of evil for allowing and
ordaining such things when of all beings in existence He's the most capable of
preventing them?" It's not merely that God is supposed to be guilty, but especially
guilty because God, in His omnipotence, can prevent them from occurring.

And in the case of Calvinism, God doesn't passively permit, but actively ordains
evils and reprobation. As I've been asked, "How can Calvinists claim God is good
with a straight face?" Allegedly, there's cognitive dissonance involved.

Ryan Hedrich already gave a good response. Now for me:

i) It's true that some Calvinists are too quick to invoke divine authority as a solution.
Although that response is true at a certain level, it's not an explanation, and it's only
persuasive for someone who already agrees with the theological framework–yet that's
the very issue in dispute.

In fairness, I've seen Arminians stipulate that God has a morally sufficient reason for
permitting inscrutable evils. But, of course, that appeal has no explanatory value, and
begs the question. Likewise, Marilyn McCord Adams contends that divine and human
goods are ontologically incommensurate. So these maneuvers are hardly confined to
Calvinists.

ii) Suppose you have a fictional character in a story who enjoys foresight regarding the
future. To be precise, he foresees two possible futures: what will transpire if he
intervenes and what will transpire if he doesn't intervene. He often finds himself in
situations where he could prevent some tragedy, yet he refrains from doing so. For
instance, he sees a house fire. He's in a position to rescue one of the children who's
trapped inside. Yet he does nothing. To outside observers, his inaction appears to be
reprehensible.

But here's the dilemma: what if by preventing a short-term evil he causes a long-term
evil or preempts a second-order good? Whenever he intervenes, there are tradeoffs. By
preventing harm to some people, his action has the side-effect of harming others, or
eliminating some resultant good.

What if he knows that the child, had he survived, would have a tenth-generation
descendent who's a serial killer? Or what if he knows that if the child dies, the parents
will procreate another child to take the place of the child they lost in the house fire. If he
intervenes, he deprives the replacement child of existence. So which life takes
precedence? On either scenario, someone loses out. Someone will benefit from his
action or be harmed by his action. There's no timeline that secures all the same goods
while eliminating every evil. In each alternate timeline, some evils are offset by some
goods while some goods come at the cost of some evils.

A fallen world is a network of good and evil. Some evils cause some goods. Some
goods cause some evils. Some goods preempt other goods.

iii) Or suppose you had a video game with artificially intelligent characters. Should the
gamer forestall harm to his characters? Well, that depends. The game has a plot. One
thing leads to another. Some characters come into existence as a result of what other
characters do, including the actions of villainous characters. You might even have the
heroic son of a villainous father. By preventing certain harms to certain characters, the
gamer is robbing some potential characters of existence. Likewise, by eliminating all the
villains, he eliminates some of the heroes, whose existence is contingent on the prior
actions of the bad guys. Some good guys wouldn't exist if some bad guys didn't exist.
Suppose a bad guy kills the boyfriend of a female character. As a result, she marries
someone else, and has a son by him, who turns out to be a hero. (Or has a daughter
who turns out to be a heroine.) In this case, preventing one murder takes another life.
So eliminating some evils must be balanced off the resultant goods that you thereby
eliminate, or alternative evils that take their place.

iv) The fact that humans are related to other humans, whereas God is inhuman, can in
some measure justify differential treatment. To take a few examples, suppose a grown
son commits a heinous murder. He is sentenced to death. It would be cruel to require
his family to carry out the sentence. It's better to delegate execution to a disinterested
third-party.

Likewise, suppose you're given a choice between saving your mother's life and saving
the lives of fifty innocent people. Objectively speaking, it could be argued that saving
fifty innocent lives is better, or more obligatory, than saving one life. But it would be
unbearable for a son to sacrifice his own mother to save fifty strangers. Moreover, it's
not even clear that his duty to the common good overrides his filial duty.

There are situations in which in would be right for an angel or an alien from Alpha
Centuri to do something which would be wrong for a human to do, precisely because
the alien or angel isn't human. He doesn't have the same social obligations or emotional
investments where humans are concerned. He can act with greater moral detachment.

v) Finally, everyone who suffers evil is evil in some degree. Take a mob family.
Mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, siblings, cousins. Some members of
the mob family may be much more evil than others. Still, there's a sense in which none
of them deserves to be immune from harm. And some of them richly deserved to be
harmed.
Flying blind

1. I've commented on this before, but I'd like to attack it from a new angle. A common
plank in the freewill defense is appeal to natural law. In order to make morally
responsible decisions, our choices must have predictable consequences. That requires
the uniformity of nature. Hence, God can't intervene too often without having disruptive
effects.

2. I think there's a grain of truth to this theodicy. And it's hardly exclusive to freewill
theism. Popular caricatures notwithstanding, Calvinism isn't fatalism. In Calvinism, it's
not merely the outcome, but every step leading up to the outcome that's predestined.
Hence, breakfast won't cook itself whether or not you get out of bed.

3. An elementary problem with the freewill theist appeal is that life is often
unpredictable. Much of the time we're flying blind. We can't reliably anticipate the end-
results of our actions. It's just a guessing game. And even when the consequences are
foreseeable, there's a big difference between having a purely intellectual grasp of the
consequences, and having to actually experience the consequences.

Many people, including many Christians, if they only had the benefit of hindsight, would
avoid making some of the decisions they did. And that isn't merely regret over impulsive
decisions. You can make a thoughtful, conscientious decision, with the best available
information at the time, only to have that blow up in your face. You can make a
reasonable, responsible decision, then helplessly watch it turn out for the worst.

4. According to freewill theism, moreover, a large part of what makes the future so
unpredictable is the libertarian freedom of human agents. And the further into the future
you project, the harder it is to extrapolate from present trends.

It's like a game of chess. Good players think ahead, several moves deep. But each
subsequent move in that calculation is exponentially more complex than the previous
move, because each subsequent move is contingent on which of all the possible moves
opened up by the previous move the player will opt for. Each player's next move must
consider multiple chains or nested outcomes of hypothetical moves and countermoves,
branching into infinity.

Nothing could be more destabilizing to predictable consequences than the wave

interference generated by so many competing agents. So many countervailing choices
by other agents, which neutralize your singular choice.

5. It might be objected that my argument commits a category mistake, inasmuch as the

uniformity of nature is categorically different from the libertarian ability of human agents.

But in a couple of respects, that's an arbitrary place to draw the line:

i) If predictable consequences are a necessary condition of praiseworthy or
blameworthy choices, then it's ad hoc to insist on the uniformity of nature, while allowing
human freedom to run riot. For that undermines the principle at least as much as
heightened divine intervention.

ii) Furthermore, the dichotomy isn't nearly that cut-and-dried. Human agents manipulate
natural processes to produce outcomes that would not occur if they let nature run its
course. Examples are endless. Consider just one: the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo
subway. In one sense, that exploited the laws of nature to produce a chemical weapon.
However, that combined natural elements in unnatural ways.

In sum, the freewill defense appeals to two divergent principles. They tug in opposing
directions.
Changing trains

I'd like to approach the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a different perspective
than is usually considered. When people denounce a past event, they frequently treat
the incident and its immediate aftermath as a self-contained event. They act as though
you could change that particular event, but leave pretty much everything else in place.

Yet they themselves may be the byproduct of the very event they denounce. They write
about the past from the standpoint of the present. They exist in the present. Yet the
present is the product of the past. There's a certain paradox when we castigate a past
event, for in some cases, by wishing it away, we'd be wishing ourselves away. Were it
not for that event, we might not even be here to stand in judgment of that event.

The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had wide-ranging effects on subsequent history.
Had that not happened, the future would have turned out very differently.

It's like taking a long train ride, where you must repeatedly switch trains to arrive at your
distant destination. There are so many opportunities to miss connections. And if you
miss one train, that throws your entire itinerary for a loop.

If Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn't been bombed, the railway tracks leading into the
future would have gone in a different direction. Even if you could begin your journey
from the same point, the original tracks would run out in the middle of nowhere. A
deserted train station. The new future would bypass the old future.

The new past wouldn't lead up to the old future, containing the critics of the reviled past
event. The future in which they exist would be replaced by a different timeline with
different descendants.

Dropping the metaphor, consider how we come to be. If a couple have conjugal
relations Monday night instead of Sunday night, and if they conceive, it will be a
different person. Or if they have relations 5 minutes earlier or five minutes later, a
different sperm may win the race to fertilize the ovum. Not to mention the chain of
events that converge on a particular man meeting a particular women. And their
parents. And their grandparents. So many opportunities to miss connections. So many
opportunities to take a different train. Even small changes in the past can ramify into
huge changes in the future. An unrecognizable future.

Now, I'm not saying this to justify the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If that's
justifiable, it will demand a different argument. What I'm saying is equally applicable to
large-scale atrocities. So I'm not saying this to retroactively sanctify whatever happens.

But it's good to be mindful of how the invasive root system of historical causation means
you can't weed out past evils without uprooting the entire garden. There are always
tradeoffs. Winners and losers.
If we hadn't bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that would be better for the victims. But
altering the course of history would deprive others.
Lord of the Flies

1. Lord of the Flies is a classic novel about some civilized kids stranded on a desert
island. In the absence of adult supervision, social life degenerates into savagery. The
treatment is the antithesis of nostalgic novels about boys separated from civilization like
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The story is fictional, but realistic. Many readers find that a plausible scenario of what
would happen in that situation.

The novel has lost some of its original shock value in an age when kids the same age
shoot each other on the mean streets of the hood.

Tracing the literary allusions in a fictional writer can be tricky because the creative
process has both conscious and unconscious dynamics. There's what the author
intends, and then there's what may subliminally inform his work. So some of the
connections I suggest may be coincidental. But it makes it more interesting to read with
those connections in mind (see below).

The novel is, in some measure, a retailing of paradise lost. "Lord of the Flies"
(Beelzebub) is a traditional, derogatory epithet for Satan. The "beast from the water"
evokes Rev 13, while the "snake-thing" evokes Gen 3, Rev 12 & 20. The "beast from
the air" might evoke the outcast, downcast dragon or serpent in Rev 12. In Revelation,
the Beast is a Satanic surrogate. An Antichrist figure.

In addition, you have the possession motif. The beast "in us". Idolatry, blood sacrifice,
human sacrifice, and a devil's pact with Lord of the Flies (i.e. pig head).

Simon evokes St. Peter. Simon is a seer. A visionary–like St. Peter (Acts 10) The
closest thing to a Christian character in the novel. And like St. Peter (Jn 21), he is
martyred.

By contrast, Piggy is the rationalist. Some literary critics classify him as a secular
humanist. But he's literally a near-sighted rationalist. And figuratively, his rationalism
blinds him to the enveloping evil. Piggy's nickname is ironic because his alter-ego is the
diabolical pig head which some of the boys worship.

As Golding explains in an interview, the boys are "innocent" in the sense that they are
ignorant of their own natures. As a result, they have little resistance to evil. They
eventually come to understand themselves, but that's "tragic knowledge".

The topical island is Edenic. The arrival of the boys interjects a seminal evil into this
Edenic setting. The lack of external restraint results in moral freefall. However, the story
also has Bacchanalian elements. Golding was a fan of Euripides. That's compatible with
a Christian interpretation, inasmuch as pagan nihilism is the opposite of Christian grace.
The violence on the island is, of course, a microcosm of world war. Golding's novel was
heavily influenced by his experience in WWII.

2. Freewill theists like Jerry Walls attack the "harsh" God of Calvinism, which they
contrast with the loving, omnibenevolent God of freewill theism. A God who acts in the
best interest of each and every human being.

Yet in reality, our world looks far more like Lord of the Flies. Humans marooned on
planet earth, left to their own devices. No significant outside intervention. This is our
desert island. Sure doesn't look like the kind of world that the theology of Jerry Walls et
al. predicts for. Indeed, Walls is very aware of the disconnect between his utopian
narrative and the dystopian reality, which is why, like John Hick, he stipulates an
eschatological payoff.

The comparison is accentuated by freewill theists who subscribe to theistic evolution. In

that event, there was no historic fall from an original state of rectitude. Rather, our "sins"
are really animal instincts. We're direct descendants of animals that had to tough it out
in sub-Saharan Africa, long ago. The law of the jungle rather than the law of God was
our ordinance. That's even more like Lord of the Flies. They revert to state of nature
because they really are little beasts.

3. Now, there are various ways a freewill theist might respond to the comparison:

i) He might agree. He might say libertarian freedom results in a Lord of the Flies world.
In order for humans to have morally significant freedom, God can only interfere on rare
occasion. But there are problems with that response:

ii) Freewill theists don't typically use Lord of the Flies as an illustration to showcase
God's omnibenevolence. Jerry Walls, for one, alleges that Calvinists resorting to
deceptive rhetoric to conceal the malevolent character of Calvinism. Yet if freewill
theism predicts for a world like Lord of the Flies, then we could rightly accuse freewill
theists like Jerry Walls of using deceptive rhetoric to conceal the malevolent character
of freewill theism.

There's a generally deistic quality to that scenario. Most of the time, we're on our own.
We must fend for ourselves. God doesn't protect the faithful from harm.

That's exacerbated by the fact that freewill theists like Walls are fond of depicting
humans as immature kids in relation to God. In attacking Calvinism, they ask how a
good parent could treat their young kids that way.

But, of course, we could say the same thing about Lord of the Flies as an allegory for
freewill theism. How could a loving, omnibenevolent parent drop their kids into that
survival situation. Leave them unattended. Isn't that the definition of child neglect? Is the
God of freewill theism a negligent parent?
2. Conversely, a freewill theist might say the comparison is misleading. God is not
detached. Consider his redemptive acts in Scripture. Consider answered prayer or
modern miracles.

There are, however, problems with that response:

i) It fails to distinguish freewill theism from Calvinism. Presumably, a freewill theist

doesn't suppose God answers the prayers of freewill theists at a higher rate than
Calvinists (or Thomists or Augustinians). Calvinists have as much or little experience of
divine intervention as freewill theists.

Likewise, Reformed theology affirms Biblical miracles and makes allowance for modern
miracles, answered prayer, special providence.

ii) The freewill defense is predicated on minimal divine intervention. That's inconsistent
with stressing God's regular intercession in answer to prayer, miraculous deliverance
from terrible ordeals, &c.

iii) Moreover, this involves, not just Scripture, but a theological interpretation of
Scripture, and whether that interpretation is borne out in reality. What's the empirical
evidence that God is omnibenevolent? What's the empirical evidence that God is acting
in the best interests of each and every person? Does the state of the world correspond
to that claim? Or does reality clash with that theological expectation?

iv) One problem is the tension in freewill theism between divine love and human
freedom. A loving parent will step in to shield his child from harm, even if that infringes
on the child's freedom.

3. A freewill theist might attempt a tu quoque argument. Is the Calvinists saying we're in
a Lord of the Flies kind of world? Does he think God takes such a hands-off approach to
human interactions? Where we're left to our wisdom and resources?

i) However, a difficulty with that maneuver is that even assuming that's a problem for
Calvinism, drawing a parallel doesn't cease to make it a problem for freewill theism. Is
freewill theism defensible on its own grounds?

ii) If, moreover, Calvinism has an admittedly "harsher" view of providence, then that
scenario is more consistent with Calvinism than freewill theism.
Evil dreams

Peter van Inwagen is a premier freewill theist. I'm going to quote and comment on some
of his statements regarding the problem of evil.

But an omnipotent and omniscient creator could be called to moral account for
creating a world in which there was even one horror. And the reason is obvious:
that horror could have been "left out" of creation without the sacrifice of any
great good or the permitting of some even greater horror. And leaving it out is
just what a morally perfect being would do: such good things as might depend
causally on the horror could–given the being's omnipotence and omniscience–be
secured by (if the word is not morally offensive in this context) more "economical"
means. The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 2006), 96.

i) One problem is the distinction between a good and a "great" good. What makes
something a great good? "Great" for whom?

For instance, suppose a couple have a child who dies of leukemia. As a result, they
have another child to compensate for the loss of the child who died. Is the replacement
child a great good? Well, it's great for the replacement child. It gives him an opportunity
to exist–an opportunity that would not otherwise obtain apart from the tragic death of his
older sibling.

ii) When Inwagen says such good things might be secured by more economical means,
that fails to distinguish between particular goods and generic goods. Even if certain
kinds of goods could be secured by more economical means (which is far from evident),
it doesn't follow that particular goods could be secured by more economic means. Take
my example of the replacement child. If you leave out the horror of the sibling that died,
you do sacrifice the replacement child.

iii) Invoking omnipotence is not a solution, for omnipotence makes feasible the
realization of alternate scenarios. But that involves sacrificing one possible outcome for
another. God can do either one, but he can't instantiate both alternatives in the same
timeline.

A defense cannot simply take the form of a story about how God brings some
great good out of the evils of the word, a good that outweighs those evils. At the
very least, a defense will have to include the proposition that God was unable to
bring about the greater good without allowing the evils we observe (or some
other evils as bad or worse). Ibid. 68.
One problem with this statement is framing the justification in terms of bringing about a
"greater" good, a good that "outweighs" those evils. But why is that a necessary
condition? What about an alternate good? A good that would not obtain apart from
attendant evil? Why is that insufficient justification?

To recur to my previous example, suppose the replacement child doesn't "outweigh" the
evil of his sibling's premature death. But why does the justification for his existence
depend on that condition?

If there were no evil, no one would appreciate–perhaps no one would even be

aware of–the goodness of the things that are good. You know the idea: you never
really appreciate health till you've been ill, you never really understand how great
and beautiful a thing friendship is till you've known adversity and known what it
is to have friends who stick by you through thick and thin–and so on. Now the
obvious criticism of this defense is so immediately obvious that it tends to mask
the point that led me to raise it. The immediately obvious criticism is that this
defense may be capable of accounting for a certain amount of, for example,
physical pain, but it certainly doesn't account for the degree and duration of the
pain that many people are subject to–and it doesn't account for the fact that
many of the people who experience horrible physical pain do not seem to be
granted any subsequent goods to appreciate. If, for example, the final six months
of the life of a man dying of cancer are one continuous chapter of excruciating
pain, the "appreciation" defense (so to call it) can hardly be said to provide a
plausible account of why God would allow someone's life to end this way. Ibid.
69.

i) Up to a point, that's a valid criticism. But it contains some dubious assumptions:

ii) The "appreciation" defense may fail as a stand-alone theodicy. It may, however,
make a distinctive contribution to an overall theodicy. There needn't be one uniform
reason for every kind of evil.

iii) What if evil is not intended to benefit everyone who suffers evil?

iv) Apropos (iii), the criticism is shortsighted. What if the beneficiary is not the person
who suffers, but someone else? In the chain of events, someone further down the line
may be the beneficiary. Changing a variable has a domino effect. Every altered variable
has a different domino effect. It's not as if one variable can be changed, while leaving
everything else in place. Removing the evil removes good side-effects. It changes how
all the dominos fall thereafter–for good and ill alike.
v) His example presumes that a person has to let the cancer take its course. But that's
subject to debate.

An omnipotent being would certainly be able to provide the knowledge of evil

that human beings in fact acquire by bitter experience of real events in some
other way. An omnipotent being could, for example, so arrange matters that at a
certain point in each persons's life-for a few years during his adolescence, say–
that person have very vivid and absolutely convincing nightmares in which he is a
prisoner in a concentration camp or dies of some horrible disease or watches his
loved ones being raped and murdered by soldiers bent on ethnic cleansing…It
seems clear that a world in which horrible things occurred only in nightmares
would be better than a world in which the same horrible things occurred in
reality… Ibid. 69.

I'm afraid that really isn't clear.

i) There's a sense in which it would be better for your loved ones if they don't actually
suffer. If these are merely dream characters.

ii) But would it be better for the dreamer if he's the one who suffers from a horrible
disease? Sure, it's only a dream, it isn't real, but since the experience is
phenomenologically indistinguishable from reality ("very vivid and absolutely
convincing"), how is that clearly better? If it happens to you, and you can't tell the
difference, how is that clearly better? Indeed, that would be a very effective form of
torture. In reality, you can only die once, however horribly, but in recurring nightmare,
that's indefinitely repeatable.

iii) If, conversely, we know it was just a bad dream once we awaken, then we don't take
it all that seriously. It's like a video game about combat. An immersive simulation.
Because no one is really harmed, it lacks moral weight. It's safe fun.

iv) Inwagen is sketching a scenario in which horrific evil only happens–or seems to
happen–in very vivid nightmares. Our waking state is Edenic.

But wouldn't nightmares like that raise doubts about God's benevolence? If these
horrors don't happen in the world I inhabit, then where do they come from? Normally,
we dream about things that happen in the world we inhabit. If that's not the case, then
what's the source of the nightmares? Do they happen in another world? Am I tapping
into another world when I dream? Is the fact that I have these nightmares a premonition
of what awaits me in the next world? Inwagen's alternative shifts the problem.
v) It isn't clear, moreover, how he can confine moral evil to nightmares. Doesn't that say
something about the imagination of the dreamer? How can his imagination be haunted
by moral evil without that spilling over into his waking state?

Repeatedly, Inwagen’s analysis of the problem of evil, and his objections to proposed
solutions, suffer from compartmentalization. The implications of a hypothetical scenario
aren't that self-contained.
Are good and evil primary colors or secondary colors?

Here's a sequel to my post in Inwagen:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/04/evil-dreams.html

Among other things, he says:

But an omnipotent and omniscient creator could be called to moral account for
creating a world in which there was even one horror. And the reason is obvious:
that horror could have been "left out" of creation without the sacrifice of any
great good or the permitting of some even greater horror. And leaving it out is
just what a morally perfect being would do: such good things as might depend
causally on the horror could–given the being's omnipotence and omniscience–be
secured by (if the word is not morally offensive in this context) more "economical"
means. The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 2006), 96.

A defense cannot simply take the form of a story about how God brings some
great good out of the evils of the word, a good that outweighs those evils. At the
very least, a defense will have to include the proposition that God was unable to
bring about the greater good without allowing the evils we observer (or some
other evils as bad or worse). Ibid. 68.

Inwagen uses some standard categories: greater good, greater evil, countervailing
goods (i.e. goods that "outweigh" evils). He also talks about the possibility of particular
evils that could have been "left out" without sacrificing any great good or permitting an
even greater evil.

One problem with that analysis is his failure to define his terms. What makes something
a greater good or greater evil? How is that identified?

Does he mean it in the collective sense of what is best overall? Is it like the common
good (i.e. what's good for the most people)? Is it the most goods with the fewest evils?

This raises the question of how we count goods and evils. Are goods and evils discrete
items? Can you put them in parallel columns to see that one possible world is better or
worse than another?

Seems to me that in a fallen world, good and evil bleed into each other. For instance,
there are virtuous parents of vicious kids and vicious parents of virtuous kids. So how
do we separate that out in order to tabulate the respective goods and evils? Do they
count as two distinct events or one seamless cause-and-effect event?
Let's take a more complex example. Suppose you have a teenager who's a good
intramural athlete. When he goes to the shopping center, he always parks in front of the
store, if there's an available slot, to save himself a few extra steps. That means he has
no compunction about taking a disabled parking slot. He doesn't care about elderly
customers with walkers or customers in wheelchairs who might actually need that slot.
He's in a hurry, and he can't be bothered to walk a few extra yards from the parking lot
to the store.

He has no empathy for the disabled. Indeed, as a natural athlete, he has a certain
disdain for the disabled. He's proud of his body. Proud of his athletic prowess. He
doesn't relate to the disabled. He's impatient with the disabled. They get in the way.
They slow him down. He may even think they'd be better off euthanized.

Until a day when he's crossing the street. He is texting. The driver is texting. He doesn't
see the approaching car. The driver doesn't see the pedestrian.

He wakes up in a hospital with spinal chord injury. No more intramural sports. He will be
in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Of course, now he sees the world from the other side of the wheelchair. Now he resents
able-bodied shoppers who take the disabled parking slot. He sees himself, when he
was the same way.

His new existence is extremely frustrating. And he becomes socially isolated, because
his buddies and girlfriend tune him out of their lives, now that he can't keep up with
them. Having him tag along is inconvenient. They'd have to go at his pace. That's no
fun.

But there's another side to this. He becomes the caring, considerate, observant person
he never used to be. He becomes a good listener. He develops an empathy he never
had before, because he is forced to identify with the weak and lonely. He hates it, but it
makes him a better person.

How do we count that? In one sense, it's better to be able-bodied than disabled. His
physical disability is a natural evil. Yet it becomes the source of moral good. A soul-
making virtue. A fallen world is a blended world of good and evil. A world in which the
boundaries of good and evil are blurry.

You can arrange possible worlds along a spectrum of good and evil. You can
distinguish possible worlds at the extremes of good and evil, where a greater good or
greater evil occupy the farther ends of the spectrum. But closer to the middle, it's harder
to say what's better or worse overall, because the goods and evils bleed into one
another in ways that aren't easily separable. There are centers of good and centers of
evil, but the circumference is blended. Primary colors of good and evil inside secondary
colors where good and evil mix.
Enter at your own risk

Peter van Inwagen is a leading freewill theist. In his book on The Problem of Evil
(Oxford, 2006), he presents a theistic evolutionary version of original sin (85ff.). I'll quote
some statements, then comment on them:

Natural evil, according to the expanded free-will defense, is a special case of evil
that is caused by the abuse of free will; the fact that humans are subject to
destruction by earthquakes is a consequence of an aboriginal abuse of freewill
(90).

As regards physical suffering and untimely death, rebelling against God is like
disregarding a clearly worded notice, climbing a fence, and wandering about in a
mine field. If someone does that, it's very close to a dead certainty that sooner or
later something very bad will happen to him. But whether it's sooner or later,
when and where it happens, may well be a matter of chance. In separating
ourselves from God, we have become, as I said, the playthings of chance (103).

i) I think there's an element of truth to this. Although I think some natural evils are
second-order consequences of sin, I don't attribute all natural evils to the Fall. Rather, I
think the Fall removes the providential protection from natural evils that humans would
otherwise enjoy.

ii) As a Calvinist, I don't think anything happens by chance. That said, Inwagen's
position is problematic on freewill theist grounds:

iii) Regarding the metaphor of someone who disregards a warning sign, the problem
with that comparison is that it's too individualistic. If, indeed, everyone suffered because
each of them disregarded the warning sign, then Inwagen's illustration would be apt.
However, Inwagen is moving within a framework where some humans innocently suffer
as a result of what other humans did wrong. Everyone doesn't climb over the fence.
Rather, many humans are born within the fenced-in minefield. It's not about getting in,
but getting out.

And the notion of collective punishment is problematic for freewill theism. How is it fair
to suffer for the misdeeds of someone else? I should only suffer the consequences of
my own free choices. I should not be made to suffer the consequences of someone
else's misguided decisions.

Put another way, if a freewill theist grants the justice of collective punishment, then it's
much harder to see how he can attack Calvinism.
iv) It also depends on who climbs over the fence. If an inquisitive 10-year-old boy climbs
scales the fence, we don't normally think he deserves whatever he gets. We make
every effort to rescue him before he steps on a land mine. So are we comparing the
fence-jumper to an adult or a child?

In my experience, freewill theists typically compare humans to children in relation to

God.

v) Finally, it's arguable that disclaimers like "use or enter at your own risk" aren't
necessarily exculpatory. If an adult disregards the warning, he's responsible for his own
actions. That, however, doesn't mean the person who created the hazard is therefore off
the hook.

Take human hunting. Suppose an enterprising businessman creates a hunting range in

which men pay to hunt one another. Say these are big game hunters who are bored
with hunting animals. That's no longer a challenge. They wish to take it to the next level.
The fact that it's voluntary hardly exonerates the businessman of wrongdoing.
Last plane out of Saigon

Lotharson: And what about four-point Calvinists rejecting limited atonement?

Jerry Walls: That is only because it is rather embarrassing to admit you don’t
really believe “God so loved the (whole) world” and gave his Son for all. But that
is only a feeble attempt to mask the hard reality that the Calvinist God does not
truly love all persons.

Such claims make shambles of the claim that God is love.

Jerry Walls: Calvinists are skillful at employing the rhetoric of love and most
people do not really understand what Calvinists are saying. So Calvinism
maintains credibility by way of misleading rhetoric about the love of God that
their theology does not really support.

Jerry Walls: The idea of unconditional election to salvation and damnation is

morally abhorrent, and applying it to your own children only makes it more
graphic. But that is Calvinist piety at its best. You sacrifice not only your child but
also your moral intuitions in the name of worshiping a God whose “goodness” is
utterly at odds with the normal meaning of that term.

https://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/bound-to-eternally-suffer-an-interview-
with-philosopher-jerry-walls/

This is typical of what Walls has said in many books, articles, and live presentations.
What's arresting about Walls is his officious self-confidence in his indubitable moral
intuitions. He acts as though it's a self-evident truth that God must love everyone. To
deny that God loves everyone is morally abhorrent. Unless God loves everybody, God's
goodness is "utterly at odds" with the "normal" meaning of the term. Jerry presumes
that, deep down, every person shares his moral intuitions. You can only disagree with
Walls on pain of sacrificing your moral intuitions.

My immediate point is not to debate the factual question of whether God does or doesn't
love everyone. I'm just dealing with Jerry's authoritarian appeal to his unquestioned
moral intuitions. It's a kind of natural theology.

Part of the superficial appeal lies in resorting to faceless abstractions or one-sided

examples. But let's put some faces on his moral intuitions:
 In 1978, Singleton raped 15-year-old Mary Vincent, cut off her forearms and left
her naked in a ditch near Modesto to die.

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jan/01/local/me-19534

According to Walls, to deny that God must love Lawrence Singleton violates our moral
intuitions. It would be morally abhorrent for God not to love the man who raped an
adolescent girl, chopped off her arms, and left her for dead in a ditch. I wonder if Mary
Vincent shares his moral intuitions.

A 9-year-old girl [Jessica Lunsford] was raped, bound and buried alive, kneeling
and clutching a purple stuffed dolphin.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/04/20/prosecutors-lunsford-raped-buried-alive.html

According to Walls, unless God loves John Evander Couey, God's goodness is "utterly
at odds" with the "normal" meaning of the term. If we could interview the dead 9-year-
old victim whom he raped and buried alive, I wonder if she'd share his moral intuitions.

Mengele promoted medical experimentation on inmates, especially dwarfs and

twins. He is said to have supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children
were sewn together to create Siamese twins; the hands of the children became
badly infected where the veins had been resected. (Snyder, Louis. Encyclopedia of
the Third Reich Marlowe & Co., 1997.)

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/auschwitz_faq_16.html

According to Walls, it would be morally abhorrent for God not to love Josef Mengele.
You can only deny God's universal love for men like Mengele by sacrificing your moral
intuitions. I wonder if the Gypsy twins who were the guinea pigs in Mengele's
experimentation would resonant with Jerry's moral intuitions. Unfortunately, they're
unavailable for comment.

Victims were reportedly skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire,
impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into
furnaces or tanks of boiling water, and rolled around naked in internally nail-
studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the
 winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly
beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off.
The Chinese Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron
tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat into the other end which was
then closed off with wire netting.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Cheka

According to Walls, God isn't good in any recognizable sense unless he loves the men
who perpetrated these atrocities. But if you were to interview the victims, would they
share Jerry's moral intuitions?

It's striking how Walls arrogates to himself the right to speak on behalf of everyone
else's moral intuitions. Although I've read and seen lots of his material, I don't recall
Jerry ever making a systematic effort–or any effort at all–to investigate the viewpoint of
people who were on the receiving end of hideous evils. He talks like a man who's lived a
charmed life. A sheltered life.

Let's compare Jerry's presentation of freewill theism with another freewill theist:

If the story is true, much of the evil in the world is due to chance…It could well
happen that a woman was raped and murdered only because she yielded to a
sudden impulse to pull over to the side of the road and consult a map. There may
be, quite literally, no more to say than that in response to the question, "Why
her?".

According to the story I have told, there is generally no explanation of why this
evil happened to that person…It means being the playthings of chance. It means
living in a world in which innocent children die horribly, and it means something
worse than that: it means living in a world in which innocent children die horribly
for no reason at all. It means living in a world in which the wicked,through sheer
luck, often prosper.

But whether a particular horror is connected with human choices or not, it is

evident, at least in many cases, that God could have prevented the horror without
sacrificing any great good or allowing some even greater horror.

No appeal to considerations in any way involving human free will or future

benefits to human beings can possibly be relevant to the problem with which this
case [Auschwitz] confronts.
 There are many horrors, vastly many, from which no discernible good results–and
certainly no good, discernible or not, that an omnipotent being couldn't have
achieved without the horror; in fact, without any suffering at all. Here is a true
story. A man came upon a young woman in an isolated place. He overpowered
her, chopped off her arms at the elbows with an axe, raped her, and left her to
die. Somehow she managed to drag herself on the stumps of her arms to the side
of the road, where she was discovered. She lived, but she experienced
indescribably suffering, and although she is alive, she must live the rest of her life
without arms and with the memory of what she had been forced to endure. No
discernible good came of this, and it is wholly unreasonable to believe that any
good could have come of it that an omnipotent being couldn't have achieved
without employing the raped and mutilated woman's horrible suffering as a
means to it.

If the Mutilation had not occurred, if it had been, so to speak, left out of the
world, the world would be no worse than it is. (It would seem, in fact, that the
world would be significantly better if the Mutilation had been left out of it…

If the expanded freewill defense is a true story, God has made a choice about
where to draw the line, the line between the actual horrors of history, the horrors
that are real, and the horrors that are mere averted possibilities, might-have-
beens. And the Mutilation falls on the "actual horrors of history" side of the line.
And this fact shows that the line is an arbitrary one; for if he had drawn it so as to
exclude the Mutilation from reality (and had excluded no other horror from
reality), he would have lost no good thereby and he would have allowed no
greater even. He had no reason for drawing the line where he did.

In the bright world of good sense, this is why God did not prevent the Mutilation–
insofar as there is a "why". He had to draw an arbitrary line, and he drew it. And
that's all there is to be said. P. van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 2006),
89,95,97,105,108.

Inwagen doesn't indulge in Jerry's invidious comparisons between Calvinism and

freewill theism. Inwagen doesn't adopt the unctuous tone of moral superiority that Walls
constantly resorts to.

But Inwagen's presentation puts freewill theism in a very different light than Walls. Why
didn't the freewill theist God intervene to prevent Mengele from sewing the Gypsy kids
together to create Siamese twins? Because God had to draw an arbitrary line, and they
happen to fall on the wrong side of the line. Don't take it personally! It's just the luck of
the draw!
It reminds me of when we evacuated the US embassy in Saigon. Many South
Vietnamese were utterly desperate to escape. They were terrified of what awaited them
when the Viet Cong took over. But there were only so many helicopters. Only so many
seats.

If 9-year-old Jessica Lundsford is raped and buried alive, that's because all the seats
were taken. Tough luck, kid!

The freewill theist God could have added more seats, but the number of seats is
arbitrary, so the cutoff between that extra seat which would have saved Jessica
Lundsford or Mary Vincent or the Gypsy twins is random. A few are rescued, but the
rest of left behind–to be scalped, skinned alive, burned alive, boiled alive, buried alive,
eaten alive, and so forth, for no reason at all. God had no reason for drawing the line
where he did, but hey–he still loves you! He's so good, compared to that awful Calvinist
God.

Although I disagree with Inwagen's theodicy, my intent is not to come down hard on his
position. He can only play the hand he was dealt, and the problem of evil is a tough
hand for any Christian to play. (The problem is much worse for atheists.) I'm simply
drawing attention to the contrast between Jerry's rose-tinted commercial for freewill
theism, and the far starker, bleaker, franker version of Inwagen. Walls is always
defaming Calvinists about our "deceptive" rhetoric, but he's hardly forthcoming in how
he packages freewill theism.
The real problem of evil

It's funny how atheist philosophers are unconsciously conditioned by a particular way of
viewing issues. Because the problem of evil is conventionally framed in certain terms,
atheist philosophers are stuck in that rut. They just keep moving in the same groove.

I've already noted this in reference to the God who's targeted by the argument from evil.
Even though atheist philosophers are usually training their guns on Christianity, albeit
tacitly, they don't formulate the argument of evil in terms of Yahweh. Instead, it's much
more generic.

Part of the reason is that some (or many) atheist philosophers don't take the Bible as
their frame of reference–despite the fact that they are usually targeting Christianity.

Now let's consider another example. To my knowledge, the argument from evil is
always formulated in general terms. Human suffering generally, or even animal
suffering.

It's striking to contrast that orientation with the viewpoint of Scripture. In Scripture, the
problem of suffering isn't about human suffering in general–much less animal suffering–
but the suffering of God's people in particular. The issue of why God doesn't intercede
more often to deliver his people from suffering. From a Biblical perspective, that's the
real problem of evil.

To the extent that Scripture indicates a tension between God and suffering, it's not in
reference to suffering in general. Moreover, it's not about God's existence, but God's
benevolence. Atheists fail to engage the argument where Scripture engages the
argument. If you wish to attack Christian theism, you must assume the viewpoint of
Scripture for the sake of argument.

Of course, the very fact that Scripture is filled with believers who complain to God about
their dereliction goes to show that while the plight of believers may seem inexplicable, it
is not unexpected. In that practical sense, it's consistent with God's existence, even if
that's not an explanation.

The tension is exacerbated by certain divine assurances that seem to promise more
than they deliver, viz. unqualified prayer promises.

Is there any way to relieve the tension? A few suggestions:

i) The soul-making theodicy has something to offer. That's not a complete answer, but it
makes a contribution. For instance, suppose you have two high school buddies who go
hiking. One of them sprains his ankle. Of course, that will slow them way down.
Because we're bipedal creatures, we can barely walk with a sprained ankle. That one
injury almost immobilizes a man.
Suppose there's a storm in the forecast. If they are overtaken by the storm, there's the
risk of death by exposure. If the uninjured hiker leaves his companion behind, he can
make it to shelter in time. But that will mean leaving his companion to fend for himself.

If the injured hiker knew that his buddy was going to abandon him in a pinch, they'd
never be friends in the first place. If he had a premonition that this was going happen if
they went hiking that day, he'd never look at his classmate the same way. The crisis
reveals something that was always missing, but only came to the fore when their
friendship was put to the test.

Conversely, suppose his buddy hazards his own prospects for survival by remaining
with his injured companion. That, too, taps into something hidden. Something only a
crisis brings out into the open.

ii) When believers and unbelievers suffer alike, when they experience the same kinds of
afflictions, how believers cope with suffering can be a witness to the world. And that's a
biblical theme. Unless believers and unbelievers were in comparable situations, it would
not be possible to compare and contrast how they deal with the same challenges.

iii) You also have the principle of eschatological compensations, viz. "For I consider that
the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be
revealed to us" (Rom 8:18); "For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an
eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Cor 4:17).

In some measure, promises of divine deliverance are ultimately about what's ultimate.
Not about deliverance in this life, but deliverance from this life.
Where is God?

I recently did two posts explaining how special providence is consistent with the
apparent randomness of the distribution pattern. Here's one that links to the other post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/03/luck-of-draw.html

i) However, an unbeliever might raise the following objection: even if special providence
is consistent with apparent randomness, that's no reason to believe in special
providence. Their abstract mutual consistency isn't evidence for special providence.
Indeed, that's is just a face-saving distinction, for even if God did not exist, that would be
consistent with apparent randomness. That's equally consonant with God's existence or
nonexistence alike.

Put another way, to say it's consistent fails to give a reason for apparent randomness.
Why would God make the pattern so elusive? What would motivate God to be so
inevident? For every apparent answer to prayer, there are so many unanswered
prayers. For every divine judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, there's countless cases of
divine inaction. For every Ananias and Sapphira dropping dead, you have every so
many wrongdoers who prosper.

To use my own example, given the gambler, he has a reason to conceal his telepathy,
but what makes that a given? How is that analogous to God?

ii) To that I'd say two things: suppose God routinely answered prayer. Suppose
immediate retribution was the norm.

Crooks don't ordinarily commit a crime in full view of the police. They wait until the coast
is clear. Likewise, smart crooks evade security cameras. They may wear a mask to
disguise their identity.

By the same token, you have people who'd commit atrocities if they thought they could
get away with it. They have no conscience. They only thing that deters them is fear of
reprisal.

Suppose you have a scrawny high school student who's bullied by a larger boy. A
football player sees that, and takes the scrawny kid under his wing. He warns the bully
to leave the kid alone. The kid is now under his protection. The football player is bigger,
tougher, stronger than the bully, so the bully fears the football player. Not somebody he
wants to tangle with.

Problem is, that only deters him from picking on the scrawny student when he's in the
company of the football player. But when he's by himself, he once again becomes an
easy target. And the bully threatens him (or his relatives) with dire bodily harm if he
reports him to the football player.
If special providence was more consistent, many people would be more God-fearing,
but for the wrong reason. They'd behave better, but they wouldn't be better. Outer
conformity absent inner conviction. The moment they thought they could do wrong with
impunity, they'd instantly revert.

iii) In addition, the question of why God doesn't make himself more evident views the
issue through the wrong end of the telescope. For the real issue is qualitative, not
quantitative. Atheism is a universal negative. If atheism is true, then there can be no
clear instances of evidence for God's existence whatsoever.

We can wonder why God doesn't intervene with greater frequency, but that's irrelevant
to the case for God's existence so long as there is some unambiguous evidence for his
existence. Even if there was scant evidence for his existence, so long as that was
unmistakable, a modicum of evidence is sufficient to disprove a universal negative.

My argument takes for granted that there's at least some clear evidence for his
existence. And that's a very low threshold to meet. Indeed, that's a very easy threshold
to meet.
Yahweh and evil

BART EHRMAN This is obviously a very difficult issue to address in 300 words or
less!!! I have devoted a book to the question, God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008),
and even that is very much only barely scratching the surface.

So, let me give just a brief background. When I was teaching at Rutgers in the
mid-1980s, I was asked to teach a class on the problem of suffering as presented
in different parts of the Bible. That was a revolutionary experience for me, as I
realized in teaching the class just how many explanations for human suffering can
be found in the Bible. Some of them are at odds with one another. I explain all
that in my book.

When I taught the class, I was a deeply committed Christian. And I continued to
be for years afterward. But I began to wrestle deeply with the problem of
suffering. There are some kinds of suffering that make sense (to me): humans do
wicked things to one another, involving such awful experiences as incest, rape,
torture, mutilation, killing, war, and so on. Those things one can explain on the
basis of free will. If we weren’t free to do such things, we would not be fully
human (I think that explanation is problematic, as I detail in my book, but it
would take too long to explain why here).

I couldn’t believe that there was a God who cared about his people and was
active in the world and intervened on behalf of those in need and answered
prayer, when there is an innocent child who starves to death every five seconds.
Other things are less explicable: famine, drought, hurricanes, tsunamis, birth
defects, and so on — all leading to horrible, unimaginable suffering. How do we
explain these things? I used to have explanations (based on what I had read in
biblical scholars, theologians, philosophers, and so on). But I got to a point where
I just didn’t think it made sense any more. I couldn’t believe that there was a God
who cared about his people and was active in the world and intervened on behalf
of those in need and answered prayer, when there is an innocent child who
starves to death every five seconds.

I certainly don’t buy the Augustine view. It’s all well and good to say that
suffering makes us better, makes us more noble, brings a greater good. But what
about that poor three-year-old child who starved to death since you started
reading this paragraph? She had to experience such gut-wrenching agony to
make my life, or anyone’s life, the world’s life better? And that’s true of all the
children who have starved to death — millions of them, just over the past few
 years (not to mention all the years since Augustine was writing). I came to a point
where I just didn’t believe it.

http://www.thebestschools.org/special/ehrman-licona-dialogue-reliability-new-
testament/bart-ehrman-interview/

This is, of course, well-trodden ground. There's a lot I could say. And I've said it before.
But for now one observation will suffice: By Ehrman's own admission, the Bible contains
many accounts of moral and natural evil. In addition, Bible writers were undoubted
acquainted with many other examples of moral and natural evil that they never have
occasion to write about in Scripture. It's illogical to say the existence of evil is
incompatible with the existence of Yahweh when, in fact, the Bible constantly depicts
Yahweh coexisting with evil. Indeed, you have unbelievers who think Yahweh commits
or commands evil. So how could moral and natural evil even count as evidence for
Yahweh's nonexistence?

The argument from evil typically uses an abstract philosophical construct as the
standard of comparison, rather than the concrete deity of living religion and historical
revelation. Not Yahweh, but perfect being theology.
Falling dominos

I'm going to comment on an article by Louise Antony: "Does God Love Us"? M.
Bergmann et al eds, Divine Evil: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (OUP,
2007), chap. 1.

She's a prominent atheist philosopher. Her article is mainly about Gen 2-3,
supplemented by Gen 22, Job, and a few other things.

God, I submit, is a terrible parent. He is, in fact, an abusive parent. God does not
love his children, and anyone who suggests that we ought to love him is
displaying the psychology of an abused child.

She gets off on the wrong foot with this characterization. To frame the issue that way
interjects a systematic error into her reading.

i) Gen 2-3 presents the relation between God and man as a Creator/creature relation or
landlord/tenant relation, not a parent/child relation. Antony is superimposing an alien
interpretive grid onto the account. There are, of course, Biblical passages that describe
God in paternal terms, but that's not how the dynamic is framed in Gen 2-3.

ii) Even if it were a parent/child relation, that's equivocal. Antony constantly conflates
two different senses of "child":

a) An immature human being

b) A son or daughter

A "child" can be a grown child. An adult. Middle-aged. In that sense, a "child" can be a
parent or grandparent in his or her own right. Even if your parents predecease you, you
remain their "child".

iii) Once again, even if we cast it in parent/child terms, the relation between God and
humans is only analogically a parent/child relation. That's subject to considerable
qualification.

Children are rational-agents-in-the-making, and a parent's role is to guide and

support that process of becoming, to provide the child with the physical,
emotional, and psychological prerequisites for moral autonomy in adulthood.
Notice the equivocation. The account never presents Adam and Eve as "children" in
that sense.

To maintain that God's authority is unconditional is to say that there is nothing

God could do to us, his children, which would be morally illegitimate.

I agree with her repudiation of divine voluntarism.

There is no indication that God and his two human creatures form a "family" of
any sort.

That's because God isn't human. The garden is not God's home.

On the contrary, God seems to have created Adam to be a worker or rather, since
there appears to be no question of securing Adam's consent to the arrangement,
a slave. God, the text tell us, simply needs a gardener.

i) The text doesn't tell us that God needs a gardner. God doesn't live in the garden.

ii) God put Adam and Eve in a nature sanctuary with some tame animals and wild fruit
trees. A startup situation. They have the raw materials they need to survive and thrive.
But there are tasks they must perform to maintain or improve on their environment. It's
good, but it could still be bettered through human effort.

iii) Antony is oblivious to the fact that the account uses double entendres to foreshadow
the tabernacle. Not only is Eden a garden, but sacred space.

Eve, in short, is created not to relieve Adam's loneliness, but to help him carry out
his preordained duties.

That overlooks Adam naming the animals, one purpose of which is to accentuate his
isolation. His lack of suitable companionship.

There is, first of all, nothing in the text to suggest that God is thinking about
Adam's safety when he issues his command.
True, but that misses the point. One of Antony's problems is her failure to appreciate
how the sin dynamic drives the plot. The occurrence of sin isn't a mistake or oversight
on God's part. It has a constructive as well as destructive role to play. Other things
happen as a result of evil.

Human history is like a row of dominoes. If you flick the first domino, all the other
dominoes fall, one after another.

Suppose, though, you flick the fifth domino rather than the first. That changes the
outcome. All the dominoes after the fifth domino will fall, but none before the fifth
domino. If you prevent a prior domino from falling, that prevents subsequent dominoes
from falling.

Although preventing a particular evil is good in itself, that changes the outcome. Some
goods result from some evils. By preventing the evil, you prevent the attendant good.
Likewise, preventing some evils causes other evils to take their place.

We are never told that God planned for Adam to live forever, and the early
imagery of mortality (Gen 3:7) suggests that Adam was doomed to die all along.

That overlooks the role played by the tree of life. Immortality is a missed opportunity.

If the tree has the power to kill, why did God create it in the first place?…Why
would he deliberately place within easy reach of his inexperienced children an
appalling object that poses a mortal danger?

Once again, she acts as though Adam and Eve are little kids with no sense of danger.
But the prohibition, including the death threat, presumes that they are able to perceive
the peril.

It doesn't require firsthand experience to avoid certain hazards. If that were the case,
the death toll would be far higher since we'd never survive to learn from our fatal
mistakes. In principle, and often in practice, abstract knowledge is sufficient to avoid
certain dangers. If someone tells you not to eat that mushroom because it's poisonous,
you heed the warning–unless you're foolhardily. You don't have to sample the
mushroom for yourself, which would be counterproductive.
 God never mentions this creature [the "snake"] to Adam, never warns him that
there's a liar afoot who'll try to trick him into disobedience…Why doesn't God at
least warn Adam not to speak to strangers?

i) Naturally, since that would thwart the test.

ii) And the business about not talking to strangers once again miscasts Adam and Eve
in the role of little kids.

iii) For that matter, there's nothing inherently wrong or generally imprudent about talking
to strangers.

Indeed, the only thing that would be unusual about God's threatening Adam with
death would be the advance notice.

Exactly. And a threat also serves as a warning.

My reason for rejecting the threat interpretation of Gen 3:16-17 is that it doesn't
fit the rest of the text. If God had been threatening Adam with death, why didn't
he kill Adam as soon as the forbidden fruit was eaten?

i) She doesn't read the account holistically. God intends Adam to father sons and
daughters before he dies. The history of the human race would be abortive if Adam and
Eve died prior to procreation.

ii) Moreover, "on the day" is a Hebraic idiom for "when" (cf. Gen 2:4). It doesn't literally
mean on the same day.

As a parent, God is not looking good. If the commandment is a warning, he's a

liar; if it's a threat, he's a bully.

She doesn't understand Scriptural usage (see above). And why would a threat make
God a "bully"?

But warning or threat, we still don't know the purpose of the prohibition. If it's
not to keep Adam safe, what's it for?…One might think that the hypothesis that
 God is testing Adam at least answers the question why God put a dangerous tree
in the garden. But while it might explain the presence of the tree, it cannot
adequately explain its lethality.

The tree of knowledge isn't toxic. The connection between consuming the forbidden fruit
and death is indirect. Adam and Eve were created as mortals, but with the opportunity
to gain immortality. When they violate the prohibition, they are denied access to the tree
of life.

The "testing" hypothesis might also seem to explain, at once, both the presence
of the serpent and God's failure to warn Adam about him. The idea would be that
God intended for Adam (or Eve) to encounter the tempter–the snake as part of
the plan…But if the serpent is really evil, and if there is a substantial risk that
Adam and Eve will succumb then there's no difference between the "test" and the
danger that's supposed to make the test necessary.

In fact, they were meant to fail, so that the dominoes will fall accordingly. This isn't
merely about the fate of Adam and Eve, but the future of the world. If they were to pass
the test, the dominoes would fall in a different order.

If God somehow engineered the encounter between Eve and the serpent, he was
engaging in entrapment. The reason that entrapment is wrong when human
police do it is that it increases the likelihood that a crime will be committed…The
point of "stings" is to arrest people who are anyway engaged in criminal activity,
not to generate activity that would not otherwise have occurred. We humans all
have our breaking points, and it is unjust for people in authority to push until they
find them.

It's silly to suggest a prohibition to refrain from sampling one particular fruit tree
pressures them to the breaking point. That's hardly acting under duress or undue
temptation. Indeed, Eve is pretty indifferent to the tree of knowledge until the tempter
singles it out.

Another point: God, should he choose to engage in this kind of entrapment, has
significantly more resources at his disposal than do mere human beings. While
human beings must rely on fallible empirical knowledge about what people are
likely to do in the circumstances they have arranged, God can control minds.
 God might have at least allowed that Moses had simply made a mistake about
what God wanted him to do…

Notice how her second statement contradicts her first. If God has infallible knowledge of
each individual, then it's nonsensical to suggest he should give Moses the benefit of the
doubt. For in that event, he knows exactly what Moses had in mind.

It is particularly chilling to think of a parent entrapping a child. Part of the

responsibility of a parent is to shield her child from temptation until the child
develops the resources to resist it.

Once more, this suffers from her systematic equivocation about "children".

God, however, takes no account of his children's position and limitations. Adam
and Eve, although physically mature, appear to be psychological and intellectual
infants. They have no knowledge of the world, and no experience to tell them
who to trust. They lack "knowledge of good and evil", and so presumably cannot
apprehend any duty to God.

i) In the account, Adam and Eve aren't physical or psychological children. Rather, they
are created as adults with innate knowledge. They bypass the normal stages of
maturation.

ii) The "tree of knowledge of good and evil" is ambiguous–perhaps intentionally so.
Because there's not much to go on, scholars disagree on what it means. Exegetical
proposals include (a) carnal knowledge (b) a megrims for omniscience; (c) moral
discrimination; (d) moral autonomy; (e) moral experience, and (f) divine wisdom.

(a) fails in part because it has no godlike counterpart (Gen 3:22) to carnal knowledge. In
addition, that would contradict the command to reproduce in Gen 1. Even if you think
these were originally independent accounts (I don't), they function as a conceptual unit
when edited into a continuous account.

(b) fails seems to fail because eating the forbidden fruit doesn't have that noetic effect.

(c) fails because it would subvert the verdict. If Adam and Eve were in a state of
diminished responsibility, how can their infraction be blameworthy? Yet the account
makes them culpable.
(d) If you combine (b) with (d), that might have some merit–to the degree that moral
knowledge depends on revealed norms, because infallible moral discrimination requires
omniscience.

(e) Another attractive possibility is a combination of (e-f). In the account, Adam and Eve
have abstract understanding of right and wrong. They know their duties. And they
experience good. But they are morally inexperienced with respect to evil. So they are
morally innocent, not morally ignorant. They experiment with evil by breaking the
command.

In a sense, the tree represents divine wisdom. They aspire to godlike knowledge.
However, the mode of acquisition is different. God doesn't know by learning.

The tree is forbidden knowledge because they can only acquire what it represents
through disobedience. The tree doesn't confer knowledge. Rather, their action reflects
and effects what the tree represents. Their very action becomes the realization of what
it stands for.

How is Eve supposed to know who is lying?

i) She should believe the God who made her and sustains her.

ii) In addition, people can be willingly deceived because their desire overcomes their
judgment. They know better than to do something, but do it anyway for instant
gratification.

When people do wrong, it's not uncommon for the full significance of their misdeed to hit
them only after they fact. "My God, what have I done!" But by then it's too late for them
to turn back the clock.

Eve is suddenly transfixed by the forbidden fruit now that she sees it through the rose-
tinted lens of the Temper (Gen 3:4-5). Only after she and Adam go through with the
misdeed is the spell broken.

God throws the children out of their home.

i) Antony acts as if Adam and Eve were little kids who can't fend for themselves. These
are adults in the prime of life.

ii) There's nothing inherently wrong with evicting a delinquent.

iii) It's not as if Adam and Eve had an inalienable right to live in Eden. God is the
landlord and they are tenants.

iv) Even if Adam and Eve hadn't been banished from Eden, their descendants would
eventually outgrow the confines of the garden. It would be necessary to colonize other
parts of the earth.

Having created beings with the power of reason, God perversely withholds
reasons, and delights in setting tests of loyalty that require his children flout logic,
prudence, and sometimes even his own laws. The most notorious of these
arbitrary tests is, of course, God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.
This is a monstrous and utterly outrageous order.

i) That's not "perverse" or "arbitrary". Remember that in earlier episodes, Abraham

betrayed a lack of faith in God.

ii) This isn't primarily for Abraham's benefit, but for the reader. The unseen audience for
this event.

iii) As a noted philosopher observes:

An elder sister left in charge of her little brother may have to enforce certain
restrictions on his behavior; her parents have told her that certain things are
forbidden; and the parents, let us suppose, had good reason for their prohibitions.
If the young brother now says "Why shouldn't I?" and argues the matter, the
sister's attempt to find a rationale for the prohibitions may be a failure, and the
young brother may be sharp enough to detect this; but he would be a young fool
if on this account he decided to ignore the prohibitions. To use another
comparison, there is the familiar story of the wise old Judge telling his younger
colleague to begin by not giving legal reasons for judicial decisions; the reason for
this was that he thought the younger man had enough knowledge of and feeling
for the law to be mostly right in his decisions, but was likely to muddle things if he
tried to spell out the reasons for his decisions. P. Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge
University Press, 1979), 141-42.

Back to Antony:

And it is not only Abraham who is tortured.

i) There's nothing in the text to indicate that Abraham was in a state of emotional
turmoil. That reflects Kierkegaard's influential misreading.

ii) Even if Abraham was distraught, that's not a factor in the narrative. The emphasis in
the narrative is not on the conflict between Abraham's religious duty and his paternal
duty, but the conflict between God's promise and God's command. How can God make
good on his promise to multiply Abraham's posterity if his son dies without issue? The
suspense is due to the fact that Abraham won't know how to relieve that conundrum in
advance of the fact. It is only relieved after the fact by God's last-minute intervention.

Imagine Isaac's terror as he realizes what his father has in mind.

It doesn't even occur to her that by this stage in the ongoing narrative, Isaac is a
strapping teenager. He can easily outrun or overpower his geriatric father. She isn't
paying attention to the implicit passage of time.

Imagine Sarah's horror when she learns what Abraham has set out to do.

There's no indication that Abraham tipped her off. What would he? Antony is making
stuff up.

According to the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, Sarah actually dies from
the shock.

Once again, that's entirely extraneous to the content of the actual narrative.

God apparently wants Abraham to know that rules are only rules because God
says so. If God changes his mind, then the rules change…God's laws really do have
a degree of moral arbitrariness to them, he doesn't so much care whether murder
occurs as he cares about whether murder is authorized.

i) Which completely ignores the fact that the command is a counterfactual command.
God has no intention of letting Abraham go through with the deed. But, of course,
Abraham can't be privy to that for it to be a real test.

ii) But as far as that goes, it isn't "murder" for God to order the execution of sinners.
 We want our children to internalize the bases of moral judgment, and not just to
do what we say because we say it. We want them to become morally
independent of us.

i) But humans can't be morally independent of their Creator. For one thing, personal and
social ethics are grounded in God's design for human nature.

ii) As an atheist, Antony has no basis for objective moral norms. Furthermore, humans
are just fleeting and fortuitous clouds of atoms.

Abusive human parents are also overly concerned with their children's deference.
Abusive fathers, in particular…Once again, this "display behavior" of God has a
parallel in the behavior of abusive human parents, especially abusive fathers.

Now she's indulging in sexist generalizations about men. Making invidious comparisons
between men and women–to the detriment of men.

God takes the bait, and sets out to prove to Satan that Job is perfectly abject…

"Taking the bait" reflects the viewpoint of a hostile reader (Antony), not the viewpoint of
the pious narrator.

If there's anything that gets God angrier than disrespect, it's loss of face…Moses
understands this: when God threatens to destroy the ever-complaining Israelites,
Moses persuades him to relent by appealing to his vanity–what will people think?

The Pentateuch often depicts God in anthropomorphic terms. Since we can't relate to
God on his level, he must relate to us on our level. For someone who constantly pushes
the parent/child paradigm, it's odd how that frame of reference suddenly deserts her at
this point. Parents adapt to the cognitive development of their kids with age-appropriate
explanations.

The serpent, on the other hand is not so clearly evil…In contrast, every detail in
Genesis, if taken at face value, testifies that the serpent tells the truth.
i) To begin with, half truths are more persuasive than outright lies.

ii) Antony is recasting God as the villain and the tempter as a Promethean anti-hero.
That, however, reflects the viewpoint of a hostile reader, not the viewpoint of the pious
narrator.

Antony lacks critical sympathy. Her animosity towards the text inhibits her from reading
the text on its own terms, as the original audience would understand it. Her
interpretations cut against the grain of the text through a moral inversion in which God is
evil, the tempter is good, while Adam and Eve are innocent dupes or hapless victims.
Although that reaction makes sense from the belligerent perspective of a secular
feminist, it's inimical to the outlook of the pious narrator. That's not exegesis. That's not
endeavoring to offer an interpretation consistent with the narrative assumptions. Rather,
it defies original intent. She lacks the critical detachment to listen to the account from
the viewpoint of the narrator and the implied reader.
Mantrap

A stock objection to Calvinism is that it implicates God in evil because God "causes" or
"determines" evil. Let's consider natural evil from the standpoint of freewill theism. Now,
I think it's reasonable to claim that physical determinism governs nature at the macro
level.

Depending on your interpretation of quantum physics, subatomic events are either

statistical or deterministic. But even if you think they are statistical, that doesn't seem to
transfer to the macro world.

According to Christian theology, there's an interplay between personal agents and

natural processes. What the natural order does when left to itself is deterministic,
absent outside intervention by a personal agent. (The subatomic order might be an
exception.)

In that respect, nature is like a machine. If I create a mantrap, it's the trap that catches
or kills the poacher or trespasser. Yet the trap was only doing what I designed it to do.
It's not the mantrap, but me, that's responsible for the outcome.

Every so often we read a news report about someone who put a venomous snake in the
mailbox of his enemy. When his enemy reaches into the box to get his mail, he is bitten
by the snake.

Now, it was the snake, and not the culprit, that bit the man. But, of course, we still hold
the man who put the snake in the mailbox responsible for the snakebite.

It isn't even a sure thing that his enemy will die of snakebite. It might be a dry bite. Or he
might receive antivenom in time to save his life. Even so, the culprit will be charged with
attempted murder.

Suppose it's the enemy's 10-year-old son who checks the mailbox that day, only to be
bitten. The culprit didn't intend to harm or kill his enemy's son. But, of course, that hardly
exonerates him. "I'm sorry, your Honor. I didn't mean to kill the boy. That was an
accident. His dad was my target!"
The divine mind-reader

1. Freewill theism has a generic theodicy: the freewill defense. (That can be
supplemented by other theodicies, like the soul-making theodicy.)

According to the argument from evil, an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God is
blameworthy for failing to preempt any preventable evil–especially gratuitous evil.

The freewill defense denies this key premise. God is not blameworthy for preempting
every preventable evil, because the price of eliminating evil is to eliminate goods that
are inseparable from libertarian freedom.

Open theism takes a different tack: God is not to blame because God lacks advance
knowledge of evil actions. God didn't see it coming down the pike. That's what is
distinctive to an open theist theodicy.

That, however, means that open theism implicitly concedes a key premise of the
argument from evil, and thereby rejects the freewill defense: if evil were foreseeable,
then God would be blameworthy for failing to prevent it.

2. However, that makes the open theist theodicy implausible. To begin with, the open
theist God is like a man in a security room. The world is blanketed by surveillance
cameras. Inside the security room are wall-to-wall screens which display what everyone
is doing everywhere, at every moment.

So, for instance, God can see Ted Bundy incapacitate a hooker or coed, dump her in
the trunk, and drive her to his hideout. Now even if God doesn't know for sure how that
will end, isn't it enough to for him to see Bundy put a woman in the trunk? How much
more do you need to see to intervene?

If a human observer saw that, and he was in a position to intervene, would he not be
culpable for failing to rescue the woman? (And keep in mind that freewill theists use
human analogies in objection to Calvinism.)

3. But it gets worse. Some open theists are more philosophically inclined while others
are more exegetically inclined. The latter pride themselves on their fidelity to Scripture.
They consider their interpretations to be more faithful, more straightforward, than
classical theism.

Yet Scripture frequently says God is a mindreader. That tends to crop up in reference to
God's qualifications as the eschatological judge.

God doesn't simply know what people do, but what they intend to do. But that means
God's knowledge of human affairs isn't confined to what he can observe. In addition,
God is right inside the mind of the serial killer or the suicide bomber.
Now, according to open theism, God can't know what we are thinking before we think it.
God doesn't know what our next thought will be.

But he does know what people are planning to do. He doesn't have to wait and see
what Bundy is going to do to that women. He has direct access to Bundy's mind.

Yet that makes it much harder for open theists to claim that moral evils are
unforeseeable. Although there may be a bit of lag time in the sense that God doesn't
know what evildoers are plotting ahead of time, his knowledge of their intentions is
simultaneous with their intentions. He knows as much as the agent himself. Real time,
up to the moment, intel. God is eavesdropping on their thoughts. He knows what they
intend as soon as they intend it.

Surely that puts God in a position to head off ever so many moral evils in the making.
He needn't wait until the last moment.
What could God do about evil?

Atheist Keith Parsons did a long post on the problem of evil:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/01/20/what-could-god-do-about-evil/

This included some lengthy comments as well. I'm of two minds about responding to
this post. I don't like to repeat myself. But I'll make a few brief observations:

i) One concerns the starting point. The argument from evil typically begins with a
definition of God supplied by philosophical theology. The "God" in question is a
philosophical construct. Here's a standard example:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.

2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate
all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate
all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#SomImpDis

And here is Parsons' version:

P: A perfectly good, omnipotent, and omniscient being will actualize an evil e only
if (a) the actualization of e is a logically necessary condition for the prevention
(the non-actualization) of an even worse evil e*; in other words, necessarily, e* is
actualized if e is not. Or (b) the actualization of e is a logically necessary condition
for the actualization of a redeeming good g; in other words, necessarily, if e is not
actualized, then redeeming good g is not.

ii) This begins by defining God by a set of attributes. (At least, the minimal attributes
need to frame an argument from evil.) But suppose, instead of commencing with a
philosophical abstraction, we took Yahweh as our starting point. Several things follow:

a) In Scripture, Yahweh isn't merely defined by his attributes, but by his actions. What is
meant by the attributes is elucidated by his deeds. You don't begin by consulting a
Hebrew lexicon to define justice, mercy, might &c. Rather, you study God in action.
Yahweh's behavior in the historical narratives of Scripture explicate his attributes.
b) Bible history is a catalogue of evil. Moral and natural evils. I doubt there's any basic
kind of evil outside the Bible that you can't find described in Bible history.

c) In Scripture, Yahweh and evil coexist. In Scripture, Yahweh's existence is consistent

with evil's existence.

It would be a peculiar argument to claim the existence of evil is incompatible with

Yahweh's existence when Scripture constantly depicts God and evil coexisting.

If you take a concrete example of God, like Yahweh, then it's unclear how the argument
from evil ever gets off the ground. The Biblical concept of God is consonant with the
existence of evil.

Even if an atheist regards Biblical narrative as fictional, that doesn't change the fact that
the Scriptural idea of God is compatible with the occurrence of moral and natural evil.
With examples of evil of the same kind that atheists cite to typify the argument from
evil.

iii) At the risk of repeating myself, time-travel stories illustrate the fact that if you change
the past to improve the future, your action prevents one set of evils at the cost of
producing another set of evils–as well as eliminating another set of goods. Indeed,
Parsons concedes that very principle:

It is the case that evils and goods are connected in intricate ways so that some goods,
indeed, some of the most important ones can only arise in the face of evils, and
eliminating those evils would also cost us the related goods.

Given the staggeringly complex effects of changing variables, where even altering a
minor variable may snowball over time, I don't see how an atheist is in any position to
say a selective improvement here or there would result in a net benefit.

iv) Parsons cites the parable of Roland Puccetti about an absentee landlord who allows
the apartment complex to fall into disrepair. But some tenants rise to his defense: For
aught we know, he may have good reason for letting this sorry state of affairs transpire.

Sure, it's always possible that there's a reasonable explanation, but that's not a
justification to suspend judgment indefinitely.

But that's misleading. This isn't simply an appeal to ignorance. There are many concrete
examples where preventing one evil prevents some attendant good or goods, as well as
causing a different evil or evils down the line. So it's not just speculation.

For instance, we evaluate the past from the viewpoint of the present. There are cases in
which an evil which seemed to be irredeemable to someone living in the past, at the
time it occurred, can now be seen to be beneficial in retrospect. So there's ample
precedent for taking that long-range view into account.
v) And that's not an appeal to global skeptical theism, but local skeptical theism. It's not
sheer skepticism, but, to the contrary, skepticism that builds on knowledge: examples of
apparently gratuitous evil which, with the benefit of hindsight, can be seen to be
purposeful. To say that divine providence is inscrutable is not to say that it's thoroughly
opaque. Rather, it can be shot through with many examples of redeemed evils, second-
order goods.

vi) Furthermore, Parsons is addressing the problem of evil in isolation to evidence for
God's existence. So it's not just a question of logical consistency, where, for all we
know, a Deity could have a reason for not preventing it–and, for all we know, no such
Deity exists. We're not balancing two antithetical propositions in abstract equilibrium.
Put that way, it may seem like special pleading to hypothesize an ultimate rationale–in
the absence of any evidence. Rather, the scales are heavily tipped in favor of God's
existence.

vii) Parsons atomizes good and evil as though every individual evil must be offset by an
individual good, in one-to-one correspondence. But there's no reason to think that's
what makes an evil gratuitous. It's not a matching quiz, but a chain of events. Does a
particular evil contribute to a second order good?

This deflates his objection to the soul-making theodicy. It's quite true that for some
people, suffering is "soul-destroying" rather than "soul-building." Yet that's only a defect
in the theodicy if you imagine that everyone is supposed to be purified by suffering. But
what if some justly suffer for the sake of others?

viii) In the prequel post, Parsons said:

Would any decent and sane person who could have thwarted the 9/11 attacks not have
done so? The simple and highly intuitive point is that some evils are so heinous and
bring about so much suffering, that any decent person would have prevented them.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/01/11/evil-still-no-good-answers/#comment-
2460021899

a) The question is deceptively simple. Normally, a good person should thwart a

humanitarian disaster.

b) But that depends in part on whether we view the event as past or future. Suppose I
was born in the 21C. Let's bracket time-travel antinomies. Suppose I can go back in
time and prevent WWI by thwarting the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But if I do
so, I will preempt my mother's birth–and, of course, my own birth!

By preventing WWI, I save many lives, but by the same token, I erase many lives. All
the men and women to be born as a result of that catastrophe–including my own.
And that's not the same thing as sacrificing my life to save others. Rather, this is
sacrificing my existence to save others. That's far more radical. I will never come into
being!

But even if I were that altruistic, it doesn't follow that I'd prevent WWI at the expense of
my own mother. I'm not prepared to do that.

Conversely, suppose you were the time-traveler. Suppose you could prevent a disaster
that would kill your mother (after you were born), but at the expense of killing my
mother. If you must choose whose mother to save, you will save your mother rather
than mine. And I'd do the same thing in reverse.

We can dilate in the abstract about saving lives, but that ignores the element of
personal attachment. When it comes to saving strangers, it may make no difference, but
people are connected to other people in complex ways. It's not a game of checkers, with
identical pieces. Even if people look alike on the outside, there are hidden affinities
between some people.

Now, we might say God has a more impartial perspective. But in that case, the analogy
breaks down. If, moreover, God doesn't have the same emotional investment in the
lives of any particular individual, then saving every life might not be his priority.
If only I had known

Freewill theists frequently distinguish between "determining" (or "causing") evil and
permitting evil. They regard the latter as exculpatory.

Suppose I buy a set of steak knives as a wedding present. A few years later, the
couple's 5-year-old son stabs his 3-year-old brother to death with one of the knives. Had
I not give the couple that particular wedding present, that tragedy would not have
happened. Am I culpable?

We'd say no, because I had no idea my gift would be used that way. Had I known, I
would have given them a different (harmless) wedding present instead.

But suppose, when I was in the cutlery store, looking for a wedding present, I had a
premonition that if I gave the couple a set of steak knives as a wedding present, that
would be the outcome. Would I then be culpable?

Presumably, we'd say yes. Given advance knowledge, that tragedy was easily
avoidable, and it's not as if my choosing to buy them a different (harmless) wedding
present would violate anyone's libertarian freedom, or destabilize the natural order.
The Final Countdown

The argument from evil presumes a standard of comparison. A better possible world, a
better feasible alternative, is the foil in contrast to the real world.

Years ago I saw The Final Countdown. It's an alternate history film in which a nuclear
aircraft carrier passes through a temporal wormhole and returns to the day before the
Pearl Harbor attack.

Once the captain figures out what's happened, he's been given an opportunity to
change history. He has advance knowledge of what will happen, absent intervention,
and he has advanced military technology to shift the balance of power.

So the film has a great dramatic premise. Unfortunately, the director lacked the interest
and imagination to exploit that premise. But it's a useful illustration. Of course, the film
raises the usual time-travel antinomies, but as a thought-experiment, we can bracket
that.

What should the captain do? Should he take advantage of the situation to avert the
Pearl Harbor attack?

There are different ways of developing the film's dramatic premise. The carrier has only
so much jet fuel and ordnance. After thwarting the Pearl Harbor attack, should he and
the crew focus on the Pacific theater or the European theater? Should he destroy the
Japanese navy? Or should he steam off to Europe and attack German assets?

Or what about selective interventions? Do something now, then lay low for a few years
before using the carrier to disrupt the Soviet nuclear program?

Should he simply prevent the Pearl Harbor attack, then sink the carrier, while he and his
crew melt into the 1940s–with no one the wiser?

The question a film like this raises is, after having done whatever they do to improve the
immediate situation, they pass back through the temporal wormhole to the same date in
the present, before they were transported into the past, what future awaits them? What
will the altered future look like? They won't be returning to the same world from whence
they came, that's for sure.

The Pearl Harbor attack gave FDR the pretext he was spoiling for to get both feet on the
ground in the war effort. In the attack itself, 2,335 U.S. servicemen were killed and
1,143 were wounded. In addition, WWII resulted in 1,076,245 U.S. servicemen dead
and wounded, as well as 30,314 MIAs. So there's an obvious sense in which
preempting the attack would be better for those who were directly or indirectly killed or
maimed as a result of the attack, not to mention their bereaved or bereft family
members.
Likewise, Japan would be spared the firebombing of Tokyo as well as the nuking of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So that would be better for them.

But, of course, there are tradeoffs. Drastic tradeoffs. Dire tradeoffs. Absent the Pearl
Harbor attack and the American counterattack and occupation, Japan would remain an
aggressive military dictatorship for however long.

England might well fall to the Nazis. That doesn't necessarily mean Hitler would conquer
Europe. But there's a difference between winning and losing. The Nazi war machine
would be able to do a lot more damage before it ran out of men and materiel. Far more
Jews would be exterminated. You might end up with a stalemate between Russia and
Germany. Perhaps they'd carve up Europe. Or maybe Russia would overwhelm
Germany and take all the marbles. That in turn might give a boost to communism in
Latin America.

Consider some of the things that hadn't happened before December 7, 1941. FDR
hadn't been reelected to a fourth term. Truman hadn't been picked as his running-mate.
Mao hadn't defeated Chiang Kai-shek. The state of Israel hadn't been established. The
Manhattan Project was barely under way.

It's very hard to predict what the world would be like had the Pearl Harbor attack been
preempted. Certainly better in some ways for many people, especially in the short term.
But worse in other ways for many other people in both the short-term and the long-term.
How often does God intervene?

Back to the stable nature theodicy:

i) To take a comparison, it's like healing and prayer. If God always healed in answer to
prayer, then medical science would be pointless–and if God never healed in answer to
prayer, then prayer (for healing) would be superfluous.

Occasional miraculous healing in answer to prayer doesn't make medical science

useless. You don't know in advance which will do the trick, or whether either one will do
the trick. Sometimes we pray for healing because medical science failed.

The dilemma for the stable environment theodicy is that it can't explain why God
intervenes in some cases rather than others. So that must be supplemented by
skeptical theism.

ii) I doubt it's possible to even guess at how often God prevents some natural evils.
Physical events leave physical evidence in their wake, but nonevents leave no trace
evidence of their nonoccurence. So what's the evidence that something didn't happen
because God preempted it?

To take a comparison, consider those time-travel scenarios in which a Jewish scientist

goes back in time to kill Hitler's granddad, thereby erasing Adolf from the space-time
continuum. If successful, there will be no evidence that Adolf ever existed, because
changing that one variable changes a host of affected variables. To be consistent, there
must be corresponding adjustments.

Of course we know that's unrealistic: hence time-travel antinomies. But I'm just using
that an analogy to illustrate a point.

In the case of divine intervention to preempt a natural evil, that doesn't change the past,
but prevent that past from happening in the first place–in which case, there's no
empirical evidence that God intervened. We have no basis of comparison. We just have
what actually happened.

It's not as if there's a gap or hole in the historical record or natural record when God
prevents a natural evil. So in that sense, there's no direct evidence for divine
preemption. Not like a missing folders in the filing cabinet between the As and the Cs
where the Bs ought to be. All the "space" is filled.

So, from what I can see, there's no estimating the frequency of divine interventions in
that respect. For all we know, divine intervention to prevent natural evils might be
commonplace. It's imponderable.
I'm not saying it's never possible to identify divine preemption. In some cases you have
plausible answers to prayer. But in other cases, no testimonial evidence will be
available.
Charbroiled Bambi

i) Atheist William Rowe famously cited a fawn dying in a forest fire as a paradigm-case
of gratuitous evil. On the face of it, that's not gratuitous evil, because forest fires are
necessary to maintain the balance of nature. In fact, animal death is necessary to
maintain the balance of nature. So that's purposeful suffering.

ii) Now perhaps Rowe would say it's gratuitous in the sense that an omnipotent God
could create a world without predation, forest fires, &c. But there are problems with that
response:

a) Yes, God could, but that would be so unrecognizably different from the actual world
that we can't even begin to do a comparative axiological analysis. We can't say which is
better and which is worse because a world without our type of ecosystem is so far
removed from human experience that it's hard to even conceive of what that would be
like. Atheists have a bad habit of artificially deleting "bad things" from the world, then
leaving everything else intact. But, of course, that requires corresponding adjustments.
It's unclear what's left after the dust settles.

b) Moreover, a world without animal suffering might be better in some respects, but
worse in others. Even if it's better overall, the goods might not be as good as a world
that's worse overall. You could have a world that's worse overall, but the peaks of
goodness are higher. So there's no single criterion of goodness.

iii) Furthermore, animals lack our human viewpoint on suffering. Take the somewhat
amorphous distinction between lower and higher animals. A continuum of sentience.

A few years ago I read about some men who discovered a rattlesnake pit right by the
playground of an elementary school. A communal rattlesnake pit. That posed an
obvious danger to the school kids.

So the men poured gasoline down the snakepit and set it afire. End of problem!

I'm sure the snakes writhed about as they were roasting alive. Does that mean they
were in pain, or is that a reflexive reaction? For instance, decapitated snakes continue
to writhe.

How does a snake brain process or interpret that stimulus? I doubt what it's like for a
man or German Shepherd to burn alive is the same for a snake. For one thing, it has a
much simpler brain. Does the same stimulus mean the same thing to reptile? Seems
unlikely.

Same thing with cooks who put live crabs directly in boiling water. Seems cruel, but isn't
that just an anthropomorphic projection on our part?
iv) I don't necessarily mean that's reducible to neurological structures. It's possible that
animals have souls. But if they have souls, they have animals souls. If a wolf has a soul,
it has a soul specific to the nature of a wolf; a soul with a lupine viewpoint. An outlook in
many respects alien to a human viewpoint.

I think it would be cruel to set a dog on fire. But I don't think it was cruel to incinerate the
rattlesnakes.

v) To take another comparison, during the Vietnam War, some Buddhist monks
protested the war by setting themselves on fire. There are Youtube videos of that
horrific scene. Yet, as I recall, they were very stoic about it. They didn't scream or flail
about.

If we were just judging by body language, we'd infer that a snake is in greater pain than
a man. But, of course, because we're human, we know that's not the case. So body
language can be deceptive.

vi) From the standpoint of Christian ethics, given borderline cases, it's best, all things
being equal, to allow ourselves a wide margin of error in the avoidance of possible
animal cruelty.

Another factor concerns intent. To set a dog on fire is an act of malice. That is done with
the intent to inflict pain on the dog. The person who does it takes depraved pleasure in
cruelty. Even if, unbeknownst to him, the effect is painless, his motivation is heinous.
Is there gratuitous evil?

i) Evils are rarely self-contained events. It's hard to think of events, even little incidents,
that don't cause a chain of events. Even individual evils have a ripple effect. Preventing
the evil would prevent some resultant good down the line. Moreover, preventing one
particular evil might mean a worse evil would take its place–either the precipitating evil
or the resulting evils.

ii) Even reflecting on an apparently gratuitous evil will affect the thinker who reflects on
it. And because the thinker is an agent, whatever impacts him will impact what he does.
So even if the evil was gratuitous in itself, it can have a purposeful influence on the
thinker. It is only gratuitous if considered in isolation. But the very act of evaluating the
evil changes the thinker in subtle ways, which–in turn–changes the world based on what
he does, and others do in response to what he does.

That's a bit circular, where reflecting on an otherwise gratuitous event makes it non-
gratuitous, but it's true nonetheless.

iii) A critic might object that if we all thought that way, we'd never intervene to advert a
foreseeable tragedy. But that misses the point. Whether or not we intervene would
depend on how farsighted we are. And in fact, God has prearranged things so that what
we do is ultimately for the good.

iv) Whether inscrutability is a "cop-out" depends in part on whether that's simply

invoked as a blocking maneuver or face-saving exercise to show that, for all we know,
any state of affairs is consistent with a hypothetical God's existence, wisdom, and
benevolence, absent positive evidence to that effect. But, of course, inscrutability isn't
cited in an evidential vacuum. It presupposes multiple lines of evidence for God's actual
existence, wisdom, and benevolence.

Is suffering chemotherapy for spiritual cancer?

Eleonore Stump says suffering is chemotherapy for spiritual cancer. But a basic
objection to the soul-building theodicy is how it can backfire inasmuch as tragedy makes
some people worse rather than better. Makes them bitter, cynical, morally hardened. It
can be counterproductive, by driving some people away from God.
However, that would only be a defective strategy if God intends all people to benefit
from suffering. But if God's aim is not to nurture soul-building virtues in everyone, then
it's not a failure if that doesn't transpire in every case.
Unforeseeable consequences

One common plank of the freewill defense is the contention that, to be meaningful, our
choices must have predictable consequences. That entails a stable environment. And
that means God can't jump in to save our bacon. The laws of nature are the price we
pay for responsible decision-making.

This argument was popularized by C. S. Lewis. Although it's common to the freewill
defense, a Calvinist can also incorporate the same principle into his overall theodicy.
Making choices based on predictable consequences is certainly consonant with
compatibilism.

So I think the stable environment theodicy has some merit, but it's inconsistent.
Although nature is predictable in some respects, nature is unpredictable in other
respects, and some natural evils are among the least predictable features of nature.

We've gotten pretty good at forecasting hurricanes. (Of course, that's useless to our
pre-scientific forebears.) But we can't predict earthquakes, mudslides, tsunamis,
droughts (and drought-related famine).

If a tsunami occurs, we may be able to predict the trajectory and arrival time. However,
that's generally useless because you can't evacuate port cities in a few hours.

We can't forecast tornadoes. If they occur, we can track then, but the lead-time is often
down to minutes. There really isn't time for advance warning. (And, or course, our
prescientific forbears couldn't even track tornadoes.)

We have a far better understanding of disease transmission, so we can now avoid or

reduce some epidemics and pandemics, viz. rat control, draining or spraying malarial
ponds and swamps. (Again, that knowhow wasn't available to our prescientific
ancestors.)

There are genetic diseases we can now predict, but not prevent. So the patient feels
doomed by a dreadful diagnosis and fateful prognosis.

It's hard to protect against venomous snakes. If you see them in plain sight, you can
avoid them or kill them with a rock or a stick.

But take Indian farmers who are bitten by cobras when they harvest rice patties. That's
predictable in the coarse-grained sense that there's an appreciable risk. But it's
unpredictable in the fine-grained sense that you don't know where not to step until it's
too late.

Likewise, it's well-nigh impossible to snakeproof a house, especially huts, shacks, and
shanties. These are porous. Lots of ways for snakes to get inside.
If it's a nocturnal venomous snake, you may be bitten if you step on it in the dark. Or
you may be bitten when it crawls into bed to snuggle up against that nice warm body.

So there's often no way to protect against kraits, mambas, cobras, Russell's vipers, &c.
You can't take adequate precautions, or anticipate where they will strike.

The stable environment theodicy is a poor fit with what the natural world is actually like.
At best, it intersects with a part of nature.
Is it evil to cause evil

Is it evil to cause evil? That seems transferable. But is it a reliable inference?

This crops up in debates over Calvinism. Mind you, there are various respects in which
the God of freewill theism causes evil.

Now, there are certainly situations in which causing evil is evil. Indeed, that may well be
typical. I'm just discussing whether, as a matter of principle, it is evil to cause evil.

Suppose torrential rain causes a damed river to become swollen. That accelerates the
downstream current. There's a much greater volume of water, moving much faster,
resulting in tremendous kinetic energy pounding the dam. The dam operator has a
choice: he can release some water to relieve the strain on the dam. If he does so, that
will flood riverside towns downstream, causing major damage. That's an evil. That
causes an evil state of affairs.

Or he can let the water build up behind the dam. The cumulative force will make the
dam lose structure integrity and collapse, causing an avalanche or wall of fast-moving
water to wipe the downstream towns off the map. That's a greater evil.

Is it evil for him to cause the lesser evil, by releasing some water to diminish pressure
on the dam?

Someone might object that God isn't subject to the same constraints as the dam
operator. But even if that's the case, the point of the example is to illustrate a point of
principle: it is not necessarily evil to cause evil.

Moreover, even an omnipotent God is under a self-imposed constraint if he uses a

natural process to produce a desired result.
Hard truths

1. Recently, the Society of Evangelical Arminians erupted with several indignant, faux
incredulous posts regarding the following statement:

God . . . brings about all things in accordance with his will. In other words, it isn’t
just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those who
love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory
(see Ex. 9:13-16; John 9:3) and his people’s good (see Heb. 12:3-11; James 1:2-4).
This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s
having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well
as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child
...

— Mark R. Talbot, “’All the Good That Is Ours in Christ': Seeing God’s Gracious
Hand in the Hurts Others Do to Us,” in John Piper and Justin Taylor (eds.),
Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006), 31-77 (quote
from p. 42).

SEA also linked to this statement by Piper:

He works all things according to the counsel of his will. This extends to the details
of all existence. Matthew 10:29, “Not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from
our Father in heaven.” Proverbs 16:33, “The lot, the dice, are cast in the lap and
every decision is from the Lord.” In Reno, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, every dice rolled
God decides what turns up.

And SEA linked to a post by Leighton Flowers with the incendiary title "Does God Bring
About the Abuse of Children for His Own Glory?"

There's a lot to sort out.

2. SEA acts as if it discovered the smoking gun of Calvinism. I understand how this
would be shocking or scandalous to uniformed Christians. But there's nothing new or
surprising here. Calvinism doesn't conceal the fact that God has predestined everything
that happens.

In addition, I understand how this would be shocking to Christians who never read the
Bible cover to cover. Yet Scripture frequently attributes the deeds of wicked men to God
operating behind-the-scenes.
That's a hard truth. But, then, there are many things in Scripture that make me swallow
hard. There are many things in the world that make me swallow hard.

3. The statement that God brings about something "for his own glory" is misleading
without further explanation. In Calvinism, God doesn't act for his own sake, but for the
sake of the elect. God cannot benefit from what he brings about, for God is sufficient in
himself, apart from his creation.

4. Calvinism didn't create the problem of evil; rather, the problem of evil is created by
the fact of evil. The problem of evil is generated by the conjunction of two propositions:

i) God exists

ii) Divinely preventable evil exists

To the extent that that's a theological problem, the challenge is hardly unique to
Calvinism. It's a challenge for Molinism, Aminianism, universalism, Lutheranism,
Thomism, Mormonism, Deism, open theism, &c. If Calvinism didn't exist, the problem of
evil would still exist.

Indeed, it's challenging for atheism. Atheism solves the problem by denying one of the
two propositions, but that's a costly solution. It solves the problem of evil by making
human life worthless. A tad self-defeating. Like an exterminator who eliminates a roach
infestation by burning down the house with the homeowner inside. Effective, but a wee
bit counterproductive.

5. In addition, the Reformed position sounds shocking or scandalous to Christian ears

that haven't bothered to think through the alternatives. You can't just assess the
Reformed position in a vacuum. You need to consider that in relation to proposed
alternatives.

In freewill theism, God allows a pedophile to abuse children because there's something
more important to God than preventing child abuse. Well, stop and think about that for a
while. Let it sink it. After all the outrage directed at Calvinism, what could be more
important than preventing child abuse? Yet a freewill theist is forced to admit that
preventing child abuse is not a divine priority. After all, God could put a stop to that.

In God's rating system, the prevention of child abuse is not God's paramount concern. A
freewill theist must say that in God's estimation, there's something more valuable than
preventing child molestation. Some other good that's better than the prevention of child
abuse.

So why isn't that shocking to freewill theists? Why isn't that outrageous? Yet the freewill
theist is committed to that proposition.
Suppose a teacher at a Christian school was accused of child molestation. Suppose,
when interviewed, the principal said he knew the teacher was a convicted pedophile. He
knew that hiring him was a risk. But he hired him anyway because some things are
more important than preventing child abuse.

You can just imagine the incensed reaction. But isn't the freewill theists forced to say
the same thing about God?

6. To say everything event is predestined is to say that everything happens for a

reason. Good things happen for a good reason, but even bad things happen for a good
reason. Indeed, especially in the case of evil, we usually think an agent had better have
a good reason for allowing (or causing) that to happen. If there's a prima facie obligation
to prevent evil, then allowing (or causing) evil requires a special justification.

Conversely, to say that God allows horrendous evils to occur for no purpose whatsoever
is hardly exculpatory. "I just let it happen. Don't ask me why. There is no why."

7. Not surprisingly, freewill theists usually turn to some version of the freewill defense.
For instance, they claim libertarian freedom is a prerequisite of moral responsibility. But
is that an adequate response?

i) To begin with, one development in freewill theism is restrictivism. On Facebook, Alan

Rhoda recently said that he and many libertarians espouse restrictivism. Take some
examples:

Restrictivism is the claim that we have "precious little free will" insofar as there
are "few occasions in life on which–at least after a little reflection and perhaps
some investigation into facts–it isn't absolutely clear what to do." Kevin Timpe,
Free Will in Philosophical Theology (Bloomsbury 2014), 24.

Restrictivism is the view that we are rarely (directly)free, only sometimes, in

somewhat unusual circumstances, so our choices and subsequent actions meet
the conditions for direct metaphysical freedom. A libertarian restrictionism holds
that it is a feature of directly free choices and actions that they were
underdetermined by prior events or states of affairs. Daniel Cohen & Nick
Trakakis, eds. Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Cambridge Scholars
Publishing 2008), 129.

[Van Inwagen] appeals to similar resources in an argument for restrictionism, the

view that…rarely, if ever, is anyone able to do otherwise than in fact he does."
Joseph Keim Campbell, Free Will (John Wiley & Sons 2013), 52.
But in that event, even many freewill theists no longer think libertarian freedom is a
necessary condition of moral responsibility. So that's not a given.

ii) But suppose, for the sake of argument, that we grant this contention. How would God
stepping in to prevent a pedophile from molesting a child nullify moral responsibility?
After all, divine intervention didn't override the pedophile's intention to molest a child. It
didn't override his plan to molest a child. It didn't override his initial efforts to act on that
plan. Rather, it's a last minute intervention that prevents him from executing his plan.

So the pedophile is still culpable for his malicious intentions and designs and abortive
actions. The fact that he was thwarted at the last minute hardly absolves him of guilt.

iii) But suppose, for the sake of argument, we grant that divine intervention nullifies his
moral responsibility. So what? The problem here is that the freewill theist is attempting
to justify God's inaction by making divine respect for moral responsibility a universal
principle that supersedes any conflicting duty. But why should we grant the universality
of that principle?

Suppose we concede, for discussion purposes, that all things being equal, God should
not infringe on our moral responsibility. Suppose, in many situations, that outranks other
considerations. But if it's a choice between protecting a child and respecting moral
responsibility, what makes moral responsibility a higher priority in that situation? In other
words, unabridged moral responsibility might be good in general, but does that make it
a greater good in every situation, to which any conflicting obligation must defer?

8. Consider another principle: For love to be genuine, the agent must either be the
ultimate source of his love and/or be free to withhold his love. But is that an adequate
response?

i) For starters, isn't that empirically implausible? As a matter of human experience, is

that a condition of genuine love? For instance, isn't parental love basically instinctive
and irrepressible? Sure, there are terrible exceptions, but I'm countering a universal
claim.

Or take friendship. In my observation, when two or more people have to spend lots of
time together, they either end up liking one another or disliking one another. Each
person has a predisposition to either click with someone else or find them aggravating
to be around. We may choose our friends, but we didn't choose what made them likable
to us in the first place.

ii) But suppose, for the sake of argument, that we grant the contention. If God steps in
to prevent a pedophile from molesting a child, how does that infringe on the pedophile's
freedom to love God? If a pedophile is allowed to molest children, doesn't that behavior
make him morally hardened? Habitual evil reduces his ability to freely love God. Divine
intervention would help to preserve the agent's ability to love God.
iii) But suppose, for discussion purposes, we concede the contention. So what?
Suppose repeated divine intervention somehow infringes on the pedophile's ability to
freely love God. Why should that take precedence over the safety of an innocent child?

Even if, as a general principle, it is good for agents to be at liberty to freely love God,
how does that override all other goods, including the good of the child? Why should the
wellbeing of the child take a backseat to the wellbeing of the molester?

Suppose, all things being equal, God should not abridge the spontaneity of love. But as
a universal principle, that loses plausibility precisely in cases like child abuse.

9. Freewill theist William Alston said:

A perfectly good God would not wholly sacrifice the welfare of one of His
intelligent creatures simply in order to achieve a good for others, or for Himself.
This would be incompatible with His concern for the welfare of each of His
creatures. "The inductive argument from evil and the human cognitive condition,"
D. Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil (Indiana U. Press,
1996), 111.

Seems to me that captures a fundamental principle and a priori intuition of freewill

theists. Problem is, their a priori proscription collides with a posteriori reality. So freewill
theists are forced to qualify their principles and intuitions in the harsh, unyielding glare
of various kinds of evils that actually transpire.

It becomes, in part, a question of theological method. Do we begin with the kinds of

evils that actually take place, and reason back from that to inform our theological
parameters? Or do we begin with a set of stimulative theological expectations, then
adapt that as best we can to the kind of world in which we find ourselves?
Artificial reality

Some theologians use the authorial metaphor to model God's relationship to the world.
God is like a novelist, the world is like a novel. Humans are like storybook characters.
The physical environment is like the setting. History is like the plot.

It's a useful metaphor–but a bit quaint. It could easily be updated to make it more
flexible and realistic. I'm alluding to science fiction involving virtual reality and artificial
intelligence.

I don't mean that's realistic in the sense that it's possible. I just mean that for illustrative
purposes, it is more lifelike.

So let's play along with that scenario. God is like a video game designer who creates
self-aware virtual characters. Unlike storybook characters, these characters are
endowed with consciousness. They have an actual mental life. They can feel simulated
physical pain or pleasure. They can experience the gamut of human emotions. They
can reason. Deliberate. Suffer psychological pain.

They are aware of their surroundings. Aware of fellow characters, with whom they
interact. They make plans. Experience disappointment, and so on.

Unlike a novelistic plot, which is static, events unfold in the video game in real time. A
real past, present, and future. Stream of consciousness.

This can illustrate different aspects of God's economic relationship:

i) The designer exists apart from the game. The designer planned the game. Created
the characters. At that level, he caused everything to happen.

ii) Yet the AI virtual characters aren't merely projections of the designer. They have
actual, individual mental states that are ontologically distinct from the designer. They
experience their world from the inside out.

Each AI virtual character has its own first-person viewpoint, that's not equivalent to
God's first-person viewpoint, or God's third-person viewpoint of the characters. These
are irreducible perspectives. Each character knows what it's like to be himself (or
herself).

iii) They might cause things to happen the way we cause things to happen in dreams,
by willing them to happen. Psychokinetic agents. And from their vantage-point, that
might be indistinguishable from physical causation.

iv) They could become aware of their designer's existence. Be cognizant of a larger
reality, outside the world in which they exist.
v) We can explore both determinist and indeterminist models.

On an indeterminist model, the designer creates the initial conditions, but after that the
game may take on a life of its own. Within certain parameters, the outcome is wide-
open.

On a determinist (or predeterminist model), the designer plans everything that happens.
Every thought, word, feeling, and action. Everything unfolds according to plan.

In principle, characters might become aware of the fact that their actions are
predetermined. That wouldn't have much impact on their action, because they don't
know in advance what they are predetermined to do. They just do whatever they were
going to do. Do whatever they were motivated to do, which turns out to be what they
were predetermined to do. To the extent that knowledge of predeterminism affects their
action by making them self-conscious about their next move, that is, itself, a
predetermined reaction. So it doesn't change the outcome.

This, of course, raises familiar theodical issues. Are they still responsible for their
actions?

A stock objection is that they can't be responsible unless they were able to do
otherwise. Suppose we grant that contention for the sake of argument.

There are stories with alternate endings. There are stories in which the character did
both. In that event, is he blameworthy if, in one case, he does something immoral?

What about the libertarian version? Unlike storybook characters, the virtual characters
can suffer actual harm. One character can make another character feel simulated
physical pain. Or induce anguish.

Or "murder" the character. Erase him from the game. All his memories and aspirations
are extinguished by another, malevolent character.

But that raises questions about the designer's benevolence. Is it proper for him to permit
one character to wield that kind of power over another? Is it proper for him to permit one
character to harm another? Much less to cause him irreparable harm?

The value of an analogy depends on sufficient similarity to the thing it illustrates to be

truly comparable, but sufficient dissimilarity to enable us to see the issue from a fresh
perspective. If it's too much like the thing it illustrates, it lacks a point of contrast to
contribute any distinctive insight into the original issue.
God moves in mysterious ways

Here is a commonly cited example:

I was healed from cancer by God!

Really? Does that mean that God will heal all others with cancer?

Well... God works in mysterious ways.

A key characteristic of ad hoc rationalizations is that the "explanation" offered is

only expected to apply to the one instance in question. For whatever reason, it is
not applied any other time or place and is not offered as a general principle. Note
in the above that God's "miraculous powers of healing" are not applied to all
cancer sufferers, but only this one at this time and for reasons which are
completely unknown.

In the above, the idea that not everyone will be healed by God contradicts the
common belief that God loves everyone equally.

How could we tell when it is happening and when it is not? How could we
differentiate between a system where God has acted in a "mysterious way" and
one where the results are due to chance or some other cause?

http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/skepticism/blfaq_fall_adhoc.htm

i) I disagree with the setup. Many atheists, as well as some Christians, routinely recast
all truth-claims in terms of evidence and counterevidence. No doubt that's appropriate in
cases where there is both prima facie evidence and prima facie counterevidence, but
everything shouldn't be hoisted onto that that seesaw.

ii) For instance, we often believe sometime happened based on direct evidence that it
happened. I believe certain things happened to me because that's a matter of personal
experience. I don't put that on one side of the scales, put possible counterevidence on
the other side of the scales, then see which way the scales tip. That's very artificial. I
simply believe it happened because it happened to me, and, in the nature of the case, I
have firsthand knowledge of things that happen to me.

Likewise, we believe lots of things based on what trusted people tell us. We don't
ordinarily feel the need to counterbalance that belief by considering possible evidence
to the contrary, then decide if one outweighs the other. The teeter-totter paradigm
doesn't fit our general belief-forming system, or even the justification of beliefs.
iii) Why does God not healing somebody else equally deserving furnish any kind of
evidence that God didn't heal me? What's the connection? If there's evidence of divine
healing, why isn't the evidence in itself the only salient consideration?

Suppose, unbeknownst to me, cyberterrorists hack into the traffic light system to
facilitate a bank heist. On the one hand it gives the getaway car an escape route. On
the other hand, it blocks traffic on the same side of the street where the police station is
located.

However, that has the fringe benefit drivers in my lane have solid green lights all the
way home, while drivers in the opposing lane, and side streets, have solid red lights. In
my ignorance, I have no idea how to account for the disparity. Moreover, this is
something extraordinary.

Yet that doesn't count against the indisputable fact that, for some inexplicable reason,
the traffic lights favor everyone in my lane. They just do! It may cause me to investigate
why that's the case. But it's not the phenomenon itself that's in question. That's not a
reason to doubt that on this particular day, the traffic lights in my lane stayed green all
the way home. And that's not a reason to doubt that it requires a special explanation.

iv) In addition, the objection presumes, without benefit of argument, if God heals people
at all, we'd expect him to heal all equally deserving people. But is that a reasonable
expectation? What's that based on? Just that it seems arbitrary for God to heal some,
but not all, equally deserving people?

But it's not hard to come up with reasons why that might be so. Consider the alternative:
suppose God healed everyone who prayed for healing, or everyone who was prayed
for. Well, that would change the future, in the sense that the future would turn out very
differently in that event than if God didn't heal everyone. Who lives and who dies, where
they live and die, when they live and die, affects the future. If more people live longer,
that has multiple ramifications.

So one reason God might not answer every prayer for healing is because that's
inconsistent with the future he intends. For instance, some people die because other
people didn't die. Take a terminal cancer patient who's miraculously healed. A year
later, he kills a cyclist or pedestrian while driving under the influence.

It sounds swell to say God should heal everyone, but what is good for one person may
be bad for another. Your healing may come at someone else's expense, down the line.
Something you do today may unintentionally harm someone tomorrow.

On the other hand, one reason God might heal some people is to furnish evidence for
his existence. He performs miracles often enough to maintain a periodic witness to his
existence, but he refrains from performing miracles routinely because that would result
in a very different future.
v) Incidentally, I, as a Calvinist, reject the premise that God loves everyone.
Soul-making theodicy

1. In the past I've defended a supralapsarian theodicy. I still adhere to that, but I'd like to
supplement it by considering the soul-making theodicy.

The basic idea of the supra theodicy is that it's better to be a fallen and redeemed
creature than an unfallen creature. But that involves second-order goods, which are
contingent on the existence of evil.

There's a difference between knowledge by description and knowledge by

acquaintance. You can grasp propositions about sin and forgiveness. That, however, is
very different from the experience of sin and forgiveness. Existential knowledge is richer
than abstract knowledge. And that's germane to a soul-making theodicy.

A supra theodicy has a subjective dimension: the personal experience of divine

forgiveness. However, it's more objective than a soul-making theodicy inasmuch as the
frame of reference is divine forgiveness. God is the object of forgiveness, while a
Christian is the subject of forgiveness.

By contrast, a soul-making theodicy has a more subjective orientation, inasmuch as it's

about the cultivation of certain virtues. Becoming a better person. A wiser person.

2. The soul-making theodicy was popularized by John Hick. In Augustinian

anthropology, Adam and Eve were finished products. They fell from a state of moral
perfection. Hick contrasted that with his own position, according to which Adam and Eve
were created with the potential for moral growth. They were still in the process of
creation. They had the potential for moral maturation. (Mind you, Hick denied the
historicity of Adam and Eve.)

There's some truth to this analysis, although it suffers from equivocation. To say
unfallen Adam and Eve were morally "perfect" simply means they were sinless. It
doesn't mean there was no room for moral improvement.

Paradoxically, fallen humans can be both better and worse than unfallen humans.
Inasmuch as they are sinners, they are worse. Yet Christians can have a moral grace
that surpasses the mere sinlessness of Adam and Eve. Saints have virtues that angels
lack.

3. Let's take an example: Suppose you have a family of five. Both parents are social
climbers and overachievers. The husband is consumed with career advancement. The
wife is a tiger mom. She makes sure the kids are enrolled in all the right student clubs
and extracurricular activities that will look good on a college application. The two
teenage sons and a daughter are into the usual things kids in their age-bracket are into.
At dinner, each member of the family is glued to the display on their smart phone.
The members of the family aren't Christian. Aren't into meaning-of-life questions. They
lead superficial lives.

One son starts to forget routine things. At first this is amusing. They think he's absent-
minded. Distracted by too much multitasking. But he begins to complain about
headaches.

His parents take him to the doctor, and he's diagnosed with brain cancer. Suddenly their
priorities come to a screeching halt.

They now have a sick family member who will just get sicker. Their social world
contracts. Their center of gravity shifts.

Instead of being frivolous and self-absorbed, they make the most of the remaining time
with their dying family member. The wrenching experience changes them. Deepens
them. Makes them better people. Develops their unrealized moral potential.

Perhaps, in their distress and despair, they turn to God. They regret the missed
opportunities. Regret taking life for granted. Regret taking one another for granted.
Regret all the things they should have said and done differently, in retrospect.

That kind of regret can refine character. Moving forward, that prompts them to treat
others with greater patience and understanding.

This is hypothetical, but there are real life examples of Christians like Eric Liddell and
Ernest Gordon who exhibit moral heroism in the face of extreme adversity.

Let's consider some objections to this theodicy:

4. At best, this theodicy can only justify the existence of certain kinds of evil.

i) However, even if that's the case, that's only a defect on the assumption that a
successful theodicy must single-handedly justify the existence of every kind of evil. But
what if different kinds of evils lend themselves to different theodicean principles? In that
event, a soul-making theodicy can make a necessary contribution. It wasn't meant to
cover more than one class of evils.

ii) In the same vein, the ordeal may benefit the caregiver even if it doesn't benefit the
patient. Or it may benefit each in different ways. Some short lives are far more
meaningful than some long lives.

2. Suffering makes some people worse instead of better. Rather than refining them,
their character deteriorates under the strain. They become hardened and bitter.
i) That's a problem for a soul-building theodicy which is predicated on God's
omnibenevolence. But if, a la Calvinism, God never intended everyone to benefit from
evil, that's not inconsistent with the theodicy.

ii) In addition, the fact that some people fail to take advantage of opportunities for moral
improvement doesn't mean the theodicy was a failure. People often blow good
opportunities. If there's something blameworthy in that situation, it's not the opportunity
but the failure to seize it.

3. Dire conditions aren't necessary for people to express these virtues.

i) That maybe true, but the question at issue is primarily the cultivation of such virtues,
and secondarily the expression of such virtues. Does the ordeal foster such virtues in
some people? Virtues they'd never develop in the first place absent the ordeal?

The virtues were latent, not in the sense that the were there all along, waiting for an
opportunity to express themselves, but because the potential was there all along,
requiring a stimulus to develop.

ii) Moreover, this is not about overcoming obstacles and testing yourself against
challenges, to build generic traits like strength of character, but specific moral and
theological virtues.

4. Terrible evils aren't necessary to develop these virtues.

That objection is circular. The philosophers who raise it have never been in a situation
that requires moral heroism. Since they lack heroic virtue, they don't value heroic virtue.
They have no firsthand standard of comparison. They haven't had that experience. So
they lack the capacity to appreciate their moral deficiency in that respect. They don't
know what they are missing.

That's the point of the soul-building theodicy. It's not about abstract knowledge, but the
kind of understanding that can only come from personal experience. Like tempered
steel, you have to pass through fire to know what it's like and to experience the effect.

They lack the necessary insight to appreciate the theodicy because they lack the
necessary experience which confers that insight. The very type of experience which the
theodicy concerns.

And from I can tell, critics haven't read accounts of Christians like Eric Liddell and
Ernest Gordon. For Liddell, it was a tremendous witness to his fellow captives. For
Gordon, it was a transformative experience. Other examples include Christians who
care for a disabled family member or family member who suffers from a degenerative
illness. It taps into unsuspected reservoirs of forbearance and charity.
5. The theodicy is circular. These virtues are only virtuous in a fallen world. They'd be
unnecessary in an unfilled world. They aren't intrinsic virtues. Indeed, isn't the goal to
eliminate evil?

i) Once the virtues are developed, it's no longer necessary to have the evils which foster
those virtues. But that's like saying the goal of maturation is to outgrow childhood. In a
sense, that's true, yet childhood is a necessary preliminary phase.

ii) In one sense I can't prove to you that these are intrinsic virtues. Moral appeals
depend on shared intuitions. That's a limitation of any moral argument.

iii) But consider an illustration. Take teen horror flicks about a group of high school
students who are friends. You know, the kind in which everyone was perfect teeth.

They go on a trip. But things go terribly awry. They find themselves in a situation where
I have a better chance of survival if you don't survive. That suddenly becomes the acid
test of friendship. Are they just fair-weather friends? Will they leave you behind? Or will
they risk their skin to save a friend?

A crisis brings out the best and the worst in people. To some extent it exposes what
was there all along, just beneath the surface. And a prolonged crisis will make people
better or worse.

Suppose these "friends" turn on each other. Desert each other. Save themselves at the
expense of one another.

Suppose, in an unfallen world, these people have the same character, only their fair-
weather friendship will never be put to the test. But surely there's something defective
about their character, even if those virtues are unnecessary in an unfallen world. Surely
they'd be better persons for having those virtues, even if they never had the occasion to
express them.

If the absence of those virtues is morally defective in a fallen world, it's morally defective
in an unfallen world. They're the same people (hypothetically speaking). How can they
be admirable in an unfallen world if their conduct would be deplorable in a fallen world?

To be good people, they should have it within themselves to rise to the challenge, had
the occasion presented itself. If we knew how badly they'd perform in that situation, our
opinion of them would plummet. We wouldn't look at them the same way.

Although this is hypothetical, there are real-world analogues. In the past, and in some
parts of the Third World today, it is dangerous to nurse the sick. Some diseases are
both contagious and life-threatening. If you care for a sick family member, you run the
risk of becoming infected and dying. But as a rule, it would be morally derelict to
abandon the ailing family member.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire

There's a blogger who attacks Calvinism from time to time. That's hardly surprising
coming from an Arminian blogger. However, he recently defected from the Christian
faith. Here's part of what he said:

So why does God not speak to someone crying out, literally, in such pain and
desperation? What is the value of God talking to all these people who are well
when the sick are ignored? I don’t want to broaden this into an argument so
much as express my experience so I will ignore the broader questions for now. In
my most desperate moments of physical and mental agony, depression, and
loneliness God was not there. I was rescued from suicidal thoughts by my family
and a very good psychologist. I know some Christians will assert that he was
there (in some sense behind it all) but I am afraid he was not there in any proper
or real sense of that term for me. So perhaps God doesn’t continually chat with
these other Christians either and they are projecting onto God what their
conscious mind expresses? But even if that is the case that helps very little since
God is still silent. It just makes it even more painful to realize that huge numbers
of Christians are deluding themselves into thinking God is talking with them
continuously when in fact he is not. The companionship which the New Testament
appears to talk about was simply not there. So what is the point of all this noetic
belief if that’s all my Christianity is (was)? What kind of God has no relational
component to offer in this life?

Christians love to use the father analogy for God. But what father would do that
to his child especially if he has all the means to be alongside them at that
moment? Certainly no decent father would distance himself at such a time. I
cannot bring myself to believe in a God who is so clearly absent at the moment I
needed him most. (And don’t get me started on the ‘Footprints’ poem!!) If the
Christian God does exist and he does communicate with people then my spiritual
antenna (as one of my Christian friends put it) is clearly broken.

What I do know is that if my son was in unbearable pain and desperation and was
sitting begging for me to comfort him in such a moment of desperation, and it
were in my power to comfort him, I would!

https://aremonstrantsramblings.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/my-journey-away-from-
christianity/

i) I think there's extensive, compelling evidence for a God who is active in human
affairs. But the pattern of God's activity is perplexing.
ii) Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the God of Arminian theism is nicer than the
God of Reformed theism. Problem is, having a nice God on paper doesn't make real life
any nicer.
You can say all the warm and winsome things about God that Arminians are wont to
say. You can contrast that with the "stern" God of Calvinism. But as this erstwhile
Arminian blogger discovered from painful personal experience, the loving, fatherly
"relational" God of Arminian theology is a paper God. A God that only exists in the mind
of the Arminian. A verbal construct. You can say the Calvinist God is harsh or "morally
monstrous." You can contrast the Calvinist God with what you deem to be the superior
character of the Arminian God. But switching from Calvinism to Arminianism doesn't
make the world any different. Believing in a nicer God doesn't make the world a kinder
gentler place than believing in a "harsh" God. Does nothing to sand off the jagged
edges.
In the Arminian lodge, you have hot chocolate and chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
But when you have to get up and go outside, the dark arctic blast slaps you in the face.
The world you must live in everyday is just the same whether you're Arminian or
Calvinist. Believing in a softhearted God does nothing to soften the world. It changes
nothing. The toasty, climate-controlled environment of Arminian theology doesn't survive
exposure to the elements. It fosters expectations that are dashed by brutal experience.
The glib, fact-free bromides of a Jerry Walls didn't prepare him for his ordeal. Reality is
unforgiving.
Cybernetic theology

How does God know the future–or does he? Some Christians might consider the
question presumptuous. That's a mystery!

However, Isa 46:10-11 indicates that God knows the future by willing the future.

Conversely, freewill theism posits a condition (man's libertarian freedom) that poses an
impediment to divine foreknowledge. And philosophical theologians of all stripes
concede the dilemma. Some freewill theists labor to reconcile divine foreknowledge with
libertarian freedom. But that shows they are acutely aware of the tension.

1. To take an illustration, suppose we compare God to a cyberneticist. Suppose a

cyberneticist creates 100 robots. Each one has different programming. The cyberneticist
knows what each one will do if he activates it.

Likewise, he knows how they will interact with each other. Depending on which robots
he activates, the results will be different.

The unactivated robots are like possible worlds. And the cyberneticist is the source of all
these alternate scenarios.

That's analogous to Reformed theism.

i) This has significant upsides. It clearly grounds divine foreknowledge and

counterfactual knowledge.

ii) It preserves the sovereignty of God, as the absolute Creator.

iii) A potential downside is the complaint that determinism implicates God in evil while
robbing man of moral responsibility. Of course, that's an ancient, perennial debate. If we
stick with the robotic metaphor, that raises to the question of whether androids are
personal moral agents. That's a popular topic in science fiction literature, going back to
Asimov's I, Robot. To insist that a robot can't be a person or moral agent simply begs
the question.

2. Contrast that with freewill theism. The cyberneticist dies. Years later, an investigator
discovers his secret laboratory.

In Molinism and Arminianism, the investigator knows, by consulting the notes of the
cyberneticist, what the robots will do, individually or in combination, if activated.

However, he doesn't know it because he made them. He doesn't know it because he

programmed the robots. He is not the source of what they will do, if activated. Rather,
what they will do is the source of his foreknowledge or counterfactual knowledge.
i) A potential upside is that it seems to diminish the tension between divine agency and
sin. However, it has many downsides:

ii) With respect to (i), there are roughly two aspects to the problem of evil: (a) How can
God be blameless? (b) How can man be blameworthy? Even if this model explains how
man can be blameworthy, it fails to exonerate God from complicity in evil. The outcome
is still dependent on something God did. In that respect it's no improvement over the
perceived problem of (1).

iii) It fails to explain how God can know the future. Indeed, it seems to remove a
necessary condition for divine foreknowledge.

iv) In fact, it fails to explain how God can know all possibilities. He's not the source of
these possibilities. On this view, what humans would do is a given. Autonomous
possibilities. God must adapt to that framework.

v) If human choices are ultimately uncaused, then how are we responsible for them? In
what respect are they our choices if they are ultimately uncaused? If, on the other hand,
they are ultimately caused, then isn't that deterministic?

vi) It reduces God to a Demiurge. There's a realm of abstract possibilities independent

of God. Equally ultimate. God simply chooses which ones to switch on.

3. In open theism, he doesn't even know for sure what they will do. Their programming
is adaptive and stochastic. Once activated, it takes on a life of its own. The end-game is
unpredictable from a distance.

i) One upside is that denial of divine foreknowledge is more consistent with man's
libertarian freedom–assuming man has libertarian freedom.

ii) A downside is that it makes God a mad scientist who activates robots to find out what
they will do.

A freewill theist might exclaim that by comparing God to a cyberneticist, I've just
conceded that Calvinism reduces men to robots! But aside from the fact that that my
illustration is metaphorical, I'm using variations on the same robotic metaphor for
Calvinism and freewill theism alike.
Is it murder?

i) A crucial principle in Arminian theodicy is the distinction between allowing evil and
causing, ensuring, and or determining evil. (I'm using "Arminian" as shorthand for
freewill theism.)

Mind you, that's a false dichotomy. Passively allowing an event to occur is often a way
of ensuring its occurrence. Likewise, on a standard philosophical definition, allowing an
event to happen is a way of causing it to happen. Your inaction or nonintervention
makes the difference.

However, let's drop that for now and consider the issue from another angle. I'm going to
adapt an illustration from William James.

ii) Suppose, during Spring break, I go hiking with a classmate. He's not my friend or
enemy. We're not close. But we're both athletic, we both like hiking, and there are
certain advantages to hiking with a companion, so I take him along.

The trail is often steep and treacherous, with loose gravel. Suppose he loses his footing
and slides over the ledge of a precipitous drop. He manages to grab onto a shrub,
which he's clinging to for dear life. I can see the fear in his eyes.

I throw him a rope, which he grabs. But the backpack weighs him down. He lacks the
strength to pull himself straight up. Moreover, his weight keeps the rope pressed against
the rocky surface. He can't get his hands around the rope to climb all the way–even if he
could get to that point.

By contrast, I have the strength and leverage to pull him to safety. But at the last minute
I change my mind. I let go, and watch him plunge to his death.

Maybe I find it exhilarating to have the power of life and death over another human
being. His life is literally in my hands.

Or maybe I'm an atheist. I'm indifferent to morality. I'm indifferent to human life. I just
don't care what happens to him. There's no malice. In the long run we're all dead. Life is
fortuitous. It has no ultimate significance. I shrug it off.

Or maybe, if you ask me why I let go of the rope, I couldn't tell you. I don't know why I
did it. It was a snap judgment. I may have had some subliminal impulse. Had I been
confronted with the same decision a day later, I might have saved him.

iii) In any case, did I commit murder? It wasn't premeditated murder. I didn't plan on that
when I invited him to join me. I didn't intend to stage a fatal accident. It's just something
I did on the spur of the moment.
Moreover, I didn't create the life-threatening situation. I didn't make him slip and slide. I
didn't push him over the ledge. That happened all by itself. A combination of the terrain
and something he did. A misstep. Whatever.

I did nothing to endanger him, beyond inviting him to hike with me. He accepted the
invitation. And I took the same risk. Neither one of us went hiking with the expectation
that one or both of us would die. There was a calculated risk.

I just let nature take its course. Gravity won!

Yet I expect most people, including most freewill theists, would say I committed murder
(or the moral equivalent) by letting him fall to his death when I could save him with no
risk to myself. And even if it wasn't murder, it was blameworthy. Indeed, reprehensible.
So how does the facile Arminian distinction exonerate God?

iv) Roger Olson grudgingly admits that there are situations in which allowing evil is
culpable, but he says there are other situations in which allowing evil is inculpable.
Problem is, he just leaves it at that. But if he presumes to attack the morality of
Reformed theism, then he shoulders a burden of proof to show how the situations in
which God permits evil are the kinds of situations where allowing that to happen is
blameless. What's the relevant difference?

He can't just stipulate that, in each and every case, those must be the right kinds of
situations. That would be special pleading. That would be exempting his own position
from the same scrutiny to which he subjects Calvinism. That would be asserting that, by
definition, the only evils that God permits are just the very kinds of evils which God is
blameless to permit. But if that's a legitimate maneuver, then a Calvinist is entitled to
make a comparable maneuver.
Friendship and the freewill defense

According to the freewill defense, God is not responsible or blameworthy for the harmful
decisions that humans make. He doesn't "cause" their choices or "determine" their
choices.

Suppose I have a college roommate who's a recovering alcoholic. Suppose I take him to
a bar. I place him in a tempting situation. I know he has a weakness for alcohol, but I
don't know if he will succumb to temptation. Suppose there's a 50/50 chance that he will
either succumb or resist.

If he does give into temptation, it's not because I "determined" the outcome. And as
freewill theists define causality, I didn't cause him to drink.

Was I blameworthy for exposing him to that gratuitous temptation? Even if, on this
occasion, he overcomes the temptation to drink, was I blameworthy for putting him at
risk? Was I acting in his best interests? Or was I playing to his weakness, thereby
exposing my roommate to harm?

Is it not my duty, as a friend, to protect him? Even if I can't do that all time, isn't that
something I could and should do in this situation?

And if he does give into temptation, am I not complicit in his downfall? Was I not
instrumental in his downfall?
Open theism and theodicy

According to open theism, God has sovereignly decided to create a world with
libertarianly free creatures and, since there are no true (would-) counterfactuals
of creaturely freedom for God to know and since, according to open theists,
libertarian freedom is incompatible with meticulous foreknowledge, God could
not know for sure ahead of time what kinds of choices his free creatures will
make. God would seem to be less blameworthy for not preventing evils that he
didn’t know in advance would happen.

http://alanrhoda.net/wordpress/?p=102

i) In human affairs there are situations where ignorance can be an extenuating or

exculpatory factor. But that's not a given.

Suppose I leave the house for an hour to go for a walk. I leave my young sons–ages 2
and 3–alone with a space heater running. In my absence the house catches fire and
they burn to death.

I didn't know in advance that this would happen. But that misses the point. It was
reckless of me to expose them to gratuitous risk. It was wrong of me to take that gamble
at their expense. In fact, even if the house hadn't caught fire, I'd still be negligent, still be
culpable, for endangering them.

ii) This assumes that God is, in fact, ignorant future evils. But surely that's overstated,
even on open theist assumptions. Suppose the open theist God didn't know 3 days in
advance that the Titanic was going to hit an iceberg and sink. Maybe that was
contingent on a string of unforeseeable human choices.

But did the open theist God still not know 3 hours in advance that the Titanic was going
to hit an iceberg? Could he not even anticipate 30 minutes in advance that the Titanic
was on a collision course with the iceberg–given the trajectory? How much lead time
does it take to swerve?

And even if that wasn't a "sure thing," is it not responsible and prudent to take
precautions just in case? Especially when innocent lives are at stake? If God can't know
for sure, isn't that all the more reason to leave himself a generous margin of error?

iii) Likewise, didn't the open theist God know that category 4 hurricane was making a
bee line for Galveston? Can't the open theist God predict when and where a hurricane
will make landfall at least as well as the National Weather Service?

iv) At this point an open theist might counter that even though God can anticipate some
(all?) natural disasters, God can't intervene to prevent them. For human choices to be
meaningful, choices must have predictable consequences. That, in turn, requires a
stable environment.

However, that reply is subject to multiple objections:

v) To begin with, the open theist is suddenly shifting ground. This argument concedes
that divine ignorance is an inadequate theodicy.

vi) A stock objection that open theists raise to Calvinism is that if every event is
predestined, then petitionary prayer is otiose, for the future is written in stone.

(Of course, in Calvinism, the stony inscription includes answered prayer.)

If, however, God can't destabilize the natural order by overriding the default setting, then
open theist theodicy negates open theist prayer.

vii) Furthermore, the argument backfires. If choices must have predictable

consequences, then choices require informed consent: permission granted in the
knowledge of probable risks and consequences.

If the residents of Galveston had known that a catastrophic hurricane was going to hit
their town on Sept. 8, 1990, many of them would evacuate ahead of the storm. And
even if some stubbornly remained behind, that would be their informed choice.

However, the open theist God withheld that information. They had no advance warning,
to make preparations.

This doesn't require God to divert the hurricane, but simply forewarn the residents. The
natural order remains inviolable.

Suppose I suffer from migraine headaches. I consult a neurologist. He says I'm in luck.
He can prescribe a medication that relieves the headache.

However, he neglects to tell me that the medication has a side-effect: it causes brain
cancer.

Although I chose to take the medication, I was denied the opportunity to make an
informed choice. Had I known the side-effect, I would not have taken the medication.
The neurologist was guilty of malpractice by failing to warn me.
Open theism dilemma

Open theism suffers from a major dilemma. On the one hand, in fielding the problem of
evil, open theists appeal to divine ignorance as a mitigating or exculpatory factor. For
instance:

According to open theism, God has sovereignly decided to create a world with
libertarianly free creatures and, since there are no true (would-) counterfactuals
of creaturely freedom for God to know and since, according to open theists,
libertarian freedom is incompatible with meticulous foreknowledge, God could
not know for sure ahead of time what kinds of choices his free creatures will
make. God would seem to be less blameworthy for not preventing evils that he
didn’t know in advance would happen.

http://alanrhoda.net/wordpress/?p=102

On the other hand, open theists contend that God can anticipate the future with a high
degree of probability. For instance:

…we would affirm God's comprehensive and exact knowledge of the possibilities
of the future–and, as has already been said, of the gradually changed likelihood
of each of those possibilities' being realized. And as the probably of a choice's
being made in a certain way gradually increases toward certainty, God knows
that also, often, no doubt, before the finite agent herself is aware of it. W.
Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Cornell, 1998), 189.

Many prophecies, in fact, have a conditional character, such as “If a nation does
not do such and such, then it will be destroyed” (see Jeremiah 18:7–10, for
example). Second, many prophetic predictions are based upon existing trends and
tendencies, which provide God with enough evidence to foresee the future
(Hasker 1989, 195). (Hasker places Jesus' prediction about Peter in this category,
by the way.) Finally, some prophecies simply reveal what God has already decided
to bring about in the future (Hasker 1989, 195). Since God's own actions in the
future are up to God, it is possible for God to know about them even though they
are contingent, so it is possible for prophecies to reveal them.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prophecy/#3
Indeed, it's an essential component of religious devotion to say that God can be trusted
to keep his promises.
To the extent that proponents accentuate divine ignorance as a distinctive element and
advantage of an open theist theodicy, they undercut the claim that God can accurately
anticipate the future and thereby be trusted to keep his promises.
Conversely, to the extent that proponents accentuate God's high probabilistic
knowledge of the future, they undercut the appeal to divine ignorance to exonerate God
in relation to evil.
Does God play dominoes?

While God’s plan for your friend’s parents included the fact that they would die in
this airline crash, He did not causally predetermine it. His will for their lives was
evidently, not that they should die years apart after lingering battles with illness
or pain, but that they should be taken together quickly to His side. Their deaths fit
into God’s providential plan for human history, which is to establish His Kingdom
among men. God has good reasons for permitting them to die in this crash,
otherwise He would not have allowed it. But as you know from reading The Only
Wise God, God’s sovereign providence over human history does not imply His
causally determining everything that happens. This event was the result of an
incomprehensible multitude of free human choices which God did not determine.
If her parents had decided not to travel on this flight because of a dream, then
God’s plan would have taken a different course. His providential planning would
have to have taken into account that free choice instead of the choices He did
have to work with. God’s providential plan does not override human free choices
but rather takes account of them.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/indonesia-air-asia-qz8501-and-the-problem-of-

That's a strange argument. God cannot prevent a plane crash without overriding our
freewill?

Let's grant libertarian freedom for the sake of argument. Let's play along with that
assumption. Let's consider some causes of plane crashes:

i) Terrorism would be the most direct example. A passenger smuggles a bomb onboard.
A pilot deliberately crashes the plane. A mechanic sabotages the plane. In each case,
the agent intends the (dire) outcome. According to the freewill defense, God must
respect human choices.

But even on its own grounds, there's a problem with that argument. Take the Air France
model of the A1380, which seats 538 passengers. You have one terrorist who wills the
plane to crash over against more than 500 passengers and crew who will the opposite.
God can't respect everyone's will in the case of conflicting volitions. Why does he side
with one terrorist?

ii) A less direct example would be human error (e.g. pilot error, air traffic controller error,
a design flaw, faulty maintenance). These involve free choices. However, in this case,
the agent doesn't intend the outcome. The plane crash is an unforeseen consequence
of human choices If the agent knew in advance the end-result of his action, he'd be
appalled. He would avoid that error.

How does it violate human freewill for God to correct a short-sighted or uninformed
choice which the agent never intended?

iii) Then there are impersonal causes (e.g. metal fatigue, bird strikes, lightning strikes,
downdrafts) that don't involve human choice. Why is God not allowed to override metal
fatigue or windshear? He's not overriding the freewill of the weather or machinery, is
he?

Sure, Craig can say that if passengers hadn't chosen to board the doomed plane, they
would not have died. But if God mustn't override human choices at all, then how can he
ever answer prayer? Nearly every answered prayer will intersect with a multitude of
human choices at the time or down the line. How can answered prayer be consistent
with every human volition that's impacted by answered prayer? Isn't Craig's position
Deistic? God flicks the first domino (creation), but after that he can't interrupt the domino
effect (i.e. actual human choices). Once he flicks the first domino, his hands are tied
thereafter. He just watches them fall.
Tug-of-war

Freewill theists typically act as though the distinction between God "causing" evil and
God "permitting" evil is morally crucial. I'm going to develop an illustration by
philosopher Stephen Mumford which a friend shared with me. Ironically, I like his
illustration, but disagree with his interpretation.

Take a tug-of-war. Suppose you begin with two evenly-matched teams. They may be
evenly matched because both sides have an equal number of teammates, and each
teammate is equal in size and strength to his fellow teammates, as well as the opposing
teammates. They are numerically and individually equally matched.

Or they may be aggregately evenly matched. Maybe one side has fewer teammates
than the other, but its teammates are bigger and stronger than the opposing side, as a
result of which each team pulls with the same amount of force. The qualitative
advantages balance out the quantitative disadvantages, or vice versa.

This results in a stalemate. Neither team can win.

So what would it take for one team to win? There are two ways that could happen.

i) By adding another teammate to one side. That would tip the balance of power in its
favor.

ii) By subtracting a teammate from one side. That, too, would shift the balance of
power.

We might say adding a teammate causes that team to win the tug of war. Just enough
extra force.

But by converse logic, we might say subtracting a teammate causes that team to lose.
Indeed, it's hard to see how that inference can be avoided. As philosopher David Lewis
once said: "We think of a cause as something that makes a difference."

If a teammate decided to quit, he'd naturally be blamed for causing his team to lose. His
team lost when he stopped pulling the rope. It was a group effort which could not afford
a single defection.

The opposing team won because his team lost, and his team lost because he gave up.
In that respect, he caused the opposing team to win. It couldn't win unless his team lost.
His team losing was a necessary and sufficient condition of their winning. He made it
happen. His action was the differential factor. The tipping point.

Furthermore, we could recast the issue in terms of rendering an outcome certain. In this
case, not pulling ensured defeat. Just as adding a teammate guaranteed (or
determined) victory for one side, subtracting a teammate guaranteed (or determined)
defeat for the other side.
Freedom and stability

All these Christian thinkers argue that free will requires an environment of
natural laws, predictability, risk and ability to do evil. In other words, even God
cannot create a world that includes genuine moral free will and responsibility and
constantly interfere to stop gratuitous evils from occurring.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/01/is-there-a-difference-

between-permitting-evil-and-doing-evil/#ixzz3OuduGbsA

Although I commented on this statement yesterday, in connection with his general post,
this is worth discussing in its own right. It merits an expanded analysis.

This is sometimes called a natural-law theodicy or stable environment theodicy. C. S.

Lewis (in The Problem of Pain) helped to popularize it. Here's one formulation:

A final important theodicy involves the following ideas: first, it is important that
events in the world take place in a regular way, since otherwise effective action
would be impossible; secondly, events will exhibit regular patterns only if they are
governed by natural laws; thirdly, if events are governed by natural laws, the
operation of those laws will give rise to events that harm individuals; so, fourthly,
God's allowing natural evils is justified because the existence of natural evils is
entailed by natural laws, and a world without natural laws would be a much
worse world.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#NeeForNatLaw

And this, in part, is how Lewis put it:

But if matter is to serve as a neutral field it must have a fixed nature of its own. If
a "world" or material system had only a single inhabitant it might conform at
every moment to his wishes "trees for his sake would crowd into a shade". But if
you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would
be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will.

If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance
is reduced. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals
which the pain-fibres in our nerves are apparently designed to transmit.
 If a man travelling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in
the opposite direction must be going up hill. If even a pebble lies where I want it
to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is
very far from being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts
of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and
modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil,
that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free, they cannot be prevented
from dealing with the problem by competition instead of by courtesy...The
permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us
to use it for hitting our neighbour on the head.

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this
abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam
became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey
me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such
a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which,
therefore, freedom of the will would be void.

Up to a point, this theodicy has some merit, but it's quite inadequate as a stand-alone
theodicy:

i) It doesn't select for freewill theism. For instance, Calvinism refers to this as ordinary
providence. It includes second causes. So Calvinism can also invoke the value of
"natural laws" as part of a Reformed theodicy. For instance, Calvinists are fond of
quoting:

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and
winter, day and night, shall not cease (Gen 8:22; cf. Jer 31:35).

ii) Moreover, the argument either proves to much or too little. Carried to a logical
extreme, this is an argument for deism. It precludes the destabilizing principle of
miracles or petitionary prayer. For once you leave the door ajar for miracles or
answered prayer, that interjects a degree of unpredictability into the outcome.

For instance, when a natural disaster is predicted (e.g. hurricanes, tornadoes),

Christians pray that God will avert the disaster. But by Olson's logic, it's misguided for
Christians to pray in that situation. Natural evils are an essential part of a stable
environment, which is–in turn–a precondition of freedom and responsibility.

iii) That's aggravated by the fact that petitionary prayer is, itself, highly unpredictable.
Sometimes God grants your request, and sometimes he doesn't. You never know
ahead of time if he will answer your prayer. And if you did know in advance that your
prayer would go unanswered, you wouldn't bother asking in the first place.

It that respect, it's hard to plan for the future based on prayer. Yet prayer is a fixture of
the Christian life.

iii) There's an ironic, fundamental tension between the appeal to libertarian freedom
and the appeal to the stability of our environment. On the one hand, the freewill theist
needs a stable environment to form the backdrop for his choices. To make meaningful
decisions, his decisions must have predictable consequences.

On the other hand, the fact that his decisions are indeterminate destabilizes the very
environment which forms the backdrop for his choices. Unpredictable choices have
unpredictable consequences. There's a circular or dialectical relationship between our
choices and our environment. The environment acts on the agent and the agent acts on
the environment. By acting on his environment, he changes his environment–which, in
turn–affects how the environment acts on him. A mutual alteration.

To the extent that the choices of libertarian agents create the future, indeterminate
choices make the future unpredictable. We step into the future we made, by our
collective decisions.

That's aggravated by the fact that our environment includes our social environment–and
not merely our natural or physical environment. We make choices in large part based on
our ability to predict how other people will react to our choices. Our free choices interact
with the sometimes countervailing free choices of other free agents, in a vast nexus
where the consequences of one agent's choice can neutralize the consequences of
another agent's choice. Of course, that raises the question of how people can be so
predictable if the outcome is truly open-ended.

Risk assessment is a common feature of decision-making. A cost/benefit analysis. But

libertarian freedom introduces unforeseeable consequences, due to the destructive
wave interference of competing free agents.

So the freewill theist is caught in a dilemma. If you demand a stable environment, that
undercuts the ability to manipulate the environment. If you demand freedom to
manipulate the environment, that undercuts a stable environment. The more freedom,
the more fluid the environment. These principles tug in opposing directions.

iv) Consider attempted suicide. Some people deliberately overdose on drugs, then
regret their rash act. They seek last-minute medical intervention. That makes the
consequences of attempted suicide less predictable. By Olson's logic, a world which
includes genuine freedom and responsibilities disallows second thoughts about
attempted suicide. Once you overdose, no attempt should be made to save your life, for
that trivializes the finality of our choices, without which we cannot make meaningful
choices in the first place. Examples could be multiplied.
Making the world safe for murder

I'm going to comment on two posts:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/01/a-problem-in-theology-distinctions-
without-differences/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/01/is-there-a-difference-between-
permitting-evil-and-doing-evil/

I'll begin by repeating a distinction I drew in a previous post:

1) I have a one-year-old child. I hold him underwater in the bathtub until he drowns.

2) I'm sitting on my chaise lounge in my backyard patio. I watch my one-year-old child

fall into the swimming pool. I know he can't swim. I sit there sipping lemonade while he
drowns.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/06/sins-of-omission.html

Back to Olson:

Mine remains that in the case of God and the human fall into sin there is a clear
difference between God "doing it" (causing it directly or indirectly such that he
wanted it to happen and rendered it certain) and "permitting it." (By the way I've
explained this distinction-with-a-real-difference here several times before.

i) There's more to the problem of evil than the Fall (which Olson doesn't believe in
anyway). There's the vast range of moral and natural evils.

ii) According to classical Arminian providence, God is surely the indirect cause of many
evils. God is not the sole cause, but he is a necessary cause.

And the same holds true for open theism. At best, open theism illustrates the law of
unintended consequences. Yet that can also be culpable, viz. criminal negligence,
depraved indifference.

iii) Doing nothing is a perfect way of rendering many outcomes certain. If a baby stroller
accidentally rolls down the hill, it is inevitable that it will run into a busy intersection
unless I step in to prevent it. In many cases, inaction guarantees the outcome.

When Calvinists (or other divine determinists) claim there is no real difference
between God doing evil and permitting evil they are usually objecting to free will
 theists’ (e.g., Arminians’) claim that for God to design, ordain, render certain, and
govern sin and evil makes God monstrous. The Calvinists making this argument
against free will theism say that if God is omnipotent and could stop evil from
happening but doesn’t he is just as culpable, if at all, as if he designed, ordained,
rendered certain and governed evil.

i) Olson is very fond of that "render certain" formula. Evidently, he's never considered
what that means. It doesn't occur to him that in Arminian providence, God ensures
many evils.

Let's go back to my example: unless the father fishes his young son out of the
swimming pool, his inaction ensures that his son will drown.

In many cases, there's nothing an agent needs to do to render the outcome certain.
Rather, some outcomes are inevitable unless an agent intervenes.

Nonintervention renders the outcome certain by allowing nature to take its course.
Absent divine action to the contrary, the outcome is inevitable.

Therefore, Olson deceives himself by imagining that he's drawn a distinction between
Calvinism and Arminianism at this juncture.

ii) What about "design." Once again, let's go back to my example. If the toddler drowns,
that wasn't by design. The father didn't plan that outcome.

But how is that distinction exculpatory? Once he sees the toddler fall into the swimming
pool, if he let's him drown, that's culpable–even if it wasn't' by design.

Suppose that in Arminianism, moral evils don't happen by God's design. But that doesn't
ipso facto exonerate the Arminian God.

All one has to do to turn aside the sweeping claim that this is a distinction
without a difference is demonstrate that everyone, including the objector himself
or herself, knows this to be a difference in at least one case. In other words, if
there is even one instance in which everyone, including the objector, must admit
that there is a real difference between “doing evil” and “permitting evil,” then the
claim that this is a distinction without a difference must fail.

That's a confused way to frame the issue. The question at issue isn't whether allowing
harm is sometimes exculpatory, but whether allowing harm (in contrast to doing,
causing, ensuring, intending) harm is ipso facto exculpatory.
Sometimes permitting evil is culpable. So he can't just resort to that bare distinction.

Since it can either be evil or not be evil to permit evil, a theodicy has to do more than
appeal to permission in general to exonerate the God of freewill theism. It must provide
specific reasons why permission would be inculpatory in that particular kind of situation.

But, of course, everyone does know that there is a difference between “doing
evil” and “permitting evil.” In the one case, “doing evil,” the evil is actually,
physically acted out by the doer whereas in the other case, “permitting evil,” the
evil is not actually, physically acted out by the permitter. This is why, to the best
of my knowledge, no law exists in any civilized society that equates the doing of a
crime with the permitting of a crime. True, some societies have criminalized
certain behaviors that include permitting a crime without doing it. But the mere
permission is never actually equated with the actual doing and that because of
two factors: 1) different intentionality, and 2) different physical involvement.

And, of course, everyone can think of instances in which there is a real moral
distinction-with-a-difference between permitting an evil to occur and actually
doing the evil (or causing it).

One does not have to think hard to come up with numerous examples in which a
person with the power to stop an evil but does not stop it is doing something
entirely different from the actual doing of the evil.

An obvious problem with that appeal is that even in cases where permitting evil is
exculpatory, that typically involves human agents with limited options. But an
omnipotent, omniscient agent has resources they don't. What's exculpatory for them
isn't ipso facto exculpatory for him, given the range of options at his disposal. The more
powerful the agent, the less excuse he has to permit some things. He can prevent
things we can't.

A similar, more popularly written, explication may be found in Gregory Boyd’s Is

God to Blame?

It's my understanding that Boyd has a view of cosmic spiritual warfare in which God and
the good guys eventually get the upper hand. We win.

But according to open theism, isn't the future always indeterminate? There will never be
a future time beyond which the future is settled once and for all time. However far into
the future we go, it will remain indeterminate.
That means the status quo ante is inherently unstable. There is no final settlement. It's
like political maps in which boundaries are continuously drawn and redrawn over the
centuries depending on which side won or lost the last border war.

If the future is perpetually indeterminate, then there are no decisive victories and
defeats. Even if God annihilated the Devil, there could be another angelic rebellion.

All these Christian thinkers argue that free will requires an environment of
natural laws, predictability, risk and ability to do evil. In other words, even God
cannot create a world that includes genuine moral free will and responsibility and
constantly interfere to stop gratuitous evils from occurring.

i) To begin with, there's an obvious tension between his appeal to libertarian freedom
and natural laws. An appeal to natural laws is deterministic. The uniformity of nature.
Physical determinism.

But if human agents enjoy the libertarian freedom to do otherwise, then isn't the
outcome unpredictable? Isn't the outcome indeterminate?

Perhaps Olson would distinguish between human agency and our natural environment.
But since their environment acts on agents and agents act on their environment, that
can't be neatly compartmentalized.

ii) By Olson's logic, petitionary prayer has no place in freewill theism. To begin with,
Christians sometimes pray that God will prevent nature from taking its course. But to the
extent that God answers their prayers, that infers with natural laws. That destabilizes
our environment. Makes the outcome unpredictable.

And that's aggravated by unanswered prayer. You never know ahead of time which
prayers God will answer.

iii) By Olson's logic, we should close Emergency Rooms. Take murder. In the past it
was easier to kill somebody. But due to those pesky, meddlesome trauma physicians,
some gunshot victims (to take one example) who would otherwise die, absent medical
intervention, survive.

That makes attempted murder far more unpredictable than it used to be. You now
assume the risk of murdering someone without the assurance of success. Genuine
moral freewill requires a world in which attempted murder has predictable
consequences.
iv) Apropos (iiii), we should fire all the criminologists. In the past, it was easier to get
away with premeditated murder. Wipe your fingerprints off the doorknob. Dispose of the
murder weapon.

But due to forensic science, it's much harder than it used to be to avoid leaving trace
evidence behind at the scene of the crime. That makes premeditated murder far more
unpredictable. You now assume the risk of murdering someone without the assurance
that your involvement will go unnoticed. Genuine moral freewill requires a world in which
it is safe to commit premeditated murder without fear of detection.

v) By parity of argument, it is wrong to post lifeguards at some beaches and swimming

pool some of the time, for that makes the decision to swim or surf rest on the
unpredictable variable of whether or not there's a life guard on duty. That affects the risk
assessment. Genuine moral freedom requires a world in which there are no lifeguards
at beaches or swimming pools.

The ability to do great good includes the ability to do great evil.

Does that logic apply to God?

Does that mean the saints in heaven retain the same libertarian ability to do great evil?

Arminianism does not include any particular view of "natural evils." Some
Arminians would say SOME are from God; others would argue that innocent
suffering is NEVER God's antecedent will and that God always only reluctantly
permits it because to always "step in" and stop it would change the nature of free
will in this world (Peterson's view). Personally, I do not think we can always know
and must remain uncertain of anything but that God can bring good out of any
natural evil. Arminianism ONLY claims that God NEVER wills moral evils
antecedently (e.g., Adam and Eve's fall into sin) but reluctantly permits them
(consequent will).

Notice that Olson doesn't bother to explain how the distinction between God's
antecedent will and his consequent will is morally germane. What makes that
exculpatory?

The upshot is he appeals to reason (as he sees it) when attacking Calvinism, but he
appeals to mystery when defending Arminianism.
A will to damn

I'm going to comment on this:

https://ochuk.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/two-wills-yes-a-will-to-damn-no-a-response-to-
piper/

i) It may be a mistake for me to respond. I disagree with Piper's position. Someone like
Bnonn Dominic Tennant, who's more sympathetic to Piper's position, might be better
equipped to defend it.

Likewise, I'm not deeply conversant with Piper's theology. My reading of Piper is quite
limited. I can't vouch for the accuracy of Adam's interpretation, or whether Piper has
said things elsewhere which would bolster his position.

ii) One initial problem is that Adam is basically operating with philosophical theology
whereas Piper is basically operating with exegetical theology. For Piper, the two wills of
God is a revealed truth. For him it doesn't ultimately matter if that appears to be
inconsistent to our finite minds.

iii) Jeremy Pierce has been critical of how Piper parses God's self-glorification:

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2006/05/jealousy.html

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2008/05/regret_in_heave.html

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2009/11/priorities-phil1.html

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2010/03/for-zions-sake.html#more

iv) Conversely, I've argued that it's not ipso facto incoherent for the Calvinist God to
have unrequited desires:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/12/divine-frustration.html

So with those caveats duly register, let's proceed:

1. If the doctrine of Unconditional Election is true, then God prefers that not all be
saved.
2. But the Bible says that God prefers that all be saved (1 Tim 2:4, 2 Pet 3:9,
Ezekiel 18:23, 32).
3. Therefore, the doctrine of Unconditional Election is false.

How might the defender of Unconditional Election respond? One might deny [2] by
some method of interpretation that concludes that the verses in question do not
really say God prefers that all be saved.
That's my own position.

Piper’s response is simple: the argument equivocates the meaning of the word
“prefers.” In [1] God prefers to actualize states of affairs that do not entail the
salvation of everyone; in [2] God prefers that the states of affairs in which
everyone is saved were actual. In the first sense, God prefers to actualizes
something; in the second, God prefers that something else were actual. A nice
way of putting it (borrowed from Steven Cowan) is that all things being equal,
God prefers to save everyone, but all things considered, God prefers not to save
everyone. Think of a physician who intends to help people overseas ward off a
deadly disease, but upon hearing that his homeland is being impacted by the
disease, he decides to stay and help his own people. It is perfectly coherent to
understand his conflicting preferences in this way. And it is this sort of “two wills”
theology that is unavoidable when trying to answer the problem of evil.

On the face of it, that's a coherent position.

Let us suppose this is right. Then, we have to answer this: what sort of
consideration is it that so constrains God from saving everyone? What is at stake
for God if he fails to save everyone? Piper’s answer is that God’s glory is at stake:
God would fail to maximize the revelation of his glory to the elect by virtue of
failing to send some sinners to hell so that they might bear, and in so doing
reveal, the full weight of divine wrath. Piper believes that a world where this sort
of wrath is not actualized is on the whole less preferable than a world in which it
is actualized (alongside a display of mercy), because it fails to exemplify the
sternness of God’s wrath.

Hovering in the background of this discussion is the assumption that there's one best
possible world. That one possible world is simply preferable to another possible world.
And no doubt there are cases where that is true. Some possible worlds are clearly
worse than others.
But in other cases, that's simplistic. One possible world may be preferable to another in
some respects, but less preferable in other respects. Among the better possible worlds,
each has a unique package of goods that isn't captured by the alternative.

I have three objections to this consideration. First, it imposes a rather strong

limitation on God’s freedom in that He is not really free to show mercy to
 whomever He likes. Piper elsewhere assumes that the failure to uphold God’s
glory is a moral failure (see The Future of Justification, 64).

i) There's a potential equivocation here. Does Adam mean a moral failure on God's part,
or on the part of humans?
If the former, then I agree with him that Piper's understanding is flawed in this respect. If
the latter, then Adam's conclusion is fallacious.
ii) Keep in mind, too, that if God has a goal that's inconsistent with universal salvation,
then God can't save everyone consistent with that goal. That's a contingent limitation.
God can save everyone minus the goal. Or God can achieve his goal. It's the
combination that's impossible.

To put this in reverse: if it's God's goal to save everyone, then God can't damn anyone.
But that's not a strong limitation on God's freedom. That just means God can't perform a
pseudotask. Not all possibilities are compossible. God can't pursue contradictory goals,
that's all.

A second objection grants the truth of the penal substitution theory of the
atonement and argues that the fullness of God’s wrath could be sufficiently
displayed (if it must be displayed) in the work of Christ. The elect would need
nothing more than the cross of Christ to understand the depths of their sin and
the severity of God’s response to it. But if a populated hell is required to
sufficiently display God’s wrath to the elect, then the cross of Christ is insufficient
to display God’s wrath to the elect.

i) That's equivocal. The primary purpose of penal substitution is to make atonement for
the sins of the elect. The main purpose is not illustrative. It's not like the moral influence
theory, governmental theory, or declaratory theory of the atonement. Penal substitution
is mainly about what it does, not what it shows. Its demonstrative value is a beneficial
side-effect.
ii) In addition, to say God's wrath is sufficiently demonstrated at the cross renders all
historical and eschatological judgments in Scripture gratuitous.

Third, given the sort of sovereignty Piper affirms, it is hard to understand what
could be glorious about God’s wrath if it is meted out for sins that were causally
brought about by God.

That's not self-evident. Suppose a Latin American gov't is attempting to wipe out a drug
cartel. To do that, it ambushes the cartel's roving death squads. It lures them into an
exposed position, where they fire on gov't soldiers, who return fire.
In a sense, the Latin American gov't "causally brought about" that confrontation. It
provoked the confrontation, through a ruse de guerre. Yet the death squads deserved to
be mowed down.

The doctrine of divine wrath contains two components. The first is a sense of
righteous indignation towards a wrong; the second is a just punishment brought
to bear on the wrongdoer. But how does one wrong God and thereby merit his
wrath by doing exactly what God determines one to do?

i) There's another potential equivocation here. Notice how Adam elides wrong into
wronging God. But must one wrong God to be a wrongdoer? Must one wrong God to do
wrong?
ii) Even in freewill theism, in what sense does a human wrong God? A human is in no
position to harm God. So it must mean something else.

The picture we are left with is a God who frustrates himself by ordaining states of
affairs that he judges to be bad. God’s anger and punishment are irrational as
they are directed towards objects that do exactly what they are supposed to do.

i) To begin with, there's the danger of framing this in overly anthropomorphic terms. One
needn't assume that God is literally angry or becomes angry. We could better recast this
in terms of divine disapproval for evil qua evil.
ii) God can disapprove of something considered in isolation, but approve of the
contribution it makes to the ultimate outcome. God can disapprove of something that's
evil in its own right, but which facilitates a greater good or second-order good.
iii) This doesn't mean God frustrates himself by ordaining events he judges to be bad.
To the contrary, these are his appointed means to the appointed end. There's an
equivocation here:

a) These are good means in the sense that they facilitate the objective.

b) These are bad means in the sense that they are wicked in their own right.

It's not as if God's means are at cross-purposes with his ends. The means are perfectly
adapted to the ends.

We need to differentiate a teleological evaluation of the means from an ethical

evaluation of the means, taken in isolation.
For instance, an evil man is evil whether or not he is put in the service of a good goal.
It's just that some people are put into arrangements which make them unwitting allies in
a cause that's better and greater than themselves.

Adam's animosity towards Calvinism prevents him from exploring or anticipating

counterarguments.

How much more irrational and stupid is God’s wrath on sinners for sins God
causes them to commit?

i) To begin with, there's the question of how Adam defines causation. Take the
counterfactual theory of causation:

We think of a cause as something that makes a difference, and the difference it

makes must be a difference from what would have happened without it. Had it
been absent, its effects — some of them, at least, and usually all — would have
been absent as well.

e causally depends on c if and only if, if c were to occur e would occur; and if c
were not to occur e would not occur.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/#CouCauDep

On that definition, God causes sin whether it's Calvinism, Thomism, Molinism, classical
Arminianism, or open theism.

Perhaps Adam would take issue with that definition. It is not, however, a Calvinistic
theory of causation. It's not special pleading for a Calvinist define causation that way.

Moreover, does Adam have a better theory of causation to offer? Every philosophical
theory of causation is open to criticism.

ii) Moreover, Molinism falls prey to parallel objections. Although there are infeasible
worlds which God cannot instantiate, God didn't choose to instantiate our word at
gunpoint. He had a free hand. He was at liberty to instantiate a different feasible world.
So why is he mad at the end-result of his own actions? He initiated this chain of events.
He knew what was coming.
Causing evil and committing evil

When attacking Calvinism, freewill theists belittle the distinction between causing evil
and doing evil. But isn't there a relevant difference?

For instance, say I get drunk at the bar. I sense that I'm drunk. But I drive back home.
Only I'm involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident on the way back.

I did evil. I committed evil.

Suppose I have a grown son who gets drunk at the bar. Senses that he's drunk But
drives back home, running over a cyclist on the way back.

I caused evil.

In the second case I initiated a chain of events resulting in a wrongful death. But I didn't
do evil. And I'm not culpable for my son's vehicular homicide.

Now, freewill theists might say the situation is different in the case of God. For instance,
if an agent knowing and intentionally causes evil. But for now I'm noting that there's a
distinction in principle between causing evil and committing evil.

That creates an interesting parallel between human and divine causation of evil vis-a-vis
open theism.

As a thoughtful human, I know that whatever I do or don't do will cause some resultant
evil somewhere down the line. Being shortsighted, I don't know what the resultant evil
will be, but I know that, even with the best of intentions, my actions will cause some
resultant evils.

And the same would apply to open theism.

Kinda like: if I throw dice enough times, I know that I will throw sixes. I don't know which
throw that will be. But sooner or later, that combination is bound to turn up.
Distraught parents

I'm going to comment on a letter from an allegedly distraught parent to William Lane
Craig:

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/letter-from-a-grieving-father

i) To begin with, I don't know that this is for real. It may just as well be an exercise in
atheistic sockpuppetry to put a prominent Christian apologist on the spot.

ii) There can be a danger in being too deferential to grieving parents. By that I mean,
there's a tendency in the current culture to treat the loss of a child as the worst thing that
can possibly happen to someone. Uniquely worse than losing a parent, sibling, spouse,
or best friend.

But is that true? I think the major reason is that other kinds of deaths are expected.
Therefore, the cultural message is that we shouldn't be as distraught by the death of a
parent, sibling, or spouse.

But how is that germane to the sense of loss and depth of loss? Surely that's based on
the quality or intensity of the emotional bond, and not whether their death is expected.

I don't think that the death of a child is uniquely painful. It's rather callous to assume
that.

iii) Why would the correspondent be reading Sam Harris? Assuming the letter is for
real, that's the kind of thing someone does who has lost his faith, and is seeking to
justify his loss of faith.

iv) Assuming the letter is for real, this illustrates the danger of false expectations. Child
mortality has plummeted in contemporary Western nations thanks to modern medical
science. As a result, the death of a child is shocking to parents.

But in the past (as well as Third World countries), parents never expected most of their
children to reach maturity. Siblings were used to losing brothers and sisters in
childhood.

Although that's emotional shocking, that wasn't intellectually shocking.

By the same token, child mortality was high in Bible times. Take references to stillbirth
in Scripture.

Child mortality is not inconsistent with Biblical theism. God didn't promise to protect
Christian children from fatal illness. This doesn't call God's existence into question. In
terms of Biblical theism, there's no presumption that you children will be exempt from
fatal illness.
We may still ask, "Why does God allow it?", but this doesn't contradict Christian
theology. There's no logical tension between what Christian theology says can happen
and what (allegedly) happened to this parent.

v) Apropos (iv), for too many people, something isn't real until it happens to them.
Unless they personally experience some tragedy, that's just an abstraction which they
don't incorporate into their outlook.

vi) Rejecting God if you lose a loved one trivializes the life and death of your loved one.
In a godless universe, life is cheap. You cheapen the value of your loved one by
rejecting God in anger over the death of your loved one.

Because your loved one meant so much to you, you reject God for taking your loved
one from you. But in so doing, you make your loved one worthless. You reduce your
loved-one to driftwood in the sea of cosmic indifference. They were just a little flicker of
consciousness between the dark and silent stretches of infinite time and space.

vii) If your loved one is born or diagnosed with a terminal illness, that's tragic, but it's an
opportunity as well. It gives you the lead-time to make the most of the remaining time.
You know the time is short. So you don't take them for granted.

That intensifies the bond. You learn to get more out of less. The time is very
concentrated. The less time remaining, the more precious the remaining time.

So there's a tradeoff. If you think someone will always be a part of your life–you have
time to burn, you can call them or see them whenever you want–there can be long
stretches when you treat them as if they don't exist. There's no urgency.

viii) Let's play devil's advocate. Suppose someone says, "Why should I be grateful to
God that something even worse didn't befall my loved one? If a mugger knocks out my
front teeth, should I thank him because he didn't set me on fire?"

a) If you're loved one was spared a worse fate even though they deserved a worse fate,
then that's reason for gratitude.

b) There's more to it than God protecting your loved one from an even worse fate.
There's the compensations of heaven.
Heavenly rewards

But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good
things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and
you are in anguish (Lk 16:25).

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing
with the glory that is to be revealed to us (Rom 8:18).

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory
beyond all comparison (2 Cor 4:17).

The reversal of fortune is a common biblical motif. The aforementioned verses scratch
the surface. However, I'm going to briefly consider an objection to eschatological
compensation from a prominent atheist:

Keith Parsons

In one of my two debates with William Lane Craig I addressed his claim that
heavenly bliss will compensate for earthly suffering. I used the example of an
eccentric billionaire who would randomly choose victims, beat them bloody, but
then compensate them with a ten million dollar check. My point was that even if
the victim later agreed that he was better off after the beating plus the ten
million than he would have been with no beating and no ten million, the beating
was still, obviously, unjustified. My point was that future rewards, however
lavish, and however deserved, do not make an injustice right…In principle, NO
degree of compensation can make a wrong right. To think otherwise is like
thinking that a lie can be made true if the liar is perfectly honest the rest of his
life.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2014/02/05/youre-just-being-obstinate-
no-you-you/#comment-1238460373

There are several glaring problems with this argument:

i) He's using an example of gratuitous evil. A sadist who chooses innocent victims at
random because he gets his kicks by inflicting pain on others. But that's disanalogous to
Biblical theism. In Scripture, the suffering of the innocent has a worthy purpose in the
plan of God. And God is well-motivated, not ill-motivated.
ii) There's a failure to distinguish between being wronged and suffering wrong. Even if I
am wronged, that doesn't entail that God wronged me. Joseph's brothers wronged him
by selling him into slavery. Their motivation was sinful. They resented him. But God's
motive in orchestrating the chain of events was quite different than theirs.

iii) I can imagine situations where compensation is a justifying factor. Suppose a hostile
state launches an unprovoked war of aggression against a neighboring state. The
neighboring state has a right, indeed, an obligation, to defend itself. A duty to protect its
citizens against attack.

Suppose a citizen of the neighboring state has a strategically valuable property. The
neighboring state seizes his property, both to keep it out of enemy hands, and to use it
as a base of operations. The value of the property is degraded due to warfare.
However, after the neighboring state wins the counteroffensive, the citizen is generously
compensated for his loss.

It was unjust, yet justifiable, to seize his property, then compensate him. Seizing his
property was necessary to defend the country against the aggressor. So even though
the citizen suffered an injustice by losing his property, the seizure was justifiable under
those circumstances. Even so, justice demands restitution for his loss.

I'm not saying that's exactly parallel to eschatological compensations. Rather, I'm using
this to illustrate the fact that, as a matter of principle, heavenly rewards can rightly
compensate for earthly suffering or injustice.
The problem of evil is trivial

The problem of evil is an abject failure. Don't take my word for it. Just ask militant
atheist Richard Dawkins:

I have never found the problem of evil very persuasive as an argument against
deities. There seems no obvious reason to presume that your God will be good.
The question for me is why you think any God, good or evil or indifferent, exists at
all. Most of the Greek pantheon sported very human vices, and the 'jealous God'
of the Old Testament is surely one of the nastiest, most truly evil characters in all
fiction. Tsunamis would be just up his street, and the more misery and mayhem
the better. I have always thought the 'Problem of Evil' was a rather trivial
problem for theists...

http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/127-the-theology-of-the-tsunami
Mercy-killing and Arminian theodicy

The distinction between God "causing" or "ensuring" evil and "letting" evil happen is
crucial to Arminian theodicy. Roger Olson, for one, constantly resorts to this distinction.
It's striking, therefore, that in his sympathetic exploration of physician-assisted suicide,
he erases the distinction between killing and letting die:

Some patients simply choose to forego all treatments for their terminal disease
and die naturally. Usually this also involves gradually starving to death or dying
by dehydration. It can take weeks. Few people blame them or even call it
“suicide.” And yet, in a way, it is suicide.

Some years ago I had the privilege of teaching nurses in several cohorts in a
“degree completion” program. My course, which they were required to take as
part of their studies, was called “Developing a Christian Worldview” and included
a unit on Christian ethics. We talked about the ethical issues surrounding death
including suicide. One thing that struck me was that almost all the nurses who
worked in hospitals agreed that PAS is quite common. They said that in many
terminal cases a doctor will order pain medicine in gradually increasing doses
that eventually suppress breathing. And that so long as the doses are necessary
to alleviate pain, even if they result in death, most district attorneys will not
prosecute the doctors or nurses involved. They said it is one of the best kept
secrets in the medical profession—given how common it is.

Were my nurse students right? Is it fairly common practice for a doctor to

increase a dying patient's pain meds to the point where they suppress breathing
with the inevitable result of death?

To me, the line between choosing to forego all medical treatment with the certain
result of death and choosing to end one's own life to end extreme suffering is
blurry at best.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/10/can-a-christian-support-physician-
assisted-suicide/
Living death or merciful death?

At the risk of exhuming a horse carcass to flog it some more, I'd like to make a further
observation. Some critics of the OT say it was unnecessary to execute the Canaanite
kids along with the adults. Adoption was an alternative. They assure us that that would
be more merciful than mass execution.

I have to wonder how much thought they've given to that. Imagine you're a Canaanite
child of 7, 8, 9. You watch an Israelite soldier put your parents, grandparents, aunts,
uncles, and older siblings to the sword. He then adopts you.

Is it really more merciful for a 9-year-old (give or take) to witness his whole family cut
down while he alone is spared, to be raised by the executioner? Not just being the sole
survivor, but being raised by the very person or people who did that to the rest of your
family?

From time to time the news reports an accident which killed the parents, leaving their
children orphaned. I can't help thinking that it many cases it would be more merciful for
families to die together, rather than being torn apart like that.

I'm not saying that's the ipso facto justification for the OT commands. I'm just
responding to critics on their own grounds, when they say the OT commanders are
"merciless," and when they offer a more merciful alternative. I don't think they've made a
serious effort to project themselves into the mind of a child. Sometimes death is more
merciful than life.

Fact is, it's not hard to destroy a person by killing the one person (or persons) they can't
live without. They linger on. But at that point it's a living death.
Saving God from himself

I think there is an important apologetic aspect to this whole issue of whether God
ordered the slaughter of the Canaanite infants...We cannot invite men to the
source of all goodness and then play a bait and switch. We cannot turn around
and say, "Oh, by the way, I told you that God is the source of love, mercy, pity,
and the laughter of children. But actually, I also believe firmly that God
commanded men to be pitiless upon little children and to cut off their laughter
forever by putting them to the edge of the sword. And they carried it through,
too. And in the end, I'm okay with that."

Which is why I cannot sit down and simply accept God's ordering the slaughter of
the Canaanite children by the Israelites.

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2014/08/on_paul_copans_attempted_solut.html
#comment-294835

One problem with Lydia's position is the notion that she can erect a high wall between
God and natural or moral evil. But even if she succeeded in that implausible exercise, it
would relocate rather than resolve the problem of evil. It's like a black market arms
dealer for a drug cartel who says he's not responsible for the cartel assassinating a
prosector because, once the buyer takes receipt of the weapons, what's done with them
is out of his hands. But, of course, we wouldn't accept that excuse.
Is God too pure to look on evil?

The Bible is very clear that God has nothing to do with evil. There is “no darkness”
in God (1 Jn 1:5). Far from intentionally bringing about evil, God’s “eyes are too
pure to look on evil” (Hab. 1:13). All evil, therefore, must be ultimately traced
back to decisions made by free agents other than God. Some of these agents are
human. Some of these agents are angelic. Either way, evil originates in their
willing, not God’s.

http://reknew.org/2014/05/romans-828-what-does-it-mean/

It's striking to see how badly Gregory Boyd quotes Hab 1:13 out of context. Let's begin
by quoting a larger sample of the passage in question:

3 Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at
wrong?Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.

12 Are you not from everlasting,

O Lord my God, my Holy One?

We shall not die.

O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment,

and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.

13 You who are of purer eyes than to see evil

and cannot look at wrong,

why do you idly look at traitors

and remain silent when the wicked swallows up

the man more righteous than he? (1:3,12-13, ESV)

Here's how Richard Patterson renders the Hebrew in his commentary:

 Why do you make me look at iniquity while You behold oppression?

O Lord, You have appointed them to execute judgment; O Rock, You have
established them to reprove. Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; You cannot
behold oppression. Why do You behold the treacherous and keep silent when the
wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves (pp129,143).

And here's how F. F. Bruce renders the Hebrew in his commentary:

You have appointed them for judgment, O Lord; you have established them for
punishment, my Rock. You are too pure of eyes to behold wrongdoing, you cannot
look on evil; why do you look on treacherous people and remain silent when the
wicked swallows up one more righteous than himself? (p852).

i) Contrary to Boyd's denial, it's very clear from Habakkuk that God does have
something to do with evil. He is behind the Babylonian resurgence. He uses them as
executors of divine judgment against wayward Israel. As Bruce observes, commenting
on v12:

The prophet goes on to acknowledge Yahweh's sovereignty over the nations; he

ordains or overrules their actions for the furtherance of his purpose in the world. The
Chaldean invaders have indeed been raised up by him for the punishment of the
ungodly–this the prophet accepts without question (p853).

ii) Habakkuk makes formally contradictory claims about God. He says God both does
and does not "look on" evil. So he resorts to paradoxical formulations.

There's a sense in which God does look on evil, and another sense in which God does
not. A double entendre. Presumably, Habakkuk means God doesn't look on evil with
favor or approval.

iii) Yet God is using evil to punish evil. Poetic justice. Indeed, the Babylonians are even
worse than apostate Israel.

Habakkuk senses a tension between the means and the ends. God goes on to explain
that having punished apostate Israel by the Babylonian scourge, God will punish
Babylon for its own iniquity.

Boyd's description conjures up the image of a king who is pure because he lives within
a walled city, surrounded by beauty. There's no crime within the walled city. No moral
ugliness.
But outside the walled city is physical and moral squalor. Utopian conditions inside the
walls. Dystopian conditions outside the walls.

The king retains his stainless purity because he never leaves the royal city to see the
rest of his kingdom. The royal city is walled off from the evil outside the walls, so the
king never sees it. He retains his innocence by averting his eyes. By shielding his gaze
from the sight of evil. The king can't bear the sight of evil, so he looks away.

There are freewill theists like Boyd who act as if God would be morally tarnished if he
even beheld evil. Like some Christians who defined holiness by never watching an R-
rated movie. Of course, that's not a position which Boyd can consistently maintain.
Dying young

I'm posting my side of a little impromptu debate between Lydia McGrew and me:

STEVE SAID ...

Thanks for your intellectual honesty. Sometimes we have to eliminate bad answers
before we can explore better answers.

I'm glad I'm not in a position where I have to carry out those commands.

That said, I don't think death by divine command is worse than death by divine
providence. I don't see that death by God's command presents a special theodicean
problem in contrast to death by ordinary providence. Either both are morally problematic
or neither is.

I think the efforts by Copan, Hess, and Matt Flannagan are shortsighted in that regard.

Same thing with more liberal theologians. If there's a problem, it's not with God's word
but God's world. Even if one denies the inspiration of Scripture, that just relocates the
problem to real-world atrocities, for which God remains ultimately responsible.

Conversely, if we have an adequate theodicy for real-world atrocities, why is that

inapplicable to Biblical holy war?

STEVE SAID ...

Why do you think the death of an infant by divine command presents a special problem,
but his death by natural evil does not? Your distinction is not self-explanatory.

Yes, my Calvinism may make a difference, but every theistic tradition (e.g. Thomism,
Arminianism, Molinism, open theism) must grapple with parallel issues.

On just about every alternative, God is the ultimate cause of natural evil.

Sorry, but I'm still unclear on why you think death resulting from a divine command is
problematic in a way that death resulting from a divine action is not. Take two scenarios:

i) Ed dies because God ordered Ted to kill Ed

ii) Ed dies because God made a mantrap to kill Ed

Does (i) present a special theodicean problem, but (ii) does not?

(I'm using the mantrap as a metaphor for death by some natural evil.)
Yes, you're focussed on the specific issue of babies, but you're combining two issues:
who dies and how they die. My question is why the mode of death is especially
problematic in one case, but not the other.

STEVE SAID ...

i) I'm afraid I don't see from your explanation why the mode of death is morally
germane. Your key contention is that killing a baby is wrong. So it's still the who rather
than the how.

ii) Also, do you really mean that killing a baby is intrinsically wrong, or generally wrong–
absent extraordinary mitigating circumstances? What about terminating ectopic
pregnancies? What about the double effect principle, viz. if the enemy uses human
shields?

"In the second case, a fortiori, God has a right to _permit_ a death by way of the natural
laws which He has put in place and which He preserves."

Isn't "permission" a bit weak or euphemistic in that context? Does God merely permit
the outcome of natural forces he himself put in place?

To take a comparison: Suppose a car is parked uphill with a wheel chock behind the
right rear tire to prevent it from rolling down the hill. Suppose I kick the wheel chock
aside, as a result of which the car rolls downhill. I didn't push the car downhill. I merely
removed an impediment. Gravity did the rest.

Yet even that action on my part is more than permitting the car to roll downhill. I caused
it to roll downhill.

If, moreover, I foresaw that by kicking the wheel chock aside, the car would run over a
2-year-old playing in the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill, I did more than permit his
death. I engineered his death.

So I fail to see a morally salient difference between death by divine command and death
by divine providence. Adding buffers between cause and effect doesn't avoid divine
agency or divine intent.

One could imagine Rube Goldberg machines in which the effect is far removed from the
cause. Yet the outcome would still be traceable to God.

(At the moment I'm discussing natural evils, not moral evils.)

STEVE SAID ...

Several issues:
i) Seems to me you're taking a harder line than you did in the body of the post. There
you framed the issue in terms of a prima facie conflict between two sets of divine
commands. Now, however, you're saying it's intrinsically wrong to kill babies/children.

ii) If, on the one hand, Scripture unmistakably contains commands in God's name to kill
babies/children–while, on the other hand, killing babies/children is intrinsically wrong,
then either the God of biblical theism doesn't exist, or else he permitted Bible writers to
misrepresent his true character. If the latter, this would mean that even though Scripture
presents itself as a corrective to false views of deity in ancient Near Eastern and Greco-
Roman religion, in fact the Bible cannot be used as a standard of comparison.

iii) It isn't quite clear to me whether or not you think God has the right to take the life of
a baby/child. When you say that's intrinsically wrong, do you mean in reference to
human agents, or do you include God in that prohibition? You've said God has a
general right to take life, as well as acting in the best interests of the baby/child, but
unless I missed something, there's a reaming ambiguity regarding your position on
God's prerogative in taking the life of a baby/child.

iv) If you think God has the right to take the life of a baby/child, then I don't see why it
would be intrinsically wrong for God to command someone to take the life of a
baby/child. That would not be a case of the human agent "playing God" by making life-
and-death decisions which only God is entitled to make. Rather, the human would be
divinely tasked to carry out a divine decision. Are you saying it would be illicit for God to
delegate the implementation of his decision to a second party? Or is the decision itself
illicit, even for God?

v) I'm studiously striving to avoid turning this thread into a debate over the freewill
defense, but since you keep introducing that consideration, I have to say something
about it. I mention natural evils because that would be a case of babies/children dying
as an end-result of a chain of events initiated by God. God taking life through
intermediate agencies, which is analogous to human agents who carry out divine
commands.

Yes, there are cases in which natural evils are partly brought about by the
choices/actions of free agents, but surely there are many exceptions. Take miscarriage.
Although the pregnancy was partly brought about by human free agency, the
miscarriage was not.

Whether a natural disaster kills humans (including babies/children) may be contingent

on "where a family chooses to live in a certain year," but God could avert their death by
giving them advance warning of an imminent natural disaster. That wouldn't destabilize
the natural order or infringe on their freedom. Far from violating their freedom of choice,
advance warning would expand their freedom of choice by giving them another, better
option. More opportunities to choose from. So I don't see how invoking the freewill
defense, even if we grant its key assumptions, will salvage your position.
vi) No, the double effect principle does not apply in this particular case. The question,
though, is whether, in principle, it is always wrong to take the life of a baby (or innocent
life). If not, then that's not intrinsically wrong.

STEVE SAID ...

Thanks. A few final points. I'll leave the last word to you:

i) I don't think the Fall accounts for natural evils, per se. Just human death by natural
evil. Actually, natural "evils" are often natural goods. They preserve the balance of
nature. I have no reason to think that's a result of the Fall. They only become "evil" in
relation to us if humans happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

ii) You seem to be suggesting my response is inconsistent. Keep in mind that I was
responding to you on your own terms, as you chose to frame the issue.

iii) To speak of advance warning as "interference" with "free human day-to-day

decisions" strikes me as special pleading. Enabling people to make informed decisions
about their future is hardly equivalent to interfering with their libertarian decision-making
process. To the contrary, that enhances their freedom of opportunity. So I think there's a
tension in your appeal which you are reluctant to acknowledge.

Notice I didn't use suggest God suspending the laws of nature. Freewill theists
sometimes argue that we need a stable environment with predictable consequences to
make free decisions. But even granting that assumption, advance warning is a different
principle.

iv) Finally, many kids/babies die every year from natural causes. Death by natural
causes can be more painful and prolonged than death by a sword or spear. Although
you can say free choices figure in some of the deaths, I don't think it's plausible to
universalize that claim.
Discovering God's goodness

Why trust Scripture to be a true revelation and guide if God is not good in some
way analogous to our best ideas of goodness?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/03/whats-wrong-with-calvinism/

You sacrifice not only your child but also your moral intuitions in the name of
worshiping a God whose “goodness” is utterly at odds with the normal meaning
of that term.

http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/bound-to-eternally-suffer-an-interview-
with-philosopher-jerry-walls/

i) Walls and Olson routinely make statements like this. It's part of their stereotypical
case for Arminianism. They begin with their preconception of goodness, which they self-
servingly equate with the "normal" understanding of goodness. They don't cite any
polling data to back up their sweeping claim. Instead, it's just a circular exercise in
defining "goodness" by reference to Arminianism.

ii) But there's another flaw in their methodology. Necessary, the very existence of evil
should affect our understanding of what God is prepared to do or allow. Necessarily, the
kinds of evils we observe in the world or see narrated in Scripture should inform our
understanding of what God is willing to do or allow.

Therefore, this topdown methodology, in which Arminians begin with pious abstractions,
with their preconceived idea of what a good God would tolerate, is an artificial postulate
that fails to connect with the facts on the ground. What a good God would do, permit, or
prevent, is something we must learn from revelation and experience. That's something
we discover, not something we intuit.
Sins of omission

Arminians like Roger Olson place enormous stock in the distinction between God
allowing an evil to occur, and God intending, causing, determining, and/or rendering it
certain to occur. Let's consider two hypothetical examples to illustrate the alleged
distinction:

1) I have a one-year-old child. I hold him underwater in the bathtub until he drowns.
2) I'm sitting on my chaise lounge in my backyard patio. I watch my one-year-old child fall into
the swimming pool. I know he can't swim. I sit there sipping lemonade while he drowns.

i) I assume Arminians would classify (1) as murder. What about (2)?

ii) I didn't create the circumstances leading up to my one-year-old falling into the pool. I
didn't anticipate his falling into the pool. I didn't push him into the pool. And I didn't
cause his lungs to fill with water.

So, by Arminian logic, I didn't murder him. Indeed, by Arminian logic, I'm not even
culpable for his death.

iii) Some philosophers would say that by my failure to interrupt that chain-of-events, I
did cause his death.

But even if I didn't technically cause his death, how is that distinction exculpatory?

iv) It could also be argued that by my failure to interrupt that chain-of-events, I rendered
the fatal outcome certain. All I had to do was do nothing to ensure the outcome.

v) But suppose it wasn't quite a sure thing. Suppose there was a chance my one-year-
old would find a way to climb out at the last minute. If I wait and see whether or not he
will drown, does that let me off the hook, so long as his drowning was not inevitable?

vi) Since his death by drowning is a foreseeable consequence of my inaction, did I not
intend the outcome?

vii) Keep in mind that in a classical Arminian model of divine creation and providence,
God is far more involved than (2). So (2) is a limiting case.
Did God will sin?

There are some scrupulous Christians who think the very effort to develop a theodicy is
unseemly or even blasphemous. To justify the existence of sin makes evil disguised
good. And it makes God complicit in sin. By the same token, freewill theists wax
indigent when Calvinists say there's a qualified sense in which God willed sin.

Now imagine if Adam never fell. Imagine if Lucifer never fell. Imagine having a
scholastic debate about whether God would allow evil into our morally pristine, unfallen
world. The same people who revile theodicies, the same people who revile Calvinism,
would consider it unthinkable, indeed sacrilegious, to suppose a holy God would ever
permit evil to exist. God is too pure to allow impurity to sully his world. They'd carry on
like Abdiel lecturing Lucifer in Paradise Lost. We'd be regaled with inspiring speeches.

But, of course, that train already left the station. So freewill theists can't fall back on a
priori arguments about how a holy God would never let evil happen. For we confront the
a posteriori reality of evil everyday.

Hence, every Christian philosopher and theologian must begin with that unsavory
starting-point. Every Christian philosopher and theologian must take that as a given. We
commence with the factuality of evil, and work back from there. Indeed, evil is a
presupposition of Christianity. Like it or not, you can't avoid saying that, in some sense,
God willed sin. It's too late in the game to shout "Sacrilege!" "Blasphemy!" The very
existence of moral evil means God has taken certain theological options off the table.
We must deal with what's left. Seek the wisdom in what is–or will be. Not what might
have been.
Is it evil to decree evil?

One of the stock objections to Calvinism goes like this: If it's wrong to do wrong, then it's
wrong to cause or determine someone else to do wrong.

No doubt this has a certain facile appeal. It seems to be logical. But is it really? One
way to test naive intuitions is to consider counterexamples.

i) Suppose a motorist is driving along a lonely backroad. Suddenly a 10-year-old boy

emerges from the tall grass, waving his hands.

The motorist stops. The boy explains breathlessly that he and his little brother were
playing in the field when his brother fell into an abandoned mine shaft.

Normally, the motorist would park his car on the shoulder and check it out. It's his duty
to render assistance in that situation.

Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the motorist hesitates, then drives away, leaving the
frantic boy behind. He feels guilty.

Unbeknownst to him, this was a trap. The father uses his son to waylay unsuspecting
drivers. When they follow the boy into the field, the father emerges from the tall grass,
shoots them in the back, and steals their wallet.

On this occasion, God suppressed the motorist's altruistic urge. Although the motorist
did wrong by failing to heed his conscience, this saved his life.

ii) Let's consider a variant on the same story. A motorist is driving along a deserted road
a night. Up ahead he sees a woman by the side of the road. The hood of her car is
raised.

He knows he has a moral obligation to come to the aid of a vulnerable woman, yet from
some inexplicable reason he continues driving.

As it turns out, this was a trap. The woman is the girlfriend of a sociopath. Her sicko,
psycho boyfriend hides in the backseat while she plays the stranded motorist and flags
down well-meaning drivers. When a good Samaritan tries to help her out, the boyfriend
emerges from the car, kneecaps the good Samaritan, tosses him in the trunk, drives to
their lair, and proceeds to vivisect his latest victim.

On this occasion, God suppressed the motorist's altruistic urge. Although the motorist
did wrong by disregarding his sense of duty, this saved his life.

iii) Perhaps a freewill theist would say that because God caused or determined the
motorist to ignore his conscience, the motorist didn't do wrong. Didn't sin.
But in that event, in what sense did God make him do wrong? And if (ex hypothesi) the
motorist didn't sin–because God determined his inaction–then in what sense did God do
wrong by determining his inaction?

Doesn't the original objection generate a dilemma for the objector?

iv) A freewill theist might object that these are unrealistic scenarios.

a) That's generally true, although I'd venture to say there must be real-life situations in
which a Christian was subconsciously dissuaded from taking a particular action by God
because God was protecting him from harm. I expect some Christians have discovered,
in hindsight, that God intervened to protect them, even though they were unaware of the
fact at the time.

b) A fixture of philosophical analysis is to consider counterexamples. This isn't just an

intellectual game. Philosophers want to produce generalizations. The way to test a
generalization is to consider counterexamples. If there are exceptions, then does the
principle still hold true? This is important in ethics.

v) But let's consider a more realistic scenario. Suppose predestination is true.

Historically, many people died in childhood. That's still the case in the Third World.

Some children die of neglect. They had neglectful parents or guardians. Some died in
orphanages.

I'm sure the cumulative number of neglect fatalities is high. If it's wrong to cause a child
to die of neglect, is it wrong to cause someone to cause a child to die of neglect?

Normally, we'd say that's true. But aren't we making tacit assumptions about how the
child would turn out had he grown up?

Odds are, some children who died of neglect would become violent criminals if they
survived. Of course, you and I aren't privy to those counterfactual outcomes. But we're
considering this from a divine perspective.

If God causes or determines a parent or guardian to cause a child in their care to die of
neglect–a child who, had he survived, would grow up to be a serial killer–did God do
wrong by causing (or determining) the parent or guardian to do wrong?

Although it may seem counterintuitive to say so, in this situation, God is inculpable for
causing a second party to do something culpable.

vi) A freewill theist might object that even if it wasn't wrong for God to do that, this won't
suffice for other situations which lack those mitigating circumstances. But even if that's
the case, I'm probing the question of whether, in principle, it is intrinsically wrong for
God to cause or determine a human to do wrong. If there are exceptions, then a freewill
theist can't object to Calvinism on those grounds as a matter of principle. He must
downshift to a case-by-case analysis.

vii) Apropos (vi), according to skeptical theism, there may often be extenuating
circumstances which mitigate an apparently gratuitous evil, but we're in the dark.
Moreover, freewill theists resort to skeptical theism when they posit that God always has
some morally sufficient reason for permitting horrendous evil, even if we can't imagine
what the reason might be. So it's not as if the Calvinist is guilty of special pleading at
this point. Or if he is, the freewill theist is equally guilty.
Arminian eugenics

Roger Olson

You leave out that the Calvinism I am arguing against claims that this whole
world and everything in it was designed, ordained and is governed by God. If God
is perfectly good in any sense meaningful to us and exercises that kind of
providential control, then, yes, he would have to create the best possible world.
To say otherwise is to slide into nominalism and voluntarism--that God is only
freely good. I think that is what most Calvinists believe (without being fully aware
of it).

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/06/is-this-the-best-of-all-possible-
worlds-what-i-would-think-if-i-were-a-calvinist/#comment-1443691864

Problem is: Olson never gives us a reason to accept his claim. Even assuming that
there's a best possible world (which I deny), why is God "only freely good" if he made a
world that falls short of the best possible world?

We'd only "slide into voluntarism" if we said God made an irremediably evil world. Olson
fails to distinguish between good and evil, on the one hand, and good, better, or best,
on the other hand. A good God can't make an irremediably evil world. But what prevents
a good God from making a good world, although he could make an even better world?

Olson has a eugenic outlook. Take natural evils. For instance, is a world without Down
Syndrome better than a world with Down Syndrome? Suppose we figure out how to
eliminate Down Syndrome. In so doing we pre-emptively eliminate people with Down
Syndrome. They are no longer allowed to begin to exist.

Is that an improvement? Improvement for whom? You might say someone with Down
Syndrome would be better off without Down Syndrome–but would he be the same
person? Or is something lost in the process? Not just losing the syndrome, but losing
the personality. Losing character traits associated with the syndrome.

From what I've read, people with Down Syndrome can be exceptionally loving and
caring. More so that many "normal" people. A world with Down Syndrome has virtues,
has a quality of goodness, that's absent in a world without Down Syndrome.

Even if the less-than-the-best possible world is less good overall than the best possible
world, the less-than-the-best possible world may include a better good than the best
possible world, which achieves its best status by evening out the disparities to secure a
smooth, uniform consistency of goodness.
Is the best possible world a world devoid of evils? Or is the best possible world a world
in which evils are offset by second-order goods? Goods unobtainable apart from evil?
God and Auschwitz

I'm going to comment on a new post by Roger Olson:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/06/is-this-the-best-of-all-possible-
worlds-what-i-would-think-if-i-were-a-calvinist/

Most Calvinists I know believe in meticulous providence.

Agreed.

Recently I posted an essay here in which I talked about my penchant for seeing
the logical outcome of everything.

His penchant fails him whenever it comes to seeing the logical outcome of Arminianism.

We should not believe in ideas whose good and necessary consequences are
unbelievable or objectionable (to ourselves). In other words, if idea A leads
inexorably, by dint of logic, to idea B and idea B is something I do not believe in, I
ought not to believe in A either.

What about revealed truths? If God discloses something to us whose good and
necessary consequences are objectionable to us, does that mean we should reject
revealed truth? If it leads to something we don't believe in, then we should realign our
beliefs to match reality.

However, the point I want to make here is that I believe divine determinism and
meticulous providence, idea “A” that God plans, ordains and governs everything
without exception, leads inexorably by dint of logic to idea “B” which is that this
is the best of all possible worlds.

Saying it leads to that logical outcome doesn't begin to show that it leads to that logical
outcome. Where is the logical argument for his conclusion?
 The one and only issue I’m raising here is whether a God who is perfectly good,
omnipotent, and all-determining would plan, ordain and govern anything less or
other than the best possible world. I cannot imagine that he would.

i) To say he cannot "imagine" that is not a logical argument.

ii) He seems to be suggesting that if God is good, then there must be parity between
the goodness of God and the goodness of the world. The world must be as good as
God. But no creature can be as good (i.e. excellent) as God.

One problem may be an equivocation on the meaning of "goodness." Does he mean

moral good or excellence?

If this world is the best world on the way to the best of all possible worlds, then it
is, for now, in the interim, the best possible world.

That's simplistic. The best means to an end doesn't make the means good in itself.
Take amputation to prevent death by gangrene.

I simply don’t understand why people who believe God plans, ordains and
governs everything don’t also believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. I
think they should.

One reason I don't believe it is that Olson has yet to give a supporting argument for his
key contention. In his post, he never gets around to making a logical case for why, given
Calvinism, this world must be the best possible world. He keeps asserting what he
needs to prove.

I can only attribute that they often don’t to either 1) lack of logic in their thinking,
or 2) fear of having to explain how this is the best of all possible worlds in light of
the Holocaust and events like it.

It's amusing to see the gaping chasm between Olson's intellectual pride and his
intellectual performance. He makes self-congratulatory claims about his logical acumen,
and makes demeaning comments about his Calvinist opponents, yet he fails to
demonstrate his operating assumption.
 I agree with the theologian who said that no theology is worthy of belief that
cannot be stated at the gates of Auschwitz.

It takes real guts to say that God planned, ordained and governed the Holocaust. I
admire and respect those Calvinists (and other divine determinists) who do it—for
their logical rigor and courage.

Yes, God "planned, ordained, and governed" the Holocaust, just as he "planned,
ordained, and governed" the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the
Babylonian Exile, and the Fall of Jerusalem (70 AD).

The problem that immediately jumps up is that if this is the best of all possible
worlds then nothing can really be irreducibly evil. If this is the best of all possible
worlds then I must say even of the Holocaust “It is a necessary part of the greater
good.” Then I cannot consider it truly evil. I would have to redefine “evil” far
away from what I and most people mean by that term.

i) You simply distinguish between whether something is good in itself and whether it can
have beneficial consequences down the line. For instance, it isn't good to be
congenitally blind, but in this case, that had good results:

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this
man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his
parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (Jn 9:1-3).

Likewise, the death of Lazarus wasn't good in itself, but it was a source of good:

But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the
glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (Jn 11:4).

ii) Since Olson has failed to discharge his burden of proof, there's nothing more I really
need to say. It's not incumbent on me to refute a nonexistent argument. But let's
examine his illustration:

Why did the Arminian God allow the Holocaust? After all, the Arminian God had the
power to prevent it. So isn't the Arminian committed to saying God allowed the
Holocaust for the best? Presumably, an Arminian will justify God's nonintervention on
the grounds that it would be even worse for God to prevent the Holocaust than to allow
the Holocaust. Had it been better for God to intervene, but he failed to do so, then in
what sense is the Arminian God "perfectly good"?
So how does Olson escape the logic of his own framework?

iii) Olson is assuming there's a best possible world for the Calvinist God to predestine.
But why should we assume such a thing? Take the Holocaust. Is an alternate world in
which the Holocaust never happened better than our world? Better in what respect?
Better in every respect?

To begin with, a world in which the Holocaust never happened would have a different
past and different future. The historical conditions leading up to the Holocaust wouldn't
exist. And the historical consequences of the Holocaust wouldn't exist.

But, among other things, that requires the elimination many people from the past, and
replacing them with a different set of people. Likewise, that requires the elimination of all
the people who were born as a result of the Holocaust. In a way, that would be a
different kind of Holocaust.

Would that be better for the people who never existed in this alternate world? What if
some of them were heavenbound? By creating the alternate world, God deprives them
of that incomparable blessing.

Some goods result from a world where the Holocaust occurred which would never result
absent the Holocaust. So a world in which the Holocaust occurred is better in some
respects, but worse than others. Better for some people but worse for others.

There are even Jews–many Jews–who benefit from the Holocaust. There are Jews who
are born as a result of the Holocaust who would never exist apart from that horrific
event. For instance, some Holocaust survivors married people they would never have
occasion to meet in a world without the dislocations of the Holocaust.
Child mortality

"Progressive Christians" labor to relativize "divine violence" in the Bible–especially the

OT. For instance, they find it morally problematic that God would command the death of
children.

As I've noted on various occasions, their solutions fail to solve the problem they pose for
themselves. If it's morally problematic for God to command the death of children, then
it's morally problematic for God to allow millions or billions of children over the millennia
to die from preventable causes. If the divine commands are morally problematic, they
don't pose a special problem, over and above problem of child mortality in general. So
it's illusory to imagine that domesticating the OT solves the problem which they raise.

But let's approach this from another angle. Suppose there was no child mortality.
Suppose no one died of natural causes. Everyone stopped aging after reaching 18 (give
or take).

If, however, humans continued to reproduce, at some point that would lead to
overpopulation. And, of course, that expands exponentially. If you have 5 kids, if each of
your kids has 5 kids…

Overpopulation would lead to mass starvation as well as warring over scarce resources.

In theory, God could prevent that if, after human population reached an optimal
sustainable level, God rendered humans infertile.

Mind you, children contribute a great deal to the quality of life. A childless world would
be a diminished world.

But let's play along with the hypothetical. I don't know how long it would take, but
wherever the cutoff occurred, there'd be no future generations. No more children.

Human mortality, including child mortality, creates room, both in time and space, for
more children to be born. Children will be born further down the line who would not be
born in a world without child mortality–or human mortality. Once the population
becomes static, there's no more room for new children.

Child mortality results in the existence of heavenbound children down the line who'd
never exist in a deathless world.

In Biblical eschatology, the collective saints in glory, who comprise a subset of the
human race, will be restored to the new earth. The saints in every generation, who go to
heaven when they die, will resume life on earth. And the latter-day Christians have
human mortality, including child mortality, to thank for that.
One could also speculate on how many humans the earth can sustain at optimal levels.
Technology can make a larger population feasible.
Doing v. allowing harm

Freewill theists typically contend that Calvinism makes God complicit in evil (or "the
author of sin") because God is said to "cause" sin according to Calvinism, where's
freewill theism let's God off the hook because God merely permits evil. I'm going to
excerpt some passages from an article which illustrate how often and easily that facile
distinction breaks down. After that I will add an illustration of my own.

Is doing harm worse than allowing harm?

James Rachels (1975) provides a classic example of the first approach.[2] He

offers us a pair of cases—in one, Smith drowns his young cousin in the bathtub; in
the other, Jones plans to drown his young cousin, but finds the boy already
unconscious under water and refrains from saving him. The two cases are exactly
alike except that the first is a killing and the second a letting die. Rachels invites
us to agree that Smith's behavior is no worse than Jones's.

It is arguably true that you can be morally responsible only for what you are
causally responsible for. So, if you cause a bad state of affairs, you've probably
done wrong; whereas if you don't cause a bad state of affairs, you haven't. In
choosing between killing and letting die, you are choosing between doing wrong
and not doing wrong. (Of course, this doesn't apply to non-harmful cases of
killing, such as, arguably, some cases of active euthanasia.) The question of what
you ought to do is then tautologously easy.

This argument begins to get into trouble when we reflect on the fact that we are
often responsible for upshots we allow: the death of the houseplants or the child's
illiteracy. When we notice that, in these cases, the plants die or the child remains
uneducated because of some failure on the agent's part, it becomes clear that the
agent does, in some sense, cause the upshots. Moreover, most widely accepted
contemporary accounts of causation imply that some event or fact involving these
agents causes the deaths or illiteracy. For example, the counterfactual account of
causation—according to which (very roughly) event E causes F if and only if had E
not occurred F would not have occurred either—implies that it was the agent's
failure to water the plants that caused the deaths.[7] John Mackie's INUS
condition—according to which E causes F if and only if E is a(n insufficient but)
necessary part of a(n unnecessary but) sufficient condition for F—implies that the
fact that the agent failed to water the plants causes the plants to die.[8]
Suppose, for example, the victim dies because I push his head under water. He
wouldn't have died if I had been absent. On the other hand, suppose he is in deep
water and cannot swim and I don't save him. He would have drowned anyway if I
had been absent. In these two cases, the counterfactual account draws the line in
the intuitively correct way.

This account is sometimes used to support the claim that doing harm is worse
than allowing harm, on the grounds that, on this account, allowing harm is simply
a matter of letting nature take its course, which, other things being equal, is
good, or at least permissible. There are two or three quick objections to this
argument. Firstly, it assumes that acting (such as killing or saving lives) is a
matter of interfering with the course of nature—in other words, that human
action is somehow outside of the course of nature. This is extremely controversial.
Secondly, even if human action is outside the course of nature, if the agent is
faced with a choice between killing one and allowing two to die at the hand of
some other agent, this argument would favor neither option since neither
involves letting nature take its course. But, as traditionally understood and used,
the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing is supposed to favor letting die in this case
just as much as in others. Thirdly, interfering in the course of nature is sometimes
obviously the better course of action—to stop the bleeding, restart the heart, and
so on.

The key difference here is between cases where the agent produces the result by
an action and cases where she produces it by an inaction—pushing the head
under water or refraining from throwing a life preserver. There's an extra
complication here, however. Sometimes, Quinn says, your relevance to a death
can be positive, you can kill, in other words, even though you don't act. This
happens, for example, when you are on a train headed towards some drowning
victims you wish to save when you notice someone tied to the tracks ahead of
you. You can stop the train but you choose not to in order to reach your
destination. Quinn believes that you kill in this case, because the train acts as
your agent, taking you where you want to go, and crushing the person tied to the
tracks in the process. On the other hand, if you had chosen not to stop the train
for some other reason but you would have not minded had someone else stopped
the train, then your failure to stop the train would not have constituted a killing.

A puzzle remains. What about cases where the agent removes a safety net from
beneath a falling victim, unplugs a respirator, kicks a rock out of the path of the
runaway vehicle, and other similar cases? No physical forces run from the agent
to the victim. So, by the account under discussion, they are cases of negative
relevance, and yet many of them, at least by many people, are confidently judged
to be cases of positive relevance.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/

Suppose a drug dealer recruits adults or teens with Down syndrome to work as
couriers. They are easily duped into working for him since they fail to appreciate the
significance of their actions.

The dealer can't be arrested for dealing drugs since he didn't actually deal the drugs. If
his couriers are apprehended, that can't be traced back to him since they lack the
mental competence to testify against him in a court of law.

Question: is it better or worse for him to peddle drugs directly or exploit individuals with
Down syndrome to do it for him?
An Arminian bedtime story

Jerry Walls

A CALVINIST BEDTIME STORY

“Imagine a parent who is able to control each and every action of his children,
and furthermore, is able to do so by controlling their thoughts and inclinations.
He is thus able to determine each and all actions taken by those children. He is
also able to guarantee that they desire to do everything that they do, and this is
exactly what he does. He puts them in a special playroom that contains not only
toys but also gasoline and matches, and then gives them explicit instructions
(with severe warnings) to avoid touching the gasoline and matches. Stepping out
of sight, he determines that the children indeed begin to play with the matches.
When the playroom is ablaze and the situation desperate, he rushes in to save
them (well, some of them). He breaks through the wall, grabs three of the seven
children, and carries them to safety. When the rescued children calm down, they
ask about their four siblings. They want to know about the others trapped inside,
awaiting their inevitable fate. More importantly, they want to know if he can do
something to rescue them as well.

“When they ask about the situation, their father tells them that this tragic
occurrence had been determined by him, and indeed, that it was a smashing
success—it had worked out in exact accordance with his plan. He then reminds
them of his instructions and warnings, and he reminds them further that they
willingly violated his commands. They should be grateful for their rescue, and
they should understand that the others got what they deserved. When they begin
to sob, he weeps with them; he tells them that he too has compassion on the
doomed children (indeed, the compassion of the children for their siblings only
dimly reflects his own). The children are puzzled by this, and one wants to know
why such a compassionate father does not rescue the others (when it is clearly
within his power to do so). His answer is this: this has happened so that everyone
could see how smart he is (for being able to know how to do all this), how
powerful he is (for being able to control everything and then effectively rescue
them), how merciful he is (for rescuing the children who broke his rules), and how
just he is (for leaving the others to their fate in the burning playroom). And, he
 says, ‘This is the righteous thing for me to do, because it allows me to look as
good as I should look.’”

From Thomas H. McCall, “We Believe in God’s Sovereign Goodness: A Rejoinder to

John Piper” Trinity Journal 29NS (2008): 241-242.

It’s hard to imagine a better story for Piperian Calvinists who have a passion for
their theology and want to convey its true glory to children and other neophytes
in the faith.

i) To begin with, this trades on the emotional connotations of small, clueless, helpless
children. That triggers our protective instincts. Yet that's hardly analogous to adults or
sinners.

ii) Perhaps even more to the point, It's striking that Arminians like Walls and McCall find
this persuasive when it's trivially easy to tell a parallel bedtime story by substituting
Arminian assumptions.

Assuming divine foreknowledge or middle knowledge, God knowingly puts them in a

special playroom that contains not only toys but also gasoline and matches. God knows
that by putting them in that situation, they will set the play room on fire. God knows that
by putting them in that situation, some of them will burn to death. God could prevent that
tragic outcome by not putting them in that situation in the first place. And that wouldn't
violate their freewill.

Even assuming that God doesn't know the outcome, a parent is negligent for placing
small children in a play room with matches and gasoline. Indeed, the legal term is
"depraved indifference." If they die in a house fire as a result of those initial conditions,
the parent is culpable for exposing them to such a risky situation.
Riddle me this!

Antony Flew penned a famous parable about the invisible gardner. His parable is
somewhat self-defeating. After all, since gardens don't prune or weed themselves, even
if the gardner was empirically indetectable, we'd be required to infer a powerful
intelligence who was acting as a gardner behind-the-scenes. Left untended, gardens
revert to the wild.

Perhaps, though, Flew intended the identity of the garden to be ambiguous. Was it
really a garden, or a meadow with wildflowers that looked like a garden?

Be that as it may, Basil Mitchell countered Flew with a little parable of his own. Mitchell
was a Christian philosopher and apologist. Here's his counter parable:

In time of war in an occupied country, a member of the resistance meets one

night a Stranger who deeply impresses him... The partisan is utterly convinced at
that meeting of the Stranger’s sincerity and constancy and undertakes to trust
him. They never meet in conditions of intimacy again. But sometimes the Stranger
is seen helping members of the resistance, and the partisan is grateful and says to
his friends, ‘He is on our side.’ Sometimes he is seen in the uniform of the police
handling over patriots to the occupying power. On these occasions his friends
murmur against him: but the partisan still says, ‘He is on our side.’ He still
believes that, in spite of appearances, the Stranger did not deceive him...
Sometimes his friends, in exasperation, say, ‘Well, what would he have to do for
you to admit that you were wrong and that he is not on our side?’ But the
partisan refuses to answer.

i) Although it's hypothetical, it would have some concrete resonance for Mitchell and
Flew, as Englishmen who lived through World War II. That's clearly the tacit background
for the parable. Even though it's fictional, it's realistic. Things like that probably
happened during the war.

ii) What's interesting about Mitchell's parable is that the Stranger is morally ambiguous.
His actions are open to two opposing interpretations. Whose side is he on? He is trying
to infiltrate the resistance or the occupation force? Is he a bad guy impersonating a
good guy, or a good guy impersonating a bad guy?

Suppose you had a Jewish scientist or military intelligence officer serving in the Third
Reich or the Vichy regime. That might seem counterintuitive, but not necessarily.
Perhaps he can pass for an Aryan. They don't suspect he's Jewish. He can do more
damage on the inside than the outside. He can be an informant to the allies or the
resistance.

But there's a catch. He must be a convincing Nazi. So he has to go through the motions.
Feign enthusiasm for the cause.

iii) This is a common plot motif in police dramas. An undercover cop tries to infiltrate the
mob. But there's a catch. The rite of initiation involves having the new recruit carry out a
hit. That's a test of his bona fides.

The new recruit is brought to an abandoned warehouse or industrial garage. The Don is
there with his goons. There's a blindfolded man kneeling on the floor. Turns out, he's a
snitch. A police informant. The Don orders the new recruit to cap the snitch.

That's a dilemma for the undercover cop, but a win-win for the Don. If, on the one hand,
the cop refuses, then the Don has blown his cover. If, on the other hand, he caps the
snitch, then he's crossed over. He's become one of them. He can never go back to
being a policeman. They have the goods on him. He's morally and legally
compromised.

How far is the cop prepared to go to maintain his cover? This is usually where you have
a commercial break, to keep the audience in suspense. How will the screenwriters
extricate their character from the bind they put him in?

There are two conventional solutions. One is the deus ex machine. They have a timely
intervention. Perhaps, at the very last moment, just before the cop has to refuse or pull
the trigger, the Don receives a phone call requiring his presence elsewhere.
Or perhaps the cop is wearing a wire. His team comes storming in right in the nick of
time.

The other solution is for the cop to say, "No, boss, he's more useful to us alive. The
police don't know we know he's a snitch. So we can use him to feed them
disinformation. Throw them off the scent."

The Don nods at this ingenious plan.

Screenwriters typically won't allow the hero to cross that line of no return. What
made 24 bracing in the first season or so is that Jack Bauer played against the
conventions. He was idealistic, but a ruthless idealist. A utilitarian. He was prepared to
do whatever it took for the common good. Defeat the enemy by any means necessary.

TV viewers weren't use to that. After a while, they come to expect it–but not at first.

iv) What's interesting about Mitchell's parable is that you can have a good guy who
appears to be morally ambiguous. By analogy, God could do things which seem to
make him morally ambiguous, even though he's benevolent. Do things which are
obviously benevolent, but do other things which call into question his benevolence.

Of course, God is in a very different situation than a double agent. So we'd have to
consider what, if anything, would be analogous.

v) In the argument from evil, atheists typically cite large-scale events to illustrate moral
or natural evils, like the Holocaust or the Boxing Day tsunami. However, it's pretty easy
to come up with a theodicy to account for such events. Precisely because they are such
massive events, their occurrence or nonoccurence has enormous consequences for
good or ill. Both good and bad consequences ensue as a result of their occurrence.
Both good and bad consequences would ensue as a result of their nonoccurence.
That's the stuff of alternate histories. Preventing the moral or natural evil would
eliminate the evil at the cost of eliminating some resultant goods as well as causing
some other evils in its place.

What's harder to account for are little evils. Private evils. Self-contained evils that seem
to have no beneficial consequences. They appear to be truly gratuitous.

Mitchell's parable, and variations thereon, does illustrate the principle that an agent can
appear to be morally ambiguous even when he's acting morally.

vi) Of course, even if we don't have a theodicy, the argument from evil is toothless.
Absent God, there is no evil. Absent God, we feel compassion for victims because
natural selection conditions us to feel that way. But humans have no objective value.

Since there's abundant evidence for God's existence, what we have is, at most, a
riddle.

It may be that some evils need to be humanly inexplicable to furnish a test of faith. If we
could explain every evil, then we wouldn't need to trust God. That, itself, may be the
explanation.
For better, for worse

Many Christians take the position that God is responsible for all the good things that
happen to us, but not for any of the bad things that happen to us. Indeed, their primary
objection to Calvinism is that Calvinism makes God responsible for the bad things as
well as the good. From their viewpoint, that’s self-evidently wrong. They can’t think of a
worse thing you could say about God. They can’t imagine how some Christians actually
believe that.

Because this is so obvious to them, they don’t give it a second thought. Or if they do
give it a second thought, they spend their time elaborating how unspeakably abhorrent
that would be. They never stop to question their assumption.

Speaking for myself, I have just the opposite instinct. Of course, I believe that God is
responsible for everything that happens. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that I
had a choice: either God is only responsible for the good things that happen to me or
else he’s only responsible for the bad things that happen to me.

If push came to shove, I’d opt for the “evil” alternative. Given a choice, I’d rather that
God be responsible for the bad things rather that the good things.

Where the good things are concerned, I have nothing to fear. Nothing to lose. I'm safe.
They pose no threat to me or my loved ones. The good is risk-free.

But evil can do me harm. Evil can harm my loved ones. Where evil is concerned, I’d
have everything to fear, everything to lose–unless God is behind the evil. Unless God
limits the evil. Unless the evil serves an ulterior good.

If God is responsible for the evil that befalls me or my loved ones, then no matter how
bad it gets, it will never get as bad as it could. It will never involve irreparable harm or
irremediable loss. If God is responsible for the evils in my life, then there’s a floor
beyond which it won’t go. If everything, including every evil event, unfolds according to
God’s wise, beneficent plan and providence, then evil is not a bottomless pit. Not for his
children.

Every evil that befalls me as a Christian, however horrible, will be a redeemable evil.
There is hope. There is good awaiting me on the other side of the ordeal–in this life or
the next.

Many of us come to a point in life, sooner or later, where life closes in on us. Where,
despite our best efforts to avoid it, our worst fears come true. Sometimes we can see it
coming, and we feel helpless to stop it. We hope and pray that it will turn aside at the
last moment, but it doesn’t.
Instead of waking up from a nightmare, you wake up to a nightmare. That awful sinking
sensation. To know you’re cornered. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. All the
dice line up against you.

It’s in times like these, as we cling to a windswept rock, that knowing God is behind our
ordeal is a source of hope and strength and consolation. Indeed, the only source of
hope and strength and consolation. In knowing this, we know that this is not the end.
This is not the epitaph. If God is behind it, then God is also in front of it. To bless us. To
do us good.

For better and for worse. But not for the worst–but for the best.
Good-bye to God

I don’t watch Supernatural very often. It was never great drama. For the most part pure
entertainment. But it started going downhill after Eric Kripke decided to introduce the
war-in-heaven plotline.

The show’s theology embodies finite godism. There’s not much difference between
angels and demons. “Heaven” is a cross between a broken, blended family and a
cutthroat firm where job promotion involves ambitious, backstabbing executives who
betray one another to please the boss. Imagine Gregory Boyd as a screenwriter, and
you get the general idea.

It soon became so campy that I only tune in now and then to sample the latest
downturn. But it does unintentionally illustrate a neglected truth.

In Supernatural, there is no Christian God. There’s no assurance that in the long run the
good guys will win and the bad guys will lose.

As a result, everyone is insecure. You don’t know who you can trust. Since no one is
safe, even your best friend might turn on you at any moment to get ahead or save his
skin. Loyalties are fickle. The players keep changing sides.

So you have Castiel, an angel who wants to do the right thing, but he’s thwarted by
hopeless moral dilemmas. He has to compromise. Has to be ruthless. Has to cut a deal
with the devil.

And when you think about it, this is, unwittingly, a parable of atheism. A godless world is
a friendless world. A Machiavellian world. A world where everyone is always at risk. A
world where everyone is dangerous to everyone else.

In a risky random world, where everyone is threatened, where there’s no certainly­–or

even probability–that virtue will be rewarded or vice be punished, that’s a fundamentally
friendless world. In a ruthless world, only the ruthless survive or prosper.

That’s why our pagan forebears practiced witchcraft and divination. It wasn’t
superstition. It was fear. Anxiety.

And secular science tells the same story–the story of a pitiless world, indifferent to
human existence. Where a stray asteroid may suddenly extinguish life as we know it.

Like movies in which the villain arranges for friends to be in a situation where there’s not
enough to go around. Not enough food, or water. No enough room in the boat. In that
situation, friends turn on one another.

Like totalitarian regimes where wives spy on husbands while husbands spy on wives.
Where, at any time, or any place, the authorities may seize you for unspecified crimes,
due to the anonymous tip of your coworker. Where everyone is on the take. Where
every man has his price, or has a price on his head. Like banana republics where
nepotism, assassination, and bribery are the common currency.
Kill the Indian, save the man

Christians sometimes defend the OT holy war commands on the grounds that some
cultures are so depraved that you have to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.
The culture is corrupt from top to bottom.

Some critics of the holy war commands counter that Israel could have adopted
Canaanites babies. That would break the cycle.

I've discussed this before, but now i'd like to approach it from a different angle. As a
matter of fact, this isn't purely hypothetical. That's been tried in the past. Beginning in
the late 19C, there are off-reservation Indian boarding schools. Indian children were
taken from their families and put in boarding schools, far from home. Physical
separation was considered essential to deprogram the children and acculturate them to
white society. The Carlisle Indian School is a famous (or infamous) example.

This was sometimes done with the best of intentions. Yet, not surprisingly, it has been
denounced. I daresay the same people who find the holy war commands objectionable
would find this form of assimilation equally objectionable. We generally think it's wrong
to break up families, unless the children are in a gravely abusive situation.
"God can't stop it!"

rogereolson says:

April 25, 2013 at 12:29 pm

I think our disagreement must lie in our perspectives about divine permission. I
see God as sometimes (perhaps often) permitting evil because he cannot stop it–
not due to any lack of power but due to what I can only call (for lack of a better
term) rules that only he knows.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/04/where-was-god-when-
the-fertilizer-plant-exploded/comment-page-1/#comment-41500

rogereolson says:

April 25, 2013 at 12:43 pm

But, speaking only for myself now, I agree that “all this is inexplicable” except by
appeal to 1) the fallenness of the world due to sin (Romans 8), 2) rules God
knows, understands and abides by, and 3) the particularities of situations that no
one but God fully understands (that determine when God can and cannot
intervene). Again, I’ll suggest a good book for you to read: Evil and the God of
Love by Christian philosopher Michael Peterson. Philosopher Keith Ward has also
written much on this subject. C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain is also helpful.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/04/where-was-god-when-
the-fertilizer-plant-exploded/comment-page-1/#comment-41503

rogereolson says:

April 23, 2013 at 12:21 pm

Imagine a world exactly like ours except that God gives clear warnings to
everyone who might be affected by evil or calamity. Then read C. S. Lewis’ The
Problem of Pain. Also, stop thinking of God’s foreknowledge as providentially
advantageous–as if foreknowing something is going to happen makes it possible
for God to change what is going to happen.
 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/04/where-was-god-when-
the-fertilizer-plant-exploded/comment-page-1/#comment-41413

rogereolson says:

April 25, 2013 at 12:39 pm

Well, we see things differently. What else is there to say? We’ve discussed this
here many times. I’m not sure you understand what is meant by a “non-whimsical
world.” It’s a world where human actions have somewhat predictable
consequences. Where, for example, gun don’t turn to putty every time someone
aims one at an innocent person. It’s a world where moral actions, including
incompetent ones, have consequences.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/04/where-was-god-when-
the-fertilizer-plant-exploded/comment-page-1/#comment-41413

rogereolson says:

April 25, 2013 at 12:46 pm

Well, you already said what you think. If you ask me, the “cause of the curse” is
not God but, as you imply throughout, us. It is the natural consequence of our
racial disobedience (distancing ourselves) from God.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/04/where-was-god-when-the-fertilizer-
plant-exploded/comment-page-1/#comment-41505

There are three fundamental problems with Olson’s theodicy of natural evil.

i) On the one hand, Olson invokes a natural law theodicy, of the sort popularized by C.
S. Lewis. According to this argument, God can’t routinely interfere with the laws of
nature because human existence requires a high degree of stability and predictability.

If, however, accidents and natural disasters are intrinsic to the natural-law structure of
the physical world, and God can’t meddle with the uniformity of nature, then in the world
to come, humans will continue to die from accidents and natural disasters. Yet that
conflicts with the eschatology of Scripture, according to which the saints will not be
subject to death and in the world to come.

Perhaps Olson would postulate that the world to come may have different natural laws,
but in that event, it isn’t naturally necessary for people to die from accidents and natural
disasters here and now, if God can coherently change the laws of nature.
ii) On the other hand, Olson also attributes accidents and natural disasters to the fall.
But if accidents and natural disasters are due to the fall, then that’s not intrinsic to the
natural law structure of the physical world. If accidents and natural disasters are the
result of the fall rather than creation, then God can prevent accidents or natural
disasters without suspending natural laws or destabilizing the natural order.

iii) Apropos (i-ii), Olson is trying to ride two horses at once. He can’t consistently say
accidents and natural disasters are built into the physical, causal structure of the world
and also attribute the same phenomena to the fall.
Is the Arminian God a cosmic terrorist?

I’m going to comment on this post:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/04/where-was-god-when-the-fertilizer-
plant-exploded/

If what many Christians believe about God is true, then the West, Texas disaster
(like every disaster) was actually good–”designed, ordained and governed by
God” necessarily means “good” in a Christian worldview.

According to predestination, the explosion was “designed, ordained, and governed by

God.” To say it’s good, without further ado, is simplistic.

Something God designs, ordains and governs (the key is ‘designs’) has to be good
in the larger scheme of things.

That qualification is more accurate than the first statement. However, it’s still
misleading.

It’s not the explosion that’s good. Rather, the explosion contributes to something else
that’s good. A good that wouldn’t eventuate apart from the explosion.

This isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. Olson prides himself on being a deep thinker, but
he’s really quite shallow.

Suppose I plan to marry my high school sweetheart. We’ve been going steady since
junior high.

Suppose she’d killed in a traffic accident during our senior year of high school. I’m
devastated. She will always hold a special place in my heart.

Still, I don’t wish to be a childless bachelor for the rest of my life, so I marry another
classmate. We have a good marriage. Our kids turn out well.

Does that make the death of my high school sweetheart good? No. Rather, it makes
possible an alternate good. It’s not her death that’s good, but the resultant alternative.
The alternate good is contingent on the tragedy of her premature demise. My marriage
is good. My kids are good. None of that would have happened had I married her.
So we’re dealing with incompossible goods. One set of goods excludes the other set of
goods.

Other Christians mean that God is eternally, immutably good in himself and his
good character governs what he does. He can’t lie, for example. It’s not that he
just chooses not to; he literally can’t because he is truth itself. Whatever God does
is good because he is good; he cannot do wrong. However, some who hold this
view (“realist” with regard to God’s nature) believe that things we perceive as
disasters and evils are designed, ordained and governed by God. To them, the
West fertilizer plant explosion (which devastated a nursing home and killed
several first responders and injured children and wiped out a large portion of a
town) was from God in the sense that it was designed, ordained and governed by
God. God didn’t just know it was going to happen and didn’t just permit it; God
planned it and wanted it to happen (even if he regretted its necessity) and directly
or indirectly caused it.

i) I don’t think God regrets his plan.

ii) Predestination renders the outcome conditionally necessary. Given predestination,

the outcome is necessary. But the given is not a necessity. Nothing necessitated God.

iii) How does Olson’s permissive approach exonerate God? Did God permit the
explosion because that’s good in the larger scheme of things? Or did God permit the
explosion even though there is nothing to mitigate that evil in the larger scheme of
things?If the explosion has no redeeming value, then what was God’s justification for
allowing it happen? Why does Olson think permission let’s God off the hook?

iv) Apropos (iii), I don’t see that Olson can invoke the freewill defense.

a) I haven’t studied the details of the accident, but presumably the factory exploded
because fertilizer is combustible (due to methane gas/ammonium nitrate). Well, it’s not
as if God would violate the fertilizer’s freewill by preventing that accident.

b) Suppose human error was a factor. Maybe factory workers were careless about
safety protocols. Even if that’s the case, God wouldn’t violate their freewill by preventing
the accident. After all, they didn’t intend the accident. It’s not like they sabotaged the
plant. Indeed, if they could have foreseen the outcome, they would have taken
precautionary measures to avoid the accident. So divine intervention would honor their
implicit intentions.

At best, Olson could only invoke the freewill defense if a factory worker deliberately
tampered with the equipment. Of course that seems like a rather perverse impediment
on divine restraint–where it’s only permissible for God to intervene if the agent did not
intend to do harm.

c) Maybe Olson would invoke a natural law theodicy, which he links to the freewill
defense. Perhaps he’d say a stable environment with predictable consequences is
necessary for making morally responsible choices.

But even if we accept that argument in principle, that has to be balanced against the
collateral damage which Olson himself is quick to accentuate: “devastated a nursing
home and killed several first responders and injured children and wiped out a large
portion of a town.”

Once again, why does Olson think divine permission ipso facto excuses God for letting
that happen? Isn’t the very question at issue whether God had good reason to let that
happen? To cite divine permission as the justification is circular when it’s divine
permission that demands justification.

Many would say God didn’t cause it because they appeal to secondary causes, but
if one asks about it’s ultimate cause they will explain that God is the ultimate
cause of whatever happens.

If that’s a problem for Calvinists, then Olson is sitting in the same leaky boat. Isn’t the
Arminian God the ultimate cause of that accident? The factory is not a personal agent
that willed its self-destruction.

Or take catastrophic accidents due to metal fatigue. Isn’t the Arminian God the ultimate
cause? Even if we grant the existence of libertarian freewill, that doesn’t extend to
inanimate objects.

Now, to my point about the West, Texas explosion (and all things like it): IF
meticulous providence is true (viz., that God designs, ordains and governs
whatever happens), then God was orchestrating it and rendering it certain
(necessary) for a good purpose.

Agreed. I accept that implication.

 What I have found in my (now becoming rather) long life is that many people who
say they believe that falter in that belief when they mature and experience really
bad things in their own lives–especially happening to loved ones.

I’ve experienced “really bad things” happen to three of my loved ones. My faith in
predestination and providence hasn’t faltered. To the contrary, that’s what makes it
bearable: knowing that this is part of God’s wise and benevolent plan. No matter how
bleak things seem, that gives you something to hope for.

It’s easier to believe that when it’s not your town, or your race, or your family it
happens to.

Olson is such an arrogant, conceited little twit.

But I’ve also noticed that few, if any, of those who believe that actually follow
through with that belief.

Unlike Olson, I follow through on my beliefs.

Instead of celebrating what happened because God designed it, ordained it and governed it they
express grief and sorrow and regret over it (especially when it happens to someone they know and
love or their own town or family or whatever).

That piggybacks on the simplistic way he framed the issue at the outset, which I already
corrected.

If I were a believer in meticulous providence, divine determinism (and still a

Christian) I would feel duty-bound to thank God for whatever happens.

I do.
 I might feel great grief and sorrow, but I would follow through the logic of what I
believe and say, publicly, that “This is from God and therefore good and I thank
and praise him for it.”

i) We should always thank God for whatever happens.

ii) Of course, people can be overwhelmed by emotion. Does Olson think Arminians are
magically exempt from that psychological response?

iii) There’s a difference between praising God and praising an event. The factory is just
a thing. The explosion is just a thing. Praise and blame attaches to the personal agents.
Events are only praiseworthy or blameworthy by extension. A personification.

I suspect, however, that IF more consistent Calvinists and others who believe in
meticulous providence/divine determinism actually did that, many people moving
toward that view would turn away. Is that why they don’t? I can only suspect
that’s a reason why they don’t. (Some do and I give them credit for it.)

Keep in mind that Olson is an intellectual coward. He picks on the laity. He doesn’t seek
out the most sophisticated proponents of Calvinism.

Another reason many don’t is because they know some people would ask them
“So what good purpose can you imagine for such a disaster from God?” Of course,
they can always appeal to mystery and just say they don’t know. That’s
respectable. Still, “inquiring minds want to know” what are some possible
reasons why God would design, ordain and govern (render certain, cause, make
necessary) something like what happened in West, Texas two days ago. I suspect
that deep in the recesses of their minds some believers in meticulous providence
who live within a 100 miles radius of West, Texas are thinking it might have
something to do with the annual “Czechfest” which is like an “Octoberfest” held
in the Czech-settled town. Lots of drinking goes on there. Or they might know
something else about the town that they think justifies such an act of God.

The problem with such explanations (and a reason people who think them often
draw back from saying them) is that so often, as in West, the brunt of the disaster
affects the weak and those trying to help the weak (e.g., nursing home patients
 and first responders trying to put out the fire). Frankly, to put it bluntly, if
meticulous providence is true, God would seem to have bad aim (e.g., the
hurricane and flood that devastated much of New Orleans left Bourbon Street in
the French Quarter almost untouched!).

He imputes to Calvinists the notion that the only good reason for this accident would be
divine judgment, then proceeds to burn the straw man he erected.

Again, though, it’s easy to imagine how disasters have good consequences as well as
bad consequences. We’re dealing with alternate futures. Alternate histories.

History is complex. Most events have ripple effects. Change one or more variables, and
that will make some things better while making other things worse. This is a popular
theme in SF movies, viz. Frequency, Looper, Mr. Nobody, The Butterfly Effect.

So where does a believer in relational sovereignty think God was when the
fertilizer plant exploded? Many will simply say “We can’t know–unless God gives
a revelation explaining his ‘place’ in it EXCEPT that God was and is there among
the suffering offering grace, comfort, strength, pardon, hope.”

It’s a tribute to Olson’s hidebound insularity that he considers that a plausible theodicy.

At best, that’s like a mechanic who knows the factory is going to explode in a few hours,
keeps a safe distance, waiting for that to happen, without preventing the accident or
even warning anyone, then comforting the survivors after the fact. At worst, that’s like a
terrorist who sabotages the factory, then comforts the survivors.
Canaanite babies

i) Some Christian apologists defend the OT holy war commands by appealing to

universal infant salvation. I'm skeptical about that postulate. However, it's pretty
speculative either way. Certainly Calvinism has the internal resources to make that
possible.

Keep in mind that denying universal infant salvation doesn't preclude God from saving
some Canaanite babies. It's not necessarily an all-or-nothing proposition. (I'm using
"babies" to cover anyone below the age of reason.)

ii) One objection to this appeal is that it's ad hoc. It superimposes on the texts
something that isn't even hinted at. I'd like to comment on that objection.

iii) To begin with, suppose God planned to save Canaanite babies through the
retroactive merit of the atonement. Would we expect Deuteronomy to say babies are
saved by Jesus dying on the cross? Clearly that would be quite anachronistic. Indeed, it
would be unintelligible to readers in the 2nd millennium BC.

iv) In addition, the retroactive merit of the atonement is the way anyone was saved
before the death of Christ. That's the way all OT saints were saved. To suggest that
that's how Canaanite babies were saved is not carving out a special exception in their
case. It's not concocting a mechanism just for them. Rather, that's a general principle.

v) In considering the silence of Scripture regarding the eternal fate of Canaanite babies,
that silence isn't confined to them. What do the holy war commands say about the
eternal fate of Jewish soldiers who die in battle? Precisely nothing. The holy war
passages don't speak to that issue in reference to anyone. Not just Canaanite babies,
but Jewish combatants. But surely some Jewish soldiers were devout Jews. Surely
some of them were heavenbound.

Indeed, it's a bit surprising that doesn't offer Jewish soldiers any hope beyond the
grave. Perhaps that's to discourage belief that death in battle is a ticket to heaven.

There are some OT texts that explicitly or implicitly teach the afterlife. But they don't
figure in the conquest narratives or the holy war commands. So I don't think the silence
of Scripture regarding the eternal fate of Canaanite babies is prejudicial. If so, that
would be equally prejudicial to Jewish combatants who perish in holy war.

vi) Finally, there's nothing about Canaanite babies qua babies that essentially
distinguishes them from other dying babies. So there's no antecedent reason, that I can
see, why God would save non-Canaanite babies but not save Canaanite babies.
For further reading

Greg Welty, Why is There Evil in the World? (Christian Focus 2018)

John S. Feinberg, When There are No Easy Answers (Kregel 2016)