G O D , T H E B E S T, A N D EV I L
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God, the Best, and Evil B RU C E L A N G T RY
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Bruce Langtry 2008
The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Langtry, Bruce. God, the best, and evil / Bruce Langtry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13: 978–0–19–923879–8 1. Providence and government of God—Christianity. 2. Theodicy. 3. Good and evil. I. Title. BT135.L37 2008 214—dc22 2008000548 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923879–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Acknowledgements Chapter 3 is a heavily revised version of part of my paper ‘God and the Best’, Faith and Philosophy, 13 (1996), 311–28, while Chapter 4 is derived from ‘God and Infinite Hierarchies of Creatable Worlds’, Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006), 460–76. Chapter 5 incorporates material from ‘Can God Replace the Actual World by a Better One?’ Philosophical Papers 20 (1991), 129–54. Footnotes in these papers thank people for helpful discussion. I also thank my colleague Graham Priest, who read a draft of Chapters 1 and 2 and made helpful comments. American philosophers and philosophy departments have been very hospitable during my visits there. In particular, I thank David Luban and Judith Lichtenberg (Maryland), Al and Kathy Plantinga (Notre Dame), Mic and Martha Detlefsen (Notre Dame), Bill Rowe (Purdue), John Kleinig and Tziporah Kasachkoff (CUNY), and Marilyn and Bob Adams (then at Yale) for their warm welcome. Australian philosophers have constituted a wonderful community in which to spend my working life. I count myself blessed indeed to have been a member of the philosophy departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of Tasmania, and the University of Sydney. The churches and other Christian groups of which I have been a member have been intellectually stimulating, spiritually challenging, and rich environments for the flourishing of long-lasting friendships. I thank my wife Elizabeth Willis, and my children Emily, Tom, and Felicity for their loving tolerance over a great many years. This book is dedicated to my mother, Zena Pearl Langtry, to my sister, Marilyn Huckel, and to the memory of my father, Stanley Gordon Langtry. Bruce Langtry University of Melbourne 2 July 2007
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Contents 1. Introduction: Problems, Concepts, and Background Theories 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11
The aims and structure of this book Moral criticisms of the project ‘God’ Theological Determinism Molinism Open Theism Creation and creatability Omnipotence Omniscience Possible worlds and moral necessity The concept of evil
2. God and Worlds than which there are None Better 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5
Are there worlds having infinite value? Infinite value and maximal worlds Maximal worlds in the absence of quantitative value What God can do: compatibilist analysis What God can do: libertarian analyses
3. Divine Choice from Infinite Hierarchies of Creatable Worlds 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5
Context and aims Rowe’s positive arguments for the Entailment Thesis An argument in favour of satisficing Worlds that are good enough Finite and infinite creatable hierarchies: implications for Rowe 3.6 Other recent supporters of the Entailment Thesis
1 1 4 6 9 19 26 27 29 37 40 42 48 48 56 57 60 64
69 69 71 74 78 83 85
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4. World Creation when there are Prime Worlds 4.1 Prime Actually and Better Outcome/Action 4.2 Risk of serious loss 4.3 Overriding moral duties 4.4 The less good is good enough 4.5 Contingent desires and underlying personality traits 4.6 Divine grace and beneficence 4.7 Loyalties and commitments 4.8 Self-sacrifice 4.9 Divine choice given creatable hierarchies of both kinds 4.10 Divine choice given several creatable hierarchies, all containing prime members 4.11 Corollaries of foregoing conclusions
90 90 93 93 95 97 103 106 106 107 109 109
5. Empirical Objections to Theism, not based on Evil 5.1 A dilemma for theological determinists and Molinists 5.2 The argument from there being prime worlds 5.3 The argument from there being no prime worlds 5.4 An objection to open theism
111 111 113 122 125
6. Logical Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 6.1 Mackie’s 1955 argument 6.2 McCloskey’s 1974 arguments 6.3 Absolute moral duties 6.4 Schellenberg’s 1993 argument
130 131 135 137 144
7. Theodicy for Two General Truths about Evil 7.1 Aims and opening considerations 7.2 The core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction: first part 7.3 The inference from (3) and (4) to (5): theological-compatibilist analysis 7.4 The inference from (3) and (4) to (5): Open Theist and Molinist analyses 7.5 A short remark about Premiss (6) 7.6 The core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction: second part
148 148 149 152 159 161 161
Contents 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14
The inference from (3∗ ) and (4∗ ) to (5∗ ) A case for Premiss (6∗ ) Suffering, dysfunction, and heaven Distribution, moral desert, and equality Objections from alternative goods The core argument concerning wrong The inference from (c)&(d) to (e); Premiss (f) More specific kinds of wrong
ix 166 168 172 176 179 184 186 188
8. Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 8.1 Tooley’s 1991 argument 8.2 Rowe’s 1996 argument 8.3 The argument from horrifically bad lives 8.4 Schellenberg’s 2000 argument
191 191 200 216 220
Glossary
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Bibliography
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Index
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1 Introduction: Problems, Concepts, and Background Theories 1 . 1 T H E A I M S A N D S T RU C T U R E O F T H I S B O O K The biblical authors wrestled with many perplexing problems concerning God and his actions towards human beings.¹ These included: What has God revealed about his character, powers, and long-term intentions? How far does the scope of his love extend? When will God act to rescue righteous people from evil, to vindicate them in the face of evildoers, and thereby to vindicate his own justice? How will God eventually succeed in combining justice with mercy? Jewish and Christian pastoral workers face other problems: How can we help people to see that God can confer meaning, or at least an enhanced meaning, on their lives? How can we reassure shattered people that God loves them, despite what has happened to them? How can we reassure other individuals that God will forgive them, despite what they did? How will God be able to help various people retain their moral integrity, in the face of very strong temptation? These are not the questions that animate this book. Although they have provided part of the background motivation for a good deal of philosophizing, and although philosophical insights might be of help in dealing with them, they are not primarily philosophical questions. God, the Best, and Evil has three closely interrelated main aims: (1) to explore some implications of divine omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness for God’s providential policies, and in particular to investigate whether God is in some sense a maximizer; ¹ I will be using masculine pronouns to apply to God, for reasons explained by Peter van Inwagen in The Problem of Evil (Clarendon, 2006), 21f. Moreover this convention will be extended to cover talk of omniscient or omnipotent beings, and of world creators, even when these hypothetical beings are not identified with God.
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(2) to assess the strength of objections to the existence of God, based on the apparent fact that God could have created a better world than this one; (3) to assess the strength of objections to the existence of God, based on evil. The book manages to reach some substantial conclusions without taking a stance on various important issues—for example, whether human freedom is compatible with God’s determining all human choices and actions. This feature may contribute to its interest. Given its second and third aims, the project cannot rest on the assumption that God exists. Any sentences in my own voice which appear to presuppose that God exists should therefore be understood as employing some hidden device befitting the context, such as an antecedent clause ‘If God exists then . . .’. Although the book does not comment on the credibility of this or that specific theistic religion, it is worth making a couple of remarks about the relevance of the problem of evil to the assessment of theistic religions, and vice versa. Firstly, it is possible that the credibility of God exists in the face of evil cannot be properly assessed without assessing the credibility of various religious packages of which it forms a part. It might turn out that ignoring the context of religious belief and practice would be like trying to assess the merits of certain propositions about magnetic attraction, and the strength of various objections to these propositions, in complete abstraction from broader theories of electromagnetism and their use in the design and operation of electrical devices: an unwise and probably fruitless way of proceeding. For all we know in advance, looking carefully at this or that theistic religion may enable us to discover that theism can be filled out with conceptual or explanatory resources that weaken objections based on evil—resources that would be hard to discover merely by reflection on the proposition God exists. Secondly, it might turn out that certain specific theistic religions encounter more severe theoretical difficulties with respect to evil than does the mere proposition that God exists. If morally perfect does not entail loving, the belief that God is both morally perfect and loves human beings comes under greater strain than the claim that he is morally perfect. Furthermore, certain beliefs that might play a useful role in the defence of theism will be inconsistent with the theology of this or that specific religion.
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Having made the foregoing points, I will ignore them in most of what follows. It is theism that I will be discussing directly, rather than Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or theistic varieties of Hinduism. Here is a guide to how God, The Best, and Evil unfolds. Chapter 1 outlines the project, defending its moral propriety, and explaining some key concepts and theories (such as Molinism and Open Theism) which will be used or discussed later on. Since there is extensive disagreement about how best to understand various key terms, and about the presuppositions and implications of various key theories, some sections of Chapter 1 will turn out to go well beyond stage-setting, and to contain complex philosophical argument. From now on ‘world’ will be used as an abbreviation of ‘logically possible world’, where a logically possible world is an all-inclusive state of affairs,² while ‘universe’ will be used to apply to the whole whose parts range from galaxy clusters to subatomic particles, as well as all minds other than God’s, whether or not these minds are physical. The a priori investigation of God’s providential policies depends on one’s understanding of what options God has, and what options he has depends on the structure of the array of worlds. Chapter 2 begins the investigation. It starts with a discussion of whether any world has infinite value, discusses whether for every world there is at least one better world, and concludes that even if there are worlds than which there are none better, we cannot infer that if God exists then the actual world is one of them. Let us say that God creates a world if and only if he causes it to be actual by exercising tight providential control with respect to (nearly) every contingent state of affairs it contains. Employing this terminology, Chapter 3 considers the proposition that there are one or more hierarchies of worlds such that, with respect to each such hierarchy, for every member of it which God can create there is a better one which God can create. I do not believe that we know whether this proposition is correct. But William L. Rowe holds that it is, and he (along with various other recent authors) argues that if it is then God does not exist. Chapter 3 argues that this latter claim is mistaken. ² One possible world does not include other possible worlds, since if it did then the resulting ‘all-inclusive state of affairs’ would be inconsistent; inconsistent states of affairs do not count as states of affairs at all, any more than inconsistent possible worlds are possible worlds. (Here is not the place to engage with protests from dialetheists.)
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Chapter 4 argues that if there are one or more worlds such that God cannot create a better world, and God creates a world, then he creates one of these worlds. Chapter 5 addresses the second main aim of God, the Best, and Evil by stating and refuting a serious empirical objection to theism, an objection which is distinct from the problem of evil. The discussion draws on arguments stated in earlier chapters. Chapters 6–8 address the third main aim of the book. Chapter 6 discusses ‘logical’ arguments from evil against the existence of God. Each of these is, or purports to be, such that the argument is deductively valid, all its non-contingent premisses are plausible, it has at least one contingent premiss concerning evil, and its contingent premisses are all widely known to be true and are all unlikely to be doubted by anyone whom the proponent of the argument is trying to persuade. None of the logical arguments discussed succeeds in establishing its conclusion. Chapter 7 offers theodicies for two general truths about evil; namely, that human beings undergo a lot of suffering, weakness, paralysis, blindness, mental retardation, phobias, delusions, and so on, and that there are a great many serious cases of morally wrong choosing, acting, and failing to act. Chapter 8 states some recent evidential—that is, non-logical—arguments from evil against the existence of God, and finds them to be unsuccessful. 1 . 2 M O R A L C R I T I C I S M S O F T H E P RO J E C T It is obvious that the universe contains evil, that there is a lot of it, and that some of it is horrific. Newspapers, history books, autobiographical essays, and eyewitnesses’ spoken testimony present us with vivid and disturbing examples. I will make no attempt here to evoke their power by quoting appropriate material, or by trying to evoke dismay and grief by my own descriptive efforts. Some philosophers and theologians have advanced moral criticisms of attempts, such as mine in Chapters 6–8, to discuss theoretical issues concerning evil in an emotionally detached manner, abstracting from engagement with the details of people’s experience as victims of severe evil. Kenneth Surin attacks all treatments of theodicy which, like mine, abstract from ‘the radical and ruthless particularity of human evil’. ‘To regard theodicy as a purely theoretical and scholarly exercise is to
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provide—albeit unwittingly—a tacit sanction of the myriad evils that exist on this planet.’ Presumably Surin would make the same criticisms of relevant philosophical writings by Michael Tooley, John Mackie, and other opponents of theism. Surin quotes with approval D. Z. Phillips’s remarks that ‘to ask of what use are the screams of the innocent, as Swinburne’s defense would have us do, is to embark on a speculation we should not even contemplate’, and that such speculation ‘is a sign of a morally corrupt mind’.³ Surin’s attack should be rejected. Cool discussion in philosophy journals of war, tyranny, and psychosis is morally legitimate for the same reasons that cool discussion in history and psychology journals of these topics is morally legitimate. A theoretical discussion of the causes and effects of the First World War, abstracting from the suffering of particular victims of the war, need not insulate academic historians and doctors from distress and perplexity in practical contexts—for example, when they must comfort close friends whose child has just died—nor need it stop them from contributing to humanitarian relief efforts. Similarly with philosophers. Some moral critics of theodicy evidently hold that the moral superficiality and imperceptiveness of contemporary philosophical writing in theodicy should be so obvious to fair-minded people that the theodicists must be either insincere or suffering from morally impaired faculties.⁴ But the absence of a morally deep account of key moral concepts, and morally sensitive descriptions of particular, actual moral situations, is a defect in a specific project only if either writing which embodied moral depth and sensitivity was required to achieve the aims of the project, or else the arguments offered are undermined by considerations which people of greater perceptiveness would have identified. The fact that in addition to the questions which a project addresses there are other good questions which the project does not address is a defect only if failure to address the good questions should undermine readers’ confidence that the conclusions reached in the project are correct. Contemporary philosophical work in theodicy aims to refute certain objections to the existence of God based on evil, and to explain why God allows, or might allow, so much evil to exist. Theodicy and attacks on specific attempts in theodicy are largely carried out employing methods ³ Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Blackwell, 1986), 50–3, 83–4. ⁴ Some such belief seems to underlie remarks by J. S. Mill on pp.186f of his Three Essays on Religion (Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1874; rep. Gregg, 1969).
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used in other areas of philosophy in the broad analytical tradition: fairly sophisticated resources from metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, along with fairly elementary moral philosophy. Participants are well aware of epistemological criticisms of such methods, especially when applied to discussions of God. Adopting a controversial starting point is not always a flaw in a philosophical enterprise, even one in moral philosophy: those engaged in the enterprise justifiably assume that it may be interesting and important even if it is not self-contained. It is sometimes said that assessing God’s policies and actions is morally wrong because we do not have the moral standing to do so: God is not accountable to us; we have no authorization to deliver a verdict convicting or acquitting him of malicious or negligent government of the universe. But tackling the main aims of this book, identified in Section 1.1, does not involve calling God to account, or delivering a verdict on his actions and omissions. The second and third aims are epistemological. As I pointed out in Section 1.1, the argument will make no essential use of the assumption that God does exist, and therefore will not conclude either that God has done y justifiably or that he has done y unjustifiably. To the extent that moral judgements about God are made in the course of the discussion, they are hypothetical in content—for example, if God were to exist, then he would be justified in doing x but would not be justified in doing y. As for the first main aim, surely rejecting the moral appropriateness of addressing it would commit one to rejecting the moral appropriateness of significant parts of Christian theology, where suggestions concerning God’s reasons for action in this or that context are often discussed and adopted or discarded in the light of assessment of the adequacy of the alleged reasons. (I am not in a position to comment on the theology of non-Christian theistic religions.) Most people who believe that God exists see that the evils around us, and the apparent suboptimality of the scheme of things, constitute intellectual challenges that need to be taken seriously. 1.3 ‘GOD’ God, the Best, and Evil assumes, without argument, that affirmations concerning God have substantial, controversial metaphysical implications. As found in the writings of mainstream authors such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz, they are not to
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be interpreted as attempts at fiction or myth, or as disguised expressions of moral values and policy commitments, or as moves in some language game to which history and moral evaluation belong but from which metaphysics is excluded. This assumption is, obviously, consistent with recognizing that many statements about God are best interpreted as involving analogical predication or metaphor. This section does not try to define the word ‘God’ by providing an illuminating list of conditions which are together synonymous with it. For one thing, the most obvious candidate definitions of this kind simply do not work. Consider three examples. Firstly, defining ‘God’ as ‘the rational agent who brought the universe into existence’ would rule out as self-contradictory the widespread view that although God did bring the universe into existence, he would still have been God even if he had not done so. It would rule out the view that if the universe had been brought into existence by a very feeble and stupid rational agent, then that agent would not have deserved the label ‘God’. Secondly, defining ‘God’ as ‘the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being’ would impede substantial debates currently taking place amongst theists, on such topics as whether God is omnipotent and omniscient, as distinct from supremely powerful and knowledgeable. Thirdly, defining ‘God’ as ‘the being who is objectively worthy of worship’⁵ runs counter to the intelligibility of the atheist who declares that God, if he existed, would be contemptible (in virtue of the ways he treats people). The foregoing points hold both if we conceive of the definition as capturing the meaning of ‘God’ as used by most ordinary English speakers, and also if we conceive of the definition as introducing a precise technical sense of the word alongside the everyday sense. We should abandon the attempt to formulate a definition in terms of a phrase synonymous with ‘God’. For a great many purposes we will successfully explain what we are talking about by saying that (if God exists) God is the rational agent who brought the universe into existence and who is, either non-temporally or at all times, very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very good. This is similar to the procedure adopted by the Compact Oxford Dictionary when it explains the first of several uses of the word ‘water’ by saying that water is ‘the liquid which forms the seas, lakes, rivers, and rain, and ⁵ This account has recently been revived by J. H. Sobel, Logic and Theism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9–11, 17.
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is the basis of the fluids of living organisms’: the explanation succeeds, even though we must admit that it is logically possible that the earth’s seas, lakes, rivers, and rain have been made of some liquid other than water but superficially similar to it—similar enough that it could also have formed the basis of the fluids of living organisms. Admittedly, Neoplatonists and pantheists do not think of God in the way just specified. Neoplatonists say that God is not a being; instead, talk of God is talk of an abstract principle which both is bound up with supreme value and also possesses creative power of some kind. Pantheists say that God is identical with the universe, or is an aspect of it. But I think that theists who came to believe that either Neoplatonism or pantheism was true would and should say that the God they had previously believed in did not exist, and that they were now using the word ‘God’ in a different (though not unrelated) sense.⁶ The explanation ‘God, if he exists, is the rational creator of the universe and is, either non-temporally or at all times, very powerful, very knowledgeable and very good’ itself requires interpretation. Are the phrases ‘rational agent’ and ‘very knowledgeable’ here being used with the same meaning as when we say that human beings are rational agents and very knowledgeable, or are they here being used with some other meaning? Different people who describe themselves as orthodox theists, and who offer the explanation of ‘God’ that we are discussing, would answer differently. I will not take a stance on the question. For the problem of evil is normally presented as a problem concerning the logical and epistemic relationships between agreed truths about evil and various central affirmations about God, and this problem will be pressing both for theists who take those affirmations literally and for those who think that some component terms are being used non-literally. After all, if you discover that a friend has deserted you in your hour of need, then you will perceive a challenge to your declaration that he or she is a tower of strength, metaphorical as the last phrase is. ⁶ In this connection it is worth drawing attention to the views of Paul Tillich, who declares that God is not a being, but is ‘being-itself ’—that is, ‘the power of being in everything and above everything, the infinite power of being’. Hence God is not a person: he is the ground of everything personal, carrying within himself the ontological power of personality. Tillich contrasts his own view with ‘ordinary theism’, which thinks of God as a completely perfect person who resides above the universe and stands in causal relations to it. He comments: ‘The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern’ (Systematic Theology, i (Nisbet, 1953), 261, 264, 271).
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If we bypass definition involving synonymy, and instead offer an explanation of ‘God’ in the way that I have done, then we preclude a clear-cut answer to the question, ‘What exactly is entailed by the proposition that God exists?’ This is hardly an objection to an explanation of the term as used in everyday discourse. Wittgenstein, Quine, and Putnam have taught us that often, in important cases, there are no clear-cut answers to such questions. Nevertheless treating ‘God’ in this way is inconvenient in two respects. It creates a need for frequent separate specification of what features of God are under discussion, what features of God are under challenge from such-and-such an objection. Furthermore, philosophical literature on the problem of evil over the last fifty years has been overwhelmingly directed to discussion of the bearing of evil on the proposition that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, and the word ‘God’ is frequently used with this theoretical loading—that is, with these features built in. These inconveniences will be removed in this book by the stipulation that from now on, unless there is local indication to the contrary, sentences such as ‘God exists’ are to be understood as accompanied by a latent statement to the effect that God is the rational agent who brought the universe into existence and who is, either non-temporally or at all times, omnipotent, infallibly omniscient, and perfectly good; the word ‘theism’ will be used for the view that God exists and that the foregoing is true of him. 1 . 4 T H E O LO G I C A L D E T E R M I N I S M God, the Best, and Evil remains neutral between three leading positions with respect to divine providence: theological determinism, Molinism, and Open Theism. Sections 1.4–1.6 do not provide arguments for or against these positions, but instead contain brief explanations of them, and some points about what their adherents should say which will turn out to be important for discussion later on.
1.4.1 Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge Many philosophers affirm both of the following doctrines: Comprehensive Providence: Everything that occurs is either intended by God or is an unintended consequence of what he intends. God plays
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an active causal role that guarantees both that his intentions are fulfilled and that their unintended consequences occur.⁷ God is in complete control of all that occurs. All of God’s decisions are reached before he implements any of them. Comprehensive Knowledge: All states of affairs that actually obtain are known infallibly by God, and there is never a time at which God exists but does not then know about any state of affairs that actually obtains. Subsequent discussion in this chapter will refine the foregoing statements, and consider how they are related to the doctrines of divine omnipotence and omniscience. Let us say that a time stream is a whole whose parts are intervals of time each of which either overlaps or precedes or follows each other part. Contemporary physics suggests that our own time stream does not go back much longer than fourteen billion years. For this reason, amongst others, theists might be wary about locating God’s states in our time stream. We should consider the possibility that God is a timeless being, and also the possibility that he is in a time stream other than our own. Theists who adopt the last alternative will say that in God’s time stream there is no time before which God did not exist, and that God has existed for an infinite number of finite, equal, and non-overlapping time intervals in his time stream. Comprehensive Knowledge implies that God never takes new decisions: his decisions are timeless, or else he has always intended to do what at any specified time he intends to do.⁸ For if God took new decisions, then he would not know them in advance: for there is no point in deliberating about what to do if you already know what your decision will be. If Comprehensive Knowledge is true, then whether or not God is timeless, and whether or not, if he is in time, he is in the same time stream as us, his decisions should be thought of as being reached simultaneously, each a part of an overall package; and talk of God as deliberating and then deciding what to do should be regarded as ⁷ It will emerge below that the word ‘guarantee’ covers at least two alternative relations between God’s causal contribution and its consequences. According to theological determinists, God’s total causal contribution is always logically sufficient for its consequences. According to Molinists, in the case of some of the consequences God’s causal contribution is not sufficient, but the conjunction of God’s causal contribution with the truth of the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom is. ⁸ The strategy of this book does not require me to assert and does not require me to deny that comprehensive knowledge implies that God lacks the power to take new decisions.
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a metaphorical way of speaking of the reasons that God has for his intentions. Thus if Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence are both true, then before God brought anything into existence he surveyed the possible worlds, considered and rejected the option of bringing into existence some universe over which he exercised only loose control and with respect to which he would have only partial knowledge, selected one world the one as over which he would in fact exercise comprehensive knowledge and comprehensive providence, and said ‘Let this one be actual!’.⁹ God’s reasons for his intentions cannot include any truths that are causally dependent on his having the intentions (though of course they can include the truth that if he were to implement a certain option then such-and-such would result). Admittedly, situations arise in which part of your reason for causing an event is that you know that if you do not do so then it will occur anyway—for example, when your action would pre-empt some other cause. But obviously if Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge are true, then God’s intentions are not formed in such a situation. Whether there are any events involving stars, rivers, or human beings is, ex hypothesi, completely up to God. It would be irrational, because in a sense circular, to identify as God’s reason for intending that some state of affairs obtain (or even for permitting it to obtain) some consideration that indispensably includes the premiss that it will in fact obtain. Let us say that a person strongly actualizes a state of affairs if and only if the person causes it by performing an action which determines it. Let us use the expression ‘metaphysically depend’ in a broad sense, in which one way that y can metaphysically depend on x is for x to be a causally necessary condition of y. Then we can say that x is metaphysically prior to y if and only if y metaphysically depends on x but x does not metaphysically depend on y. Theological Determinists affirm Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence. They believe that God has strongly actualized the actual world by strongly actualizing every contingent state of affairs, except any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all God’s actions which strongly actualize states of affairs. The ⁹ Some philosophers hold that necessarily if God is in our time stream and there occur undetermined events, then God lacks infallible foreknowledge of them. So they hold that if God is in our time stream and God has comprehensive knowledge, then there are no undetermined events, and hence Comprehensive Providence is true.
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‘except’ clause, and perhaps other ‘except’ clauses to be discussed later, should now be regarded as included in the doctrine Comprehensive Providence. Some theological determinists believe that God brought the universe into existence a finite time ago, and strongly actualized the obtaining of the fundamental scientific laws, which are all deterministic: since the beginning of the universe each of its states has been determined by its earlier states. Other Theological Determinists do not believe this, on the grounds that while the universe would be fully deterministic if it were a closed system, in fact God intervenes and strongly actualizes various states of affairs that are not determined by earlier states of the universe. From now on let the phrase ‘initial conditions’ be understood as neutral between these views: initial conditions are either states of the universe when it first came into being, or else are states occurring at some later time but strongly actualized directly by God.
1.4.2 Divine Knowledge of Counterfactuals Adherents of comprehensive providence typically agree that God does not directly strongly actualize each contingent state of affairs in his chosen world, but instead, with respect to a great many states of affairs, if not all, he strongly actualizes them indirectly: they are causal consequences of states of affairs he strongly actualizes directly. For example, God is said to have parted the Red Sea by sending a strong wind to hold back the waters. If God is deliberating about whether to strongly actualize state of affairs A by strongly actualizing state of affairs B, he needs to know whether if he were to strongly actualize B then A would obtain. The italicized sentence is called a counterfactual conditional (or counterfactual, for short). The expression is unfortunate since the antecedent may turn out to be true—that is, be not contrary to fact. Nevertheless, I will stick with the established terminology. The semantics and epistemology of counterfactuals are philosophically challenging topics. Theological determinists might hope to circumvent most of the difficulties by confining their attention to conditionals of the kind: (1) If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs S1 . . . Sn then he would thereby indirectly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs A1 . . . Aj,
Introduction
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where S1 . . . Sn are the laws of nature and initial conditions. Now if the laws were deterministic, the antecedent would entail the consequent. So there would be no mystery about how counterfactuals such as (1) can be true, nor about how God knows which ones are true. But we have good empirical grounds for believing that in fact the laws of nature are not deterministic. (If the laws of nature connecting the match’s being struck (and the circumstances in which it is struck) to its lighting are indeterministic, then God can still strongly actualize the match’s lighting, but he surely cannot do so by strongly actualizing the match’s being struck.) For this reason alone, Theological Determinism needs other counterfactuals, in addition to those of kind (1). There is also a second and deeper reason. In the absence of some strong and undefeated argument for saying that it is necessary that if God exists then he strongly actualizes every contingent state of affairs (except any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all his actions bound up with bringing the universe into existence) we should suppose that God faces a choice between doing so and not doing so. The worlds in which he does not do so will include worlds in which he strongly actualizes the laws of nature but not all the initial conditions of the universe yet all subsequent states of affairs are determined by the initial conditions; they will include worlds in which God strongly actualizes the laws of nature and the initial conditions but many of the laws are indeterministic and God does not intervene directly to strongly actualize all states of affairs that are not determined by the initial conditions and the laws; they will also include worlds where God exists but there are laws that he does not strongly actualize; and so on. But in many of these worlds there are true counterfactuals. Therefore God, in surveying the range of possible worlds in which he exists, knows of many counterfactuals that there are many worlds in which they are true even though their truth is not guaranteed by his own providential decisions. Theological Determinists should all agree that God, in deliberating about his overall providential options, needs to know propositions of the kind: (2) If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1 . . . Sn then as a result all and only C1 . . . Cn would probably obtain.¹⁰ ¹⁰ Katherin Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 71, 77 ascribes to Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas the view that God’s knowledge is nonpropositional, and endorses this view herself. I have not enquired into what account these authors would give of God’s ‘deliberations’ about means.
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Let us call such propositions prevolitional probabilistic counterfactuals —‘PPCs’ for short. God needs knowledge of which ones are true if he is to seriously consider whether to make extensive providential decisions that result in states of affairs that he does not strongly actualize or in any other sense guarantee to obtain. This is so whether or not he in fact strongly actualizes the actual world. Given the role they have to play in guiding God’s choices before he takes any creative or providential actions, the truth of the true PPCs must be supposed to be metaphysically and (for God) epistemically prior to God’s actual providential decisions. From now on let us take this supposition to be built into the term ‘PPC’. It might be thought that God could avoid the need for knowledge of the foregoing kinds by constructing a decision tree, illustrated by the following diagram. The top row (A1, B1, C1 . . .) contains God’s possible original decisions; row 2 represents possible states of affairs obtaining in response to the corresponding alternatives in row 1; row 3 represents God’s possible decisions given the corresponding decision in row 1 and state of affairs in row 2, and so on. God simply has to choose the path that corresponds to his preferred overall outcome. Each complete path specifies a world, and the chosen path corresponds to the actual world.
A1
x2
a3 b3 g3
y2
d3
e3
B1
C1
etc.
etc.
z2
z3
h3 q3
etc. etc. etc.
But God’s merely understanding the foregoing structures of possibilities does not suffice to enable him to decide what to do at row 3 if
Introduction
15
(say) he were to adopt resolution A1 and y2 were to occur. Theological Determinists—at least, those who do not insist that it is logically necessary that if God exists then Theological Determinism is true—should acknowledge that in choosing between his global options God needs knowledge of PPCs.
1.4.3 Are True Prevolitional Probabilistic Counterfactuals Possible? One difficulty concerning the logical possibility of true PPCs arises from the principle, widely urged by Theological Determinists against Molinism, that all contingent truths, including conditionals, require suitable metaphysical grounds. Call it the grounding principle. If it is hard to locate suitable grounds for counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, it will be just as hard to locate them for PPCs. (The expression ‘counterfactual of creaturely freedom’ will be defined in Section 1.5.1.) Theological Determinists who adhere to the grounding principle, and who agree that God might have taken decisions that resulted in there being states of affairs that he does not strongly actualize or in any other sense guarantee to obtain, have only one viable recourse: to declare that there are true PPCs and they are all logically necessary. The most promising way to uphold this claim is by saying that PPCs, previously identified as having the form (2) If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1 . . . Sn then as a result all and only C1 . . . Cn would probably obtain, should be understood as possessing the deep structure (2∗ ) The logical probability that all and only C1 . . . Cn obtain as a result of God’s directly strongly actualizing all and only S1 . . . Sn, given that God directly strongly actualizes all and only S1 . . . Sn, is considerably greater than 0.5. If PPCs are logically necessary, then they do not need metaphysical grounds. Statements of logical probability are purportedly a priori and true in virtue of their contents. Logical probability is often explained in terms of the idea of partial entailment, or the idea of degree of belief by an ideally rational person. Whether the concept of logical probability is philosophically coherent has been a matter of debate for nearly
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God, the Best, and Evil
a hundred years. So has whether it is useful in handling significant epistemological issues.¹¹ Here are three plausible groups of candidates for the status of true logical-probability statements apt for incorporation into a fully-fledged PPC. Firstly, there are statements which seem to be undergirded by mathematical laws of probability—for example: The logical probability that this ball is white, given that it is drawn at random from an urn containing 99 white balls and one non-white ball, is 0.99. Secondly, there are those that seem to be undergirded by essential properties of natural kinds—for example, some people think that the physical probability that a randomly selected uranium atom will decay within a specified time interval is a logically necessary feature of uranium, known a posteriori, and if they are correct then this truth will undergird a corresponding logical-probability statement.¹² Thirdly, there are PPCs that seem to be undergirded by possibilities involving contingent, indeterministic laws of nature. For example, consider a proposition p saying that, as a matter of contingent fact, the physical probability of x obtaining given that y obtains is 0.7; then there will be a corresponding logical-probability statement The logical probability that x obtains, given both that God strongly actualizes p’s being true and also that y obtains, is 0.7.¹³ If there are true logical-probability statements of these three kinds, then some of them will involve statements about free human actions. The most plausible examples concern what free human agents will do given that they are playing simple games (such as backgammon) in a skilful, rational manner and considerations outside the game are excluded. But the foregoing examples, important though they are, do not provide much basis for confidence that there are many true PPCs whose consequents include specifications of free human actions in the unconfined and complex situations of social life. ¹¹ Philosophers of religion are familiar with Richard Swinburne’s defence of the concept—for example in his book Epistemic Justification (Clarendon, 2001). See also James Franklin, ‘Resurrecting Logical Probability’, Erkenntnis, 55 (2001), 277–305. ¹² Here is the a priori statement: The logical probability that x will decay within a time interval of duration d, given that x is a randomly selected atom of uranium and that the physical probability of a randomly selected atom of uranium’s decaying within a time interval of duration d is N, is N. The word ‘physical’ here means ‘concerning the natures of things and situations (whether or not immaterial entities are involved)’. ¹³ There is also a fourth, elementary group, typified by The logical probability that all daughters are female relative to any evidence statement is 1, and by The logical probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, given that it has always risen in the past, is less than 1.
Introduction
17
Theological Determinists who reject the logical possibility of true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, and who hold that it is contingent that if God exists then Theological Determinism is true, must maintain one of two alternative positions: (1) There are many true PPCs whose consequents include specifications of free human actions in the open-ended circumstances of everyday life. God uses these in comparing his global options concerning deterministic worlds containing free agents with his options concerning indeterministic worlds containing free agents. (2) There are no true PPCs, or few of them, whose consequents include specifications of free human actions in the open-ended circumstances of everyday life. Therefore when God is assessing his providential options in advance of taking any decisions, he cannot compare, on the one hand, the human actions that would certainly result from his strongly actualizing this or that set of deterministic laws and initial conditions with, on the other hand, the human actions that would probably result from his strongly actualizing these or those indeterministic laws and initial conditions.
1.4.4 God’s Position if there are Many True, Suitable PPCs Let us explore the first alternative. Suppose that suitable true PPCs are available, and that God is deliberating about whether to strongly actualize R1 . . . Rn, where these would be indeterministic laws of nature and initial conditions. How much does he know about what would probably happen if he were to strongly actualize R1 . . . Rn? Suppose that the logical probability that C1 obtains as a result of God’s directly strongly actualizing all and only R1 . . . Rn, given that God directly strongly actualizes all and only R1 . . . Rn, is very high indeed, but less than 1. The relevant logical probability with respect to the conjunction C1&C2 will be less than it is for each of the conjuncts. As we add more and more states of affairs to the conjunction, there will quickly come a point at which the relevant logical probability is low. It might be argued: Suppose that God, from an everlastingly past standpoint in our time stream or from a standpoint outside it, is considering rich and complex worlds whose histories are not strongly actualized by him, as desirable alternatives to many that are. The considerations about diminishing probabilities raised in the previous
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God, the Best, and Evil
paragraph imply that God’s knowledge of PPCs will give him very little information that would be of use to him in comparing a plan according to which he directly or indirectly strongly actualizes particular free actions of particular people with a plan according to which he does not do so—or in comparing a plan involving his strongly actualizing valued general patterns of free action with a plan according to which these valued patterns will hopefully come about as a result of indeterministic processes. (The second of these points is apparent if we let ‘C1, C2’ etc. denote kinds of action and so ‘C1&C2& . . .’ denotes a highly complex pattern of human activity: probabilities will decrease.) Even if there are true PPCs, adopting an indeterministic policy in the absence of true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom would be very much a leap into the dark. God, in contemplating such a policy, might well be confident of his ability to respond to new incoming information about events as it reaches him, and to find his way through to some kind of satisfactory outcome.¹⁴ But before his overarching initial decision he could envisage only very vaguely what that satisfactory outcome would turn out to be. The foregoing argument does not establish its pessimistic conclusion about God’s ability to foresee outcomes before taking any action. Two points need to be made. Firstly, while it is true that the logical probability of a conjunction of states of affairs C1&C2& . . . relative to a specified R1 . . . Rn will decrease as we add more conjuncts, it is also true that as we add more conjuncts to C1&C2 . . . the conjunction R1&R2 . . . can be extended indefinitely, beyond Rn. Probability theory leaves it quite open whether there are true logical-probability statements licensing the assertion that however many particular free creaturely actions we envisage, there will be some set of decisions God can take, outside our time stream or within it but everlastingly past, such that if God were to implement those decisions then those particular free creaturely actions would very probably be performed. Secondly, God, in deliberating about whether or not to adopt a deterministic overall plan, would realize that an indeterministic policy with respect to particular free actions by particular people could be combined with a deterministic policy with respect to general but ¹⁴ Obviously if God occupies a time stream other than ours, he does not respond to events as they occur; that is, as they become present or past relative to him—they don’t. Still, if it is logically possible for events in one time stream to cause events in another, then surely it is logically possible that different events in our time stream cause God to acquire information about them at different times in his, in such a way that the order in which items of information are received is the same as the order in which the events occur.
Introduction
19
non-universal patterns of free action. How is this possible? Well, it can be determined that either A will obtain or B will, but not determined which of them will obtain. Expert tennis players can ‘determine’ their victory against novice players, despite being unable to ‘determine’ the sequence of individual free actions constituting the match. Even if God thought that adopting an indeterministic policy with respect to particular free actions would involve a substantial risk of failure, as well as a good chance of success, in obtaining particular desired actions and resulting events, God could still be assured of the fulfilment of his more general aims by strongly actualizing the desired patterns of free action—as long as they did not require that everybody or nearly everybody freely act in such-and-such a way.
1.4.5 God’s Position if there are Few or No True, Suitable PPCs Theological Determinists will say that if suitable true PPCs are unavailable then God would realize, when comparing deterministic with indeterministic approaches, that if he were to start out seeking the occurrence of various particular actions by particular people, then an indeterministic approach to these actions would involve acting in ignorance of outcomes. It is hard to see how in these circumstances God could be rational in adopting really important aims concerning particular actions of particular people. But he could still adopt important general goals and guarantee their fulfilment by strongly actualizing the desired non-universal patterns of free action. Many Theological Determinists have been silent about whether theism is logically compatible with indeterminism, and specifically with libertarian free will. They have relied on theological arguments for saying that God has in fact strongly actualized all that occurs, whether or not he could have chosen to exercise looser control over what goes on. Some Theological Determinists believe that human beings make many free choices and perform many free actions: let us say that these philosophers are Theological Compatibilists. 1.5 MOLINISM
1.5.1 Basic Ideas Molinists agree with Theological Determinists that the propositions Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge are both
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God, the Best, and Evil
true. They believe that human beings typically possess freedom with respect to many choices and actions, and that such freedom is incompatible with determinism,¹⁵ and incompatible specifically with God’s strongly actualizing the relevant choices and actions. Nevertheless they hold that God plays an active causal role that guarantees both that his intentions are fulfilled and that their foreseen unintended consequences obtain. Molinists’ distinctive ideas are derived from work of the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian and philosopher Luis de Molina.¹⁶ Prominent contemporary Molinists include T. P. Flint and A. F. Freddoso. Some terminology needs to be introduced. Let us say: (1) A person weakly actualizes non-conjunctive state of affairs x if and only if neither any other person nor any other state of affairs strongly actualizes x and yet this person performs some single action that both makes a salient causal contribution to x’s occurrence and is such that if he or she were to perform it then x would obtain.¹⁷ (2) A person weakly actualizes a conjunctive state of affairs (other than a world) if and only if the person weakly actualizes each of the conjuncts. (3) Molinists will agree that propositions of the kind If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs S1. . .Sn then he would thereby weakly actualize the state of affairs Bj, where ‘Bj’ specifies one or more free choices and actions by rational creatures, are of two kinds: those whose truth is metaphysically prior to ¹⁵ There is a technical problem here. Arguments originating with Harry Frankfurt have persuaded many libertarians that your freely eating an apple is compatible with its being determined that you eat an apple, as long as the determining state of affairs did not in fact play a causal role in bringing about the event-token that consisted of your eating the apple. This point was reflected in my own definition of the expression ‘strongly actualize’ in Section 1.4.1. The libertarian assertion ‘Determinism is incompatible with free action’ should be regarded as short for a more complicated formulation. ¹⁶ Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, ed. A. J. Freddoso (Cornell University Press, 1988). ¹⁷ Suppose that a physician both diagnosed lung cancer and somewhat weakened the patient’s constitution by unsuccessfully trying to retard the development of the cancer. What the physician did, that is the two actions together, causally contributed to the patient’s dying prematurely and was such that if the physician were so to act then the patient would die prematurely. But Molinists would not want to say that the doctor weakly actualized the patient’s dying prematurely. My use of the expression single action, and of talk of conjunctive and non-conjunctive states of affairs, is aimed at ruling out the example. Presumably there are non-conjunctive states of affairs; but there is no need to produce examples of them here. If A and B are states of affairs, then there is a state of affairs A&B, of which A and B are conjuncts.
Introduction
21
God’s providential decisions and actions, and those whose truth is metaphysically posterior to them. Let us call the propositions of the first kind counterfactuals of creaturely freedom [hereafter ‘CCFs’].¹⁸ (4) God weakly actualizes a world if and only if there are CCFs true in the world and God weakly actualizes some states of affairs in the world and he either strongly or weakly actualizes every contingent state of affairs in the world except the obtaining of the CCFs and any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all his actions bound up with bringing the universe into existence. Molinists hold that when God is deliberating about his overall providential options in advance of having taken or implemented any decisions, he uses knowledge of true counterfactuals, including CCFs, to guide him in formulating candidate comprehensive plans, and in choosing which of these plans he should implement. By strongly actualizing his chosen initial conditions he implements the chosen plan and thereby makes the propositions Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge true, consistently with human free will. If there are indeed true CCFs, then, given their envisaged role in guiding God’s choices, the true CCFs must be supposed to be metaphysically and (for God) epistemically prior to God’s actual providential decisions, if God exists. From now on let us take this supposition to be included in the meaning of ‘CCF’. (Some writers, however, use the expression to apply to just about any counterfactual whose consequent specifies free choices or actions by rational creatures, even when its truth value is obviously not prior to God’s actual past providential decisions—for example, If the telephone rang, you would answer it.) Molinists can be seen as arguing that there are true CCFs, along the following lines (where the assumption that God exists is present but not explicitly stated as a premiss): ¹⁸ The words ‘all and only’ in the antecedent help simplify the exposition a good deal. This is because God strongly actualizes A and If God were to strongly actualize A then he would thereby weakly actualize B do not together entail B obtains. For God strongly actualizes A is consistent with God strongly actualizes both A and C, and If God were to strongly actualize A then he would thereby weakly actualize B is consistent with If God were to strongly actualize both A and C then B would not obtain.
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God, the Best, and Evil
(1) There occur free creaturely choices and actions. [Premiss] (2) Free choices and actions are incompatible with Theological Determinism. [Premiss] (3) Theological Determinism is false. [From 1, 2] (4) Comprehensive Knowledge is true. [Premiss] (5) Comprehensive Providence is true. [Premiss] (6) In the actual world, and also in many other worlds, God acts indirectly, by employing means. [Premiss] (7) God’s decision about whether he will weakly actualize a world and, if so, which world he will weakly actualize is formed on the basis of a comparative evaluation of alternative global options for action. [Premiss] (8) Comparatively evaluating options with respect to indirect action involves God’s comparing what would result, or would probably result, from his acting directly in such-and-such ways. [Premiss] (9) If God acts indirectly, there must be truths specifying what would result, or what would probably result, from God’s acting directly in such-and-such ways. [From 8] (10) There are truths specifying what would result, or what would probably result, from God’s acting directly in such-and-such ways. [From 6, 9] (11) God’s comparative evaluation of alternative global options for action involves there being, amongst the truths envisaged in 10, ones that are metaphysically and (for God) epistemically prior to all contingent states of affairs that obtain as a result of God’s acting. [From 3, 4, 7, 8, 10] (12) Some of them concern free choices and actions by rational creatures. [From 1, 10] (13) There are true CCFs. [From 10, 11, 12] Molinists have a second argument for there being true CCFs. In broad outline, it goes like this: (1) God has everlastingly past, infallible, complete foreknowledge of future free choices and actions of rational creatures. (2) Such knowledge is possible if and only if it arises from God’s infallible, complete knowledge of what states of affairs he intends to strongly actualize together with his infallible, complete knowledge of true, suitable CCFs. (3) Therefore there are true CCFs.
Introduction
23
1.5.2 Is it Necessary that there are Enough True, Suitable CCFs? All Molinists hold that it is only contingently true that God has brought anything into existence, and that what he has brought into existence includes free rational agents. Should they maintain that it is necessary that if God brings free rational agents into existence then there are true CCFs? Should they also maintain that it is contingent that there are true CCFs? Molinists emphasize that necessarily if a CCF is true then it is contingently true, but this does not settle either question. Its being necessary that there are true CCFs is consistent with its being merely contingent that there are enough true CCFs to enable God both to bring into existence many rational creatures each possessing extensive scope for free action, and yet to have the degree of knowledge and providential control over them specified by the doctrines Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence. In the absence of independent strong arguments for supposing that either of these two doctrines is necessarily true, the premisses of the two arguments (1)–(13) and (1)–(3) above obviously do not imply that it is necessary that there are any true CCFs, let alone a very large array of them. Does the law of conditional excluded middle provide the basis for a good argument that necessarily there are enough true CCFs to make Comprehensive Providence compossible with the occurrence of a great many undetermined creaturely choices and actions? The so-called law can be expressed as the schema necessarily, for all states of affairs x and y, either if x were to obtain then y would obtain, or else if x were to obtain then non-y would obtain.¹⁹ (The two disjuncts are not negations of each other. Let us say that they are opposites of each other.) Our linguistic and metaphysical intuitions are unreliable guides as to whether the law is ¹⁹ Thus the law of conditional excluded middle is stronger than the proposition that necessarily either if x were to obtain then y would obtain, or else if x were to obtain then it is not the case that y would obtain. This weaker proposition, while less controversial than the Law of Conditional Excluded Middle, provides no basis for holding that necessarily either the proposition If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1. . .Sn then he would thereby weakly actualize Bj is true or else the proposition If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1. . .Sn then he would not weakly actualize Bj is true. (Maybe God might or might not thereby actualize Bj: if so it is not the case that he would and not the case that he wouldn’t.) Moreover the second italicized proposition, whether or not it is true, is not a CCF.
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God, the Best, and Evil
true. Various technical theories of the semantics of counterfactuals claim to resolve the matter, but it is far from clear which if any of the current theories is correct. So appeal to the law is of little help in establishing whether it is necessary that there are true CCFs, and enough of them to satisfy the needs of Molinism. Freddoso finds the law plausible, and reports that Molina assumed it to be true. Nevertheless Freddoso, and also Flint, think it safer to dispense with the unrestricted law, and commit Molinism only to the assumption that a restricted version of the law is true of CCFs. They do not argue in favour of the restricted version.²⁰ Even were we to accept that the law is true, and therefore that necessarily there is an infinite number of true CCFs, this would not settle whether necessarily there is a sufficiently rich array of them to enable it to be necessarily true that God had the option of weakly actualizing a world which contained a great many rich creaturely lives suffused by free actions. Obviously such a world must contain a great many positive actions—for example, getting out of bed, having breakfast. Yet it is surely logically possible that God exist and be faced with a large array of true CCFs all or almost all of which have stifling or barren consequents, such as . . . then the agent would freely stay in bed all day. If God were as a matter of contingent fact in such a situation, then he could not bring it about that there were a great many libertarian-free positive actions, over which he exercised tight control, and which contributed to an overall state of human life which constituted a serious option for him. Flint discusses whether all true CCFs have negative consequents, and says that he ‘suspects’ that this is impossible. But he offers no argument to support his suspicion.²¹ Anyway, the negative consequents are only some of the stifling or barren consequents. Consider the free-will defence developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Alvin Plantinga, who did not at the time realize that he was preparing the way for a significant American revival of Molinism. Plantinga’s strategy relies on the premiss that it is logically possible that there is nothing that God could do such that if he were to do it then all rational agents would always freely choose rightly. That is, whatever CCFs are ²⁰ A. F. Freddoso, Introd. to Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Cornell University Press, 1988), 50; Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Cornell University Press, 1998), 49. ²¹ Flint, Divine Providence, pp. 48–50. All that Flint provides is an account of the concept creaturely world type which is crafted to accommodate the supposition that he is mistaken.
Introduction
25
in fact true, God might have been faced with a body of true CCFs such that he could not bring free creatures into existence and guarantee that they would perform many actions all of which were morally permissible. Molinists who assent to the free-will defence will find it difficult to resist the idea that it is logically possible that the true CCFs be such that God cannot do anything to guarantee that many people freely care for children, or engage in agriculture, or be members of stable communities, and accordingly such that God cannot exercise tight control, or have infallible, complete foreknowledge in any world in which there are free human beings in rich and complex communities. If there had been no suitable CCFs, but God had wanted to bring such communities into existence and to exercise tight control over them, then he would have had to juggle with probabilities (if there were probabilities to juggle), and keep on intervening as events happened. Assume, as Molinists do, that in fact God was faced with a set of true CCFs providing a wide range of options each involving his weakly actualizing a great many positive, undetermined actions. God could have nevertheless decided to exercise a much looser providential supervision of human activity. He could, for example, have refrained from weakly actualizing any choices or actions, but have adopted important general goals and guaranteed their fulfilment by strongly actualizing the desired non-universal patterns of free action. Theological Determinists who think that it is logically impossible that God exercises merely loose control over the universe typically hold the principle of sufficient reason, or some similar philosophical doctrine. It would be difficult for a Molinist to affirm the principle of sufficient reason: what is the sufficient reason for the truth of the true CCFs? This explains why Flint confines himself to theological arguments which could establish, at most, that if God exists then Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge are contingently true. Finally, it is worth considering whether, even if they were assured of the truth of a rich array of true CCFs, Molinists will also need a rich array of true PPCs. For presumably God, when deciding whether to bring into existence a universe containing free creatures, would want to consider providential options involving his exercising only loose control over free rational creatures, along with options involving his bringing into existence a universe which lacks free creatures but is nevertheless indeterministic. In order to do so, he would need to consider what would probably happen if he were to do this or that.
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God, the Best, and Evil
1 . 6 O PE N T H E I S M Open Theists believe that God exists and that human beings make many free choices and perform many free actions. They also believe that free will is incompatible with Theological Determinism. They differ from Molinists in that they deny Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge, and deny that there are true CCFs. Contemporary open theists include Richard Swinburne and William Hasker. How, according to Open Theists, is God to reach a decision on whether to bring free people into existence, and if so what physical and cognitive powers, and what emotional repertoire, to give them? Maybe God possesses some reason which delivers an answer which is independent of what might or might not subsequently happen. But in the absence of some good argument for saying that he has such a reason, it is more plausible to suppose that he takes outcomes into consideration. How? God can have exhaustive knowledge of outcomes of his strongly actualizing any specific set of deterministic laws of nature and initial conditions. (This supposition is consistent with God’s being in time and free to change his plans, and free to intervene in the course of events to bring about events that are not determined by earlier states of the universe. For the phrase ‘initial conditions’ is being used to cover both states of the universe at the (perhaps fuzzy) time of creation and also states occurring at some later time but strongly actualized directly by God.) Open Theists deny the existence of true CCFs; so they deny that God can use them to obtain knowledge of events that he does not directly or indirectly strongly actualize. Section 1.4 introduced the concept of a PPC, and explained that if there are suitable true PPCs then God might be able to use them, together with very elaborate propositions concerning initial conditions, to predict many free actions with a high degree of reliability (falling short of infallibility). God could thereby assess his options concerning indeterministic worlds containing free agents. Furthermore, whether or not there are true, suitable PPCs, God could combine an indeterministic policy with respect to particular free actions with a policy of strongly actualizing general but non-universal patterns of free action, thereby obtaining infallible coarse-grained knowledge. While Theological Determinists and Molinists hold that God in fact exercises very tight control over the universe, many of them hold that
Introduction
27
God could have opted for looser control. Those who take this view typically offer theological arguments rather than philosophical ones for saying that Open Theism is false—that is, they appeal, explicitly or implicitly, to some premisses derived from some special revelation. 1 . 7 C R E AT I O N A N D C R E ATA B I L I T Y The English word ‘create’ can be used when a person brings a thing such as a statue into existence, and also when a person brings about a situation or state of affairs—for example, ‘he created a disturbance’. So philosophers, in addition to speaking of God’s creating human beings, the stars, and so on, have had no qualms about speaking of God as creating a possible world. When he does so, an all-inclusive possible state of affairs becomes actual. From now on let us consider it to be built in to the meaning of ‘create’ that if a world is created then some person creates it; and let us simplify the exposition by treating God as the only candidate creator. Exactly what divine causal contribution to a world’s becoming actual should be counted as constituting God’s creating the world? An obvious suggestion is that God creates a specific world if and only if he strongly or weakly actualizes it. But is there some sense of ‘create a world’ apt for use by Open Theists and by people who think that although God did not in fact opt for loose providential control, he could have? Suppose that in world Z God forms some very general long-term goals and then adopts a flexible approach, responding to what is happening with a succession of new short-term aims and actions. Accordingly, he strongly actualizes all states of affairs that are not dependent on free actions, and he inclines, but does not strongly or weakly actualize, particular free creatures to perform particular actions that are likely to help fulfil his aims. Suppose also that in Z all or almost all God’s long-term large-scale goals, and short-term aims concerning particular free actions by particular people, are fulfilled. Might we sensibly say that Z contains the state of affairs God creates Z ? Perhaps. But let us not adopt this way of speaking, instead seeking economy of expression by confining the scope of create to strongly or weakly actualize. For world Z is either a ‘freak’ world in which God has an amazing run of luck, or else it is a world in which his control is not very loose. Even if we broadened the meaning of ‘create’ to cover the Z example, Open Theists would still deny that God has created the actual
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world. For they believe that in the actual world God’s short-term aims with respect to particular free people are very often not fulfilled. This is why William Hasker describes God as ‘taking risks’, and as experiencing ‘aversion, anger or disappointment over the actual course of events’.²² Of course, in worlds in which God exercises loose providential control it can still be true that God creates the universe, in the sense of bringing into existence the objects and structures within which events unfold. Given that God creates a world if and only if he either strongly actualizes it or weakly actualizes it, what account should be given of God can create world W and World W is creatable? It might be thought that Theological Determinists will treat God can create W as equivalent to It is logically possible that God create W. But many Theological Determinists will say that there are, or can be, contingent limitations on what God can do by way of world creation—limitations set by contingent properties God possesses prior to his deciding what world to create. For example, if God has a preexisting, contingent disposition to love rational creatures, then he cannot strongly or weakly actualize a world in which he never has that disposition. Molinists will say that God’s options concerning world creation depend partly on what CCFs are true, which is a contingent matter. There is a rough-and-ready distinction between an agent’s intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities, on the one hand, and what the agent can in the current circumstances do, on the other hand. A similar distinction is familiar from non-personal contexts. For example, in an obvious sense, the power to dissolve zinc is intrinsic to hydrochloric acid: it is not dependent on the actual existence of any zinc; yet, in another obvious sense, whether or not a particular sample of hydrochloric acid can now dissolve a particular piece of zinc depends on circumstances that are extrinsic to the acid, such as whether the acid and the zinc are currently separated by a glass barrier. Let us say that God can, relative to world V, create world W if and only if in V God exists and has the intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities needed to create W, and has the opportunity to create W, and it is logically possible that God create W.²³ ‘God can create W’ is to ²² Hasker, Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (Routledge, 2004), 133, 158, 160. ²³ It is not some lack in God’s intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities that is responsible for the fact that he cannot create a married bachelor. Similarly, if world W contains the state of affairs W’s being not actualized by God, then even though God has all the intrinsic powers and capacities required to actualize W, he cannot do so.
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be understood as short for ‘God can, relative to the actual world, create W’.²⁴ A world is creatable if and only if God can create it. If God has contingent character traits and desires which are prior to his decision whether to create a world, and which world to create, then at the point when a decision is made God does not have the opportunity to create a world in which he lacks those character traits and desires: it is ‘too late’. So the foregoing definition has the consequence that as a matter of contingent fact all creatable worlds contain God’s having those character traits and desires. 1 . 8 O M N I P OT E N C E This section deals mainly with some implications of God’s omnipotence for what he can do by way of world creation.
1.8.1 Are there Contingent Limitations on what God can do? For reasons apparent from earlier sections, to count as omnipotent with respect to world creation God need not be able to create a world in which he strongly or weakly actualizes any state of affairs whose obtaining is incompatible with some property that God himself contingently possesses prior to his own actions. It might be objected that if moral goodness is not essential to God then omnipotence with respect to world creation requires that God be able to create a world which is on balance very evil, even though doing so is incompatible with perfect goodness, which he possesses prior to all his creative actions. The objection fails, broadly speaking for reasons supplied by T. V. Morris, who argued that necessarily if God is contingently omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good at any time then he does not act in a morally defective way at any subsequent time.²⁵ ²⁴ Can God act in a morally wrong manner? Some philosophers will say ‘Yes: he has the causal powers and ample opportunities to do so but freely chooses not to do so’. Others will say ‘No: he has the causal powers and the opportunity to act wrongly but it is necessary that he does not choose to do so’. Others will say ‘No: because it is necessary that God does not choose to act wrongly, he does not have the causal power to do so; for example, though God at all times has the power to utter the words ‘‘Alfred is bald’’, he does not have the-power-to-utter-those-words-in-circumstances-where-to-do-so-would-be-to assert-a-falsehood-and-thereby-deceive-his-audience’. ²⁵ T. Morris, ‘Properties, Modalities and God’, Philosophical Review, 93 (1984), 35–56.
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Some people hold that the passing of time limits what God can do. Here is a time-honoured example. Suppose that at past time t some person Alice lost her virginity, and that she survived the event. Before time t God could have ensured that Alice remained a virgin for the whole of her life, but after t he has not been able to do so: it is too late. This is a contingent limitation, because it is contingent that Alice lost her virginity at t. Our present concern, however, is with what omnipotence should be understood to imply about worlds God can create, relative to his position before he does anything. The salient truth is that, relative to such a position, God could have created some world in which Alice remained a virgin for the whole of her life, though he could not have created a world in which both she lost her virginity at t and she remained a virgin for the whole of her life. As I pointed out in Section 1.7, whether Theological Determinists say that there are contingent limitations on what God can do by way of world creation should depend on whether they think that God has contingent properties prior to his deliberating about what world to create. Molinists hold that the true CCFs impose contingent constraints on what worlds God can create. Consider a specific true CCF. If it had been false, then God would have been able to create a world of a kind that he in fact cannot create; namely, a world in which there are free creaturely choices and in which God strongly actualizes all and only the states of affairs mentioned in the antecedent but does not thereby weakly actualize the truth of the consequent. Furthermore, even if the true CCFs in fact constitute a rich array with positive consequents, Molinists seem unable to rule out its being logically possible that all or almost all true CCFs had stifling or barren consequents. Molinists must say that if this possibility had obtained, then God would not have been able to create a world of a kind which he can create; namely, a world in which there are a great many free, wise choices. A similar point applies concerning the logical possibility that all or almost all true CCFs were of the kind If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs S1 . . . Sn, then the agent would perform such-and-such a seriously evil action. Hence Molinism implies that it is contingent that God can create a world in which there is an acceptable overall outcome concerning the histories of flourishing communities of free creatures. How wide a range of options God has concerning such a goal depends on the array of true CCFs.
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1.8.2 Flint and Freddoso’s Account of Omnipotence Is such variation in what worlds God can create consistent with his being omnipotent with respect to world creation? Flint and Freddoso offer a libertarian treatment of the general concept of omnipotence which is relevant to this question.²⁶ What they say is obviously intended to be suitable for adoption by Molinists, though their paper does not work with the fully-fledged concept of a CCF. They begin by arguing as follows. Let ‘C’ denote the circumstances in which Jones finds himself at time t, including the fact that what Jones does at t is not determined by prior states of affairs. Consider (λ) If Jones were in C at t, then he would freely decide at t to refrain from writing a letter to his wife. Since (λ) is either true or false, and since no one other than Jones can determine how Jones would freely act, not even an omnipotent being can decide by himself to make (λ) true or false. Hence if (λ) is true then not even an omnipotent being can strongly or weakly actualize its being the case that Jones is in C at t and Jones freely decides to write a letter to his wife. And if (λ) is false then not even an omnipotent being can strongly or weakly actualize its being the case that Jones is in C at t and Jones freely decides to refrain from writing a letter to his wife. Therefore at least one of the contingent states of affairs cannot be strongly or weakly actualized by God: Jones’s being in C at t and freely deciding at t to write a letter to his wife and Jones’s being in C at t and freely deciding at t to refrain from writing a letter to his wife. Since this fact follows solely from the logically necessary truth that one being cannot causally determine how another will freely act, it should not be regarded as a kind of inability which disqualifies an agent from counting as omnipotent. Flint and Freddoso now proceed to offer a formal analysis of omnipotence. Let a counterfactual of freedom (sic) be a counterfactual whose consequent specifies at least one free choice or action. Let a world type for person S be a set which is such that for any counterfactual of freedom over which S has no control, either that counterfactual or its opposite ²⁶ ‘Maximal Power’, in A. F. Freddoso (ed.), The Existence and Nature of God (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 94–5.
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is a member of the set.²⁷ For any free agent there will be some world type. Then: Person S is omnipotent at t in W if and only if for any state of affairs p and any world-type-for-S Ls such that p is not a member of Ls, if there is a world W∗ such that (i) Ls is true in both W and W∗ , and (ii) W∗ shares the same history with W at t, and (iii) at t in W∗ someone actualizes p, then S has the power at t in W to actualize p. Here Flint and Freddoso are using ‘S has the power at t in W to actualize p’ interchangeably with ‘in W, S can, at t, actualize p’. I assume that they are using ‘actualize’ to mean ‘strongly actualize or weakly actualize’. Let p be Jones freely writes a letter a letter to his wife, and suppose that in W∗ but not in W Jones actualizes p by freely actualizing a letter to his wife. For ease of exposition, suppose that W is the actual world. In W∗ there was something that Jones had the power to do at t, namely freely write a letter to his wife, such that if Jones did it then p would be actual. But in the actual world is there something that God has the power to do at t, such that, given the history of the actual world up to t, if God did that thing at t then p would be actual? I can see no reason to suppose so. There are lots of things that God could do at t to encourage Jones to freely write a letter to his wife, indeed to make it highly probable that Jones would freely write a letter to his wife, but perhaps nevertheless God could do nothing at t to weakly actualize Jones’s freely writing a letter to his wife. Maybe in neither world are there true counterfactuals which give God the opportunity. If so, then Flint and Freddoso’s analysis counts God as non-omnipotent in the actual world. Let us step back from the details of their account and consider the big picture. I agree with them that, given such assumptions as the truth of libertarianism, the fact that there are contingent states of affairs which God cannot actualize should not prevent God from counting as omnipotent with respect to world creation. But Molinism still needs to deal with a puzzle. ²⁷ Flint and Freddoso use the word ‘negation’. But obviously they mean ‘opposite’. (This term was introduced in Section 1.5.2.)
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The cases in which God faces an infinite array of true CCFs seem to divide into three logically possible sub-cases: Scenario 1: The true CCFs are collectively favourable to God’s weakly actualizing a broad range of significantly different worlds each containing an acceptable overall outcome for the histories of flourishing communities of free creatures. Scenario 2: The true CCFs are collectively favourable to God’s weakly actualizing a quite narrow range of significantly different worlds each containing an acceptable overall outcome for the histories of flourishing communities of free creatures. Scenario 3: The true CCFs are collectively unfavourable to God’s weakly actualizing any significantly different worlds each containing an acceptable overall outcome for the histories of flourishing communities of free creatures.²⁸ In these scenarios ‘significantly different’ means ‘significantly different with respect to the kinds and mixes of values instantiated in the worlds’. (Even if there are infinitely many different shades of red, of orange, and so on, the range of significantly different colour shades between red and green is broader than the range of shades of blue.) In Scenario 1 God has a much wider range of significantly different options than he has in Scenarios 2 and 3, and in Scenario 2 he has a much wider range than he has in Scenario 3. This generates a sense in which God can do a lot more in Scenario 1 than in Scenarios 2 and 3, and a lot more in Scenario 2 than in Scenario 3. Should these differences between what God can do be taken to imply that, in Scenarios 2 and 3 at least, God is not omnipotent?
1.8.3 A better account for Theological Determinists and Molinists Here we should employ the distinction drawn in Section 1.7 between an agent’s intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities, on the one hand, and what the agent can do, on the other, and we should explain omnipotence primarily in terms of the former. For while what God can ²⁸ Notice that even Scenario 3 is consistent with Flint’s ‘suspicion’ that it is impossible that all true CCFs have negative consequents.
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do differs from one scenario to another, his intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities can plausibly be supposed to be the same. What God can do depends partly on what opportunities he has, and the range of the true CCFs is partially constitutive of the range of God’s opportunities. If the true CCFs provide no opportunity for God to weakly actualize a certain human’s freely performing some specific action, then there is no logically possible being who, faced with those same CCFs, could weakly actualize the human’s freely performing that action. Both Molinists and Theological Determinists are free to make use of the account of creatability offered at the end of the preceding section, and to say: God is omnipotent with respect to world creation in world W if and only if God exists in W and for any world W∗ in which God exists either God can, in W, create W∗ or else he cannot, but his doing so is not precluded by any defect or limitation in the intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities he has in W.²⁹ From a Molinist standpoint an important advantage of this account is that it explains why God can be omnipotent with respect to world creation despite the fact that how much he can do varies depending on what CCFs are true. Another advantage is that the account explains why God can be omnipotent with respect to world creation despite the fact that he cannot create any world in which he breaks his promises. If God is essentially perfectly good, he cannot create any such world, because his doing so is logically impossible and the logical impossibility does not derive from any falling short in God. If God is contingently perfectly good, he cannot do so because he is perfectly good prior to creation and so prior to making any promises, and, as Morris has shown, it is necessary that if God is contingently omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good at any time then he does not act in a morally defective way at any subsequent time; once again, the inability does not result from any defect or limitation in God’s intrinsic causal powers or cognitive capacities. ²⁹ This analysis of omnipotence with respect to world creation bears similarities to the general account of omnipotence offered by Erik J. Wielenberg, ‘Omnipotence Again’, Faith and Philosophy, 17 (2000), 26–42. My analysis possesses the advantage of employing the concept of intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities.
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1.8.4 Open Theism and Omnipotence Open Theists deny that God can either strongly or weakly actualize any worlds containing free people. While they believe that God brought into existence the universe and its parts, they believe that God is not in the process of creating the actual world. Nevertheless they typically claim that their position is logically compatible with God’s being omnipotent. William Hasker says: According to the open view of God, God is strictly omnipotent, in the sense that he is able to do everything which is logically possible and consistent with God’s morally perfect nature. It is worth stressing that God as so conceived is in no way deficient in power as compared with God as viewed by Calvinism [i.e. Theological Determinism].³⁰
There is a tangle here that needs to be unravelled. Hasker thinks that God must take risks if he brings into existence creatures possessing libertarian freedom. Hasker would agree that God’s taking significant risks requires more than the logical possibility of his intentions being frustrated: there must in each case at the very least be, for him, an epistemic possibility of failure, and there must in many cases be considerable uncertainty about the outcome. Now epistemic ‘cannots’ generate ‘cannots’ that apply to actions. There is a minuscule probability that you might spin the dial of a combination lock at random and thereby succeed, by sheer fluke, in opening the lock. Nevertheless there is a sense of the can/cannot pair—call it the epistemo-practical sense —in which people cannot open a bank vault if it is locked and they do not know the combination of its lock. Given that infallible foreknowledge of free human actions is impossible if there are no true CCFs, and given (as Hasker thinks) that true CCFs are logically impossible, and given that someone possessing libertarian freedom is likely to reset the combination of the lock on a particular vault several times over the next few days, God cannot, in the epistemo-practical sense, reliably tell someone now what the combination of the lock will be this time next week. Here is an important feature of the epistemo-practical sense. Open Theists hold that (1) It is logically impossible that God infallibly foreknow an undetermined truth. ³⁰ Hasker, Providence, p. 101.
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Let us suppose that (2) As a matter of contingent fact, it is now undetermined what the combination of the lock will be next week. It would be fallacious to infer, from the conjunction of (1) and (2), that (3) It is logically impossible that God now infallibly give correct information to someone specifying the combination of the lock. But it is not fallacious to infer from (1) and (2) that (4) God cannot (in the epistemo-practical sense) now infallibly give correct information to someone specifying what the combination of the lock will be next week. The truth of (2) places God in a position where (4) is true. Hence Hasker should admit that, contrary to the foregoing quotation from his most recent book, there is a relevant sense of ‘cannot’ in which God cannot do everything which it is logically possible for God to do and which is consistent with God’s morally perfect nature. Consider two worlds V and W. In both worlds the overall state of the physical universe at time t1 determines the state of any physical object O at any later time tn, unless either God’s or some creature’s libertarian-free action, occurring between t1 and tn, causally affects the state of O at tn. In V there are few free creatures, and their personal capacities and level of technology make them physically capable of affecting only a small part of the universe. In W there are many free creatures, who are capable of affecting a very large part of the universe. It follows, given the truth of key Open Theist assumptions such as the impossibility of true CCFs, that in V God can plan and direct the history of the universe in much greater detail that he can in W. There are several promising strategies for philosophers seeking to maintain that Open Theism is compatible with divine omnipotence. One involves generalizing the account of omnipotence with respect to world creation that I formulated above. Open theists can agree with the main idea underlying that account, that while what God can do varies greatly between different worlds, his underlying, intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities do not. It is plain that, given such an account of omnipotence, the doctrine Comprehensive Providence does not entail that God is omnipotent. It is also plain that Open Theists, together with those Molinists who think
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that there might not have been true CCFs apt for God’s exercising tight control of the universe, and those Theological Determinists who think that God might have opted for loose control, should declare that divine omnipotence does not entail comprehensive providence. 1.9 OMNISCIENCE Theological Determinists and Molinists hold that God is omniscient. Theological Compatibilists who hold that God is in time typically think that by adapting arguments in favour of the compatibility of determinism and human freedom they can reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge of free, determined human choices and actions. Molinists who believe that God is in time maintain that they can achieve such a reconciliation by saying that God’s foreknowledge of undetermined choices and actions is generated jointly by his knowledge of what initial conditions (including the laws of nature) he has decided to strongly actualize, together with his knowledge of the true CCFs he took into account when reaching his decisions. (Whether this is the case, even granted that there are the true CCFs Molinists envisage, is an important question which need not be discussed here.) Most Molinists will accept physicists’ testimony that as a matter of contingent fact there occur physically undetermined events other than free creaturely choices and actions. How can God have everlastingly past, infallible foreknowledge of these events? Perhaps he himself strongly actualizes them directly. Perhaps there are counterfactuals similar to CCFs except that their consequents specify, or are made true by, the occurrence of these events rather than by choices and actions. What should Open Theists say about divine omniscience? Hasker declares that according to Open Theism God is ‘omniscient, in that he knows everything that logically can be known’. He adds that ‘it is logically impossible for God to have foreknowledge of creaturely actions that are truly free’.³¹ While God could have brought into existence a universe in which he had full foreknowledge of every detail, by himself determining all that occurred, he chose to bring into existence a universe containing free rational creatures, and so his foreknowledge is incomplete. I agree with Hasker’s view that the extent and degree of completeness of what God knows can vary across possible worlds while the fact that he ³¹ Hasker, Providence, p. 101.
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is omniscient remains constant. But nevertheless Hasker’s own defence of the idea is unsuccessful. Let us agree, for the sake of argument, that if a choosing is free then that particular event-token is essentially free and therefore essentially undetermined. Let us also agree that essentially undetermined events are essentially incapable of being infallibly foreknown. Divine omniscience needs to be understood, however, in terms of knowledge of truths as well as knowledge of events³²—for example, God’s omniscience involves not only his remembering my last birthday party: he also remembers that it lasted for three hours. Hasker holds that God’s knowing everything that logically can be known is compatible with his not knowing that such-and-such people will perform such-and-such free actions because it is logically impossible that God has foreknowledge of any free action. But the assumptions (1) It is logically impossible that both John Howard will freely eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015 and God now infallibly foreknows that Howard will do so. and (2) As a matter of contingent fact, John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015 and will freely do so. do not jointly entail (3) It is logically impossible that God now infallibly foreknows that John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015. Given (1) and (2) are true, God does not foreknow that John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015. Yet it is logically possible that both John Howard eats exactly one apple on 1 January 2015 and God foreknows this truth, because it is only contingently the case that when John Howard eats the apple he will eat freely. Hence given that (2) is true, Hasker will have to admit that God does not infallibly foreknow every truth that logically can be infallibly foreknown. Swinburne crafts a definition of ‘omniscience’ which is designed both to deal with philosophical difficulties concerning God’s knowledge of the truth or falsity of human assertions containing indexicals such as ³² Various medieval philosophers denied this; but it is impracticable to pause to deal with every line of dissent from my exposition.
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‘you’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ and also to reflect the view that God cannot have foreknowledge of future free actions (human or his own). Swinburne says: [God’s omniscience should be defined as knowledge, at each period of time,] of all propositions that it is logically possible that he entertain then and that, if entertained by God then, are true, and that it is logically possible for God to know then without the possibility of error.³³
This definition, however, is unsuccessful for the same reason that Hasker’s was. Suppose that John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015, and will freely do so. Suppose that not only will the relevant act-token be undetermined; it is also the case that nothing will determine that Howard eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015.³⁴ According to Swinburne, God does not know now that John Howard will eat an apple on 1 January 2015. But this proposition is one for which it is logically possible both that God entertains it now and also that if he does entertain it now it is true; moreover the proposition is one which it is logically possible for God to know now. So Swinburne’s definition yields the result, which he intended to avoid, that God is not omniscient now. Theological Determinists, Molinists, and Open Theists should be able to agree on the following working definition of ‘omniscient’: God is omniscient in world W if and only if God exists in W and for any proposition p which is true in W, in W it is the case that either God knows that p, or else he does not but his knowing that p is not precluded by any defect or limitation in his intrinsic cognitive capacities. The key idea is that incompleteness of God’s knowledge does not entail limitation in God’s intrinsic cognitive capacities. The definition enables Theological Determinists and Molinists to say that God would still have been omniscient even if he had voluntarily decided to exercise only loose control over human choices and actions. Given the foregoing definition, the doctrine Comprehensive Knowledge does not entail that God is omniscient, and the doctrine that God is omniscient does not entail Comprehensive Providence. It is also plain that Open Theists, together with those Molinists who think that there ³³ Swinburne, The Christian God (Clarendon, 1994), 133. ³⁴ The ‘not only. . .but also’ specification is inserted with Frankfurt’s examples in mind.
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might not have been suitable true CCFs enabling God to exercise tight control of the universe, and those Theological Determinists who think that God might have opted for loose control, should declare that divine omniscience does not entail Comprehensive Knowledge. 1 . 1 0 P O S S I B L E WO R L D S A N D M O R A L N E C E S S I T Y This is a good place to say a little more about possible worlds, and the relevant concepts of possibility and necessity. A world should be regarded as a whole whose parts are states of affairs, rather than as a set whose members are states of affairs. For any proposition p there is a state of affairs which we can refer to by the expression ‘Its being the case that p’, but sometimes distinct propositions p and q are such that ‘Its being the case that p’ and ‘Its being the case that q’ refer to the same state of affairs. Just as the actual world is a whole comprising all and only the actual states of affairs, including both logically necessary and logically contingent states of affairs, so non-actual worlds are wholes such that every part of the whole is a logically possible state of affairs, and every part is logically compatible with every other part, and there is no state of affairs which is logically compatible with every part and which is not itself a part. I will remain silent on the question of whether we should be realists about non-actual states of affairs, and non-actual worlds (as opposed to identifying them with linguistic entities, or regarding talk of them as useful fiction). Logical possibility and logical necessity can be defined in terms of each other: It is logically possible that p if and only if it is not logically necessary that not-p. Obviously I have been using the expression ‘logically necessary’ to cover not only tautologies but also truths of mathematics and propositions like All bachelors are unmarried and If A is north of B then B is south of A and Nothing is both red and green all over at the same time. More controversial examples include Water is H2 O and Saul Kripke is not a crocodile. (Some philosophers say that these five examples are all ‘metaphysically necessary’.) Cognitivists about the right and the good can easily regard the foregoing sense of ‘logically necessary’ as already including some propositions in which words like ‘right’ and ‘good’ occur—for example If an action is good in some respect then it is not also bad in the same respect, and If A is better than B then B is inferior to A. Such propositions are neutral between
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coherent rival schemes of evaluation, because they must be respected by all such schemes—by western utilitarians, by Muslim fundamentalists, by Plato, by Lenin, by Gandhi . . . Any acceptable conjunction of evaluative propositions must respect constraints corresponding to such propositions. A great many non-cognitivists about the right and the good also will be prepared to extend the meaning of ‘logically necessary’ to cover the italicized sentences, regarded now not as propositions but, say, as constraints on coherent prescription. God, the Best, and Evil extends the application of ‘logically necessary’ in an additional way. Although some moral propositions and ascriptions of value are true partly in virtue of relevant contingent facts, there is a strong case for saying that others are in some sense necessarily true. Consider, for example, If Alice is perfectly good then she does not torture people for the fun of it. The truth of this proposition does not seem to depend on contingent circumstances Alice happens to find herself in, or on contingent truths about human nature, or on contingent truths about torture. It would be true of any logically possible person, whatever their community and whatever their biological species, that if they were perfectly good then they would not torture any other person, whatever the latter’s community and whatever their biological species, for the fun of it. Similarly with Other things being equal, a person’s being wise is good for its own sake. Kit Fine would agree that these propositions about torture and wisdom should be classified as necessary, but he maintains that the sense or kind of necessity they involve cannot be subsumed under, or defined or understood by reference to, the sense or kind of necessity involved in the five examples given three paragraphs ago.³⁵ Nevertheless in this book I will be treating If Alice is perfectly good then she does not torture people for the fun of it and Other things being equal, a person’s being wise is good for its own sake as logically necessary propositions. If you think that Fine is correct, then you can charitably regard my expression ‘logically necessary’ as short for ‘logically or morally or axiologically necessary’. Accordingly, I will be assuming that there is no possible world in which God is perfectly good and performs a morally impermissible action, or in which God is perfectly good and performs an action which is less rational than some relevant alternative action that he can perform. ³⁵ Kit Fine, Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (Clarendon, 2005).
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1 . 1 1 T H E C O N C E P T O F EV I L Most recent philosophical books and journal articles on the problem of evil do not provide any serious explanation of the concept of evil. What frequently happens is that some examples are listed, and then the concept assumed to be available as a basis for a distinction between two broad kinds: moral evil and natural evil.³⁶ The most impressive recent scholarly account of changing concepts of evil (and approaches to ‘the’ problem of evil) over the last few centuries has been provided by Susan Neiman, but her work has so far had little influence in philosophy of religion journals.³⁷ Aquinas said: Evil is simply a privation of something which a subject is entitled by its origin to possess and which it ought to have, as we have said. Such is the meaning of the word ‘evil’ among all men.³⁸
It is not clear to me whether in speaking of ‘the meaning of the word’ Aquinas intended to claim synonymy, or something weaker such as logical equivalence. For it is obvious that ‘evil’ is not synonymous with the expression ‘a privation of something which . . .’. Many philosophers would classify all the following as clear-cut examples of evil: • • • • • •
war schizophrenia quadriplegia pain, and the emotional distress caused by pain intended violations of important moral duties malice
These examples cannot, however, be taken for granted. The conceptual boundaries of evil are understood very differently by different ³⁶ Moral evil, it is said, consists of morally wrong actions and morally bad states of mind together with any resulting pain, illness, deprivation, etc., while natural evil consists of pain, illness, deprivation, etc. which (leaving aside any role played by God) result entirely from impersonal causes such as earthquakes. Although the distinction is useful, Chapters 6–8 do not use it. ³⁷ Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2002). ³⁸ For this and similar quotations see H. J. McCloskey, God and Evil (Nijhoff, 1974), 25 ff.
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thinkers. For instance, A. A. Long tells us that the Stoics confined the word ‘evil’ (kakon) to moral character and action, and did not apply it to pain, disease, and so on.³⁹ Leibniz works with a threefold classification of evils: metaphysical/physical/moral. Physical evil consists of suffering, sorrow, and misery. Moral evil consists of sin. Metaphysical evil consists of imperfection. In a sense, finitude can be seen as imperfection; but in that case not all imperfection counts as metaphysical evil. Rather, what Leibniz has in mind are monstrosities and other disorders in nature such as earthquakes and floods, even ones which preceded the arrival of human beings in the relevant regions of the universe.⁴⁰ Many people would regard Leibniz’s concept of evil as too broad: earthquakes and floods which have no adverse effects on human beings or their interests should not count as evil. Other people would regard Leibniz’s account as too narrow: they might say, for example, that the destruction of a great work of art is evil even though it causes no suffering, sorrow, or misery, involves no sin, and does not constitute a disorder in nature. John Kekes, in his article ‘Evil’ in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, says: ‘Evil must involve harm, and it must be serious enough to damage its victims’ capacity to function normally. Furthermore, the harm must be unjustified, since not even serious harm is itself necessarily evil, as it may be just punishment for crimes committed, or the only means of preventing yet greater harm’ (3: 463). The context invites us to take Kekes as here charting the scope and limits of the concept of evil. But many people use the word ‘evil’ in a much broader sense. They would, for instance, count the intention to kill someone to facilitate a bank robbery as evil, even if the intention was not carried out, and so there was no victim whose capacity to function normally was damaged. People holding hedonist theories of value are likely to agree, against the Stoics on the one hand and Kekes on the other, that war, schizophrenia, and so on are genuine examples of evil. But they are likely to insist on a distinction between primary and secondary meanings of the word. ‘Evil’ is in the first place applied to suffering and unhappiness, and has secondary application to other states, in virtue of their including ³⁹ A. A. Long, ‘The Stoic Concept of Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly, 18 (1968), 329–43. ⁴⁰ Theodicy, sects. 241, 244–5. Charles Journet, The Meaning of Evil, trans. Michael Barry (Kenedy, 1963), 42–3 ascribes to Leibniz the view that beings are metaphysically evil merely in virtue of their finitude. This seems to me a misinterpretation.
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suffering and unhappiness, or their being causes or signs of suffering and unhappiness. Just as the word ‘healthy’ is used in its conceptually fundamental meaning to describe plants and animals (including humans), and in derivative senses to describe foods and pathology results, so the primary use of ‘evil’ generates derivative uses to describe natural disasters, diseases, traits of character, and also the news of these. Are the differences of opinion noted above conceptual in nature, or do they come down to substantial differences in value judgements? We need not pursue this question here. (Maybe it has no determinate answer.) The relevant point for our purposes is that there is disagreement not merely about what are recognized as borderline cases: what some people regard as clear-cut evils, other people regard as clear-cut non-evils. Fortunately, a full, rich account of the concept of evil, or a theoretically well-founded taxonomy of evils, is not required for the arguments of this book. For now, the salient question is: What minimal, partial understanding of evil, and identification of examples of evil, is necessary and sufficient for generating the most serious arguments from evil against the existence of God? War provides the basis for an objection to the existence of God because, a priori, we would expect there to be no war if God existed. Why? Because typically wars include a great deal of death, suffering, deprivation, enmity, and morally wrong conduct; and if God existed he would have very strong reasons, derived from the nature of these states of affairs, for ensuring that war did not occur. Maybe those reasons could be overridden by other considerations; maybe not. But the first firm reference point we can use when identifying concepts of evil suitable for use in this enquiry is this: (1) Evil is such that God, if he exists, has (at the very least) strong prima facie reasons for ensuring that there is little or no evil. There are a number of other features of evil that help to fix the meaning of the word as it occurs in recent philosophical discussion of evil as an objection to the existence of God: (2) The evils in this universe include at least some kinds of morally wrong human intention and action, at least some kinds of morally bad motives and states of character, as well as at least some kinds of human suffering, ill-health, impairment, and deprivation. (3) A particular state of affairs can be evil even though its effects include great goods which more than compensate for bad effects. A rape is
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evil even if a child is born as a result and that child’s life is a great good to the child itself and to the mother. The torture of one person is an evil even if it somehow leads to the prevention of several other cases of torture. (4) An evil state of affairs, considered in abstraction from any goods of which it is a part, goods which are a part of it, or good effects which it produces (or of which it is a necessary condition), is worthy of aversion, and of being disvalued and opposed. (5) Some cases of an agent’s wronging someone are cases of evil, but not all. If I take your car without your consent and without other legally valid authorization, I am wronging you. But in some such cases I am acting innocently, because I placed reasonable trust in someone else’s statement that they owned the car and wanted me to take it. My wronging you is not a case of evil. (6) Some cases of the deterioration or destruction of the good are evil, but not all—for example, the fading of a beautiful sunset. (7) Evil states of affairs are not merely trivially bad. Some writers classify as evils even minor violations of moral duty. They are justified in doing so only if they hold that minor violations of moral duty are axiologically important. Unpleasant experiences that give rise to no significant distress are not evil. Most philosophers writing about God and evil do not discuss whether talk of evil, including the preceding seven statements, is to be understood in cognitivist or non-cognitivist terms. This omission is not surprising, because the objections to the existence of God based on evil are neither strengthened nor eliminated nor weakened by the stance taken on the cognitivism/non-cognitivism issue.⁴¹ To illustrate the point, let us take a simple ‘Hurrah!/Boo!’ account of goodness and badness. Even the conceptually thinnest emotivist theory must recognize some place for rational argument concerning goodness and badness. For example, it must somehow provide for the validity of the following reasoning: If Mary enslaves children then Boo!Mary. Mary enslaves children. Therefore Boo!Mary. ⁴¹ Here I find myself in agreement with the general drift of Michael Tooley’s remarks in his paper ‘The Argument from Evil’, (Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), 89–134), pp. 99 ff.
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Some account of validity extending beyond truth-preservation will be required. Perhaps, for example, in discussions of moral inference the Hurrah!/Boo! theorist will try to replace ‘true’ and ‘false’ by ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’. Given all this, the Hurrah!/Boo! account can recognize objections to the existence of God based on evil. For example: If God exists then Hurrah!God. If Hurrah!God then there exists little or no suffering. There is a lot of suffering. Therefore God does not exist. More elaborate arguments concerning God and evil may be difficult or impossible to formulate given the impoverished resources of the ‘Boo!/Hurrah!’ account. The same will be true of arguments concerning Mary. But sophisticated non-cognitive theories may be able to do better. An axiologically and morally penetrating account of the nature of evil would explain what was evil about, say, war in terms which were more profound and more illuminating than saying merely that wars involve a lot of death, suffering, deprivation, enmity, and morally wrong conduct. This book does not offer a deep and sensitive treatment of these matters. Its working assumption is that such a treatment is not necessary for making substantial progress with the question whether evil provides a strong objection to the truth of classical theism, or of theism. I intend no disrespect to victims of great evils when I stick to the narrowly conceived task I have assigned myself. Like the concept of evil, the concept of goodness-for-its-own-sake, or ends-in-themselves, is contested. While some philosophers think that defenders of theism have little chance of success as long as they confine themselves to a religion-neutral value theory, in this book I will attempt to do so.⁴² Indeed, I will work with a minimal, partial understanding of goodness-for-its-own-sake, constituted by such platitudes as: Goodness-for-its-own-sake is such that if God brings a universe into existence then he has (at the very least) strong prima facie reasons for ensuring that it contains a lot of goodness-for-its-own-sake. ⁴² Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999), 11–12.
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The states of affairs that are good-for-their-own-sakes include at least some kinds of morally good motives and states of character, as well as at least some kinds of human pleasure and achievement. States of affairs which are good for their own sakes, considered in abstraction from any evils to which they are linked, are worthy of being pursued, welcomed, and valued.
2 God and Worlds than which there are None Better Let us say that a world is maximal if and only if there is no world better than it. Sections 2.1–2.3 of this chapter investigate whether there is at least one maximal world. Sections 2.4 and 2.5 jointly establish, given some plausible (but contestable) assumptions, that we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists and there is at least one maximal world then the actual world is maximal. In Sections 2.1–2.3 the word ‘value’ sometimes means the quantity of net goodness of some state of affairs, and sometimes means the number which measures the quantity.
2 . 1 A R E T H E R E WO R L D S H AV I N G I N F I N I T E VA LU E ? Perhaps the questions Are there worlds having infinite value? and Are there maximal worlds? are epistemically independent of each other. But, surely, even if this turns out to be so, it is not obvious at the outset, so it is worth enquiring into the first question before tackling the one which mainly concerns me, the second. This section argues that it is not known whether there are worlds having infinite value. Everyone agrees that whether one world is better than another depends on what good and bad states of affairs each world contains, and on how good and bad they are. Some accounts of the value of a world are mathematically aggregative (from now on ‘aggregative’ for short) in the following sense. They start by identifying certain individual basic value states, and assign positive or negative numbers as measures of their value. Some aggregative theorists would be happy to identify the value of the state with the net amount of goodness (positive or negative) in the state, but they do not need to speak this way. Simple aggregative
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theories then declare that the value of a world is measurable by some specified mathematical function of the values of the basic value states it contains.¹ That is, these values—the numbers—are all the information we need to calculate the value of the world. Complex aggregative theories require that more information be used. For example, a theory might keep track of which individual people various basic value states concern, and when in these people’s lives they obtain. Obviously there are aggregative theories which imply that there are worlds of infinite value. Might there be non-aggregative theories, serious candidates for truth, which use cardinal measures of how good a world is, and assign some worlds infinite value?
2.1.1 Can Non-Aggregative Theories Recognize Infinite Value? Marking students’ essays involves taking into account various features of the essay, but typically the mark is based on a holistic judgement of how good the essay is, rather than an aggregation of marks assigned to the relevant features. Marking scales differ widely. In my own department an essay mark is a natural number between 0 and 100, but we could devise various scales that had no upper limit. On one of these scales, let us suppose, if a superb first-year essay would receive 100, then a superb fourth-year honours essay would receive 300, and a typical article published in the Journal of Philosophy would receive 900. It is hard to see, however, that the explanation of the marking scale so far given assigns any meaning to the mark Infinity. We might wonder whether Infinity tells us that the piece of work that receives it is infinitely better than the first-year essay, the postgraduate essay, or the journal article, and is therefore better than any philosophical work for which some natural number would be a justified mark. But surely it is doubtful that the expression ‘infinitely better’ itself has a clear meaning that can be applied to pairs of essays, and used to confer meaning on the mark Infinity. Maybe Infinity could be stipulated to be the mark appropriate to an essay than which none better can be conceived. But is such an ¹ One reason we need basic value states is to avoid double counting. For example, if Alice’s being courageous early this morning and Alice’s being temperate early this morning both basic count positively towards the value of the world, we need some way to avoid counting, as well, the compound states of affairs consisting respectively of their disjunction and their conjunction.
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essay logically possible? Even if it is, the mark Infinity, so defined, would not be a quantitative measure. A non-aggregative theory could understand the sentence ‘There are worlds having infinite value’ to be saying simply that there are worlds than which none better can be conceived. Now there are well-known reasons for supposing that what we human beings can, psychologically speaking, conceive (or imagine, or entertain) does not coincide with what is logically possible. So from now the conceivable will be reinterpreted as coinciding with the logically possible. So the proposed way of understanding the sentence ‘There are worlds having infinite value’ amounts to treating it as logically equivalent to ‘There are maximal worlds’. In that case, of course, the claim that there are worlds having infinite value could not count either for or against the claim that there are maximal worlds. Non-aggregative theories typically ignore the essay-marking model, and deny there is such a thing as the (quantitative) value of a world. Some of them say that there is never such a thing as the value of the states in a world. Others are open to there being amounts of net goodnessfor-its-own-sake in some states of affairs within worlds, but nevertheless reject all quantitative statements about how good a world is—even statements saying merely that the world’s value is indeterminate but at least such-and-such a quantity. Maybe they ought to relent a little over a few very simple, sparse worlds. I know of no non-aggregative theory of goodness that affirms that a world can be infinitely good in a quantitative sense. We should therefore turn again to aggregative theories of the goodness of worlds. They all seem hopeless, for reasons given by Michael Stocker and others.² But it is worth spending a little time investigating whether, if we are open in principle to the idea that some aggregative theory is true, it is likely that we will be strongly attracted to the view that there are infinitely good worlds, in a quantitative sense of ‘infinite’.
2.1.2 Can Aggregative Theories Rule out Assigning Finite Values for All Worlds? Let us consider two different approaches to the problem. Firstly, there are aggregative hedonist theories that identify the basic value states in ² Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford University Press, 1990).
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any world as all consisting in a person’s feelings of pleasure or displeasure during a short unit interval of time, measure the value of each state simply by the intensity of the feelings, and declare that the value of a world is some specified mathematical function of the value of the states. If we choose summation as the mathematical function, then worlds will have infinite value if they contain finitely many people all of whom have a positive net amount of pleasure throughout infinitely long lives, or if they contain an infinite number of people who all have a positive net amount of pleasure throughout their lives whatever their length. But even if we accept the foregoing simple hedonist account of the values of the basic value states, and accept that the value of a world is determined by aggregation, we ought not to accept summation as the method of aggregation. For one thing, doing so would commit us to what Derek Parfit called the Repugnant Conclusion, that For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.³
A hedonist who wants to avoid the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’ has moved away from the idea that the only thing that matters is the quantity of pleasure in a world, and is attaching independent significance to its distribution. What remains doubtful is that any aggregative hedonist proposals currently on offer succeed in avoiding unacceptable comparative judgements of the kind illustrated by the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’. The second aggregative approach to the question whether there are worlds of infinite value arises from the reflection that aggregative theorists, whether theists or not, should accept that there are worlds in which God exists. So consider what aggregative theorists should make of the following argument: (1) There are worlds in which God exists and has infinite positive value—that is, the state of affairs God’s existing has infinite positive value. (2) In no world in which God exists and has infinite positive value are there states of affairs that individually or collectively have infinite disvalue. (3) Therefore there are worlds that have infinite positive value. ³ Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), 388.
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The inference from (1) and (2) to (3) is not entirely unproblematic, but let us, along with many though perhaps not all aggregative theorists, acquiesce in this inference and consider whether we should assent to (1). Although (1) is more plausible than, say, There are worlds in which a cat exists and has infinite value, its truth is far from obvious. Let us suppose that the basic value states in our preferred theory all consist in some individual’s possessing some good-making property, and the theory assigns to each such state a measure of value which is proportional to the degree to which the individual possesses the property—for example, intelligence. Obviously, if argument (1)–(3) above is to be at all interesting, if the inputs to the aggregation function are all finite numbers, then its output must also be a finite number. But if some or all of the inputs are infinite numbers, might the aggregation function produce a finite number as output? It might be argued: If in every world in which God exists he has only finite value then we can conceive of a being who in some or all worlds in which this being exists has greater finite value than God has in any world, contrary to the Anselmian idea that God is a being than whom none better is possible. Is this argument strong? Let us grant the strong, Anselmian premiss (4) If there is some world in which God exists and has value N then there is no world in which any other being exists and has a value equal to or greater than N. (4) does not yield (1). After all, (4) is consistent with (5) There is a finite number M such that there is no world in which some being has a value greater than M. If (5) is true, then although we can in some sense imagine a being of value greater than the finite number M, this is a bit like our imagining that there is a greatest prime number, or a class of all classes that are not members of themselves: what we imagine is ‘inconceivable’—that is, a logical impossibility. Maybe the number N mentioned in (4) is identical with the number M envisaged in (5). Would having ‘only’ a finite value constitute a lack or defect in God which, even if it is a necessary lack or defect, renders him less than entirely worthy of worship? No. Consider the fact that God cannot reduce the temperature of an object below −273 degrees Celsius. (Treat the expression ‘−273 degrees Celsius’ as rigidly designating absolute zero. It is irrelevant that ice could have melted at a higher temperature.)
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Here we have a finite number, −273, measuring a necessary limit to God’s power. But being able to reduce the temperature ‘only’ to this finite level does not constitute a shortcoming in his power. The source of the limit is not God’s nature but the essential properties of temperature and heat. Similarly, if there is a finite limit to the value of God’s existence then its source is not his nature but the essential properties of goodness. It might be objected that if there is some world in which God has a finite value N then surely there will be worlds in which there are k non-divine beings each of whose life has a finite positive value j such that kj > N; and surely there being a possible collection of beings who are collectively of greater value than God is, is contrary to the spirit of the Anselmian way of thinking about God. But granted that there are indeed worlds in which there are k non-divine beings each having a finite positive value j such that kj > N, are there worlds in which the collective value of these beings is at least N? The objector can hardly rely on the premiss that the collective value of x beings each of value y is always equal to x multiplied by y, since accepting that premiss will saddle us with the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’. Given that God is a being than which none greater can be conceived, and given that we have an aggregation function which assigns God’s existing the finite value N, the conclusion to draw is that the aggregation function is non-linear, and will, as k and j increase, assign to the successive states of affairs There existing k non-divine beings each of whom has finite value j values that converge on N but do not reach it. A similar point holds concerning a series of worlds containing some single being B, such that in each successive world B receives a finite increase in one or more of B’s good-making properties. The aggregation function will surely assign finite increases to the values of B’s existing. Although one can imagine an aggregation function which assigned an infinite difference in value to B in two successive members of the series, such a function seems deviant. Why would anyone want to adopt it? Given that (1) and (2) jointly entail (3), there is a big theoretical advantage, from the viewpoint of aggregative theorists, in being able to say that in some or all worlds in which God exists the value of God’s existing is finite. Although two sets can both have an infinite number of members and yet one have a greater cardinal number of members than the other, there is no reason to suppose that two states of affairs might both have infinite value and yet one have a higher cardinal value than the other. Therefore supposing that the value of God’s existing is finite avoids the need for appeal to an ad hoc hypothesis in order to say
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that worlds in which God exists can not only be ranked ordinally by the better-than relation: they can be assigned different cardinal values. Of course if (1) and (2) do not jointly entail (3), then it will be true anyway that worlds in which God exists can be assigned different cardinal values. Aggregative theorists, even if they are atheists, will be unhappy with a theory of quantitative value that cannot assign different values to different worlds in which God exists. Why? If all such worlds had infinite value, couldn’t aggregative theorists still do most of the jobs for which they need values by assigning them to the different created portions of the worlds?⁴ Unfortunately this may not be possible. For in many cases, at least, God’s actions in a world are inextricably involved in the ‘created portions’; moreover in worlds in which God exists a large part of the value of many states of affairs involving creatures is conferred on those states of affairs by God’s involvement.⁵ We should conclude that we lack good reasons for supposing that a plausible aggregative theory, if there is one, will assign infinite values to some worlds. Are there good reasons against the supposition?
2.1.3 Are there Good Arguments against Some Infinitely Valuable Worlds? My colleagues Allen Hazen and Greg Restall, in personal communications, have raised an interesting issue bearing on the foregoing question. Restall writes: It seems that any proponent of infinite quantitative value must explain how their position differs from a straightforward variant of their position which restricts all quantitative value to being finite. For any function f that the proponent of IQV (infinite quantitative value) might suggest as the measure of value (f is a function from states of affairs to numbers: for simplicity’s sake, let’s make them the positive real numbers, plus a special number, ‘infinity’, though the case will work just as well for more ⁴ This is suggested by David Basinger, ‘Divine Omniscience and the Best of All Possible Worlds’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 16 (1982), 146. ⁵ Sections 3.3 and 3.4 employ the proposition that in some possible worlds the whole consisting of states of affairs involving created entities, considered in abstraction from their relations to God, is disappointing, or alternatively non-disappointing, relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. But this proposition is much less problematic than the view that an aggregative theorist can specify some viable way of assigning different values to worlds in which God exists by assigning different values to states of affairs involving created entities, considered in abstraction from their relations to God.
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complicated measures), proponents of FQV (only finite quantitative value) can offer a function g which has a maximum finite value N that it never goes beyond. It’s straightforward to define this from f: let g(x) = fix(f(x)) where ‘fix’ is a function from [0, infinity] to [0, N]: fix(a) = Na/(a + 1) fix(infinity) = N Fiddling with it shows that fix(0) = 0, fix(1) = N/2, fix(2) = 2N/3, etc., but fix(x) = N only when x is infinity. So g defined by setting g(x) = fix(f(x) ) is a function with a maximum, and furthermore it’s order preserving. g(x) > g(y) if and only if f(x) > f(y), so measuring ‘better than’ with f or with g makes no difference. Now, all of this is purely mathematical fiddling. But it raises an issue for the proponent of IQV. If for any measure of value with an infinite quantitative value we can construct what looks like a measure of value which doesn’t have one, exactly what rules out this so-called ‘measure’? What can one say which shows how a measure like f is better than a measure like g?
I have two answers to Restall’s question. The first of these addresses Restall’s specific illustration of the general point. Consider the problem of measuring the combined length of two rods laid end on end. If the lengths of the rods are x and y, then we can specify the combined length as follows: f(x, y) = x + y. And treating f as admitting varying numbers of arguments, we can say that f(x, y, z, . . .) = x + y + z + . . . This leads to infinite combined lengths. Suppose that we now define the function g in Restall’s way. There are decisive reasons for preferring f to g. For one thing, f gives the same results independently of our choice of units of measurement, whereas g does not. If we describe the two rods as respectively 1 metre and 2 metres long, the use of g yields the following reasoning about the rods’ combined length: g(x, y) = fix(x + y) = fix(3) = 3N/4 m = 300N/4 cm; and if we describe the rods as respectively 100 centimetres and 200 centimetres in length, the use of g gives us a combined length of fix(300) = 300N/301 cm = 3N/3.01 m. The same holds for weights, temperatures, etc. The discrepancy indicates that the use of g is absurd. The foregoing point, however, concerns only one suggestion about how we might define a function which has a finite maximum value for worlds. What about the general idea that here will always be such a function available, one whose use we have no way of excluding? The main problem with the idea is this: Someone might offer a similar argument,
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from the availability of some relevant mathematical function to the conclusion that even a galaxy containing an infinite number of stars could not properly, non-arbitrarily be said to have infinite mass or infinite size, and that even a galaxy that has existed forever could not properly, nonarbitrarily be said to have existed for an infinite period of time—where a galaxy exists forever if and only if for every finite period E throughout which the galaxy has existed there is some earlier, equal period F through which it has existed, such that E and F do not overlap. Surely we would regard such an argument as too-powerful-to-be-sound. In the absence of some strong positive reasons for adopting a function which has a finite maximum to the value of worlds, the mere conceivability that there exists an appropriate function constitutes at most a reason for being less than certain that there are worlds having infinite value. Think of Leibniz, whose ‘worlds’ were big things rather than big states of affairs, and were such that God was located outside them rather than inside them. He held that the value of a world depends on the variety of phenomena and simplicity of the laws in that world, and there comes a point at which any increase in the one must be at the expense of a decrease in the other; so the aggregative function can be represented by a curve that has a highest point. Well, our possible worlds are not Leibniz’s. If God’s value is essential to him, then either in all worlds in which he exists he has finite value, or else some worlds have infinite value, or an acceptable aggregative function assigns some worlds a finite value even though they contain at least some states of affairs, such as God’s existing, which have infinite value. 2 . 2 I N F I N I T E VA LU E A N D M A X I M A L WO R L D S Let us now consider how infinite value bears on the main topic of this chapter; namely, whether there is at least one maximal world. If there is a best world, it will be maximal, but there might be several maximal worlds in the absence of a best one. Suppose for the sake of argument that there are many worlds having denumerably infinite value, and no worlds having non-denumerably infinite value. Then all of the worlds having infinite value have the same cardinal value. Even so, some such worlds may be better than others. Here is why. Surely there are two worlds A and B in which exactly the same people exist, an infinite number of them, such that each person leads a very
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good life, taken as a completed whole, and no person’s life is better or worse than anyone else’s, and there are no important moral differences between A and B concerning the processes by which outcomes are obtained. The main difference between the two worlds is that everyone leads a better life in A than in B. Surely if we hold that A and B have infinite value, we ought to add that nevertheless A is better than B.⁶ The foregoing argument—and various other arguments in this chapter—assumes that all basic value states are states of persons. If you think that there are also independent basic value states involving dolphins, forests, and deserts, then it will be easy enough to reformulate the arguments accordingly. If we accept the foregoing argument, then we may hold an aggregative theory of the value of worlds, but we have rejected the universal applicability of an aggregative approach to ranking worlds. For we now hold that for worlds of infinite value the relative position of a world is a matter not only of its value but how it compares to other worlds having the same value, and this is not determined by any mathematical function—not unless we trivialize the concept of a mathematical function by broadening it to include almost any way of reasoning to a conclusion. The ranking of worlds might still be determined by some relation between the respective basic value states, but this does not suffice to make the theory aggregative.
2 . 3 M A X I M A L WO R L D S I N T H E A B S E N C E O F QUA N T I TAT I V E VA LU E Can it be shown that whether or not there are worlds of infinite value, indeed whether or not worlds possess value at all (in the quantitative sense of ‘value’), for any world there is a better one—that is, there are no maximal worlds? Call the following the ‘Same People, Better and Better Lives’ argument: Surely for any world V containing people there is some other world W in which exactly the same people exist as in V, each person’s life in W ⁶ Closely related arguments have been endorsed in many recent papers, including Mark Nelson, ‘Utilitarian Eschatology’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 28 (1991), 339–47, and Peter Vallentyne and Shelly Kagan, ‘Infinite Value and Finitely Additive Value Theory’, Journal of Philosophy, 94 (1997), 5–26; it was when reading Vallentyne and Kagan that I acquired the idea of an aggregative theory of value.
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is better, overall, than their life in V, the distribution of goods in W is not less fair than it is in V, and the differences between V and W are not due to morally bad actions or unfair processes in W. Surely W is better than V. This reasoning can be repeated without limit. Therefore for any world there is a better one. The foregoing argument is unsatisfactory. My reasoning has six stages: (1) Improvements in a person’s life have to be in principle recognizable by the cognitive capacities of finite beings such as us.⁷ (2) If the series of worlds generated from V in the way described is endless, then there will be an endless series of discernible improvements to the lives of the people who exist in V. (3) Even if we hold that worlds do not have values, we can still sensibly speak of one world’s being much better than another, just as in the absence of any way of assigning a cardinal measure of how funny a comedian is, we can still sensibly say that some comedians are much funnier than others. (4) Consider worlds located a large but finite number of steps along the series of worlds envisaged in (2)–(say) 1020 steps along. The inhabitants will be beings who lead lives vastly better than our own. (There have been fewer than 1020 seconds since the Big Bang.) The qualitative difference between their lives and ours would strike us as more dramatic than the qualitative difference between our lives and those of, say, a mosquito or even an earthworm. (5) But what will be the situation when we get to the position in the series numbered 10 to the power one billion? Can we make any sense at all of the idea that there is a world containing beings whose lives are that much better than our own? It is not clear that there is such a world. (Can we make any sense of the statement that there is a world containing a mosquito the size of the Milky Way? The laws of nature would have to be so different that we lose our grip on the idea that it is a mosquito.)⁸ (6) Therefore ‘Same People, Better and Better Lives’ fails to show that there are no maximal worlds. ⁷ Talk of improvements in this context should be understood to involve comparisons between states of affairs in different worlds, rather than at different times within the same world. ⁸ There is a potential threat here to the concept of God. But there is no space for a detour to explore the issue.
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Call the following the ‘Extra-People’ argument for the claim that there are no maximal worlds: Surely for any world V containing people there is some other world W such that (1) everyone who exists in V exists in W, while there are a finite number of people who exist in W but not in V; (2) in each world, every inhabitant leads a life which is worth living, and is neither better nor worse than any other inhabitant’s; (3) everyone who exists in both worlds leads a life in each which is neither better nor worse than his or her life in the other; (4) the distribution of goods in W is not less fair than it is in V, and the differences between V and W are not due to morally bad actions or unfair processes in W. In that case, W is better overall than V. This reasoning can be repeated without limit. Therefore for any world there is a better one. The argument contains no assumptions or conclusions about quantitative value. Furthermore, advancing it does not commit one to the doctrine that if one world is related to another via what Parfit calls ‘mere addition’ then the larger world must be better. There is ‘mere addition’ when, in one of two outcomes, there are extra people who have lives worth living, who affect no one else, and whose existence does not involve social injustice. Parfit showed that the doctrine in question encounters major difficulties. In evaluating the argument, let us assume that we can exclude the use of quantitative principles from which ordinal rankings might be derived. Do the specified conditions entail that W is better than V? Perhaps the view that they do is sustained by the following line of thought: Each extra person in W is making no less a contribution than the people in V to the lives of family, friends, and fellow citizens, and is no less worthy of being treasured and loved for his or her own sake. Therefore the presence of these extra people makes W better than V. But it is not plain that the first sentence entails the second. In general, there is a close connection between what goes on in a world and how good the world is, but the nature of the connection is not well understood.
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The argument assumes that all basic value states are states of persons, or at least of individual beings. This assumption might be denied. Leibniz thought that what needed to be taken into account was the variety of phenomena in the world, and the economy of the laws which generate the phenomena—other things being equal, the fewer and simpler the laws, the better. He believed that there would be an optimal trade-off between these two considerations. Here is a non-Leibnizian illustration of why the supporting thought suggested above does not suffice to sustain the view that the listed conditions jointly entail that W is better than V. Suppose that we are invited to rank two novels A and B, which differ in that B contains another chapter, inserted at the point where A ends. The additional chapter is at least as well written as any chapter in A. Nevertheless we cannot be confident that B is a better novel than A. Maybe the additional chapter introduces some incoherence in the plot. Thus the addition of an additional well-written chapter, holding the rest of the novel’s text constant, does not guarantee the preservation of all the virtues of A. Maybe, alternatively, B is not inferior to A, but nevertheless the additional chapter does not add to or intensify any of the good-making properties of the novel—for example, it does not make B thematically richer, or make it end on a better note. Hence while ‘Extra People’ is superior to ‘Same People, Better and Better Lives’, it should nevertheless be viewed with considerable caution. 2 . 4 W H AT G O D C A N D O : C O M PAT I B I L I S T A N A LY S I S Sections 2.4 and 2.5 together argue we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists and there is at least one maximal world then the actual world is maximal. Although at various points the argument employs a local supposition that there is at least one maximal world, the overall strategy does not depend on the supposition. The contribution of this section to the joint task is to consider whether if Theological Compatibilism is true and there is at least one maximal world, then God creates a maximal world. Both sections assume that every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures, and no morally wrong ones. This proposition is unproved, but nevertheless plausible. Its chief opponents seem to be those, such as Leibniz, who hold on
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a priori grounds that the actual world is maximal. Of course many theologians have believed that the actual world, containing as it does Adam’s sin and Christ’s redemptive activity, is much better than the world that would have been actual had Adam resisted temptation. And greater-goods theodicists often assert that we are better off with various moral evils and the greater goods for which they are logically necessary than we would have been with neither the moral evils nor the goods. But each of these statements is consistent with the assumption. Let us subdivide the discussion, considering in turn the situation relative to two alternative theses: (a) God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness jointly entail that if God can create a maximal world then he does. (b) Possibly, God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world, but he does not. Suppose that (a) is true. Now we are also assuming (i) Necessarily, every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures (including free choices to do what is morally obligatory), and no morally wrong ones. Now (a) and (i) jointly entail (ii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then the actual world contains creaturely choices and actions, and no creaturely choices and actions are morally wrong. Compatibilism tells us that Necessarily, if initial conditions C held millions of years ago and universal laws of nature L are true then person A performs action X and Initial conditions C held millions of years ago and universal laws of nature L are true are together consistent with Person A does X freely. After all, an action’s being determined is consistent with its being the case that the person would have acted differently if the person had adopted different aims or values, or had discussed the options further with friends, and so on. Indeed an action’s being determined is consistent with its being, in a sense, an ‘accident’ that you acted as you did: perhaps, for example, if you hadn’t glanced to your left at that precise moment then you would not have seen your friends, and so you would not have spoken to them. But whether or not God exists and is perfectly good is no accident. And (ii), in the present context, should be understood in such a way
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that it assures us that, necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and can create a maximal world then he systematically arranges initial conditions (including the laws of nature) with the overriding intention of strongly actualizing there not being anyone who performs a morally wrong action. Thus No person ever performs a morally wrong action differs vitally from No person ever reads aloud the second 1000 digits in the decimal expansion of pi. There are maximal worlds, let us suppose, in which both are true, and both are determined to be true. In many of those worlds, however, the latter is only accidentally true, and lots of people are free to read aloud the digits. Given (ii), in none of those worlds are people free to act wrongly, for, however complicated the causal chains immediately preceding a person’s decision, the non-occurrence of morally wrong choices and actions is entrenched in the universe at least as deeply as the laws of nature. We need not take a stance on whether in all worlds which God strongly actualizes everything that occurs is intended by him. It remains the case that even if God intends that some individual does not read aloud the second 1000 digits of pi, he might have lacked this intention, whereas according to (ii) he could not have lacked the intention that the individual not perform a morally wrong action. Even if it is determined that S not do A, a human being S may still be free to do A. Nevertheless if doing A is logically inconsistent with conjunction of the laws of nature and There is carbon or There are planets then S is not free to do A. And if doing A is logically inconsistent with the existence of God then S is not free to do A. Now S performs a morally wrong action is inconsistent with the conjunction of (ii) and God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and If God exists he can strongly actualize a maximal world, a conjunction which during this stage we are supposing to be true. The first three conjuncts, if true, are necessarily true.⁹ Therefore S performs a morally wrong action is logically inconsistent with God exists. Therefore S is not free to perform a morally wrong action. Some compatibilists will reject this reasoning, on the basis of one or another analysis of free action. For example, it might be insisted that an agent S is free to do A if and only if it is true that if S were to decide to do A then S would do A, and that S is free in deciding to do A if and only if S’s decision-making processes are not being manipulated by other people and S is not suffering from any of a number of specified mental ⁹ Admittedly, even if compatibilism is true, the maximal worlds might all contain undetermined events which God cannot actualize, but surely if this is so then it is necessarily so.
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deficiencies or afflictions, such as delusion. It will be said: Despite the cited differences between performing a morally wrong act and reciting the second 1000 digits of pi, the relevant conditions for freedom are fulfilled. But this needs to be shown in detail. Suppose that your performing a specific action were indeed inconsistent with the conjunction of the laws of nature and There is carbon. Then surely either it would be false that if you were to decide to perform the action then you would do so, or else your deciding to perform the action would be inconsistent with the conjunction of the laws of nature and There is carbon. In the former case my claim that you would not be free must be conceded. In the latter case the account of freedom in deciding comes under pressure. Although various specific versions of compatibilism employ analyses of free will which, if plausible, would undermine my claims about freedom to perform a morally wrong action, compatibilism itself, the generic position, does not. Hence it is consistent with compatibilism for me to say that the relevant difference between performing a morally wrong act and reading aloud the second 1000 digits of pi is that in the former case, but not the latter, the very structure of the creation rules out its being the case that both if S were to attempt to do A then S would do A, and S attempts to do A. Compatibilists ought to acknowledge that in such a situation S is not free to do A. Hence compatibilists should agree that from (ii) we can infer (iii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then no rational creature is ever free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. But (a) and (i) also jointly entail (iv) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then rational creatures are sometimes free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. From the conjunction of (iii) and (iv) we can infer (v) Necessarily, it is not the case that both God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and God can create a maximal world. Since we are assuming that God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, we can conclude that (vi) God cannot create a maximal world.
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Since either (a) or (b) is true, we can draw the following conclusion from Section 2.4: If compatibilism is true then either God cannot create a maximal world or he can do so but his perfect goodness does not entail that he does. In either case it is obvious that if compatibilism is true then we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists then the actual world is a maximal one. 2 . 5 W H AT G O D C A N D O : L I B E RTA R I A N A N A LY S E S Let us now suppose that libertarianism is true. Assume also, as in Section 2.4, that there are maximal worlds and necessarily every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures (including free choices to do what is morally obligatory), and no morally wrong ones. It follows immediately that God cannot strongly actualize any maximal world. The question remains, can he weakly actualize one, and thereby create it? Let us look at the issue first from the standpoint of Open Theism. If Open Theism is true, then although God can bring into existence a universe within which there are free human choices, he cannot create any world containing free human choices, and therefore he cannot create any maximal world. So if Open Theism is true, the following disjunction is true, in virtue of the truth of the first disjunct: either God cannot actualize a maximal world, or he can but his omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness do not entail that he does. We should now consider matters from a Molinist standpoint. If the views expressed in Section 1.5.2 are correct, Molinists should say that whether God can create a maximal world is a contingent matter, depending on what CCFs are true. As Molinists see it, there are two alternatives: firstly, that according to the true CCFs there is a possible set of circumstances which God can strongly actualize and given which free creatures would always choose and act rightly; and, secondly, that according to the true CCFs there is no such set. In the latter case the following disjunction is true, in virtue of the truth of the first disjunct: either God cannot create a maximal world, or he can but his perfect goodness does not entail that he does. Suppose, however, that the first alternative holds: that according to the true CCFs there is a possible set of circumstances in which free creatures would always choose and act rightly. Does it follow that God
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can, by strongly actualizing the specified circumstances, weakly actualize its being true that free creatures always choose and act rightly? As in Section 2.4, let us consider in turn the situation relative to the two rival theses (a) God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness entail that if God can create a maximal world then he does. (b) Possibly, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world, but he does not. Suppose that (a) is true. Then we encounter an argument which is in many ways strikingly similar to one employed in Section 2.4, in connection with compatibilism. We are assuming (i) Necessarily, every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures (including free choices to do what is morally obligatory), and no morally wrong ones. Now (a) and (i) jointly entail (ii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then the actual world contains creaturely choices and actions, and no creaturely choices and actions are morally wrong. And (ii), in the present context, assures us that necessarily if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and can create a maximal world then, even if God does not cause and determine any creaturely actions, he systematically arranges laws and initial conditions with the overriding intention that no person perform a morally wrong action. If so, then no one is free to act wrongly, for the non-occurrence of morally wrong choices and actions is entrenched in the universe at least as much as if it were a law of nature. The structure of creation is not up to rational creatures. It might be objected: People are free to act wrongly, since they have the power to act in such a way that, if they were so to act, then God could not create a maximal world. Look at it this way. Suppose that people are actually in circumstances C and act rightly; then according to Molinism the subjunctive conditional If people were in C then they would act rightly is true. Now if they had acted wrongly in C then a different subjunctive conditional would have been true, namely If people were in C then they would act wrongly. If God had seen that this conditional was
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true, then despite the truth of (a) and (i) he might well still have placed people in C, since it may well have been true that he could not create a maximal world.¹⁰ This objection fails. Whether or not God can create a maximal world depends, according to Molinism, on what CCFs are true. Nevertheless whether or not God can create a maximal world is not up to rational creatures. I have no decisive proof of this last claim, but it seems highly plausible for the following reasons. Suppose that it is up to you whether in your present actual circumstances you freely recite the second 1000 digits of pi, and so it is up to you whether the conditional If you were in these circumstances you would recite those digits is true. It does not follow that it is up to you whether there are any possible circumstances which God can strongly actualize and given which you would freely recite the second 1000 digits of pi. Indeed this surely is not up to you—that is, is not under your control. Your powers over your own motivational structure do not extend so far. (You can clench your teeth and think to yourself, ‘No matter what happens, I will not recite those digits!’ but doing so will not suffice.) Similarly, suppose that it was up to the rational creatures who in fact existed whether in the circumstances C1 in which God in fact placed them they always freely acted rightly. Nevertheless it was surely not up to them whether there were any possible circumstances which God could strongly actualize and which were such that in those circumstances some rational creatures or other always freely acted rightly; nor was it up to them whether, if there were such possible circumstances, some of them were included in maximal worlds. Hence even though, according to Molinism, it had become in circumstances C1 up to the rational creatures who in fact existed whether God in fact created a maximal world, it was not up to these or any other creatures whether God could have created a maximal world.¹¹ The foregoing claims are not certain; but they are credible. (It is not certain that there is at least one world at least as good as the actual world ¹⁰ This objection is intended to avoid the idea that people who acted wrongly in C would thereby have strongly or weakly actualized the truth of some corresponding CCF. I will not discuss whether the intention is fulfilled. ¹¹ Suppose that there is exactly one maximal world, and that it is up to the rational creatures who in fact exist whether in the circumstances in which God has in fact placed them they always freely act rightly. Then it is up to them whether God can actualize a maximal world. But, pace Leibniz, it is plausible to suppose that if there is any maximal world then there are many of them.
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and which contains unicorns; but I think that it is true, and it would require a strong and surprising argument to remove my belief.) We should conclude that the objection fails to undermine the claim that (ii) assures us that, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and can create a maximal world then the non-occurrence of morally wrong choices and actions is built into the structure of the creation at least as much as if it were a law of nature. Suppose that there is a prison governor who is able to predict accurately, five minutes in advance, when a prisoner will form the intention to try to leave. Given that the prisoners possess libertarian free will, her predictions are fallible; but they are very reliable. She normally leaves all the doors of the prison unlocked, but when she predicts an attempt to leave she initiates a process which, four minutes later, locks all the doors. Plainly, if the doors are unlocked at a given time, then there is a sense in which a prisoner can, during the next four minutes, leave the prison: if he tries to leave, then (we can suppose that) there is nothing the governor can do to stop him.¹² Nevertheless there is an obvious sense in which no prisoner is free to leave. After all, the prisoners have all been confined against their will for years. They all want to leave, but they are as securely held as if they were chained to the walls. The upshot: There are many very different ways in which you can be deprived of your freedom. From a libertarian viewpoint, one of these ways is by having it built into the nature of the system, unalterable by you, that you will never perform a certain type of act. This is our position if (a) and (i) are true. A prisoner might be able to defeat the governor’s predictive powers by resolving ‘I will set up an indeterministic process which has a probability of about 1/2 of issuing in a certain outcome O, and I will try to leave, 30 seconds after observing what happens, if and only if what happens is O.’ I stipulate that in the case in question no prisoner is clever enough to devise this expedient; but if there had been one, the governor ¹² If the governor never fails to predict, five minutes in advance, the formation of an intention to try to escape, then if a prisoner tries to escape at some specific time, the governor will have taken steps to stop him. What if the governor occasionally gets distracted? What if the door-locking mechanism occasionally malfunctions? The prisoners cannot properly be said to be free to escape: they have a low degree of freedom to leave. ( The concept degree of freedom is discussed in Section 7.6.2.) I said early in Section 2.4 that Sections 2.4 and 2.5 would employ the assumption that every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures, and no morally wrong ones. Let me now clarify this by saying that by ‘free’ I meant having a high degree of freedom.
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would have detected this fact, and taken additional steps to prevent this unusual prisoner from escaping. People are often unable to do things that other individuals can do, because of limitations in their knowledge and ingenuity. Hence from (ii) we can infer (iii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then no rational creature is ever free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. But (a) and (i) also jointly entail (iv) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then rational creatures are sometimes free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. From the conjunction of (iii) and (iv) we can infer (v) Necessarily, it is not the case that both God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and God can create a maximal world. Since we are assuming that God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, we can infer that (vi) God cannot create a maximal world. If you think that (a) is true, then you will draw the conclusion that even if the true CCFs tell us that there is a possible set of circumstances in which free creatures would always choose and act rightly, it does not follow that God can, by actualizing the specified circumstances, weakly actualize its being true that free creatures always choose and act rightly. We are not yet in a position to decide whether (a) is true. We know, however, that either (a) or (b) is true. So what we can say, on the basis of the discussion so far, is that if Molinism is true then, whether or not there are true CCFs which tell us that there is a possible set of circumstances in which free creatures would always choose and act rightly, either God cannot create a maximal world or he can but his omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness do not entail that he does so. Hence we conclude from this section that if either Open Theism or Molinism is true, then we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists then the actual world is a maximal one. This result complements that reached at the end of Section 2.4 concerning compatibilism.
3 Divine Choice from Infinite Hierarchies of Creatable Worlds 3.1 CONTEXT AND AIMS Sections 1.4–1.9 provided an introduction to three leading theories of the extent and method of divine providence: Theological Determinism, Molinism, and Open Theism. They explained that Theological Determinists and Molinists agree that God exists, and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. They also agree that God creates the actual world—that is, strongly or weakly actualizes every contingent state of affairs in it (with a few exceptions such as God’s existing, if this is contingent)—and that God knows infallibly everything that occurs. The third leading theory of divine providence, Open Theism, denies both tight providential control, and infallible and complete divine knowledge. Open Theism is a libertarian theory which denies that there are, or even could be, the true CCFs that seem required to reconcile libertarianism with tight providential control and infallible, complete divine knowledge. Sections 1.8 and 1.9 explained that there is a sense in which Open Theists can affirm God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Although God, the Best, and Evil is intended to be neutral between the three theories just sketched, this chapter will employ the temporary working assumption that either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, and that therefore God creates the actual world. While some people hold that God can create any world it is logically possible for him to create, others think that there are contingent limitations on what he can create. Molinists, for example, think that the range of creatable worlds depends partly on what CCFs are true. Section 1.7 discussed how we should understand the expression ‘can create’.
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The following stipulative definitions will prove useful: Two or more worlds are commensurable with each other if and only if each is either better than, inferior to, or ranked equally with, the other. A creatable hierarchy is a set S of worlds such that each member of S is commensurable with each other member and God can create any member of S, and there is no world outside S which is both commensurable with each member of S and which God can create. A world W is a prime member of a creatable hierarchy H if and only if W is a member of H and there is no better member. A world is prime if and only if it is a prime member of some creatable hierarchy. In investigating what kind of world God will create if he creates some world or other, there are three (epistemic) possibilities to consider: (1) there are one or more creatable hierarchies and none of them has a prime member; (2) there are one or more creatable hierarchies and each of them has at least one prime member; (3) there are at least two creatable hierarchies and at least one of them has prime members while at least one does not. The task of this chapter is to consider the first of these three alternatives. It argues against what I will call the Entailment Thesis, advanced by William L. Rowe in his recent book Can God Be Free? The proposition For every creatable world there is another one that is better than it entails the proposition There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being.¹
Rowe should be interpreted as using the word ‘create’ as God, the Best, and Evil does, in such a way that God creates a world if and only if he strongly or weakly actualizes (nearly) every contingent state of affairs in it. Throughout his book Rowe simply ignores the view, endorsed by Open Theists, that God’s actions sometimes fail to achieve God’s aims. Accordingly, the Entailment Thesis is to be taken as equivalent to: ¹ William L. Rowe, Can God Be Free? (Oxford University Press, 2004), 92. Rowe uses ‘world’ to mean ‘possible world’, and on pp. 40–1 he proposes that a world be thought of not as a whole consisting of created objects such as trees, rivers, and minds, but instead as ‘a maximal state of affairs W such that for any state of affairs either it or its negation is included in W’. I concur.
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The proposition There are no prime worlds entails the proposition There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being. There have been various other philosophers writing in the last fifteen or twenty years along more or less similar lines to Rowe, but Rowe’s arguments for the Entailment Thesis are at least as strong as anyone else’s, so I will discuss his views at length, and attend to the best of the other presentations in Section 3.6.
3 . 2 ROW E ’ S P O S I T I V E A RG U M E N TS F O R T H E E N TA I L M E N T T H E S I S Rowe’s main argument is that the thesis follows from the following proposition, ‘Principle B’, which he declares to be a necessary truth: If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world it could create, then it would be possible for there to be a being morally better than it.² Obviously Principle B entails the Entailment Thesis only if the proposition If an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being exists then this being creates some world is necessarily true. So Rowe is committed to the necessary truth of this proposition.³ Open Theists will point out that in neglecting their position without any argument Rowe leaves his case for the entailment principle seriously incomplete. Rowe needs to rule out the possibility that there are worlds better than any creatable worlds, and that God can and should try to foster the becoming actual of one of these worlds. Rowe acknowledges that ‘we are far from proving’ Principle B,⁴ but offers two arguments in prima facie support of it. Here is the first: For if an omniscient being creates a world when it could have created a better world, then that being has done something less good than it could do (create a better world). But any being that knowingly does something (all things considered) less good than it could do falls short of being the best possible being.⁵ ² ibid. 97. ³ Rowe says: ‘Given that it is better to create a world than not to create at all, God is doing the right thing in choosing to create a world rather than not to create at all’ (p. 111). ⁴ Ibid. 121. ⁵ Ibid. 89, 120f.
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Consider the proposition that even if for every creatable world there is one that surpasses it in goodness, an omnipotent, omniscient agent’s failure to create an unsurpassed creatable world constitutes a fault that shows that the agent himself is not unsurpassably good. Rowe is not asserting this proposition. Instead, he is saying that an omniscient agent’s creating a world when there is a better one that it could create shows that the agent is not unsurpassably good.⁶ There is an important ambiguity in Rowe’s expression ‘done something less good than it could do’. Rowe’s first premiss in the foregoing argument can be understood in either of the following ways: (1a) If an omniscient being creates a world when it could have created a better world, then that being has thereby performed an action which is less good—that is, less morally good, less rational, or less a manifestation of excellence in acting—than an alternative action that the being could have performed. (1b) If an omniscient being creates a world when it could have created a better world, then that being has thereby performed an action whose total causal consequences are less good than those of some alternative action that the being could have performed. (1b) is plausible; but to just about everyone except maximizing actconsequentialists (1a) will surely seem no less doubtful than Principle B itself, and so cannot contribute to a strong argument for the principle. For example, deontologists and rule-consequentialists will be able to envisage cases in which one imperfect but omniscient being is to choose which of two worlds another imperfect being is to create, and the first being has a moral duty to choose the inferior world rather than the better one.⁷ Rowe’s second premiss can be understood in either of the following ways: (2a) Any being that knowingly performs an action which is less good— that is, less morally good, less rational, or less a manifestation of ⁶ William L. Rowe, 104 ff. ⁷ In Section 1.7 I said that God creates a world if and only if he strongly or weakly actualizes it; the terms ‘strongly actualize’ and ‘weakly actualize’ had been defined in Sections 1.4.1 and 1.5.1 respectively. This explanation of ‘create a world’ can easily be given a natural extension to cover a situation in which there are two imperfect beings and one of them is the creator.
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excellence in acting—than an alternative action that the being could perform falls short of being the best possible being. (2b) Any being that knowingly performs an action whose total causal consequences are less good than those of some alternative action that the being could perform falls short of being the best possible being. Here (2a) is plausible.⁸ But unless we are already maximizing actconsequentialists why should we regard (2b) as more secure than Principle B itself, and so a good starting point for a persuasive argument for Principle B? As for maximizing act-consequentialism, Section 3.5 will explain why it is far from clear that this doctrine can be used as a premiss supporting (2b)—or (3a) or (3b), stated below—and thereby supporting Principle B. To sum up: (1b) and (2a) look initially plausible, but they do not jointly entail Principle B. It is plain that if we interpret Rowe’s argument in such a way that it is free from equivocation with respect to the expression ‘do something less good than one could do’, and its premisses jointly entail Principle B, then either (1a) or (2b) requires a great deal to be said in its favour before most philosophers will be impressed by Rowe’s argument for Principle B, and by the argument based on Principle B for the Entailment Thesis. Rowe’s discussion of the recent literature contains a second positive argument in direct support of the Entailment Thesis; it also constitutes an argument for Principle B. Here is the major premiss: (3a) When the agent’s motive in acting is to bring about a good state of affairs, the goodness of an action—measured in terms of the quality of its result—is expressive of the agent’s goodness.⁹ The context makes it clear that the goodness of an action and of an agent are to be understood as their moral goodness. But, so understood, the principle is obviously false. An agent may be motivated by a desire to bring about a good state of affairs, and this desire may be fulfilled, ⁸ Construed uncharitably (2a) implies that if there is a best possible being then each of his actions—including trivial ones like brushing one’s teeth (or whatever is the equivalent for such an exalted being)—manifests excellence in acting as much as each other action. I assume that a more charitable interpretation can be devised. Similarly with respect to (2b). ⁹ Ibid. 100. I am not quoting Rowe; rather, the proposition sums up what he says over several sentences.
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but the moral goodness of the action and of the agent may diverge far from the quality of the result. For example, the quality of the result can vary with luck and with the interference of other people, without there being any variation of the moral goodness of either the action or the agent. Perhaps Rowe overlooks the foregoing points because he is thinking of an omnipotent and omniscient creator, who does not find the outcomes of his providential activity affected by luck or by the interference of other people. But it is hard to see how Rowe can obtain a good argument for the entailment thesis by somehow restating (3a) so as to get a premiss with a more restricted scope. Consider, for instance: (3b) If an omnipotent and omniscient agent’s motive in creating a world is to bring about a good state of affairs, then the degree of goodness of the world measures the degree to which the agent is morally good. Suppose that there exists a being M who is omnipotent, omniscient, and moderately good, and consider two worlds V and W such that W is better than V but if M were to create W then M would violate an important moral duty recognized by deontologists and rule-utilitarians, while if M were to create V then M would not violate any moral duty. It is true that even deontologists and rule-utilitarians admit that at least some moral duties are defeasible by considerations of utility. But why should they think that, given that M, V, and W are as described, they should conclude—as (3b) requires them to conclude—that M’s creating W would indicate M’s possession of a higher degree of moral goodness than would be indicated by M’s creating V? Other things being equal, in intentionally bringing about the better state of affairs one acts in the better way, all-things-considered. Section 3.3 will argue that this truth does not provide the basis for a good argument for the Entailment Thesis. 3 . 3 A N A RG U M E N T I N FAVO U R O F S AT I S F I C I N G If there are no prime worlds, and an omniscient being creates a world, then he creates a world when he could have created a better one. Rowe thinks that in this case the omniscient being performs an action which is less good than a relevant alternative action that he can perform, and therefore falls short of being the best possible being.
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I deny Rowe’s claim. It is logically necessary that an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being cannot act in a morally better way, or in a way which is better all-things-considered, or more rationally, than he in fact acts. If there are no prime worlds, then what follows is that in every creatable hierarchy there are infinitely many pairs of worlds V and W such that both W is better than V and an omnipotent and omniscient being can create W, but his creating W need not be a morally better action, or better all-things-considered, or more rational, than his creating V. Other things being equal, in intentionally bringing about the better state of affairs one acts in the better way, all-things-considered. Nevertheless there are certain situations in which the inference from The agent could have selected a better world to be created to The agent could have acted in a better way is defeated.¹⁰ One defeater consists of the conjunction of the following three conditions: (1) For every world that could have been selected there is a better one that could have been selected. (2) The world that was in fact selected is good enough relative to the foregoing circumstances. (3) Failure to select any world would have led to an outcome that was far inferior to each of the worlds which is good enough. Alongside issues concerning God’s choices if there are no prime worlds, there is a puzzle concerning rational, self-interested choice. Suppose that a superior being offers to prolong your life for a finite number of good days, with the number of days to be chosen by you, without restriction on how many days you may pick. Rational decision theory can reasonably be required to advise you about what you should do in the foregoing situation. It is tempting to argue: For any number of days, N, that you might obtain, you would be better off if you obtained N + 1 instead.¹¹ So for any N you have better reason to select N + 1 instead. So you would be ¹⁰ In addition to the defeater proposed in the next sentence of the main text, others are discussed in Chapter 4: for instance, the creator may have agent-relative reasons, deriving from his own contingent desires and personality traits, for selecting the world that is inferior, as judged from an agent-neutral standpoint. ¹¹ You may be eighty years old at the time you receive the offer, and you may have decided that your aims in life are largely complete, and that death would not be unwelcome. But the superior being’s offer surely calls for reconsideration of this attitude, in the light of new opportunities which have unexpectedly been opened up. What is at
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acting more rationally if you selected N + 1 than if you selected N. So you should not select N. This conclusion, however, is inconsistent with the obvious truth that you should select some number, rather than walk away from the offer. You should satisfice—that is, choose a number that will secure an outcome which is good enough.¹² Indeed, you are rationally required to do so. Satisficing will lead to a better outcome for you than failing to satisfice. Nevertheless satisficing involves choosing an outcome despite the fact that there is an alternative available outcome given which you would be better off. It might be objected: When a policy is rationally required, and there are various rationally permissible ways of implementing it, some of these ways can be more rational than others. Even though it is more rational to satisfice than to fail to satisfice, and therefore there are some numbers that it is rationally permissible for you to choose, for each such number N it remains more rational for you to satisfice by choosing N + 1 than to satisfice by choosing N. Decision theory provides demands (including prohibitions), recommendations, and assessments (including comparisons) of rationality. These must fit together harmoniously. Specifically, our decision theory (C1) should not both recommend, of each of several candidate actions, that it be not performed, and also recommend that there be one of these actions which is performed; and (C2) should recommend that an action be not performed if the theory identifies some rival action (or refraining from action) as more rational; and (C3) should recommend (and, indeed, demand) that an action be performed if the theory identifies the action as rationally required. The objectors violate at least one of these conditions of theoretical coherence. Their theory evidently identifies, for each available choice of the number of days, at least one rival choice as more rational. According to condition (C2), their theory should therefore recommend, for each available choice of number, that you not make it. But their theory admits that satisficing—making one of the available choices—is stake is not merely more days, but new goods, currently only partially understood, whose attainment more days would make possible. ¹² ‘Satisfice’ is a technical term from decision theory and economics.
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rationally required, and so according to (C3) it should recommend that you make one of them. But these two recommendations jointly violate (C1). You are rationally required to select some finite number of days. Our decision theory should affirm this. It follows, via (C3), that our decision theory should recommend that you select some finite number of days. No doubt it will add some supplementary recommendations—for example, that the number selected should be greater than any number of days you have a reasonable expectation of living even if you decline the superior being’s offer. Let us call any number that fulfils this and similar clauses ‘admissible’. According to (C1), if our theory should recommend that you select some admissible number of days, then it should not recommend of each admissible number that you not select that number; in which case, we can infer, via (C2), that our theory should not, for every admissible number, identify at least one other number (for example, the number’s successor) as one which it would have been more rational to select. We should conclude that there is at least one admissible number N such that N it is not more rational to select N + 1 instead, even though you will be better off if you select N + 1 than if you select N. Notice that I stipulated that you will be better off if you select N + 1 days than if you select N. I was able to do so because what did the work in the story employing the word ‘you’ is the underlying thesis that it is logically possible that there be some good and some agent such that marginal value of the good for the agent is always positive. It might be claimed that necessarily beyond some point the value of, or the value brought by, an extra day of life would always be zero or negative. Rather than get into a debate on this issue, important as it is elsewhere in the philosophy of religion, I would simply change the example. For instance, suppose that ‘you’ attach great value to the number of your descendants. What the superior being offers is to ensure that you have whatever finite number of descendants you choose, and to ensure that each descendant has a good life. The foregoing problem has an ethical variant. Suppose that you are a child’s guardian, and have a moral obligation to act in that child’s interests. A superior being offers to prolong the child’s life for a finite number of good days, with the number of days to be chosen by you. What should you do? An argument similar to the one above leads to the conclusion that, morally speaking, you should satisfice for the sake of the child.
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We should not respond to the problem of how an omnipotent and omniscient being should choose when there are no prime worlds by concluding that There are no prime worlds entails There is no omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being. Drawing that conclusion would provide no way out of the underlying ethical problem, which is raised equally by agents who are limited in knowledge and power, and who may or may not be morally perfect, but are faced with an infinite hierarchy of better and better states of affairs that they can decide will be brought about. What moral demands and recommendations does our well-developed moral theory issue to such agents? What should it say about when their selecting a better state of affairs would be acting in a morally better way than their selecting a less good state of affairs? It should recommend that they satisfice—that is, that they select some good state of affairs even though they could select a better one. Therefore it should not also recommend, of each available good state of affairs, that they not select that one. Therefore it should not declare that, whichever state of affairs they select, there is at least one alternative member of the hierarchy such that selecting it would be a morally better action. I claimed earlier that when an agent is choosing a world to be created from an infinite hierarchy of better and better available worlds, the inference to the conclusion that whatever he does he could have acted in a better way is defeated. An objection was stated: that however good the world chosen, the agent would always have chosen better by choosing a better candidate. We are now in a position to identify where the objection goes wrong. We should resist the inference from If the agent had chosen W instead of V then he would have chosen a better world to If the agent had chosen W instead of V then he would have chosen better.¹³ 3 . 4 WO R L D S T H AT A R E G O O D E N O U G H In Can God Be Free? Rowe responds to an earlier version of the line of reasoning advanced in Section 3.3.¹⁴ He focuses on my original ¹³ The arguments in this section yield a response to two points made by Klaas J. Kraay (‘William Rowe’s A Priori Argument for Atheism’, Faith and Philosophy, 22 (2005), 211–34) about shortfalls in some arguments in my paper ‘God and the Best’ (Faith and Philosophy, 13 (1996), 311–28). Incidentally, I accept Kraay’s premiss P1, but reject the proposition obtained from P1 by omitting the words ceteris paribus; it is this latter proposition, rather than P1, whose conjunction with Kraay’s (7) entails his (8). ¹⁴ The earlier version was contained in ‘God and the Best’. Rowe’s discussion of my article is on pp.121–7 of his book.
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claim, modified above, that in the scenario in which there are no prime worlds the conclusion that God could have acted in a morally better way is defeated by the fact that some worlds are good enough. He applies pressure to the idea that some worlds are good enough.¹⁵ Rowe observes that in my view whether or not a particular world is good enough for God to create is not an intrinsic feature of the world, but is relative to the range of options God faces. He complains that I seem, wrongly, to think that it is obvious just what worlds are acceptable for actualization, relative to the choice situation in which for every world that could have been selected there is a better one. So I should now say more about this non-obvious matter. That there is more that can be said is plain from the longevity example. Plainly if you were to choose the number 1 you would be choosing irrationally. You should satisfice by picking a number which is high enough. But when is a number high enough, relative to this choice situation? There must be some guidelines for choosers, even if they are very sketchy, since in their absence wise choice would be impossible in the situation supposed—a consequence which our decision theory must avoid. What counts as a world which is good enough, relative to the task of a person who is to decide which world will be created out of an infinite range of better and better worlds? As I have already pointed out, we need not assume that the chooser is perfectly good. The issue concerns what our moral theory tells him about which of the available worlds are such that he would be choosing in a morally better way if he selected one of the others, and which of the available worlds are not. If there are worlds in the latter group, then they are the ones that are said, in the present context, to be good enough. What answer our moral theory gives will depend on its assumptions about value. Suppose, for instance, that it identifies the basic value states in any world as all consisting in a person’s feelings of pleasure or displeasure during a short unit interval of time, measures their value simply by the intensity of the feelings, and declares that the value of a world is the sum of the values of the states. In that case there seems to be no principled way of identifying, amongst the worlds that have positive net value, some that are good enough. But a theory of the foregoing kind is very implausible. ¹⁵ Rowe, Can God Be Free?, pp.124–6.
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So suppose instead that our moral theory embodies the assumption that worlds are to be ranked chiefly by the extent to which they include many large communities of people characterized by justice, a rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose lives embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together, and do not also include communities which are seriously malfunctioning. A theory of this kind is likely to support the judgement that there are worlds such that, whether or not there are even better worlds, they are not flawed, deficient, or disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of worlds. (From now on, for brevity’s sake, I’ll just say ‘(non-) disappointing’; the other adjectives should be regarded as tacitly present.) Such judgements fit in with a much wider array of judgements of quality—for example, we can regard a meal cooked by a friend as very good, without enquiring into what a five-star restaurant chef would have succeeded in doing with similar raw meat and vegetables; we can rate the first performance of a new piano sonata as wonderful, without listening to other performances of it by pianists of higher repute. At this point a complication needs to be recognized and dealt with. Many theists hold that if God had not brought anything into existence at all, then the actual world, containing only necessary states of affairs and contingent ones involving him, would have been good enough. Presumably then they will say that whatever creative actions God took, if they did not involve bringing about bad states of affairs, then the resulting world would be good enough—for example, God might have merely brought into existence, ex nihilo, a few stars, which shone until they burned out. Rowe would reject these claims. In order to circumvent this dispute I propose, for the sake of argument, to suppose that if God exists and there are no prime worlds then he will create some world such that it contains states of affairs involving created entities, these states of affairs (considered in abstraction from their relations to God) are collectively very good, and the whole consisting of these states of affairs is not disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. Then I will adopt a convention, for the rest of this chapter, licensing talk of a world as good enough when what is under discussion is whether it contains states of affairs which involve created entities and which fulfill the three conditions stated in the preceding sentence.¹⁶ ¹⁶ Cf. Section 2.1.3, n. 5
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How good does a world have to be to be good enough, relative to the choice situation specified? Here is a sufficient condition: when an agent is selecting a world to be created from an infinite hierarchy of better and better candidates, a world is good enough if it is non-disappointing in the light of the values that underlie the ranking of worlds, and moreover is abundantly better than those worlds that only just barely escape the accusation that they are disappointing.¹⁷ Can God Be Free? yields grounds for thinking that Rowe would object to the last few paragraphs, along the following lines.¹⁸ Let us compare two hypothetical agents Alice and Beryl, each of whom, in different possible worlds, is faced with the task of selecting a world to be created from an infinite hierarchy of better and better candidates, and each of whom adopts the following policy: I will satisfice, and moreover I will choose in a great-hearted manner, and so select a world which is abundantly better than any world which is just barely non-disappointing. The difference between Beryl and Alice is that Beryl rules out of further consideration worlds that Alice is quite prepared to regard as living options, because Beryl has a much higher standard than Alice ¹⁷ At p.125 Rowe considers a being who creates a world W100 from an infinite series of increasingly better worlds. Such a being, Rowe says, could instead have created a world a billion times better than W100. Surely there might be a being whose goodness simply would not let him create W100 when there was this superior alternative option. If so, then the being who creates W100 is not absolutely perfect. The last few paragraphs form the basis for a reply to Rowe. Furthermore, it is at best very risky to assume that if a creator faces an infinite hierarchy of better and better creatable worlds then in selecting one of them he declines worlds a billion times better than the one he chooses. If there is an infinite hierarchy of better and better worlds, it may nevertheless be that these worlds cannot sensibly be regarded as themselves possessing quantitative values, even fuzzy ones, and if the worlds do possess quantitative values, these values may converge on some finite limit. (Rowe ignores these epistemic possibilities when he says on his p. 135: ‘In the [infinite] series of increasingly better worlds . . . each world logically could be better than a world below it by the same degree or amount’.) In the former case, no world will be a billion times better than any other; in the latter case, if the value of the selected world is close to the limit then it may be that no world is a billion times better than it. (Of course even if most or all worlds lack quantitative values some worlds may be a billion places above V in the ranking, and it might be appropriate to say that these worlds are very much better than V.) ¹⁸ Cf. Rowe’s response to Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder’s views on his pp.92–8, and his principle III∗ and assumption A3, which he states on his pp. 115 and 119 respectively and employs in his discussion of W. J. Wainwright’s paper ‘Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe and the Necessity of Creation’. (Rowe’s and Wainwright’s pieces are both to be found in Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), Faith, Freedom and Rationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).)
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of what is required by great-heartedness, and of what should count as being abundantly better than the minimally and near minimally non-disappointing. Surely, the objector declares in support of Rowe, our moral theory should deliver the verdict that in virtue of Beryl’s higher standards and the accompanying choice-disposition Beryl has a better moral character than Alice; and furthermore, given that Alice’s choice of a world is classified as morally inferior by what we ourselves describe as the higher moral standards of Beryl, we should regard Alice’s choice of a world as morally inferior to various alternative choices. The example can be reiterated, since for every possible agent there will be another who has much higher standards pertaining to great-heartedness, and to what should count as being abundantly better than barely non-disappointing. Hence for every possible agent faced with the task of selecting a world to be created from an infinite hierarchy of better and better candidates, there is another possible agent who faced with a similar task makes a morally better choice and who has a better moral character. Hence the account given in Section 3.3 is mistaken. Here is some parallel reasoning concerning self-interested choice in the longevity example. Suppose that you have chosen a number of days. Someone now alleges that your standards of what counts as a good enough life, and the dispositions which have led you to hold those standards, have led to a less rational choice of a number of days than alternative standards and dispositions that you might have possessed, and reflect a less rational practical intellect. Indeed, it is alleged, not only has this in fact happened; it had to happen, because whatever specific standards you might have held, there would have been others which it would have been more rational to hold. Hence, even if relative to those standards you actually hold your choice of number of days was at least as rational as any other, your choice was not, all-thing-considered, as rational as a choice of this or that larger number would have been. It is plain that there is an error somewhere here. As Section 3.3 argued, the view that for every number there is another number which it is more rational for you to choose should be recognized (in the light of plausible general principles of decision theory) to be inconsistent with the manifest truth that, having received the superior being’s offer, practical reason requires you to choose some number. Hence the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, and so the reasoning that led up to it, should be rejected,
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But where, specifically, does the reasoning go wrong? Well, for one thing, it is far from clear that there is indeed an infinite series of standards of a good enough life that it is more and more rational for you to hold, as the objector in the longevity example assumes. (The mere fact that one person chooses a higher number than another does not show that they have different standards—that is, different underlying values and criteria for applying those values.) Similarly, in the case of choice between worlds it is far from clear that there is an infinite series of standards of a minimally good enough world that are not only higher and higher in the sense of more and more demanding but are also such that, other things being equal, a person who holds a higher standard has a morally better character than a person who adopts a lower standard. Instead of developing this point further, let us move straight on to the question: Relative to the premiss that there is indeed such an infinite series of standards, what recommendations do our decision theory and value theory jointly deliver about which standards you should hold? They should at least recommend that choosers adopt (or reaffirm) some standards of what counts as a non-disappointing life and of what counts as a good enough world, and cultivate some relevant dispositions, rather than, say, choosing at random or in accordance with whatever dispositions the choosers happen to find themselves with. If the objectors were to suggest the contrary, then they would not be entitled also to make their various moral claims about Alice, Beryl, and other agents. (C1) and (C2), in Section 3.3, make it plain that our decision theory and value theory should not recommend of each available standard that you not hold it, and of each available disposition that you not cultivate it. Hence, given they should not, for every available standard say that there is at least one alternative which it would be more rational, or better-all-things-considered, to hold. I can now safely reaffirm my own conclusions about satisficing by divine and non-divine choosers. 3 . 5 F I N I T E A N D I N F I N I T E C R E ATA B L E H I E R A RC H I E S : I M P L I C AT I O N S F O R ROW E Although my main criticisms of the Entailment Thesis are now complete, it is worth drawing attention to one other consideration that Rowe should find awkward. It becomes apparent in the context of the supposition, which Rowe would find it hard to rule out, that God is
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faced with some creatable hierarchies containing prime members, and some creatable hierarchies without them. Let V be a prime member of some creatable hierarchy, and let W be a good member of some hierarchy that lacks prime worlds. Surely, other things being equal, God will be indifferent between creating V and creating W. After all, V is incommensurable with W. It might be objected that if God creates W then he acts in such a way that he has better reason for creating some other world instead, whereas if he creates V then this is not the case. Now it is true that in general if some world W∗ is better than W then this constitutes a reason for actualizing W∗ instead of W. But in the context of God’s specific overall choice situation, W ∗ is better than W does not entail God has better reasons, all-things-considered, for actualizing W ∗ : that the former does not entail the latter follows from the truth, for which Section 3.3 argued, that in this context W ∗ is better than W does not entail It would be more rational, all-things-considered, to create W. Hence the first premiss of the objection is erroneous. God should indeed be indifferent between actualizing V and actualizing W. An especially interesting point emerges from the previous paragraph. Rowe is committed to saying that God’s being morally perfect is compatible with God’s creating V but is incompatible with God’s creating W. Hence Rowe is committed to the view that God should rank creating V higher amongst his options than creating W, even though V and W themselves are incommensurable in value. Plainly, this view is incompatible with maximizing act-consequentialism. Hence given the assumption that some creatable hierarchies contain prime members and some do not, Rowe cannot invoke the truth of maximizing act-consequentialism in any argument he might appeal to in direct support of Principle B, or in support of (2b) or (3a).¹⁹ Moreover the view that an agent may rank one candidate action higher than another even though their respective total causal consequences are incommensurable is incompatible with both Rowe’s (3a), which ¹⁹ I do not assert that Principle B entails act-consequentialism. Nor do I assert that Rowe himself is a maximizing act-consequentialist. After all, he recognizes the existence of supererogatory acts (Can God be Free?, p. 82). Of course it might be argued that my longevity example provides a strong objection to all varieties of consequentialism that rank one action as better than another if and only if its causal consequences are better overall. I need not press this suggestion here, but rest with the point that Rowe will have to work hard before he is in a position to use any such variety of consequentialism to lend plausibility to Principle B.
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constitutes the major premiss of Rowe’s second argument in direct support of the entailment thesis, and also Principle B. It is hard to see how Rowe can rule out its being true that some creatable hierarchies contain prime members and some do not.
3 . 6 OT H E R R E C E N T S U P P O RT E R S O F T H E E N TA I L M E N T T H E S I S
3.6.1 Erik Van Wielenberg Conclusions similar to Rowe’s, supported by fairly similar reasoning, have been advanced in several other recent publications.²⁰ Amongst the best of these presentations is Erik Van Wielenberg’s. I will not summarize the whole of his paper, but will confine myself to his case for his crucial premiss (P ), which says: (P ) Necessarily, if x is essentially omnipotent and omniscient and creates some world or other, and x is a morally unsurpassable agent in every world in which he exists, then x creates some world W such that W is not surpassable for x.²¹ He points out that (P ) and the proposition For each world which God can create there is a better world he can create jointly entail There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, morally unsurpassable being.²² Since (P ) is necessarily true if it is true at all, a successful argument in favour of (P ) will establish that For each world which God can create there is a better world he can create entails There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, morally unsurpassable being, which is very close in content to Rowe’s Entailment Principle. Van Wielenberg offers us two arguments for (P ). To facilitate evaluation of these arguments I should introduce two items of his technical terminology. A non-Hurka virtue is (in contrast to typical ²⁰ For example, Steven Grover, ‘Why Only the Best Is Good Enough’, Analysis, 48 (1988), 224; Jeff Jordan, ‘The Problem of Divine Exclusivity’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 33 (1993), 92f; Steven Grover, ‘Rival Creator Arguments and the Best of All Possible Worlds’, Sophia, 43/1 (2004), 101–14; and Erik Van Wielenberg, ‘A Morally Unsurpassable God Must Create the Best’, Religious Studies, 40 (2004), 43–62. ²¹ Van Wielenberg, ‘God Must Create the Best’, p. 44. The version of (P) I have given is a close paraphrase of Van Wielenberg’s own words. ²² Ibid. 58.
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virtues) one which does not involve a disposition to pursue intrinsic value states in proportion to their degree of intrinsic value. Agent x faces a Hurka-conflict in situation S if and only if there is some non-Hurka virtue V such that if x acts in accordance with V in S, then x pursues intrinsically valuable states less proportionally than x could otherwise. Both arguments for (P ) share the following premiss: x is a morally unsurpassable agent in world W if and only if it is not the case that there is some world W∗ and some agent y such that y in W∗ is more disposed to pursue intrinsically valuable states proportionally when not facing a Hurka-conflict than x is in W.²³ I can explain why Van Wielenberg’s first argument for (P ) should be rejected by stating the following key piece of reasoning: Consider worlds W and W∗ such that in W there exists an essentially omnipotent and omniscient being A who chooses to create W, and in world W∗ there exists a similar being B who chooses to create W∗ , where W is better than V. Suppose that A and B are choosing from amongst the very same worlds as each other. It follows that B is (in W∗ ) more disposed to pursue intrinsically valuable states proportionally than is A (in W).²⁴ Therefore, unless either A or B faces a Hurka-conflict, A is not a morally unsurpassable agent in every world in which A exists.²⁵ The supposition that A and B are choosing from amongst the very same worlds as each other is, however, inadmissible. It is logically possible for A to create a specific world only if it contains A’s creating it, while it is logically possible for B to create a specific world only if it contains B’s creating it. Given that there is no world which contains Both A and B’s creating it, it follows that A cannot create any worlds which B can create, and vice versa.²⁶ I will not pause to consider whether Van Wielenberg’s argument can be repaired, since it is likely that the ²³ van Wielenberg, 48; y can, but need not, be identical with x. ²⁴ If V and W do not have quantitative values, then ‘proportionally’ will not have its usual mathematical meaning. Presumably Van Wielenberg would say that in such cases agents can be said to choose proportionally if and only if given a choice between two outcomes one of which is better than the other, they always choose the better outcome. ²⁵ This is a close paraphrase of sentences occurring on Van Wielenberg’s pp. 48–9. ²⁶ In Section 3.4 I considered two hypothetical agents Alice and Beryl each of whom, in different possible worlds, is faced with the task of selecting a world to be created from an infinite hierarchy of better and better candidates. Their task description did not imply that any of the worlds constituting options for Alice were options for Beryl, or vice versa.
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criticisms I will make of Van Wielenberg’s second argument for (P ) would apply also to any repaired version of the first argument. The second argument for (P ) proceeds as follows: Consider a single candidate creator A, who is essentially omnipotent and omniscient. Suppose that A selects for creation some world W such that W is surpassable for A. This implies that there is a better world W∗ which A can create and in which A is otherwise disposed exactly as he is in W. In W∗ A creates W∗ . It follows that A is more disposed to pursue intrinsically valuable states proportionally in W∗ than A is in W. Hence unless A faces a Hurka-conflict in selecting which world to create, A is not a morally unsurpassable agent in W. Now necessarily, if x is an essentially omnipotent and omniscient creator, and is a morally unsurpassable agent in every world in which x exists, then x does not face a Hurka-conflict in deciding which world to create. Therefore A is not a morally unsurpassable agent in W.²⁷ In my view the foregoing reasoning fails because it does not include qualifications required to accommodate the epistemic possibility that there is an infinite hierarchy of better and better worlds available for choice. Van Wielenberg, however, accepts the unqualified reasoning and says that if whichever world A chooses there will be some better world A could have chosen, then whichever world A chooses A could have been more disposed to pursue intrinsic value states proportionally than A is, and is therefore not morally unsurpassable. For reasons explained in Sections 3.3 and 3.4, our moral theory should declare that if there is an infinite hierarchy of better and better worlds available for choice, then choosers such as Van Wielenberg’s A should satisfice. It should say that choosers should hold some standards of what counts as a good enough world, and cultivate some relevant choicedispositions, rather than, say, choosing at random or in accordance with whatever dispositions the choosers happen to find themselves with. Therefore our moral theory should not recommend of each available standard that the chooser not hold it, and of each available choicedisposition that the chooser not cultivate it. Hence it should not say, for every available choice-disposition, that it is morally inferior to some other. ²⁷ This is a close paraphrase of sentences occurring on Van Wielenberg’s p.49.
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3.6.2 J. H. Sobel The arguments presented in Section 3.3 suffice to dispose of J. H. Sobel’s recent treatment of the Entailment Thesis.²⁸ In relation specifically to the argument on his p. 473, two comments are worth explicitly making. The first concerns Sobel’s premiss (xiii): For any choosing beings X and Y, if S , the set of exactly the items X can choose, is a subset of S, the set of exactly the items Y can choose, and X and Y agree in their preferences for items in S , then if the object of a rational choice by Y from S is in S , it is identical with the object of rational choice by X in S . This principle is correct if rational choice means rationally required choice, but not if it means rationally permitted choice or rationally non-inferior choice.²⁹ In supposing that the particular world which happens to be the actual world was the object of a rational choice by God, Sobel must surely have the latter in mind—for he did not even attempt to exclude there being worlds that tied with this world. Here is a counter-example to Sobel’s premiss (xiii), so understood. X and Y are altruists, choosing on behalf of some child of whom they are joint guardians. A superior being has offered to prolong the child’s life by a finite number of good days, with the number of days to be chosen by X and Y. Y may choose any natural number, while X may choose only even numbers. They are to deliberate separately, and give their choices separately to the being, who will average the numbers chosen, rounding upwards, if necessary, to the nearest whole number. Here the set of items that X can choose is a subset of items that Y can choose, and X and Y rank the numbers in the same order of preference. Let us suppose that X chooses an even number, as required, and that Y also happens to choose an even number, but a different one. Section 3.3 argued, in effect, that X and Y are both acting in a rationally permissible and non-inferior manner if they satisfice. It is not at all surprising, or an indication of some flaw in their ways of choosing, that X and Y should choose different even numbers. Hence we should reject (xiii). ²⁸ J. H. Sobel, Logic and Theism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 470–3. ²⁹ My agreement even under the first interpretation is subject to the remedying of an elementary defect. X and Y may surely choose different items that are ranked equally or are members of different, incommensurable hierarchies of options. Hence the antecedent of (xiii) should include the clause If for each pair of items
of objects of rational choice, either a is preferred to b or b is preferred to a . . .
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Of course the foregoing is not a knock-down argument against Sobel. He might reply: ‘Your argument in favour of satisficing was based on your three conditions (C1), (C2), (C3). I am a lot more confident that my premiss (xiii) is true than I am that your (C1), (C2), and (C3) are all true. So I am freed to regard your counter-example as spurious’. This dispute does not come down simply to different people having different intuitions or gut feelings. The issue is whether (C1), (C2), and (C3) are all more deeply entrenched in, less dispensable to, rational decision theory, than (xiii) is. Here is my second comment on Sobel’s argument on p. 473. Let ‘Alpha’ rigidly designate the particular world which is in fact actual. The ‘somewhat perfect being’ could not have created Alpha. For even though the somewhat perfect being could have existed in some world, which therefore would have been actual, it is essential to Alpha that it contains the state of affair Alpha’s being created by the perfect being rather than by the somewhat perfect being. Similarly, if it is true in world Beta that the somewhat perfect being creates Beta, then God could not have. Therefore the worlds which the somewhat perfect being could have chosen to be actual are not a subset of those that the perfect being could have chosen to be actual—contrary to the antecedent of Sobel’s premiss (xiii). So even if premiss (xiii) were true, the argument would still fail. I conclude that we should reject the view that There are no prime worlds and If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being then he creates some world jointly entail There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being.
4 World Creation when there are Prime Worlds 4 . 1 P R I M E AC T UA L LY A N D B E T T E R O U TC O M E / AC T I O N Section 3.1 pointed out that in studying what kind of world God will create if he creates some world or other, there are three epistemic possibilities to consider: (1) There are one or more creatable hierarchies and none of them has a prime member. (2) There are one or more creatable hierarchies and each of them has at least one prime member. (3) There are at least two creatable hierarchies and at least one of them has prime members while at least one does not. The preceding chapter dealt with the first of these possibilities. Sections 4.2–4.8 address a sub-case of the second, in which there is exactly one prime creatable hierarchy and it has a prime member. Section 4.9 tackles the third possibility. Section 4.10 deals with another sub-case of the second possibility, in which there are several creatable hierarchies and all of them have at least one prime member. Section 4.11 draws some important additional conclusions from the discussion in Chapters 2–4. Sections 4.2–4.8 support the following claim—call it Prime Actually: It is logically necessary that if God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, and there is exactly one creatable hierarchy and it has at least one prime member and God creates a world, then God creates a prime world.¹ ¹ In this chapter, as usual, the description ‘omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good’ should be regarded as tacitly present when God is discussed. Sections 1.8 and 1.9 dealt with the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience.
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Here are two lines of thought in its favour: The appeal to God’s rationality. If God is perfectly good then he creates no world such that he has better reasons all-things-considered for creating some other world instead; and if a creatable hierarchy has both prime and non-prime members then God always has better reasons all-things-considered for creating a prime rather than a nonprime member and would be acting more rationally if he created a prime member. The appeal to God’s moral unsurpassability. God’s perfect goodness involves more than his doing nothing morally wrong and having no defects of character. It must also be the case that there is no world in which there is a being x (God himself, or some other being) such that x is a morally better agent in that world than God is in the actual world. Now if all creatable hierarchies contain at least one prime member and God creates a non-prime world, then God does not act in the best way that he can, morally speaking, and therefore does not act in the best way that he can all-things-considered, and so it is possible that there is an agent who is better than God is in the actual world; namely, an agent who creates a prime world. So if all creatable hierarchies contain at least one prime member and God is perfectly good and God creates a world then God creates a prime world.² The trouble with these two lines of thought is that they are mere argument sketches. Let me develop the point by concentrating on the appeal to moral unsurpassability. Consider a human agent, Emily, who brings about a state of affairs x, thereby passing over the option of bringing about a better state of affairs y. Utilitarians and other maximizing act-consequentialists will say that Emily would have acted in a morally better way if she had brought about y. They might well hesitate about inferring that she would have been a morally better person. The complexities of utilitarian accounts of moral virtue leave room for there being special situations in which the less virtuous of two people will be the one more likely to perform the right action. Rule-consequentialists and ² A similar argument is advanced by Philip L. Quinn, ‘God, Moral Perfection and Possible Worlds’, in F. Sontag and M. D. Bryant (eds.), God: The Contemporary Discussion (Rose of Sharon, 1982), 212f. It is endorsed by William Rowe, ‘The Problem of Divine Perfection and Freedom’, in Eleonore Stump (ed.), Reasoned Faith (Cornell University Press, 1993), 228f, and by Jeff Jordan, ‘The Problem of Divine Exclusivity’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 33 (1993), 93.
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non-consequentialists will be even more doubtful. They will list many possible reasons why Emily may have done the morally better deed, acted more virtuously, and done what she had the best reasons for doing, in bringing about x. Now there are many apparently relevant differences between Emily and God. So it may well turn out that God always has better reasons for creating a prime member of a creatable hierarchy than for creating any of its other members. It may well turn out that if God creates a prime member then he acts in a morally better way, and is himself morally better, than he would be if he created a non-prime world. These claims, however, need argument. That argument is not supplied in the appeals to God’s rationality and moral unsurpassability as set forth above. An illuminating argument for Prime Actually can be constructed using the following principle—call it Better Outcome/Action: Other things being equal, in bringing about the better overall outcome one acts in the better way. In a specific case the conclusion that one acted in the better way can be defeated by various circumstances. (At least, this is what philosophers who reject maximizing act-consequentialism will say.) The existence of defeaters for Better Outcome/Action implies that in some cases the inferior action has better consequences than the better action. I will argue that if all creatable hierarchies have prime members, and God is choosing between a prime and a non-prime world, it is implausible that any of the defeating circumstances obtains. Better Outcome/Action is distinct from: Other things being equal, one has a moral duty to bring about the best overall state of affairs that one can. Our question concerns not the scope of God’s moral duties but the implications of his perfect goodness. Let us examine the defeaters that are most often involved with Better Outcome/Action, and see whether any of them apply to God’s choosing between a prime and a non-prime member of some creatable hierarchy. Since Prime Actually is either necessarily true or necessarily false, counter-examples to it need be only logically possible cases.
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4 . 2 R I S K O F S E R I O U S LO S S We can quickly dismiss the first candidate defeater, that an action which in fact succeeded in bringing about the better state of affairs may have involved an unacceptable risk of a net overall result which is very bad, or at least significantly inferior to a state of affairs which would have been secured by aiming slightly lower. We are supposing that God will create some world or other, and is therefore choosing between creatable worlds. Now all creatable worlds are worlds in which God exercises tight providential control. (Proof: Consider any world W that does not include God’s exercising tight providential control in W. Since W is all-inclusive, it follows via the law of excluded middle that W includes God’s not exercising tight control in W. Hence God creates W entails God does not exercise tight control in W. Hence God creates W entails God creates W and God does not create W. Since the states of affairs that are included in a world are necessarily included in it, it follows that it is logically impossible that God create W. Hence God cannot create W.³) Since all creatable worlds are worlds in which God exercises tight providential control, whichever world God creates he takes no risks.
4 . 3 OV E R R I D I N G M O R A L D U T I E S Agents sometimes have a moral duty to bring about the inferior state of affairs, or (for some other reason) a moral duty not to bring about the better state of affairs.⁴ What about God? This section argues that necessarily ³ Here is as good a place as any to point out that while God can create a world W only if W includes God’s creating W, if W includes God’s creating W then this fact establishes merely that it is logically possible that God create W. Even so, if there are contingent limits on God’s power, then God may be unable to create W. ⁴ T. Morris, ‘Duty and Divine Goodness’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 21 (1984), believes that since God is essentially good and so could not violate his moral duties if he had any, he has none. But Morris believes that God necessarily ‘acts in accordance with those principles which express duties for a moral agent in his relevant circumstances’. Would a proposed action’s inconsistency with such a principle constitute a defeater for God’s bringing about a state of affairs in accordance with Better Outcome/Action? The arguments of Section 4.3 can easily be adapted to show that
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if a creatable hierarchy contains some good world V that God can create without violating any moral duty, then it will contain no world, better than V, which God can create only if he violates a moral duty. If God creates a world W then W itself contains the state of affairs God’s creating W. If God has a moral duty not to create some state of affairs included in W, and if God’s creating W is included in W, then the state of affairs God’s violating a moral duty, along with more specific states of affairs such as God’s telling a lie or God’s unjustly punishing someone, are also included in W. Now if God is essentially morally good, these constituent states of affairs are logically impossible, and therefore W is not a possible world after all; so there is no world W such that God creates W only if he violates a moral duty. And if, instead, God is contingently morally good, then W is possible but God is not perfectly good in W. Surely God’s being less than perfectly good, and telling a lie (or whatever), must involve such a gigantic loss of value that W cannot be as good as a good world which includes God’s creating the world and which God has no moral duty not to create. (Call this last consideration the loss-of-value argument.) Some value theorists will reject the loss-of-value argument—hedonists, for example. But philosophers who take theism seriously should find it persuasive. Contrast God with Jim in Bernard Williams’s well-known example.⁵ Jim is offered a choice about the fate of twenty innocent Indians captured by some South American soldiers: either Jim kills one Indian and the other nineteen go free, or else Jim refuses to kill and all twenty Indians are killed by the soldiers. Although most deontologists will say that Jim ought not to shoot an Indian, they can all agree that the state of affairs in which Jim shoots one and the other nineteen go free is better than the state of affairs in which he refuses and the soldiers shoot all twenty—after all, Williams constructed the example as part of an objection to utilitarianism. Deontologists think that the prohibition against murder operates as a side constraint on Jim’s actions. Now Jim is a human being, and no doubt already a sinner; if he commits an additional injustice, the heavens will not fall. But God is different. God’s perfect goodness is to be understood in such a way as to imply that in the actual world God has greater goodness-for-his-own sake than any acting in accordance with the relevant principles would never lead God to refrain from creating a prime world. ⁵ J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973), 98f.
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other possible being or possible collection of beings. And a vital part of his perfect goodness is his flawless moral goodness. Accordingly, an omnipotent, omniscient being who was morally flawed might be very admirable, but would not be worthy of religious worship, and would have far less goodness-for-his-own-sake than God has in the actual world. Hence it is hard to see how the additional good to be gained by God’s violating a moral duty could ever outweigh the good that would thereby be lost. Accordingly, the loss-of-value argument is vindicated. For any world in which God violates a moral duty, there is a better world in which he does not do so. Therefore no prime world could be such that God had a moral duty not to strongly or weakly actualize some state of affairs included in it, and so not to create the world itself. 4.4 THE LESS GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH It might be suggested: God can remain morally perfect and completely rational in creating a non-prime world V rather than a prime member W of the same creatable hierarchy, because the wholly satisfactory nature of V defeats the inference from W is better than V to Creating W is a better action than creating V. Even maximizers can agree that there are circumstances in which moderation in the pursuit of the good is rational and consistent with virtue, while dissatisfaction with what is entirely satisfactory—with what would be entirely satisfying if it were not for the option of taking the better—is less than admirable. For example, conducting a prolonged hunt for the best birthday card to send to a friend, when you have already found one which is entirely adequate given the nature of the friendship, is not typically something you have good reasons all-things-considered to do. Mozart must have finished work on some of his pieces to be performed while knowing that they were not up to the standard of his finest work, and this is a good thing: a refusal to do so would perhaps have been a sign of hubris, and of a lack of wisdom in setting his goals. But here, maximizers will hasten to add, finding and buying the best birthday card you can obtain, and ensuring that this sonata-inprogress turns out to be the very best finished work of which you are capable, do not involve bringing about the best overall state of affairs, all-things-considered, that you can. You stop looking at more birthday cards because you have good reason to stop: you have better things to do with your time, and you do not want to become a perfectionist about
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matters concerning which the quest for perfection is silly. Your seeking and obtaining the better birthday card, the better holiday, or the better school for your child need not have the better overall outcome, taking into account all the causal and non-causal consequences of your actions. In contrast, it is logically necessary that creating the better world has a better overall outcome than creating the inferior world. Later sections will deal with cases in which you avoid what will maximize the good, in order to remain loyal to some friend, or to indulge some taste, and you partly defend your doing so by saying that the overall outcome will be good enough. Right now the issue is whether even if you know that outcome y would be better than outcome x, and you have no other good reasons (such as reasons based on loyalties or personal tastes) for preferring to bring about x, you might nevertheless classify x as ‘good enough’ and bring it about, without thereby acting defectively with respect to rationality or moral goodness. We need not be consequentialists to answer ‘No’. Surely, given that • • • • • • •
y is better than x and y is better than x is at least a prima facie reason for preferring to bring about y rather than x and x is good enough is, ex hypothesi, not a prima facie reason for preferring to bring about x rather than y and you have no other good reasons for preferring to bring about x and y and x are not members of an infinite set of better and better candidate outcomes and other things are equal and you know the foregoing
we should conclude that you would be more rational to bring about y than to bring about x, and that your bringing about y is a better action, all-things-considered, than your bringing about x. It may seem odd to declare that if a creatable hierarchy H lacks prime members then the inference from V and W are members of H and W is a better world than V. to God’s creating W would be a better action than his creating V. is defeated by the premiss V is good enough, though if H has prime members then the inference is not so defeated, whether or not W is itself prime.
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Indeed, it would be odd. But the declaration is not one that I myself am committed to making. Consistently with what I say about satisficing in Section 3.3, what I maintain, instead, is that the inference from V and W are members of creatable hierarchy H and W is a better world than V. to God’s creating W would be a better action than his creating V. is defeated by the premiss There is one creatable hierarchy, and it lacks prime members, and V is good enough, and failure to create any world would have led to an outcome which is far inferior to God’s creating some world which is good enough. even though the same inference is not defeated by the premiss There is one creatable hierarchy, and it has at least one prime member, and V is good enough.⁶ In many circumstances moderation in the pursuit of the good is a virtue, and dissatisfaction with what would be entirely satisfying if it were not for the option of taking the better is less than admirable. But if God is choosing between a non-prime world V and a prime world W, he does not find himself in such a situation. The loss-of-value argument (advanced in Section 4.3) suggests that there is no prime world in which God’s attitudes and choices are less than admirable. 4 . 5 C O N T I N G E N T D E S I R E S A N D U N D E R LY I N G PE R S O N A L I T Y T R A I TS Leibniz held that although it is contingent that God chooses the best, God is pleased by things in direct proportion to their ‘prior’ goodness—that is, goodness they possess as possible beings, prior to his ⁶ Section 4.10 enables this point to be extended. The inference from V and W are members of H and W is a better world than V to God’s creating W would be a better action than his creating V is defeated by the premiss All creatable hierarchies lack prime members and V is good enough and failure to create any world would have led to an outcome which is far inferior to his creating some world which is good enough even though the same inference is not defeated by the premiss All creatable hierarchies have at least one prime member and V is good enough.
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being pleased by them.⁷ Some philosophers would object that this view erodes God’s standing as a genuinely personal agent, making him sound like an intelligent robot whose function or raison d’être is to discover what constitutes the best all-things-considered, independently of what he himself prefers, and bring it about. We should instead suppose, they would insist, that God has his own contingent character traits superimposed on the comparatively abstract attribute perfect goodness, and his own contingent unmotivated desires: we should suppose God possesses at least some of them prior to making his providential decisions, and that these contingent features play a role in generating his decisions.⁸ This view is controversial. It conflicts, for example, with the widespread doctrine that all God’s real properties are ones that he has necessarily, and that although the predicate ‘loving Jacob rather than Esau’ is contingently true of God, God does not possess the real property loving Jacob rather than Esau—in which case God’s loving Jacob rather than Esau can hardly possess metaphysical, causal, or explanatory priority to God’s timeless or everlastingly past providential decisions. Awkward questions arise concerning whether God has strongly actualized, weakly actualized, or neither strongly nor weakly actualized these contingent states of himself. If we suppose that God lacks contingent character traits and desires, then we do not need to consider whether they give rise to a defeater for Better Outcome/Action in God’s choice situation. So let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that God does have contingent character traits and desires. This assumption is consistent with Prime Actually. To see this, consider which state of affairs would be better: your now having a cup of tea, or your now skipping tea? Suppose that having a cup of tea will not damage your health, prevent your fulfilling a duty, or inconvenience anyone else. Then which state of affairs would be better depends mainly on what you would like to do, and on what you would enjoy more. Furthermore, we sometimes find ourselves in situations in which we are faced with a choice between bringing about A and bringing about B, where A is neither superior nor inferior to B, and we choose to bring ⁷ G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy (1710), ed. A. Farrer (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 183. William Hasker agrees: ‘God will not have a non-rational attachment to some one value in preference to other, objectively greater values’ (Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (Routledge, 2004), 180). ⁸ The concept of an unmotivated desire is explained by Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1970), 29.
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about A because doing so better expresses our freely chosen lifestyle, better reflects our love for some mode of culture, or for some landscape, or perhaps advances a big project to which we have already devoted a lot of time and emotional energy. But in these situations our better expressing our lifestyle, etc. is itself a non-causal consequence of our choice. In choosing to bring about A we bring about more than A, and this fact must be taken into account when we decide what to do. Given our working assumption that God has contingent character traits and desires, for many pairs of states of affairs, x and y, whether x is better than y surely depends partly or entirely on them. So perhaps God’s acting on his own tastes and what he finds interesting, and so bringing about x rather than y, never involves his departing from bringing about the better state of affairs. Hence Prime Actually may be true, while whether a world is prime may depend partly on God’s contingent tastes and desires. Although the points made in the last three paragraphs are important, they do not resolve the main issue, whether Prime Actually is true. Let us assume that, for some V and W, its being the case that W is prime and V non-prime depends on God’s personal preferences in V and W. The question remains whether God’s choice between the two worlds is settled by the fact that W is better than V and God can create W. Many philosophers believe that there exists what Samuel Scheffler calls an ‘agent-centred prerogative’ according to which it is often morally permissible for agents to depart from the course of action that will produce the best available overall outcome, as judged from an ‘agentneutral’ standpoint, in order to indulge their own tastes, pursue their own projects, and act in harmony with their own desired lifestyles.⁹ Notice that even if agent-centred rankings of outcomes need to be taken into account as well as agent-neutral ones when observers assess the moral status of actions, the resulting judgement is itself made from an agent-neutral standpoint. To see this, consider cases in which outcome A is better than outcome B, taking into account all relevant considerations including the agent’s tastes and preferences, but it is the agent’s moral duty (arising from a prior promise, say) to bring about B rather than A. The agent who brings about B out of respect for his or her duty is acting on an agent-centred reason. This is consistent with ⁹ Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Clarendon, 1982).
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impartial spectators’ recognizing that the agent is acting rightly, and performing the morally best action, in bringing about B. We need, however, to distinguish two different claims about the force of agent-centred prerogatives: The weaker claim: Agent-centred prerogatives sometimes make it morally and rationally permissible to perform an action which will have inferior total consequences, as judged in agent-neutral terms. The stronger claim: Agent-centred prerogatives sometimes make doing what will have inferior total consequences at least as morally good and as rational an action as doing what will have the better total consequences. Scheffler himself advanced only the weaker claim.¹⁰ The candidate defeater for Better Outcome/Action, however, rests on the stronger claim. I am not aware of any good arguments in favour of the stronger claim. It is not logically possible that there is a pair of creatable worlds, V and W, such that given God’s relevant agent-centred reasons God’s creating V is a morally better action, or one that it is more rational for God to perform, than God’s creating W, even though W remains the better world, as judged from an agent-neutral standpoint. For if there were such a pair, then W would contain the state of affairs God’s creating W even though it was true in W that creating V would have been the morally better, or more rational, action for God to perform. But, necessarily, a perfectly good being never performs an action when he knows that it would be morally better or more rational for him to perform some contrary action instead. So in W God would not be perfectly good. But if God is essentially perfectly good, there can be no such world, and if he is contingently perfectly good then the loss-of-value argument renders it doubtful that W can really be better than V. Perhaps, it might be thought, God has opposing prima facie reasons which wholly cancel each other out. In favour of creating a prime world W is the fact that W is the better world; in favour of creating a non-prime world V is that God’s creating V fits in better with agent-relative considerations bound up with tastes, desires, and so on which God possesses before reaching his decisions.¹¹ If so then God’s ¹⁰ Samuel Scheffler, 14, 17 ff. ¹¹ The second reason might be expanded to include the fact that V contains at least an ‘acceptable’ level of net goodness.
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tastes and desires are taken into account in two quite different ways: they contribute to settling which is the better world, and they have a further role in helping to settle whether God has better reasons allthings-considered to create one world rather than the other, and if so which one. The result is either that all-things-considered the reasons for creating V are exactly as strong as the reasons for creating W, and so God’s creating W is as morally good and rational good an action as God’s creating V. If so then we have a counter-example to Prime Actually, since plainly in the circumstances described there would be no guarantee that God would create the prime world rather than the non-prime world. Since Prime Actually is either necessarily true or necessarily false, counter-examples need be merely logically possible cases. Let P be the proposition: It is logically possible that there be a creatable hierarchy containing a pair of creatable worlds, V and W, such that V is non-prime and W is prime and, in virtue of God’s contingent desires and underlying personality traits, God’s reasons in favour of creating V are not inferior to his reasons for creating W. Is there some kind of general presumption in favour of P? Anyone who thinks so needs to explain why there is not also some kind of general presumption in favour of the following proposition (Q): It is logically necessary that if there is a creatable hierarchy containing a pair of creatable worlds, V and W, such that V is non-prime and W is prime and, in virtue of God’s contingent desires and underlying personality traits, God’s reasons in favour of creating V are just as good as his reasons for creating W, then that hierarchy also contains another prime world U which fits in better than V (though not better than W) does with God’s contingent preferences and underlying personality traits and which God accordingly has better reasons to create than he has for creating V. If Q is true then P does not defeat the presumption identified by Better Outcome/Action, in favour of creating a prime world. In fact P and Q are both very unsafe premisses for use in discussion of Better Outcome/Action and Prime Actually. Molinists might offer the following argument in favour of P—call it the limiting-counterfactuals argument. If Molinism is true, surely it is logically possible that God is stuck with an array of true CCFs that generate and limit his options in such a way as to make true the state of affairs whose logical possibility P affirms. After all, many Molinists hold that it is logically possible that the true CCFs did not give God an opportunity to create a world in which everyone always freely acted rightly.
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Molinism will work as a theory of providence only if it involves, in addition to the doctrine that God has taken advantage of suitable CCFs and created the actual world, the doctrine that God had a wide range of options concerning which worlds to create. Molinism will work only if it affirms that God is secure against the existence of many erratic gaps—even random gaps—in the array of true CCFs, creating disturbing and erratic restrictions on his options. The most promising way of supporting these two commitments is to link them together by the thesis that although each CCF is contingently true, it is necessarily the case that the array of true CCFs is sufficiently wide, rich, and orderly to give God a great many attractive options concerning the creation of worlds involving free rational creatures. P, however, requires that it be logically possible that the true CCFs drastically limit God’s options in ways that Molinists should find unacceptable. For example, suppose that the logical possibility set forth in P is actual, and suppose that in both V and W (related in the way set forth above) God has a friend and a certain situation arises in which the friend needs help; in V God helps the friend while in W he refrains from doing so. Are there no creatable worlds at all in which God has the same friend but prevents the situation of need from arising? And if there are such worlds, are they all inferior to W? Are there no creatable worlds in which God refrains from helping the friend in the relevant situation, but amply compensates the friend afterwards, with the result that the friendship is thereby enriched? And if there are such worlds, are they all inferior to W? How unfortunate for God, to have so few ways forward open to him with regard to this friend! If Molinists concede that these things are logically possible, then they seem to have no way of ruling out its actually being the case that God found himself in just such a situation, and therefore they have hamstrung their overall theory of providence. And if Molinists deny that such things are logically possible, then they thereby have strong reasons for rejecting P. Since Theological Determinists—at least, the compatibilists amongst them—usually hold that God can do more than Molinists think that he can, they have even stronger reasons for rejecting P. The foregoing considerations do not amount to a proof that roles played by God’s contingent personality traits and desires do not yield a counter-example to Prime Actually, but they do amount to a good prima facie case against that conjecture.
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4 . 6 D I V I N E G R AC E A N D B E N E F I C E N C E Robert Merrihew Adams defines grace as ‘a disposition to love which is not dependent on the merit of the person loved’.¹² He argues that a perfectly good God would or might be gracious, and so might well choose to create and love less excellent creatures than he could have chosen. He infers that such a God might not create the very best world that he could. Now if the inference is to be valid, Adams must by ‘creatures’ mean not only rational creatures such as human beings, but anything that God creates, and he must by ‘world’ mean the totality of created beings —from subatomic particles to galaxy clusters. God could have chosen to bring into existence, and love, beings who collectively constitute a less excellent whole than he could have chosen. So understood, what Adams says seems right. But of course I have throughout this book been using the expression ‘world’ to refer not to possible wholes whose parts are beings but to possible all-inclusive states of affairs. They include not only states of affairs involving rivers, echidnas, and planets but also states of affairs involving God. The truth that God’s perfect goodness is consistent with his bringing into existence, and loving, beings who are individually less excellent, and add up to a less excellent whole, than alternative beings he could have brought into existence does not entail that God’s perfect goodness is consistent with his strongly or weakly actualizing a non-prime all-inclusive state of affairs when he could have strongly or weakly actualized a better, prime one instead. We might try revising Adams’s definition of grace, and say that God is gracious to people only if God sometimes benefits them on occasions when it would be better, all-things-considered, if he did not do so. It might then be argued as follows: Acting graciously is compatible with perfect goodness. Therefore God’s sometimes benefiting people on occasions when it would be better, all-things-considered, if he did not do so is compatible with his perfect goodness. Therefore God’s ¹² Robert Merrihew Adams, ‘Must God Create the Best?’, Philosophical Review, 81 (1972), 317–32; the quotation is from p. 324. Cf. William Wainwright’s assertion that the value of gratuitous love is not a function of the object loved, in his paper ‘Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe and the Necessity of Creation’, in Jeff Jorden and Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), Faith, Freedom, and Rationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).
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creating a non-prime member of a creatable hierarchy that also has prime members is compatible with his perfect goodness. The foregoing argument is unsatisfactory. For one thing, why should we adopt the revised definition of grace, rather than retain Adams’s account? It might be answered that a gracious action is performed for the sake of the person to whom grace is extended, whereas if the agent benefits the person only when it is best, all things considered, to do so then the agent acts rather for the sake of maximizing total goodness. This claim, however, is doubtful. Think about what utilitarian agents will say to the accusation that they cannot rationally act from love. Here, for example, is J. S. Mill: utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action¹³
Furthermore, if we do adopt the revised definition of grace, saying that an agent is gracious towards someone only if the agent is prepared to benefit the person even when doing so would not be best all-things-considered, why should we then accept the premiss that acting graciously in the revised sense is compatible with perfect goodness? Appeal might be made to revelation, but if we look at the great, paradigmatic stories of what the biblical writers regard as divine gracious action (past or promised for the future) it is not at all clear that any of the stories implies that God benefits someone when it would have been better, all-things-considered, if he had not done so. The word ‘grace’ is often applied to the action of welcoming or benefiting someone when doing so is motivated by kind-heartedness and goes well beyond the call of duty. Of course the mere fact that in various cases the welcoming and benefiting go beyond the call of duty is consistent with their being, in those cases, a necessary condition of perfect goodness. T. J. Mawson rejects Prime Actually in the light of a consideration which concerns beneficence but not grace. According to Mawson, what perfect goodness requires is that God perfectly fulfil the demands of love towards his creatures. Hence if God brings into existence a set of creatures then they will live in the best or joint best of all possible worlds ¹³ J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 2; cf. Smart, in Smart and Williams, Utilitarianism, pp. 44–5.
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for this set of creatures, considered as a totality (if there is such a world).¹⁴ I propose for the sake of argument to assume that Mawson’s principle is correct, and to examine whether it constitutes a serious difficulty for Prime Actually. Let us simplify the discussion by considering all pairs of worlds such that V and W contain the same creatures, each of the non-human creatures in V is equally well off in W, and each human being in V is better off than he or she is in W. Is there some such pair such that W is prime and V is non-prime? It might be replied: Yes, for amongst the worlds fitting into the ‘W’ slot there will be some with a better distribution of goods amongst the human beings and amongst the other creatures, and also more goods which are not good for any creatures at all, such that these facts more than compensate for the fact that in V each human is better off. It is far from clear that the reply is correct, but let us suppose that it is. Consider then all pairs such that V and W* contain the same creatures, each of the non-human creatures in V is equally well off in W*, each human being in V is better off in V than in W*, and W* has a better distribution than V of goods amongst the human beings and amongst the other creatures, and also has more goods which are not good for any creatures at all. Surely for each such pair there will be some world U such that U and W* contain the same sentient creatures, each of the non-human sentient beings in U is equally well off in W*, and each human being in U is better off than in W*, and U is not inferior to W* with respect to the distribution of goods amongst the human beings and amongst the other creatures, or with respect to goods which are not good for any creatures. I have no proof of this conjecture, but it is prima facie plausible that the description of U is free from contradiction and other sources of logical impossibility. If the conjecture is true then surely U is better than W*, and so W* is not prime. Yet U fulfils Mawson’s principle as well as W* does. Hence there will be no possible cases in which there are prime worlds yet God, in order to perfectly fulfil the demands of love towards his creatures, must create a non-prime world. Thus Mawson’s account of what God’s goodness requires is compatible with Prime Actually. ¹⁴ T. J. Mawson, Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Clarendon, 2005), 200–5.
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4 . 7 LOY A LT I E S A N D C O M M I T M E N TS Another defeater frequently involved with Better Outcome/Action is bound up with reasons generated by love, friendship, and other bases of loyalty in morally admirable human lives. As I pointed out in Section 1.4.1, if God creates a world, and if God timelessly or omnitemporally possesses comprehensive knowledge, then God’s choice of which world to create is not made in stages, as actual events unfold. His decisions about what will happen do not take into account what has actually happened up to the time of decision. Since his choice of which world to create must take place ‘before’ he has brought anything at all into existence, and thus ‘before’ he has entered into any relationships with people, there is a straightforward sense in which the choice cannot be motivated by loyalty.¹⁵ He cannot take into account reasons for action that are generated by creature-related loyalties and commitments that precede his choice of which world to create, for there are none. God might, however, be motivated by an unmotivated desire to have a friend of such-and-such a kind; and he might take into account the idea that if he acquires a friend of the kind in question, then he should act loyally towards the friend. Issues raised by this idea were discussed in Section 4.5.
4 . 8 S E L F - S AC R I F I C E The presumption that in bringing about the better overall state of affairs one acts in the better way is sometimes defeated in cases of self-sacrificial action. Perhaps from an impartial standpoint it is better that you should survive than that some stranger should survive, but sometimes your sacrificing your own life to save a stranger’s is at least as morally good an action, and at least as rational an action, as not doing so. Leaving aside complications arising from the Christian doctrine of the incarnation ¹⁵ The inverted commas around the word ‘before’ are a reminder of the point, made in Section 1.4, that if God is timeless then expressions usually indicating temporal order are in this context used to indicate some logical or epistemological or metaphysical order.
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and the death of Jesus, it is obvious that God cannot die, or damage himself. But perhaps he can forgo the fulfilment of important desires in order to benefit other people, when from an impartial standpoint it would be better if his desires were fulfilled and the people left unbenefited. Do we have, in some such situation, a counter-example to Prime Actually? The issues involved in answering this question are similar to those canvassed in Sections 4.5. The moral and rational non-inferiority of forgoing the fulfilment of one’s desires can be seen as due to a special kind of agent-relative prerogative. Section 4.5 distinguished between a stronger and a weaker claim concerning the existence of agent-centred prerogatives, and pointed out that the alleged counter-examples rest on the stronger claim, for which there seem to be no good arguments. Even if the stronger claim is true, both Molinists and Theological Determinists have good prima facie reasons for rejecting the logical possibility of its being the case that there are prime worlds but God cannot create a prime world in which God has no reason for selfsacrificial action. And it is implausible to suppose that God could have an unmotivated desire, one not based on reasons, for acting self-sacrificially. 4 . 9 D I V I N E C H O I C E G I V E N C R E ATA B L E H I E R A RC H I E S O F B OT H K I N D S The time has now come to consider the second of the three epistemic possibilities listed in Section 4.1, that there are at least two creatable hierarchies and at least one of them has prime members while at least one does not. Chapters 3 and 4 have affirmed the principle Better Outcome/Action: Other things being equal, in intentionally bringing about the better state of affairs one acts in the better way, all-things-considered. The ‘other things being equal’ clause reflects the idea that whether one action is more rational or morally better than another is not always fixed merely by which action has better consequences. Section 3.3 assumed, as Rowe did, that there is exactly one creatable hierarchy and that it lacks prime worlds, and considered whether it is possible that God exists and creates one of the worlds. For each candidate world there is a better world that he could create. Nevertheless, I argued,
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in this situation the inference from God could create a better world to God could act in a better way is defeated by the conjunction of the following three conditions: (1) For every world that God could create there is a better one that he could create. (2) The world that he in fact creates is good enough relative to the foregoing circumstances. (3) Failure to create any world from the creatable hierarchy that lacks prime worlds would lead to an outcome that was far inferior to creating one of the worlds in that hierarchy which is good enough. If, however, there are several creatable hierarchies and some of them have prime members while others do not, the third of these conditions is not fulfilled: by selecting a prime world, the agent could avoid creating a world from one of the hierarchies that lacks prime worlds, without thereby ending up with an inferior outcome. Let H be a creatable hierarchy that lacks prime members, and let W* and W be members of H. W* is better than W and H is the sole creatable hierarchy does not entail God would act in a better way if he created W*. The inference from W* is better than W and in addition to H there is exactly one creatable hierarchy J with prime members to God would act in a better way if he created W* is not defeated by the three conditions listed above, since the third condition does not obtain. I will assume that there is an infinite subset of better and better members of H such that the inference is not defeated by any other circumstances either; this assumption receives indirect support from other sections in this chapter. Given that there are both H and J, whichever specific member of H God were to create he would act in a better way if he created some other world instead—some world which is better than the created world. On the other hand, if God were to create some prime member of J, then he will not have better reasons for creating some non-prime world instead. Therefore God acts in a better way, all-things-considered, if he creates a prime member of J than if he creates some member of H. Therefore his perfect goodness guarantees that if God creates a world then he will create some prime member of J.
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4 . 1 0 D I V I N E C H O I C E G I V E N S EV E R A L C R E ATA B L E H I E R A RC H I E S , A L L C O N TA I N I N G PRIME MEMBERS Now let us turn to the case in which there are several creatable hierarchies, and all of them have prime members. Suppose that V is a non-prime member of some creatable hierarchy H while W is a prime member of some creatable hierarchy H*. Bringing together considerations advanced in various preceding sections of this chapter, we can see that if God creates V then he has better reasons for creating some other world instead—a better member of H—whereas if God creates W then he does not have better reasons for creating some other world instead. Therefore, despite the fact that V and W themselves are incommensurable, God acts in a better way if he creates W than if he creates V.¹⁶ Therefore God’s perfect goodness guarantees that if God creates a world then he will create some prime world.
4 . 1 1 C O RO L L A R I E S O F F O R E G O I N G C O N C LU S I O N S The last couple of sections yielded two results. Firstly, that if God exists and there are several creatable hierarchies and some of them have prime members while others do not and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. Secondly, that if there are several creatable hierarchies and all of them have prime members and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. The conjunction of these two propositions with Prime Actually entails the following proposition: Prime Actually Strengthened: It is logically necessary that if God exists and there are prime worlds and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. At the beginning of Chapter 2 a maximal world was defined as a world such that there is no world better than it. Obviously it is logically necessary that if there is at least one creatable world which is maximal ¹⁶ Therefore maximizing act-consequentialists must either deny that there are prime worlds, or deny that some worlds are incommensurable with others.
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then a world is prime if and only if it is maximal and God can create it. Therefore Prime Actually Strengthened entails a proposition that I will call Maximal Actually: It is logically necessary that if God exists and there are maximal worlds which God can create and God creates a world then God creates a maximal world. Sections 2.4 and 2.5 entitle us to conclude that either God cannot create a maximal world, or he can but even given that he creates a world his omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness do not jointly entail that he creates a maximal world. The conjunction of this conclusion with Maximal Actually entails: God cannot create a maximal world. If God cannot create a maximal world then, given the assumption (shared by Theological Determinists and Molinists but not by Open Theists) that God exists and creates the actual world, it follows that if God exists then the actual world is not maximal. This result should not be surprising. Recall that the argument for saying that God cannot create a maximal world depended on the premiss that necessarily every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures and no morally wrong ones.¹⁷ Since everyday observation reveals that the actual world contains many morally wrong choices and actions by rational creatures, the assumption commits theists to saying that the actual world is not maximal. ¹⁷ The assumption constituted premiss (i) in Sections 2.4 and 2.5.
5 Empirical Objections to Theism, not based on Evil 5 . 1 A D I L E M M A F O R T H E O LO G I C A L D E T E R M I N I S TS A N D M O L I N I S TS Sections 5.1–5.3 consider an objection to both Theological Determinism and Molinism, while Section 5.4 considers a related objection to Open Theism. Although neither objection is based on evil, they both start from conclusions reached in Chapters 3 and 4, together with the idea that if there has been someone supervising the universe, whoever it is has not been doing as well as an omnipotent and omniscient being could count on being able to do. The two objections jointly constitute what at first sight appears to be a strong objection to the existence of God.¹ The name ‘Alpha’ will be used to rigidly designate the actual world—that is, this one. Sections 4.2–4.11 argued in favour of the principle Prime Actually Strengthened, according to which it is logically necessary that if God exists and there are prime worlds and God creates a world then God creates a prime world.² Theological Determinists and Molinists who hold that God exists and has (as a matter of contingent fact) created Alpha, are committed by Prime Actually Strengthened to saying that (as a matter of contingent fact) if there is at least one prime world then Alpha is prime. It might be thought: Surely it is plain on empirical grounds that if God exists then Alpha is non-prime. Even if we leave evil aside, we can ¹ As usual, the description ‘omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good’ will be tacitly present when God is discussed. Section 1.9 explained that there is a sense in which Open Theists can assert that God is omniscient even though they hold that there is much that God does not know about the future. ² The term ‘prime world’ was introduced in Section 3.1.
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envisage many improvements to human history, to the broader natural history of our planet, and to the lives of presently living human beings and non-human animals—better states of affairs which God could have strongly or weakly actualized. Therefore Theological Determinists and Molinists should say that there are no prime worlds. The arguments advanced in Section 3.3 suggest that if there are no prime worlds then God will satisfice. The inference from God can bring about a better state of affairs to God can act in a better way is defeated by the fact that for every world which God can create, God can create a better world than it, and such-and-such a specific world is good enough given this choice situation, and failure to select any world would have led to an outcome that was far inferior to each world which is good enough. But surely, it might be thought, everyday observation and reflection massively support the view that Alpha is not good enough relative to God’s supposed choice situation. Suppose, as Section 3.4 did, that worlds are ranked in value chiefly by the extent to which they include large communities of people characterized by justice, a rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose lives embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together, and do not also include communities that are seriously malfunctioning. Surely, relative to these desiderata, and also relative to the world-creation opportunities which Theological Determinists and Molinists believe that God had, Alpha is deficient and disappointing, and hence not good enough. Moreover this is plain even if we leave evil out of consideration. If God exists then he has not satisficed. The upshoft is that whatever view Theological Determinists and Molinists have about the existence of prime worlds, they face an objection, based on empirical evidence other than evidence concerning evil. Their dilemma can be set out in the form of a pair of arguments. Here is the first member of the pair: (i) There are prime worlds. [Assumption] (ii) Prime Actually Strengthened: It is logically necessary that if God exists and there are prime worlds and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. [Premiss] (iii) If God exists and creates a world then he has created Alpha. [Premiss] (iv) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. [From i, ii, iii] (v) If God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha. [Premiss]
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(vi) Either God does not exist or he does not create a world. [From iv, v] (vii) Theological Determinism and Molinism are both false. [From vi] Here is the second argument: (viii) There are no prime worlds. [Assumption] (ix) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, then if there are no prime worlds and God has the opportunity to create a world which is good enough, then he creates some world which is good enough. [Premiss] (x) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God exists and he created Alpha. [Premiss] (xi) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God had the opportunity to create a world which is good enough. [Premiss] (xii) Alpha is good enough. [From viii–xi] (xiii) Alpha is not good enough. [Premiss] (xiv) Neither Theological Determinism nor Molinism is true. Section 5.2 examines the first argument, and Section 5.3 the second.
5 . 2 T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M T H E R E B E I N G P R I M E WO R L D S
5.2.1 Structural Analysis: the Need to Bypass (1c) Whether (v) is true is knowable by human beings only a posteriori. Since ‘Alpha’ rigidly designates a world whose complete description includes Alpha’s containing the state of affairs Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar, the proposition In Alpha, Brutus stabs Caesar is necessarily true, but of course we do not know a priori that Brutus stabbed Caesar, or even that in Alpha Brutus stabbed Caesar. If we know that (v) is true, then we do so by knowing what happens in Alpha, and we know this only empirically. If (v) should be classified as obviously true, this will not be because it is self-evident, or demonstrable by pure reason. It will be because it is the conclsuion of some strong argument containing obviously true empirical premisses. This argument may also contain a priori premisses, but in what follows I will consider enthymematic formulations in which the a priori premisses are suppressed.
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Below is a restatement of the first horn of the dilemma. The auxiliary argument for (v) has been incorporated into the main argument. To save space, (i)–(iii) are taken for granted, and acccordingly (iv) is treated as secure; and since the step from (vi) to (vii) is trivial, the abbreviated formulation stops with (vi). For expository convenience, various propositions already stated are renumbered. Call the following schema Argument (I): (1a) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. (1b) [specific empirical information about Alpha directly relevant to its improvability.] (1c) Therefore Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha. [From 1b] (1d) Therefore either God does not exist or he does not create a world.³ [From 1a, 1c] The immediate task is to assess the strength of Argument (I) relative to the assumption that (1a) is true. Various formulations filling the slot marked ‘(1b)’ will be considered below; but a fair amount of progress will be made before reaching this stage. Alongside Argument (I) consider Arguments (II) and (III). Is (I) weak, like (II), or strong, like (III)? (2a) If Cathy died while the jury was deliberating then Cathy was not convicted. (2b) Five witnesses testified under oath that they saw Cathy commit the crime; and Cathy’s own story was ripped to shreds under cross-examination. (2c) Cathy was convicted. [From 2b] (2d) Therefore Cathy did not die while the jury was deliberating. [From 2a, 2c] (3a) If Cathy died while the jury was deliberating then Cathy was not convicted. [Premiss] (3b) Today’s newspaper reports that Cathy was convicted. [Premiss] (3c) Cathy was convicted. [from 3b] ³ How could God exist but not create a world? By proceeding as Open Theists think he does: by strongly actualizing some states of affairs and causally contributing to the obtaining of, but neither strongly nor weakly actualizing, other states of affairs.
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(3d) Therefore Cathy did not die while the jury was deliberating. [from 3a, 3c] From now on the expression ‘the a-premiss’ will sometimes be used to cover (1a), (2a), and so on, according to the context. All three arguments are enthymematic. Their strength as stated is evaluated in the light of additional empirical information—for example, about the reliability of newspaper reports of trials. Consider Argument II from the standpoint of visitors who left the courtroom during the lawyers’ closing submissions. They believe the apremiss, along with some other background information about Cathy’s good health. They have heard the witnesses, including Cathy herself, and so accept (2b), and on the basis of (2b) they accept (2c). But in doing so, they were surely already taking it for granted that (2d) is true. The visitors might well feel justified in doing so: there is no evidence against (2d), and moreover it is well known that defendants rarely die while the jury is deliberating. But if the inference from (2b) to (2c) depends on the visitors’ already taking it for granted that (2d) is true, the two-stage argument from (2b) to (2c) and then from the conjunction of (2c) and the a-premiss to (2d) is circular. Consider some visitors who, as the lawyers are making their closing submissions, possess a strong prima facie reason for suspending judgement about (2d)—e.g. they have just been informed that five minutes ago Cathy swallowed poison, that she will soon fall unconscious, and that it is uncertain whether she will survive. What conclusion do they come to about (2d)? Well, suppose that someone now tells the visitors that since they accept the a-premiss and (2c) they are committed to accepting (2d). They would be correct to reply: We are re-evaluating our position. Whether we should continue to accept (2c) depends on how likely it is, relative to the conjunction of the a-premiss and our other relevant information, that Cathy will die while the jury is deliberating. If the principal question to be decided is whether (2d) is true then plainly we ought not to infer (2c) from (2b) and then infer (2d) from the conjunction of (2c) and the a-premiss. Instead, we should suspend judgement on (2c), and try to determine whether (2d) or its negation is more likely, taking into account our background evidence and the new information about the poisoning. Similar points apply in connection with Argument (I). People who already believe (1d) are justified in inferrring (1c) from (1b) But, given
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that (1b) does not entail (1c), they would be reasoning fallaciously if they used this inference as part of an argument to reinforce their belief that (1d) is true. Given that (1b) does not entail (1c), people who currently suspend judgement on (1d) would be reasoning fallaciously if they accepted (1c) on the basis of (1b) and then accepted (1d) on the basis of (1c) and the a-premiss. Hence the a-premiss and (1b) together provide strong argument for (1d) if and only if there is some convincing line of thought in favour of (1d), employing the a-premiss and (1b) but bypassing (1c)—that is, dispensing with (1c) as an intermediate step.
5.2.2 Is (1b) Surprising? One way of arguing from (1a) and (1b) while avoiding (1c) is to consider a hypothetical group consisting of Theological Determinists and Molinists who believe the a-premiss, and also know that the earth has rational and other sentient inhabitants, but know nothing more about the history and present state of our planet. Would such people confidently expect the negation of (1b), and be surprised and disconcerted to find that (1b) was true? Similar questions arising in relation to the weak Argument (II) and the strong argument (III) have the answers No and Yes respectively. The foregoing structural analysis has been able to proceed in abstraction from the specific content of (1b). However, the time has now come to consider some alternative propositions filling this slot. Such propositions are, of course, chosen with an eye on corresponding candidate improvements upon Alpha. Often it is hard to be sure that a proposed change would constitute an improvement. We ask ourselves, ‘Would a world whose only relevant difference from Alpha is such-and-such be a better world than Alpha?’. The larger the scale of the change involved in such-and-such, the more likely it is that this change entails others which are relevant to value comparisons, and the harder it is to be confident that all things considered the other world is indeed better than Alpha. So it may be worth trying a strategy of considering small-scale candidate improvements upon Alpha. Here is an attempt at executing such a strategy. It is couched in the form of an argument, (IV), which can be regarded as a specific version of the schematic argument (I).
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(4a) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. [Premiss] (4b) The degree of pleasure felt by the dog Rover while eating its evening meal yesterday was less than the maximum degree of pleasure that in general it is psychologically possible for Rover to feel. [Premiss] (4c) Therefore Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha—for example, a world that differs from Alpha only in that Rover feels slightly more pleasure when eating his evening meal yesterday (and in entailed and supervenient respects). [From 4b] (4d) Therefore either God does not exist or he does not create a world. Argument (IV) does not concern evil. Even if theists could show that the existence of evil, or the existence of great evils such as we actually find around us, did not constitute a strong objection to the existence of God, there would remain the challenge based on God’s apparent ability to create a world better than Alpha. The Rover example has been chosen to highlight this fact. Are the a-premiss and (4b) jointly a strong reason for (4d)? To establish that they are, one must develop a convincing line of thought employing the a-premiss and (4b) but bypassing (4c). Suppose that there were a group of Theological Determinists and Molinists who believed the a-premiss, and also knew that the earth has canine inhabitants, but knew nothing more about the history and present state of our planet. Would such people confidently expect the negation of (4b), and be surprised to find that (4b) was true? I cannot see good grounds for thinking that they would. Consider the possible worlds in which every dog on every, or almost every, occasion feels the maximum degree of pleasure that in general it is psychologically possible for it to feel. Each of these worlds differs from Alpha in many ways. But surely in all of them canine life is seriously defective with respect to important goods other than pleasure. It is implausible to suppose that any of these worlds is prime. In a prime world, if there are dogs then many of them on many occasions will feel less than the maximum degree of pleasure. Is there some special fact about Rover and his evening meal yesterday in virtue of which, if the a-premiss were true and God were to exist, then (4b) would be not true? No such fact has been specified. We have no grounds to assert this last conditional proposition. Hence the argument for (4d) fails.
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Let us try another version of the basic argument for (1d), one which envisions improvements on a much larger scale. Surely, other things being equal, things would have been better if, in general, human physical and mental capacities had been greater than they are? And surely God could have created a world in which this was so? Theists who hold the a-premiss are committed to denying (5c) Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha—for example, some world in which human physical and mental capacities are in general greater than they are in Alpha. How can the theist deny (5c) without grotesque ad hoccery? My answer should by now be plain. There must be some argument for (5c). Here is a candidate explicit, empirical premiss for that argument: (5b) Human physical and mental capacities have such-and-such limits—for example, no human being can run a marathon in less than an hour. It is tempting now to argue in two stages: firstly from (5b) to (1c), and then from (1c) and the a-premiss to (1d). But my discussion of earlier sample arguments shows that this procedure involves a fallacy in inductive logic. Our starting point is constituted by two premisses—the a-premiss and (5b). To establish that these are jointly a strong reason for (1d) one must develop a persuasive line of thought bypassing (5c). It is doubtful that such a convincing line of thought can be developed. Since the existence of koalas, with their distinctive range of abilities, is not bad, we humans do not fall below some universal minimum level of acceptability. It might be claimed that in virtue of being intelligent agents we are endowed with aspirations relative to which we are far too poorly equipped. But the evaluation involved in the words ‘far too poorly’ needs support. Any intelligent agents of any species whose abilities were finite would be able to identify good levels of ability which were beyond their reach. Such a situation is not itself bad. Is there some other reason why an omnipotent being should not, morally speaking, bring such agents into existence? Is there some reason why he should not, morally speaking, endow them with the specific finite levels of capacity that are characteristic of humanity? None is evident. The objection to the existence of God based on the a-premiss and (5b) seems at best inconclusive.
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It is obvious that, even leaving aside evil and its effects, human communities could have richer cultures than they in fact typically have, and individual humans could often be happier than they are. But this truth does not entail that God, if he exists, can create a better world than Alpha. For suppose that the entailment did hold. Then surely it would be necessarily true that if God cannot create a better world than Alpha then it is not the case that most people avoid involvement in poetry, painting, and drama and instead watch gridiron and netball. Now we are currently examining the first horn of the dilemma for theological determinism and Molinism, and accordingly assuming that there are prime worlds and that Prime Actually Strengthened is true. If Prime Actually Strengthened is true then it is necessarily true, and if there are prime worlds then this fact is a major structural feature of how things are, on a par with There is helium and There are stars. It follows that relative to the human population of the universe it is inevitable that it is not the case that most people avoid involvement in music, poetry, etc. and instead watch gridiron and netball. Given this, not only Molinists but also Theological Determinists (for reasons that will be explained in Chapter 7) should agree that individuals have only a low degree of freedom in behaving in the specified ways. But this is a respect in which the overall outcome would be inferior to the situation in Alpha, where typically even poor people have a high degree of freedom in this area. Surely it would be rash to claim that necessarily individuals’ lives would go better all-things-considered if they were happier and went better with respect to literary and artistic values but were inferior with respect to freedom. Nevertheless it might be maintained that the fact that human communities could have richer cultures than they in fact typically have and individual humans could often be happier than they are creates a presumption that God, if he exists, can create a better world than Alpha. Yes, but presumptions can be defeated. At this point we need to recall the place in the overall argument of this discussion of greater happiness and richer cultures. The argument to be evaluated goes like this: (6a) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. [Premiss] (6b) Human cultures, and individual human lives, have such-and-such desirable qualities and not others. [Premiss] (6c) Therefore Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha—for example, a world
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that differs from Alpha in that individuals are happier and cultures are richer. [From 6b] (6d) Therefore either God does not exist or he does not create a world. [From 6a, 6c] For reasons explained previously, (6a) and (6b) together provide a strong argument for (6d) if and only if there is some convincing line of thought employing the a-premiss and (6b) but bypassing (6c). Leaving aside evils and their effects, are actual levels of human cultural achievement and individual happiness less than we would expect them to be if (1a) were true and God created some world? Well, it is plain that if Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God could have strongly or weakly actualized higher levels of these goods than he has in fact done. A world in which he did so would in that respect be better than Alpha. But it is very far from being plain that all worlds, or even any worlds, in which he did so would all-things-considered be better than Alpha. Suppose that there is a ranking of worlds with respect to human cultural achievement and individual happiness (CAIH). Let a TopCAIH world be a world such that God cannot create any world which is higher in the ranking. Either there is at least one TopCAIH world or there is not. Philosophers who hold that the only good states that are goodfor-their-own-sakes are cultural achievement and human happiness will say that if there are TopCAIH worlds then they are all prime. But a great many philosophers will dissent from this theory of value. It is a very insecure basis on which to found a strong objection to theism. Yet apart from the foregoing theory of value, there does not seem to be any reason to suppose that if there are TopCAIH worlds, they are all prime. After all, many TopCAIH worlds might be poorly endowed with other goods. Given that God will choose one of the prime worlds, there seems to be no reason to believe that if amongst the prime worlds there are some TopCAIH worlds, then he will discriminate in favour of the TopCAIH prime worlds. Cultural achievement and human happiness have already been fully taken into account in classifying these worlds as prime. What if there are no TopCAIH worlds? For each world, God can create a world which is higher in the supposed ranking. But ex hypothesi there are prime worlds, and if God exists he will create a prime world. So the mere fact that there is an infinite number of worlds ranked higher than some particular world W with respect to human cultural
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achievement and individual happiness does not entail, or even create a presumption, that W is not prime. Perhaps the best strategy for opponents of Theological Determinism and of Molinism is to appeal to evident great evils that the world contains. Surely things would have been a lot better if all, or at least a large amount, of the evil in it had not existed? And surely God, if he exists, could have strongly actualized there being much less evil than in Alpha, without thereby precluding the existence of at least as much good? Many philosophers have argued that if theism were true then there would be a lot less suffering, injustice, selfishness, bigotry, illness, etc. than Alpha is known to contain. Their arguments have been such that if they succeed then they will also establish that if both the a-premiss and theism were true then there would be a lot less suffering, and so on, than Alpha is known to contain. On the other hand, other philosophers have offered theodicies whose upshot is that even if God were to exist and to create a world, it might well still be the case that there was as much suffering as Alpha is known to contain. Maybe some theodicies explicitly or implicitly rely on the negation of the a-premiss.⁴ But most theodicies do not. It is plausible to suppose that if it is successfully argued that if God were to exist and to create a world, it might well contain as much suffering as Alpha contains, then it can also be successfully argued that if the a-premiss were true and God were to exist and to create a world, then there might well be as much suffering as Alpha contains.⁵ If so, then accepting the a-premiss will not make the task of defending Theological Determinism or Molinism much harder than it otherwise would be. Obviously the results of Chapters 6–8 bear directly on this matter, even though they do not try to show that if God were to exist and to create a world, it might well contain as much suffering as Alpha contains. What is clear is that the first horn of the dilemma does not constitute a threat to Theological Determinism and Molinism, independent of considerations concerning evil. ⁴ Cf. George N. Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-time Religion (Clarendon, 1988), ch. 2. ⁵ Michael Tooley, in a paper in which he advances an objection to the existence of God, based on evil, argues that if the existence of evil is logically compatible with the existence of God, and if evil can be logically necessary for a greater good that outweighs it, then ‘the idea of worlds that are larger and larger, either in space or in time, suggests that one cannot place an upper limit on the quantity of evil that might be found in a world created by God’ (‘The Argument from Evil,’ Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), 89–134; the quotation is from p. 92.).
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5 . 3 T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M T H E R E B E I N G N O P R I M E WO R L D S Let us now consider the second horn of the dilemma, presented in Section 5.1 in the form of the argument: (viii) There are no prime worlds. [Assumption] (ix) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, then if there are no prime worlds and God has the opportunity to create a world which is good enough, then he creates some world which is good enough. [Premiss] (x) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God exists and he created Alpha. [Premiss] (xi) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God has the opportunity to create a world which is good enough. [Premiss] (xii) Alpha is good enough. [From viii–xi] (xiii) Alpha is not good enough. [Premiss] (xiv) Neither Theological Determinism nor Molinism is true. The argument is deductively valid. The first premiss, (viii), is secure because it is an assumption on which turns the second horn of a dilemma. For reasons that should be clear from Chapter 3, Theological Determinists and Molinists should accept (ix). Premiss (x) is obviously true. Therefore Theological Determinists and Molinists must reject either (xi) or (xiii). Neither (xi) nor (xiii) is evident to the senses, or delivered by empirical science, or self-evident. The truth of (xi) might be thought obvious: after all, Theological Determinists and Molinists typically hold that God might have refrained from bringing anything into existence at all, in which case the resulting actual world, limited to necessary states of affairs and contingent ones involving him alone, would have been good enough. Such a world would not have been deficient or disappointing, because God himself is very good. If so, then the only way that Alpha could fail to be good enough would be if the contingent states of affairs not involving God were on the whole very bad. Whether or not they are will be addressed in Chapters 6–8. Right now, however, the main concern is whether (viii) and (ix) generate a good objection to Theological Determinism and Molinism which is independent of considerations about evil.
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Saying that Alpha is not good enough amounts to saying that in Alpha the whole consisting of states of affairs involving created entities (considered in abstraction from their relations to God) is disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. Now it can hardly be maintained that God could acceptably refrain from bringing anything into existence, but could not acceptably bring into existence merely one atom of hydrogen. So what counts must in some way be relativized to kinds of wholes consisting of states of affairs involving created entities. Rather than develop a fully-fledged theory of the evaluation of such wholes, I will simply assume, for the sake of convenience, that what counts is the quality of rational creatures’ individual and communal lives. With this understanding, (xi) should read: (xi ) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God has the opportunity to create a world which contains rational creatures and is such that the whole consisting of states of affairs involving these people (considered in abstraction from their relations to God) is not disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. It is doubtful that (xi ) should be affirmed either by Molinists or by people who prior to encountering (viii)–(xiv) have been suspending judgement about whether Molinism is true. Maybe, for example, all non-disappointing worlds of the kind described in (xi ) contain many good free (and therefore undetermined) choices and actions by rational creatures, and comparatively few bad ones, and the true CCFs are unfavourable to God’s creating such a world. Maybe in consequence God cannot bring into existence large communities of free people, all of which are characterized by justice, a rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose life embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together. Maybe, alternatively, the true CCFs enable him to do so but they do not enable him to do so while giving human beings much greater intelligence and a much longer typical natural lifespan. It might be objected that these hypotheses are nothing more than ad hoc, fanciful speculation. But the immediate issue is whether Molinists, and also people who have hitherto suspended judgement about Molinism, can confidently dismiss these hypotheses and thereby enable themselves to affirm (xi ). If it is not evident that they can, then (viii)–(xiv) is not a danger to Molinism.
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Here is a proposition, not involving evil, on the basis of which some philosophers will find the conjunction of (xi ) and (xiii) plausible: (S) In Alpha the good for human beings is limited to levels far below non-extravagant human aspirations. We do not find around us, except (at best) in a very sporadic fashion, large communities of people characterized by a justice, rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose lives embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together. Quite apart from disruptions involving evil, this truth is no accident. Important long-lasting features of human nature and the natural environment are not well set up to promote and sustain the existence of such communities. Surely God could have strongly actualized improvements. For example, he could have adjusted the weather so that it is more favourable to bountiful harvests. He could induce small variations in human fertility that would ensure that in all geographical areas the human population is well adjusted to the available natural resources. He could give human beings greater intelligence and creativity, and a greater natural lifespan, than they in fact typically have. It is tempting now to argue in two stages: firstly from claim (S) to (xi ) and (xii ), and then from (xi ) and (xiii), together with (viii), (ix), and (x), to (xiv). But in Section 5.2 I argued that this procedure is unsafe. To show that (viii) and (S) jointly provides a strong argument against Theological Determinism and Molinism it needs to be argued that if (viii)–(xi ) were all true, and either theological determinism or Molinism were true, then (S) would (probably, at least) be false. Let us focus on changes suggested in (S) which would be good-fortheir-own-sakes rather than as means or necessary conditions for states of affairs good-for-their-own-sakes. Consider, then, the truth that God could have created a world in which human beings were more intelligent and creative, and lived for longer (given favourable conditions), than is in fact the case. No doubt worlds in which he does so are in that respect better than Alpha. But this truth does not suffice to make it surprising that God created Alpha, since, given our current assumption that there are no prime worlds, whichever world God creates he will be able to create worlds that are much better all-things-considered, and therefore better in important specific respects. Koalas are less intelligent, and have shorter lives than God could have given them. But it is implausible to say that extra-terrestrial rational enquirers who believed that (viii)–(xi ) were all true, and that either
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Theological Determinism or Molinism was true, would expect koalas to be more intelligent, and to live longer, than koalas in fact do. Why should the same enquirers take a different attitude with respect to humans? Surely the extraterrestrial enquirers would note that humans’ actual levels of intelligence and creativity and their actual lifespans (under favourable conditions) are as great as is needed to foster large communities of people characterized by justice, a rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose lives embodies a wide range of human goods functioning well together. In the light of this truth, they would conclude that the relevant aspects of the actual situation are not surprising and disconcerting. Hence, leaving aside evil and its effects, there is no strong reason for the view that if (vii)–(x) were all true, and either Theological Determinism or Molinism were true, then humans would be more intelligent and creative, and longer living, than they are. We should conclude that the second horn of the dilemma does not constitute a threat to Theological Determinism and Molinism, independent of considerations concerning evil.
5 . 4 A N O B J E C T I O N TO O PE N T H E I S M Open Theists believe that God does not create the actual world, and that since he does not foreknow all that happens, many of his decisions and actions are based on incoming information about what has happened so far. Although they deny that there are true CCFs, they are quite free to maintain that there are truths of the kind If event E had occurred, the free (and therefore undetermined) creaturely decision D would still have been freely made. For example, suppose that Meg did not drink tea yesterday, and that the Prime Minister travelled to Melbourne this morning, and that given the context—for example, Meg was a university student, of no interest to any politically important person, and having no interest in whether the Prime Minister travelled to Melbourne today—there was no feasible way that her drinking tea yesterday could have affected the Prime Minister’s decision, or could have been caused by some event which also caused the Prime Minister’s decision. Surely the proposition Even if Meg had drunk tea yesterday, the Prime Minister would still have decided to travel to Melbourne this morning is true. If so, then it is also true that if Meg had drunk tea yesterday then the state of affairs Its being the case that both she drank tea yesterday and the Prime
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Minister freely decided to travel to Melbourne this morning would have obtained.⁶ Accordingly, we are now in a position to introduce the idea of world replacement. Let us say that God replaces world V by world W if and only if the following applies. • • • •
W is actual V contains state of affairs x but not y, and W contains y but not x God strongly actualizes the occurrence of y and the non-occurrence of x and if God had not so acted then V would have been the actual world
What motivates the definition is that it enables people to say that God can replace one world by another even if it is false in each of these worlds that he creates that world. Open Theists are immune from the objection to Theological Determinism and Molinism which Sections 5.1–5.3 discussed and cautiously dismissed. Nevertheless they face a closely related objection. Let us say that a world is premium if and only if God, if he exists, cannot replace it by a better world. All prime worlds are premium, but according to Open Theists, at least, not all premium worlds are prime.⁷ Open Theists need to deal with a dilemma which can be stated in the form of the following pair of arguments: (xv) There are premium worlds. [Assumption] (xvi) If God exists and there are premium worlds then God cannot replace Alpha by a better world. [Premiss] (xvii) If God exists then he cannot replace Alpha by a better world. [From xiv, xv] (xviii) If God exists then he can replace Alpha by a better world. [Premiss] (xix) God does not exist. [From xvii, xviii] (xx) There are no premium worlds.
[Assumption]
⁶ Some claims made in this paragraph are far from certain. This is not cause for concern, since they are made in order to set up an objection to Open Theism, an objection which, I will argue, fails. ⁷ Since all prime worlds are premium, the dilemma stated below also threatens Theological Determinists and Molinists.
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(xxi) If there are no premium worlds, and God exists, and he has the opportunity to take a sequence of actions which would result in a good enough world’s becoming actual, then the actual world is good enough. [Premiss] (xxii) If God exists then he has the opportunity to take a sequence of actions which would result in a good enough world’s becoming actual. [Premiss] (xxiii) If God exists then Alpha is good enough. [From xx–xxii] (xxiv) Alpha is not good enough. [Premiss] (xxv) God does not exist. [From xxiii, xxiv] Consider the first horn of the dilemma. Premiss (xvi) can perhaps be supported by an auxiliary argument, based on a slightly modified version of the principle Better Outcome/Action, which was employed in Chapter 4: Other things being equal, in bringing about the better overall outcome one acts in the better way. It is then argued that none of the defeaters which in general arise in connection with Better Outcome/Action need arise in connection with God’s replacing a non-premium world by a better one. For example, despite Open Theists’ admission that God sometimes takes risks, surely for any non-premium world God can always find at least one way of replacing it by a better world without thereby incurring any risk. For there will always be some improvement which can be strongly actualized, without having any effect at all on undetermined states of affairs such as free human choices. Nevertheless, even if we accept premiss (xvi), the first horn of the dilemma fails. For reasons given earlier in this chapter, the argument can and should be reformulated as follows: (6a) If God exists then he cannot replace Alpha by a better world. [Premiss] (6b) [specific empirical information about Alpha directly relevant to its improvability.] [Premiss] (6c) If God exists then he can replace Alpha by a better world. [From 6b] (6d) God does not exist. [From 6c, 6d] How should agnostics respond to the foregoing reasoning? Outside the context of (6a)–(6d) the inductive inference from (6b) to (6c) seems
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very strong. But surely agnostics should wonder whether it is defeated, or at least severely weakened, by the conjunction of the newly presented premiss (6a) together with the proposition (which they have hitherto affirmed) It is far from certain that God exists and it is far from certain that God does not exist. Maybe the impression that given (6b) one should believe (6c) depends on already taking it for granted it is not the case that both God exists and (6a) is true. So in a context in which (6a) is a premiss and the conclusion is God does not exist one should not rely on the inference from (6b) to (6c). Instead, philosophers who want to use (6a) and (1b) as the basis of a strong argument for (6d) must find a convincing line of thought bypassing (6c). One way of investigating the issue involves considering a hypothetical group of Open Theists who believe (6a) on a priori grounds, and also know that the earth has rational and other sentient inhabitants, but know nothing more about its history and current state. Leaving aside evil and its effects, would such people be surprised and disconcerted to find that (6b) was true? For reasons similar to those presented in Section 5.2, I conclude, cautiously, that they would not be. Consider now the second horn of the dilemma. It might be thought obvious that Open Theists will affirm (xxii). After all, they typically hold that if God had not brought anything into existence at all then the actual world, containing only necessary states of affairs and contingent ones involving him, would have been good enough. Such a world would not have been deficient or disappointing, because God himself is very good. If so, then the only way that (xxiv) could be true would be if the contingent states of affairs not involving God were on the whole very bad. Whether or not we should believe that they are seems to depend partly on the strength of an inductive inference from the observed balance of goods and evils around us, and partly on other issues which will be addressed in Chapters 6–8. But right now the main concern is whether (xx) and (xxi) generate a good objection to the existence of God which is independent of considerations about evil. The second horn is insecure. For reasons given earlier, in this context (xxii) should read: (xxii ) If God exists then he has the opportunity to take a sequence of actions which would result in a world which contains rational creatures and is such that the whole consisting of states of affairs involving these people (considered in abstraction from their
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relations to God) is not disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. It is far from clear that Open Theists should affirm (xxii ). Perhaps, for example, all non-disappointing worlds of the kind described in (xxii ) contain many good free (and therefore undetermined) choices and actions by the rational creatures, and comparatively few bad ones, and maybe there are no states of affairs which God could strongly actualize and which would result in the occurrence of many good free choices and actions and few bad ones. People are entitled to assert (xxii ) only if they are already entitled to assume that Open Theism is false. (Remember that Open Theists, like Theological Determinists, deny that there could be true CCFs. If in (xxii ) we replaced ‘would result’ by ‘would probably result’ we would get a proposition which perhaps some Open Theists would assent to, but this proposition would not fulfil the role assigned to it in (xx)–(xxv).) Furthermore, even if premiss (xxii ) were secure, the argument would still run into difficulties. For reasons given earlier, the key remaining issue is whether if God were to exist and if (xx)–(xxii ) were true then it would be anomalous or discordant that (S) and similar propositions were true. I argued at the end of Section 5.3 that, leaving aside evil and its effects, it would not be. We should conclude that the objection to Open Theism, based upon the apparent improvability of the world in respects unrelated to evil, is unsuccessful.
6 Logical Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God Let a logical argument from evil be an argument which fulfils or purports to fulfil the following conditions: (1) (2) (3) (4)
It is deductively valid. It has at least one contingent premiss concerning evil. All the non-contingent premisses are plausible. All its contingent premisses are widely known to be true, and are unlikely to be doubted by anyone whom the proponent of the argument is trying to persuade.
The fourth condition is motivated by the need to avoid its being the case that any evidential argument from evil can be turned into a logical one, in the ways exemplified by the following pattern. Let P and Q be, respectively, a plausible contingent proposition concerning evil and a plausible non-contingent proposition, such that P and Q; therefore there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being is an inductive argument.¹ From this inductive argument we can generate the argument P, Q, and there exists no omnipotent being; therefore there is no omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being. The latter argument fulfils the first three conditions stated above, but obviously if we count it as a logical argument from evil then we will trivialize the notion. The fourth condition suffices to avoid such an unwelcome outcome. Notice that the fourth condition entails, but is not entailed by, the circularityexcluding requirement that the premisses be not epistemically posterior to the conclusion. The stronger condition is needed because it is very far from clear that There is no omnipotent being is epistemically posterior to There is no omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being. ¹ As usual in this book, it is assumed that if God exists then he is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.
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This chapter states and assesses several logical arguments from evil against the existence of God.
6 . 1 M AC K I E ’ S 1 9 5 5 A RG U M E N T J. L. Mackie, in his paper ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, said: In its simplest form, the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three . . . However, the contradiction does not arise immediately; to show it we need some additional premisses, or perhaps some quasi-logical rules connecting the terms ‘‘good,’’ ‘‘evil,’’ and ‘‘omnipotent.’’ These additional principles are that good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can, and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. From these it follows that a good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely, and then the propositions that a good omnipotent thing exists, and that evil exists, are incompatible.²
One can show that P is logically incompatible with Q by appealing to the obvious logical incompatibility between P & R and Q, only if R is known to be a logically necessary truth. Section 1.10 broadened the meaning of ‘logically necessary’ to cover substantial moral principles whose truth is independent of contingent circumstances. Mackie, however, is evidently thinking of logical necessity in a narrower way, which is why he suggests that the additional premisses he needs can be usefully thought of as ‘quasi-logical rules’. The rest of Mackie’s article states and attacks various proposed solutions to the problem of evil. The exact modal classification of Mackie’s additional premisses does not matter much, however, because—as philosophers have long recognized—at least one of them is not true at all. Obviously a good person does not always eliminate evil as far as possible: for example, many people voluntarily expose themselves to suffering in pursuit of sporting achievement and scientific discovery, and this does not display a moral ² J. L. Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, Mind, 64 (1955), 200–12; repr. in M. Adams and R. Adams (eds.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford University Press, 1990)—the quotation is from pp. 25f.
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defect. More generally, good people often allow various particular evil states of affairs to occur not in order to minimize the overall level of evil but in order to achieve worthwhile goods for other people. Furthermore, it is very far from clear that there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do. Even leaving aside such tricky questions as whether an omnipotent being can forget an appointment, in Section 1.8. I pointed out that Molinists and Open Theists, at least, hold that there are contingent limitations on what an omnipotent being can do, and in Section 1.8.3. I suggested a definition of ‘omnipotence’ suitable for sustaining their view—an account that some Theological Determinists might find attractive too. Mackie is aware that his additional premisses might be challenged. Let us move to the stage where he is discussing the idea that the universe is better with some evil in it than it could be if there were no evil. He considers the idea that pain and misery constitute first-order evils which are logically necessary components of second-order good—such as, perhaps, sympathy with suffering and heroism in facing danger—and that the second-order good outweighs the first-order evil. Mackie argues that this idea fails to solve the problem of evil. The fatal objection, he says, is that there is also second-order evil, such as malevolence, cruelty, and cowardice. ‘We should, therefore, state the problem of evil in terms of second order evil, and against this form of the problem the present solution is useless.’³ Someone might try to solve this new problem by appeal to third-order goods, but if so, Mackie says, they would be faced with a new objection based on third-order evils, and so on ad infinitum. How did the theist’s appeal to second order goods address Mackie’s original argument? By providing reasons for rejecting the first additional premiss: we cannot say that it is a universal quasi-logical rule that all good ‘things’ always eliminate evil as far as they can, because a good and very powerful person might allow some first-order evils in order to make possible some appropriately related second-order goods.⁴ Mackie’s response involves not defending his first additional premiss but instead abandoning it. He does not assert that God is omnipotent and wholly good is logically incompatible with the truth Second-order evil exists, since ³ Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, p. 32. ⁴ The theist is also, obviously, pointing out that there is a problem with Mackie’s second additional premiss: even an omnipotent being cannot make possible, let alone bring about, certain second-order goods without allowing certain first-order evils.
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he acknowledges that this assertion might be vulnerable to an objection based on third-order goods for which second-order evils were logically necessary. So does he still want to maintain that God is omnipotent and wholly good is logically incompatible with some truth about evil? If so, which truth? Mackie says that even if second-order evil could be ‘explained’ in terms of some third-order good, ‘it is fairly clear that there would be third order evils contrasting with this third order good; and we should be well on the way to an infinite regress, where the solution of a problem of evil, stated in terms of evil(n), indicated the existence of an evil(n+1), and a further problem to be solved’.⁵ This approach will be convincing only if he explains why there is an asymmetry between good and evil, so that the existence of an evil(n+1) does not ‘indicate’ the existence of a good(n+2), and hence at every level of evil the problem is solved. Here is another way of expressing the same point. Mackie’s strategy seems to commit him to the proposition For some n, there are evils(n) such that there does not exist any outweighing good( n+1) such that even an omnipotent person cannot prevent the evil(n) without preventing the good( n+1). But he does not offer any argument in favour of this proposition. Without any argument, it is no more plausible than its rival, For some n, if there are evils(n) then there exists an outweighing good( n+1) such that even an omnipotent person cannot prevent evils(n) without preventing the good( n+1) but there are no evils( n+2). Mackie might argue for his own proposition by addressing the case in which, say, n = 3. He might specify what the evils(3) are, and then challenge theists to specify suitable goods(4). Suppose that Mackie succeeds in identifying his evils(3), and suppose that theists fail to come up with viable candidate goods(4). Will he have thereby established, or even rendered it highly plausible, that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being is logically incompatible with the existence of evils(3)? No. He would need to establish that it is logically impossible that there be evils(4). It should be pointed out that in his paper Mackie did not in fact identify any evils(3). If he had done so, then theists could have set about trying to deal with a more formidable challenge to their position. Suppose that Mackie had in fact identified some evil(3), and theists had failed to identify any goods(4). Then Mackie would have felt justified in employing the contingent premiss that there do not exist ⁵ Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, p. 32.
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goods(4). Nevertheless this premiss would not have been widely known to be true, and it would have been doubted by many whom Mackie is trying to persuade. Hence Mackie’s 1955 argument would still have fallen short of being a successful logical argument from evil. It is worth looking briefly at some remarks in Mackie’s book The Miracle of Theism that are relevant to the foregoing discussion. Mackie repudiates the claim that There is evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God, understood as omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. He defines an absorbed evil as one which is explained and justified by an outweighing good for which the evil is logically necessary. He admits that completely absorbed evils are logically compatible with theism, but declares that it is doubtful that unabsorbed evils are.⁶ He points out that the free-will defence is aimed at reconciling the existence of unabsorbed evils with the existence of God, but he argues that the attempt fails. Arguments advanced in my Chapter 7 cast doubt on what Mackie says about the matter, even if we accept his general compatibilism with respect to free will. How does Mackie know that there are unabsorbed evils? Maybe all apparently unabsorbed evils are in fact absorbed by states of affairs occurring in a very good afterlife. Rather than maintaining that this hypothesis is logically impossible, Mackie would reply that it is ad hoc, and therefore ineffective in upholding theism. Now unless Mackie has some other reply to the hypothesis, it is plain that his revised argument from evil should be classified as an evidential argument rather than a logical one. For the fact that there is little or no evidence in favour of a hypothesis and that it is therefore unworthy of belief does not show that its negation is known to be true and is unlikely to be doubted by anyone whom the proponent of the argument is trying to persuade—cf. The first person to climb Mt Wellington was 26 years old. Here is another way of expressing the point. A great many agnostics, let alone theists, will in the context of assessments of whether theism is true be properly reluctant to grant as a premiss the proposition God does not ensure that there is a very good afterlife in which all apparently unabsorbed evils are in fact absorbed by good states of affairs. This proposition must therefore be the conclusion of some argument, presumably one couched in terms of improbability or disconfirmation, and this argument will be nested within Mackie’s overall argument from evil, which accordingly counts as evidential. ⁶ J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Clarendon, 1982), 154f.
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Chapter 8’s treatment of evidential arguments advanced by Tooley and Rowe provides material for a direct reply to Mackie.
6 . 2 M C C LO S K EY ’ S 1 9 7 4 A RG U M E N TS H. J. McCloskey, in his book God and Evil, claims that the truth There is evil is logically incompatible with There exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being.⁷ He explains the need to supply an additional premiss in order to make the logical incompatibility plain by generating a formal contradiction. He admits that it has been more difficult to formulate such a premiss than it initially seemed. He then says: it is possible to state what is as relevant and adequate as such a principle here, namely, that an all-perfect being will always choose the world which is better than a world which is less good, and in particular, a world which is better and contains less evil than a world which is less good and contains more evil.⁸
Since, obviously, McCloskey is relying on the assumption that the all-perfect being’s choice is guaranteed to be effective, we can properly ascribe to him the view that the being is choosing a world to be created —that is, strongly or weakly actualized. In evaluating the strength of McCloskey’s reasoning, we should consider him to be advancing two overlapping arguments. Here is the first: (1) There are worlds that contain evil. Let W be one of them. (2) An omnipotent being can create a world which is better than W. (3) In all possible cases, given a choice between two worlds that are candidates for being created, one of which is better than the other, a perfectly good being will choose that the better world be created. (4) Therefore a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good will not create W. (5) The actual world contains evil. (6) Therefore the actual world was not created by a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good. (7) Therefore there does not exist an omnipotent and perfectly good being. ⁷ H. J. McCloskey, God and Evil (Nijhoff, 1974), 7–9, 77.
⁸ Ibid. 7f.
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If the foregoing argument is to show that (1) entails (4), then (2) and (3) must both be logically necessary truths. Are they? It is highly disputable. Let us start by considering (2). Suppose that every world better than W contains a rich array of good free choices and actions by rational creatures. As I pointed out in Sections 1.5 and 1.8, Open Theists affirm that God is omnipotent, yet they deny that God can create any world containing free choices and actions by rational creatures. Molinists also affirm that God is omnipotent, yet they are committed to saying that whether God can create a world of the kind described is a contingent matter, depending on whether the true CCFs are suitable. How about (3)? Suppose that the worlds better than W between which the perfectly good being can choose form an infinite series of better and better worlds. Then for reasons that should be plain from Section 3.3 the perfectly good being should satisfice—that is, choose a world despite the fact that there is a better world that could be chosen. So if W is good enough, the perfectly good being might well choose that W be created. Although the foregoing considerations fall short of proving that at least one of (2) and (3) is false, McCloskey has not argued persuasively that (2) and (3) are both true, let alone necessarily true. Therefore he has failed to show that (1) entails (4). Furthermore, it is highly doubtful that (6) entails (7). Remember that ‘creates’ in this context must mean ‘strongly or weakly actualizes’, for if the word ‘choose’ in (3) bears a meaning such that the chooser’s choice might be ineffective, premiss (3) loses much of its initial appeal. Now (6) entails (7) only if it is a necessary truth that if there is an omnipotent, omniscient being then he creates whichever world is actual. But Molinists and Open Theists reject the conditional, and many Theological Determinists will reject its logical necessity. Plainly, McCloskey’s first argument is not a good logical argument from evil against the existence of God. Here is McCloskey’s second argument: (1) There are worlds which contain evil. Let W be one of them. (2∗ ) An omnipotent being can create a world that both contains less evil than W and is better than W. (3∗ ) In all possible cases, given a choice between two worlds A and B which are candidates for being created, and are such that both A
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contains less evil than B and A is better than B, a perfectly good being will choose B. Therefore a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good will not create W. The actual world contains evil. Therefore the actual world was not created by a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good. Therefore there does not exist an omnipotent and perfectly good being.
It seems to me that this argument succumbs to objections very similar to those I raised against the first argument. Even though Mackie’s and McCloskey’s arguments fail, there might be some other, successful argument for the view that There is evil, or perhaps (for some n) There is n-th order evil, entails There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being. I am not aware of any such argument. In fact, very few philosophers in the last twenty-five years have tried to produce one.⁹ 6 . 3 A B S O LU T E M O R A L D U T I E S Even though the mere fact that there is evil, or that there is n-th-order evil, is logically compatible with the existence of God, perhaps there actually occur certain kinds of first-order evil—for example, horrific suffering by innocent people—which are logically incompatible with the existence of God. Let us start with a familiar passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where the character Ivan says: ⁹ The following argument is worth noting briefly: (1) If God exists then he is the indirect cause of many morally wrong actions and states of mind, and of much suffering. (2) If a rational agent directly or indirectly causes someone else’s moral wrongdoing or morally defective state of mind, or suffering, then even if it is morally permissible for the agent to do so, he or she must have some moral or metaphysical imperfection. (3) Hence if God exists he is morally or metaphysically imperfect. [From a, b] (4) If God exists then he is morally and metaphysically perfect. (5) Therefore God does not exist. [From c, d] There is a considerable literature bearing on premisses (a) and (b), just about all of it discussing various medieval and renaissance theories of causation.
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If all have to suffer so as to buy eternal harmony by their suffering, what have the children to do with it—tell me please? It is entirely incomprehensible why they should have to buy harmony by their sufferings.
There are two paths for atheists to take from this point. The first is to say: ‘It seems to me that there is not and could not be any adequate moral justification of God’s exposing children to great suffering, and so the suffering of children persuades me that God does not exist; I hope that you will come to see things the way I do’. Such words may carry weight with the theist. After all, even though Ivan’s own position is more nuanced than atheism or agnosticism, most readers recognize that he has advanced a formidable challenge to theism. The second path is to move beyond personal confession and appeal, to offer a discursive argument. This might involve, for example, producing an argument for the thesis that every possible rational agent possesses a moral duty to prevent evils of this or that kind, as far as the agent can—a duty which in all possible circumstances overrides all other considerations. The idea is that the thesis, if true, will be necessarily true, and suitable for displaying the logical incompatibility of the evils with the existence of God. If, contrary to expectation, the thesis is contingently true, then it might still figure in a good logical argument from the existence of great suffering by children, against the existence of God. Few professional philosophers have taken this second approach in print, even if it is likely that many would endorse it if asked. Lots of people advancing atheological arguments from evil have been consequentialists, and so disbelievers in absolute moral duties—that is, non-defeasible ones: duties which are necessarily exceptionless. D. Z. Phillips, for one, can surely be classified as an absolutist in view of the following criticism of Swinburne’s appeal to greater goods in theodicy: We have our reasons, final human reasons, for putting a moral full stop at many places . . . Often, when the invitation to consider consequences is made, the appropriate reply is ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ And if there is a ‘higher’ form of reasoning among God and his angels, where such matters are open for compromise and calculation, then so much the worse for God and his angels.¹⁰ ¹⁰ D. Z. Phillips, ‘The Problem of Evil’, in Stuart C. Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion (Cornell University Press, 1977), 115–16.
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But advancing a deontological objection to a strategy in theodicy does not commit one to advancing a deontological objection to the existence of God, based on evil.
6.3.1 Arguments where the Major Premiss Covers All Rational Agents Section 1.2 tried to allay unease about the moral propriety of stating and discussing examples of the following kinds (Argument I): (1) It is always morally impermissible to allow a child to be tortured when one knows that one could prevent it.¹¹ (2) Many children are in fact tortured. (3) If God exists and some child is tortured then God knows that he could prevent the instance of torture. (4) So if God exists, then he allows many children to be tortured, when he knows that he could prevent these instances of torture. (5) Therefore God does not exist. In Argument (I) there is no room for doubt that the second and third premisses are true. Even Open Theists should admit that at some moment shortly before each instance of torture God knows—perhaps not infallibly, but with even more certainty than the torturer and the victim possess—that this instance is about to occur unless God prevents it; and, at this moment God can prevent it. Furthermore, the existence of the torturer and the latest prospective victim are themselves problematic. God could have set up a system in which there were free agents but which prevented anyone from torturing anyone else. After all, he has set up a system which has so far prevented anyone’s riding a hippopotamus from Melbourne to Sydney. But is the first premiss a non-defeasible truth? Knock-down considerations either way are not to be expected.¹² But surely there are grounds ¹¹ Let It is morally impermissible to do such-and-such be construed as logically equivalent to There is a moral duty to not do such-and-such. ¹² The first premiss might be thought to follow from Kant’s third formulation of the categorical imperative, known as the ‘formula of the end in itself ’: Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), trans. in H. J. Paton, The Moral Law (Hutchinson, 1948), 91). Interpreting Kant’s formula, and working out how it applies to a wide range of ordinary moral cases, turn out to be very difficult tasks. What would Kant say about the various examples in this section?
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for serious doubt. Sometimes the one and only way that an agent can prevent someone else, a girl say, from being tortured is to kill her. In at least some of those appalling cases it will be in the interests of the girl herself that the agent allow her to be tortured rather than kill her. It is surely very far from obvious that in all cases falling into this subset the agent will have a moral duty to prevent the child’s being tortured, and therefore a derivative moral duty to kill her. Surely in some such cases the agent lacks the moral duty in question. There are, of course, important differences between the position of the human agent in these cases and the position of God. But this fact does not diminish the success of the example in its intended role, which is not to suggest a good reason that God might have for allowing children to be tortured, but rather merely to cast doubt on the non-defeasible status of the major premiss of Argument (I). Let us turn now to Argument (II), another proposed logical argument from evil, based on absolute moral duties: (1) It is always morally impermissible to knowingly cause children to suffer greatly, unless the suffering (or some evil at least as bad) is necessary for the greater good of these very children, and will probably contribute to their actually attaining the greater good. [Premiss] (2) If God exists then a great many children are in fact caused great suffering, as part of the workings of a system that God maintains in existence and continuously superintends. [Premiss] (3) God has caused all these children to suffer greatly. [From ii] (4) In some such cases, either it is false that the suffering (or some evil at least as bad) is necessary for the greater good of these very children, or else it is not probable that the suffering will contribute to their actually attaining the greater good. (5) Therefore God does not exist.¹³ [From i, iii, iv] Once again, knock-down considerations either way are not to be expected, but there are grounds for serious doubt about premiss (1). Before I explain why, it is worth looking briefly at the inference from (2) to (3). I assume that even Open Theists will agree that although God does not exercise strict control over free human choices, there is a sense in which he superintends them. Since God caused the key structural ¹³ This argument has obvious affinities with the one stated in n. 9, but is not identical with it.
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circumstances of life on this planet—the existence of the human species, our susceptibility to illness, injury, death, and so on—God’s moral responsibility for suffering involves more than his merely allowing suffering. But, granted this, does it follow that he has caused children’s suffering? Perhaps, to the extent that premiss (1) is plausible, the meaning of ‘cause’ in (1) and (3) must be value-laden—for example, with the idea that if there is credit or discredit to be assigned, then the agent who made the relevant causal contribution, or notably refrained from making a preventive intervention, should be assigned a substantial share in the credit or discredit. In that case, the inference from (2) to (3) is far from unproblematic, and needs a thorough investigation—for example, of the role of other agents, which may divert credit or discredit from God, to whom they would otherwise attach. I will not undertake such an investigation here. Anyway, it is surely plausible to suppose that if God exists then in some instances he has caused a child to suffer greatly. Let us now consider premiss (1). Sometimes a child suffers greatly as a result of his mother’s dying, or of suddenly being deprived of contact with his mother for a very long period, and this suffering is not in the interests of the child. In some of these situations the mother has voluntarily brought about her own death, sacrificing her life in a very good cause—for example, by giving up her place in a life-raft so that someone else may be saved. In other situations the mother has voluntarily departed into exile, even though she cannot take the child with her. The mother knows that her child will suffer greatly, and so finds herself in a tragic predicament. It is surely very far from obvious that in all such cases the mother’s actions involve her acting wrongly by violating a non-defeasible moral duty not to knowingly inflict great suffering on a child. In the examples given the mother foresees but does not intend the suffering that she brings about. What if in Argument (II) we replace the phrase ‘knowingly cause’ by ‘intentionally cause’? There is debate about whether it would ever be morally permissible for someone intentionally to torture a child in order to placate a madman who would otherwise torture ten other children (or commit some other atrocity). We need not enter this debate here. It suffices for my purposes to point out that even if the amendment turns the first premiss into what we should accept as a genuine absolute truth, the correspondingly amended second premiss becomes doubtful. Granted that if God exists then he causes some children to suffer greatly, what reasons do we have for agreeing that God intends of
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some children that they suffer greatly, when their doing so is either not necessary for their own greater good or will not probably contribute to it? Although it is easy to gain the impression that Theological Compatibilists and Molinists hold that God intends that many children undergo great suffering, this is not entailed by Comprehensive Providence. There are Biblical passages that can be read as implying that God has sometimes intended that children suffer greatly, but this chapter is concentrating on objections to the truth of God exists, based on what is entailed jointly by this proposition and publicly observed, virtually undisputed truths about evil. Atheological objectors can, of course, continue to tinker with Argument (II), and also with Argument (I), in the attempt to construct improved versions, with much more plausible premisses. But it may well turn out that for each such revised version one of the premisses lacks warrant. There is no reason to believe that future attempts will result in a true, strictly exceptionless moral premiss which, along with true minor premisses, will be apt for a sound absolutist objection to the existence of God.
6.3.2 An Argument whose Major Premiss Covers only Omnipotent, Omniscient Agents Rather different issues are raised by the next argument (III): (1) It would be morally permissible for an omnipotent, omniscient being to allow great suffering to occur to someone only if the suffering, together with the other very bad states in the person’s life, were outweighed by very good states in his or her life.¹⁴ (2) But there exist people in whose lives the good states do not outweigh the bad, such as children who for the whole of their short lives have been subject to severe physical and emotional abuse. (3) Therefore there does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being. Marilyn McCord Adams would reject the first premiss, on the grounds that God has no moral duties to creatures: ¹⁴ The atheist Michael Tooley asserts a proposition fairly close to the first premiss of Argument (III) on p. 113 of his paper ‘The Argument from Evil’, (Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), 89–134). His surrounding remarks show that he would be very favourably inclined to Argument (III), even if he does not quite advance it. The first premiss has also been asserted by a number of theists.
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Personal though God is, the metaphysical size-gap is too big for God to be drawn down into the network of rights and obligations that bind together merely human beings.¹⁵
Nevertheless Adams thinks that horrific evils, such as children’s being subject to severe physical and emotional abuse, raise problems of whether God is loving towards and good to created persons. She does not try to provide justificatory reasons for God’s policies and actions, but instead to offer partial explanatory reasons for them. She argues that if God loves individual created persons then any horrific evils they undergo are defeated within the person’s life.¹⁶ It is plausible to suppose that God is perfectly good only if God is good to any rational creatures he brings into existence. So even if Adams is correct in saying that God does not have moral duties or obligations towards us, theism is faced with a variant of Argument (III), obtained by replacing the original major premiss by If there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being then that being allows great suffering to occur to someone only if the suffering, together with the other very bad states in the person’s life, is outweighed by very good states in his or her life. The original major premiss implies that an omnipotent, omniscient being’s moral duty to not allow great suffering without outweighing goods for the sufferer cannot be defeated by conflicting moral duties, or by great goods for other people that might be produced or made possible by his allowing the individual’s suffering; nor can it be defeated by some requirement of retributive justice. It is hard to find strong arguments in favour of this premiss, but let us assume that it is true. How about the second premiss? The only viable way that theists can reject it is by saying that although there are individuals who in their earthly lifespans are overwhelmed by fear, pain, and other kinds of distress, these evils do not dominate their life as a whole, since their life as a whole includes a very long, perhaps everlasting, post-mortem life span which goes very well indeed.¹⁷ The issue that needs to be addressed here is not whether the occurrence of great goods in one’s very long post-mortem life span would suffice to justify an omnipotent and omniscient being’s allowing the suffering ¹⁵ Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 43. ¹⁶ ibid. 42–6. ¹⁷ Notice that this response to the second premiss does not require the claim that people’s post-mortem lives contain absorbing goods.
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one undergoes in one’s short earthly lifespan. It would not. The issue is rather whether appeal to an everlasting, very good afterlife succeeds in disposing of the threat to theism constituted by Argument (III). Philosophers sympathetic to Argument (III) are likely to reply: It doesn’t. All that the appeal to an afterlife can establish is that the observed, commonly agreed facts about evil are logically compatible with the conjunction of theism and the first premiss. But theism remains in deep trouble. For the existence of an afterlife is an ad hoc hypothesis. There are no good arguments, independent of assumptions including theism, for the existence of an afterlife at all, let alone a very long and very good one. Therefore the widely known truth that there are individuals who die in childhood and who in their earthly lifespans are overwhelmed by suffering constitutes very strong evidence against the truth of theism. Even if agnostics agree that the existence of an afterlife is unlikely, they might well maintain that just as we should neither believe nor disbelieve that God exists, so we should neither believe nor disbelieve that there is no afterlife. If they take this line, they might well maintain that we should neither believe nor disbelieve that there exist people whose entire life histories are dominated by suffering, even though it is plain that there are people whose life histories’ earthly stage is. In that case agnostics will say that the second premiss of Argument (III) is not known to be true, and that it is properly regarded as doubtful by many people whom the proponent of the argument is trying to persuade. Hence Argument (III) is not a strong logical argument from evil against the existence of God. It is best revamped, I think, in the following terms: Assuming that the major premiss is necessarily true, do various propositions that are widely known to be true and are unlikely to be disputed by anyone to whom the argument is addressed constitute strong prima facie evidence against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being? I postpone consideration of this matter to Section 8.3. 6 . 4 S C H E L L E N B E RG ’ S 1 9 9 3 A RG U M E N T J. L. Schellenberg, in his paper ‘Alpha-Claims and the Problem of Evil’,¹⁸ claims to identify a ‘logical problem of evil’, and says that strong inductive evidence against the existence of God generates ‘good reason ¹⁸ Sophia, 32/1 (1993), 56–61.
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to believe that the existence of certain actual evils actually entails the actual non-existence of God’.¹⁹ Nevertheless it is not clear whether Schellenberg’s intended conclusion is relevant to this chapter. This is because it is puzzling what he means by the foregoing claims, in the light of their prima facie incompatibility with various other remarks he makes. For he says that the critic of theism must admit that ‘there may be many possible worlds in which God exists and evils like E [an unspecified instance] exist’. Elsewhere in the paper he declares that even if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good is logically consistent with There is evil, we have good reasons for believing that two other, but related propositions to which theists are committed are mutually inconsistent. The inconsistency of these other two propositions seems both to play a central role in Schellenberg’s argument for the first, dramatic inconsistency claim, and also to contribute to a case against theism that is independent of the first claim. The question which is important for this chapter is whether Schellenberg in fact shows that if there are evils which are strong inductive evidence against the existence of God then it provides good reason to believe that the existence of these evils entails the non-existence of God. Schellenberg says that the world-indexed proposition The actual world (Alpha) includes Socrates’ being snub-nosed, if true, is necessarily true. So he must be using the symbol ‘Alpha’ to rigidly designate the actual world; so truths about what Alpha contains are logically necessary, while it is contingently true that Alpha is actual. In that case, he is correct in saying that strong inductive evidence for No omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God exists constitutes strong inductive evidence for saying that Alpha includes God’s being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good is inconsistent with Alpha includes there being evil. (We do not need Schellenberg’s own long argument on his pp. 59–60 to recognize this. For the propositions expressed by the last two italicized sentences are consistent if and only if they are both logically possible, and hence only if they are both true; and, as a matter of contingent fact, they are both true only if God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.) Schellenberg is also correct in saying that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good is true if and only if Alpha includes God’s being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good is true, and There is evil is true if and only if Alpha includes there being evil. ¹⁹ Ibid. 57, 60.
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Nevertheless it would be fallacious to infer, from the various propositions I endorsed in the previous paragraph, that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good is inconsistent with There is evil. For the two equivalences identified two sentences ago are material equivalences, not logical equivalences. This is because it is only a contingent truth that Alpha is actual. Look at it this way: Atheists typically hold that snow is white and that Caesar is dead. They therefore hold that, as matters of contingent fact, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good is true if and only if Snow is black is true, and There is evil is true if and only if Caesar is dead is true. They would not want to then add some true truths about the consistency or inconsistency of various Alpha-indexed propositions, and to conclude that Snow is black is inconsistent with Caesar is dead. Schellenberg’s final three sentences are as follows: Of course, in thus asking after the consistency of [Alpha includes God’s being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good ] with [Alpha includes there being evil], we are restricting our attention to the actual world: the critic of theism must admit that, even if [Alpha includes God’s being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good ] is inconsistent with [Alpha includes there being evil], there may yet be possible worlds in which God and evils like E coexist. But is not the actual world the world with which we should be most concerned?²⁰
If the two propositions are mutually inconsistent, then we can conclude that Alpha does not include both evil and an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God. The degree of confidence that we are entitled to have in this conclusion, however, is determined entirely by the strength of our inductive evidence against the existence of a God of the supposed kind. (The relevant evidence cited in Schellenberg’s paper is the existence of evils for which we do not know of any morally sufficient reason.) Schellenberg takes a detour via the mutual consistency or inconsistency of various claims about what Alpha includes, but the detour yields no worthwhile results that supplement the traditional evidential case against theism. This is precisely what we would have expected without spotting the specific fallacy I identified three paragraphs ago. Simply replace There is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God by Cathy is a very good architect, and construct an inductive argument against the latter proposition, based on her having specified an obsolete air-conditioning ²⁰ Sophia, 32/1 (1993), 60.
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system in some building design. Such an argument would provide a reason for believing that Alpha contains Cathy’s being a very good architect is logically inconsistent with Alpha contains Cathy’s having included this feature in her design. But it would do nothing to create a difficulty for defenders of Cathy’s status as a very good architect, over and above the straightforward empirical objection provided jointly by the obsolete air-conditioning specifications. Obviously there may be logical arguments from evil which I have not stated and discussed.
7 Theodicy for Two General Truths about Evil 7 . 1 A I M S A N D O PE N I N G C O N S I D E R AT I O N S Philosophers sometimes use the word ‘theodicy’ to cover accounts of why God allows evil (or certain kinds of evil)—that is, to cover accounts of God’s actual reasons for allowing it, along with an explanation of why God’s acting on these reasons morally justifies his allowing the evil. In this book, however, ‘theodicy’ will be used in a slightly broader way, so that it also covers (the specification of) truths which suffice to justify God’s allowing certain propositions about evil to be true, whether or not these are the reasons on which God acted. God is morally justified in virtue of the specified truths.¹ If God is morally justified in virtue of some truth, then he may also be morally justified in virtue of some other truth. He will have taken both of them into account. Yet it does not follow that the first one, say, deserves the description ‘God’s reason’ for permitting evil (or the kind of evil under discussion).² This chapter deals with theodicies for two general truths: (1) In the actual world, human beings undergo a lot of suffering, weakness, paralysis, blindness, psychosis, mental retardation, and so on. ¹ The theologian John K. Roth is writing in an unusual way—one might say ‘a deviant way’—when he calls his response to God and evil a ‘theodicy’: he denies God’s perfect goodness. His chapter ‘A Theodicy of Protest’ appears in Stephen T. Davis (ed.), Encountering Evil (T & T Clark, 1981). ² Some propositions which entail that God is justified in allowing the existence of suffering do not justify God’s allowing suffering and so are not theodicies for There is suffering even if they are true—for instance, the proposition God is justified in allowing suffering is not. The matter turns on the overarching problem of explaining the relation in virtue of.
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(2) The actual world contains a great many serious cases of morally wrong choosing, acting, and failing to act. The theodicies provided below cover only the foregoing two general truths. In relation to the totality of evil in the actual world the chapter offers at most only a partial account. It says nothing about animal suffering, nothing about suffering which is neither caused by nor preventable by human beings, and nothing about whether an omnipotent, omniscient being, if one were to exist, would be morally justified in allowing as much evil as there is in the actual world.³ Why bother with such severely restricted results? One important reason is that they can play a useful role in warding off objections to theism based on more specific truths about evil. The results of this chapter will be put to work in the next one.⁴ Sections 7.2–7.11 address the first of the two general truths stated above, while Sections 7.12–7.14 address the second. The overall strategy of the chapter is neutral between theological compatibilism, Molinism, and open theism.
7 . 2 T H E C O R E A RG U M E N T C O N C E R N I N G S U F F E R I N G A N D DY S F U N C T I O N : F I R S T PA RT Let ‘dysfunction’ refer to problems such as paralysis, blindness, senile dementia, breakdowns in family life, and so on. ‘Suffering’ and ‘dysfunction’ will always refer merely to serious evils undergone by human beings, except when non-rational animals are explicitly under discussion. For convenience of exposition, I will begin by tackling the truth that there exists some suffering and dysfunction, and then tackle the truth ³ Marilyn McCord Adams draws attention to ‘a pair of distinctions (i) between two dimensions of Divine goodness in relation to creation—namely ‘‘producer of global goods’’ and ‘‘goodness to or love of individual created persons’’—and (ii) between the overbalance/defeat of evil on the global scale, and the overbalance/defeat of evil within the context of an individual person’s life’. Correspondingly, she says, ‘we may separate two problems of evil parallel to the two sorts of goodness mentioned in (i)’ (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999), 29–30.) I agree. Sections 6.3 and 8.3 deal with certain specified objections from horrific evils to the existence of a God who is good to every individual person. ⁴ In fact, when considering Rowe’s evidential argument from evil I argue that if God exists then one would not expect, for every more specific kind of evil, to know of the goods that justify God’s allowing there to be evil of that kind, and nor would one expect, for every instance of evil, to know of the goods that justify God’s allowing that instance.
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that there exists a lot of suffering and dysfunction. In each case, I attack a certain claim about what God is morally required to do, by identifying certain goods which would be lost if God acted in accordance with the alleged moral requirement. The relevant truths about these goods provide the theodicy. Moral requirements on God to treat some group in certain ways are of two kinds: fundamental ones, which are independent of contingent features of the group and God’s relationship with it, and non-fundamental ones, which depend on contingent truths. If God promises to confer some specific benefit on some specific group, then this will create a non-fundamental moral obligation for him to keep his promise by conferring the benefit. But surely if God is required to ensure that there is no human suffering or dysfunction then the requirement does not arise from contingent intentions he forms or from states of affairs he causes: it arises jointly from essential features of human beings and of suffering and dysfunction. (1) Necessarily, even if there is no non-defeasible moral side constraint which requires an omnipotent, omniscient being to ensure that rational creatures undergo no suffering or dysfunction, considerations based on consequences but not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe make it a fundamental moral requirement that such a being ensure that rational creatures undergo no suffering or dysfunction.⁵ [Assumption for reductio] (2) Necessarily, R is a fundamental moral requirement applying to an omnipotent, omniscient being and R is not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe if and only if an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being possesses strong reasons allthings-considered, not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe, for acting in accordance with R. [Premiss] (3) Necessarily, if there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being then he possesses strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he might make, that if he were to bring rational creatures into existence then he would ensure that they underwent no suffering or dysfunction. [From 1, 2] ⁵ Robert Nozick distinguished between moral side constraints and moral goals in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Blackwell, 1974), 29.
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(4) Let settled worlds be all and only those worlds in which there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being and he brings into existence rational creatures [Stipulation] (5) It follows that in all settled worlds (i) rational creatures undergo no suffering or dysfunction, and (ii) rational creatures are not free and morally responsible in refraining from causing individual instances of suffering or dysfunction, and (iii) whether or not rational creatures undergo any suffering or dysfunction does not depend on individual rational creatures’ personalities, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, or intentions. [From 3, 4] (6) In each settled world the value that has thereby been lost is very great, and greater than the disvalue of there being some suffering and dysfunction. [Premiss] (7) Necessarily there is no non-defeasible moral side constraint which requires an omnipotent, omniscient being, if there is one, to ensure that rational creatures undergo no suffering or dysfunction (and which therefore defeats the specified considerations bound up with consequences concerning freedom, etc.). [Premiss] (8) Therefore in all settled worlds the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being lacks strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he might make, to ensure that rational creatures undergo no suffering or dysfunction. [From 5, 6, 7] (9) But (8) is logically incompatible with (3). Since we should accept that (3)&(4) entails (5), and since we should accept premisses (6) and (7), we should reject (3). Then, having rejected (3), we should reject (1). The word ‘Necessarily’, at various places in the core argument, reflects the view, explained in Section 1.10, that if a moral principle holds independently of contingent non-moral circumstances then the principle is necessarily true. A moral principle’s being necessary is compatible with its being defeasible—that is, with its incorporating an other things being equal clause or a similar device. Considerations of consequences can apply independently of contingent circumstances, because it is a necessary truth that God can bring about various consequences. The core argument does not employ or depend upon the assumption that it would sometimes or usually or always be morally wrong for
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people to cause or voluntarily allow themselves or other people to undergo suffering or dysfunction. Let us assume that (7) has been rendered plausible by the discussion of non-defeasible moral duties contained in Section 6.3, and that (2) is so obviously true as to need no defence here.
7 . 3 T H E I N F E R E N C E F RO M ( 3 ) A N D ( 4 ) TO ( 5 ) : T H E O LO G I C A L - C O M PAT I B I L I ST A N A LY S I S
7.3.1 The Main Considerations It will be useful to have in hand a distinction between people’s being morally responsible for its being true that p, and their being morally responsible for their having caused, or made a causal contribution to, its being true that p. Suppose that Tom knows that, inevitably, if he does not shut the door then someone else will do so. Considering only actions that are in Tom’s power, the door will be shut whatever he does or does not do. Then he is not morally responsible for the fact that the door will be shut.⁶ Yet given that Tom does in fact shut the door, it may well be the case that he is responsible for this fact and therefore for his being the cause of the door’s being shut. Assume that generally speaking God’s strongly actualizing a state of affairs is compatible with some rational creature’s being morally responsible for its obtaining. Let W1 be some settled world. Given our assumption that (3) is true, it is true in W1. (For (3) is of the form Necessarily p, and Necessarily p entails Necessarily necessarily p; so if Necessarily p is true in the actual world then it is true in every world.) Necessarily, an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being does not suffer from akrasia: he always acts on what he has strong reasons all-things-considered to do. It follows that in W1 there is no suffering or dysfunction. Suppose that in W1 God has strongly actualized both There being wool and There not being any woollen hats. Compare In W1, there is no ⁶ This statement should be qualified as follows. Suppose that at some past time Tom could have acted, but culpably failed to act, in a certain way such that if he had so acted, then it would in consequence have now been in his control whether the door will be shut—for example, if he could have and should have ensured that no one else was there and waiting to shut the door if he did not. In this case, if Tom did shut the door then he might now be held morally responsible for the door’s being shut.
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suffering or dysfunction with In W1 there are no woollen hats. In W1 each is true, and God has ensured that each is true. Yet presumably God might easily have had a different intention with respect to woollen hats. For even if God formed this intention before he brought anything at all into existence, God’s having this intention is presumably for reasons which are subtly dependent upon the fine details of other divine intentions, which themselves might have been different. But God’s intending that there is no suffering or dysfunction does not depend on the fine details of other divine intentions: for we are supposing that his intention was formed and is sustained by strong reasons all-things-considered, which he possessed independently of taking any other resolutions. Even if God’s perfect goodness is not essential to him, there is no risk at all that he will fail to act in accordance with what he has strong reasons all-things-considered to do. Indeed, as Morris argues, if God is in time and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good before taking any creative decisions, then it follows that he is perfectly good at all later times (and will therefore do what he has best reasons for doing).⁷ So it is not the case that God ‘might easily’ have decided to allow suffering or dysfunction. Hence in W1 it is true both that God ensured that there are no woollen hats and also that there might have been woollen hats; but in W1 it is not true that rational creatures might have undergone suffering or dysfunction. On any plausible compatibilist view of freedom and moral responsibility whether or not you are free and morally responsible in acting depends on how your action is determined. Compatibilists maintain that you can be free and morally responsible in acting even if the way you act is determined by circumstances holding fifty years ago. But you cannot be free and morally responsible in acting in doing X if you were genetically engineered during an in-vitro fertilization process to do X, in the sense that as long as you are alive and capable of acting at all you will do X and this fact is determined by that past genetic engineering. Compatibilists should also recognize that if refraining from doing X is logically incompatible with conjunction of the laws of nature and truths about major structural features of the universe and its history, such as There is carbon or The physical universe began with a big bang about fourteen billion years ago, then no human being acts freely or morally responsibly in refraining from doing X, and it is inevitable that no one does X. ⁷ T. Morris, ‘Properties, Modalities and God’, Philosophical Review, 93 (1984), 35–56.
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It is true of every person S that S’s causing, or causally contributing to, an instance of suffering or dysfunction is logically incompatible with (3)&God exists. Since (3), if true, is necessarily true, it follows that it is true of every person S that S’s causing, or causally contributing to, an instance of suffering or dysfunction is logically incompatible with God exists. But even if God exists is contingent, its truth is not an accident; it is not a causal consequence of circumstances which might easily have been different, since if God is in time at all he has always existed, there was never any chance that God would fail to come into existence, and there has never been a chance that God would cease to exist or cease to be omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. The existence of God is a major structural feature of reality. Hence given that (3) is true, in every settled world it is inevitable that no one causes an instance of suffering or dysfunction, and no one freely refrains from doing so, and no one is morally responsible for refraining from doing so. The foregoing argument has not relied on the assumption, rejected by compatibilists, that, in all cases, if a state of affairs obtains and whether it obtains has always been outside anyone’s control, then every state of affairs logically incompatible with this one is such that no one is ever free and morally responsible in refraining from causing it. Nor has it relied on the assumption that people are free and morally responsible in refraining from doing X, only if they can do X. I asserted No one is morally responsible in refraining from doing X if her doing X is logically incompatible with ‘God exists’ simply because it seemed intuitively obvious to me, just as many compatibilists will find it intuitively obvious that •
•
some action descriptions are impossible in ways that preclude any human’s being morally responsible for not fulfilling them—for example, run a marathon in ten minutes, and if a state of affairs is logically incompatible with the conjunction of the laws of nature and Carbon exists or with The universe began with a big bang about fourteen billion years ago then no one is free and morally responsible in refraining from bringing about that state of affairs.
The relevant truths about human bodies, the chemical elements, and the origins of the universe are not just any old initial conditions. If the state of affairs There being some rational creature who does X is logically incompatible with the conjunction of the laws of nature and some major structural feature of the universe or its history, then for every
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particular person whether or not that person does X is independent of that person’s personality, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, and intentions. Similarly, if the (3)&God exists is true then whether or not there is suffering or dysfunction does not depend on anyone’s distinctive traits.
7.3.2 Distinctive Personal Traits and The Proximate Causes of Action It is worth my providing an additional argument for the foregoing claim. Let us focus on a particular inhabitant of settled world W1, Alice. What are the proximate causes of its being the case that Alice never causes suffering or dysfunction? There are two candidate TheologicalCompatibilist explanations. Firstly, God might have strongly actualized laws of nature which jointly guarantee that there cannot be any suffering or dysfunction. Obviously if this were the approach God adopted in W1 then for every particular person the fact that neither she herself nor anyone else ever experienced suffering or dysfunction would not depend on her distinctive personal traits—just as, in fact, not running a marathon in ten minutes does not depend on anyone’s distinctive personal traits. It is the second candidate explanation that requires more scrutiny here: in W1 God strongly actualizes Alice’s not causing suffering or dysfunction by means which vary from occasion to occasion. At any given time the cause of Alice’s not causing suffering or dysfunction might be any of the items on the following open-ended list: • • •
• •
Alice takes careful steps in order to avoid causing harm. Alice wants to act in a way which she does not realize would cause serious harm, but she is distracted before she finalizes her plans. Alice accidentally initiates a causal process which if completed would cause harm, but this causal process is stopped or diverted by someone who realizes the danger and acts to prevent the calamity. Alice accidentally initiates a dangerous causal process which is stopped or diverted by sheer coincidence. Nothing like the foregoing occurs, but God intervenes miraculously to prevent Alice’s initiating a dangerous causal process, or to interrupt or divert the process once it has begun.
Suppose that you are in some country where the secret police have been ordered by the president to prevent you from going back to your
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hotel room tonight, but to leave you the illusion that you are free to do so. They devise a sequence of expedients, each one being activated if and only if the preceding one does not succeed. They arrange for you to be invited to spend the night at the president’s ranch, hoping that for your own reasons you will go. If you decline the invitation then they will organize a bogus phone call from your boss saying that an emergency has arisen and you should catch the next flight to Melbourne. If you do not catch the flight . . . and so on. Surely, given the power and the overriding purpose of the secret police, you are not in control of whether you go back to your hotel room tonight. You are free and self-governing about whether you accept the invitation to spend the night at the ranch; and whether or not you do so depends on your own distinctive personal beliefs, preferences, commitments, and so on. But even if in fact you voluntarily stay overnight at the ranch, you will have been subject to a manipulative system: your circumstances will be adjusted as much as needed to achieve a fixed outcome—your not going back to your hotel room—irrespective of the preferences and intentions you would have had in the absence of domination, in the relevant respects, by the secret police. Alice’s position is similar in a crucial respect: ex hypothesi, in W1 God is adjusting both Alice’s external circumstances and also her inner states in order to achieve a general overall result, namely her not causing harm, which became fixed, in a way that did not depend on her actual character, wishes, and feelings, even before God decided to bring into existence rational creatures at all. In W1 whether Alice never causes harm is independent of her distinctive personal traits, even if on many occasions these traits play a significant role in the actual causal chain leading to her refraining from causing a particular instance of harm—or, indeed, leading to her preventing harm.
7.3.3 Exploring the Restrictions on Freedom and Responsibility We are entitled to assume that in settled worlds most people are not beset by massive cognitive error concerning their everyday experience. We might support the assumption by the Cartesian principle that God is no deceiver; alternatively, we might fall back on the conclusion, already reached, that in settled worlds there is no dysfunction, and conjoin it
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with the claim that massive cognitive error is a kind of dysfunction.⁸ Accordingly, if (3) is true then in W1 people know on complex and overwhelming inductive grounds that there is no significant chance that anyone will undergo suffering or dysfunction, just as in the actual world most people know that there is no significant chance that they will meet a centaur. Therefore if (3) is true then in W1 no one is free to choose to cause suffering or dysfunction; no one can intend to cause suffering or dysfunction. For you can choose to cause a state of affairs, and you can intend to cause it, only if you believe that there is a significant chance that you will succeed in doing so.⁹ Furthermore, in W1 people also know that there is no significant chance that anyone will undergo suffering whatever they do or refrain from doing: sloppy planning, unwise choices, forgetfulness, inattention, misunderstanding, clumsiness, and malicious intentions never cause anyone—the agents themselves, their families and friends, or anyone else—to be seriously hurt. It is worth reflecting on just how great the restriction of human responsibility would be. In the actual world getting married involves assuming strong imperfect duties to promote one’s spouse’s well-being, and in normal cases one’s degrees of sensitivity, generosity of spirit, and practical wisdom have a big effect on the other person’s quality of life. Now if the rational creatures in W1 are humans then in W1 no one’s inadequacies as a husband or wife cause the other person to undergo suffering or dysfunction. But might these inadequacies cause the relationship to become stale, and of little positive importance to one’s spouse? If so, this counts as a major failure: a relationship which ought to be making a major contribution to the other person’s being happy, and leading a fulfilled life for a human being, is not doing so, and this is at least partly because of one’s own personal inadequacies. The defective condition of the marriage is a very bad state of affairs, just as quadriplegia is a very bad state of affairs. It amounts to dysfunction. Yet if (3) is true then in W1, ex hypothesi, people do not undergo dysfunction. Therefore in W1 no marriages are tedious, insipid, dreary, or boring, and in no marriage is either husband or wife morally ⁸ Cf. Swinburne’s Principle of honesty, which he states and defends in Providence and the Problem of Evil (Clarendon, 1998, 138–41). ⁹ You can try to do something without either choosing or intending to do it. For example one might say to a child, ‘No one can touch their left elbow with their left hand: let us both try to do it, and you’ll see that I am right’. Here is a case of choosing and intending to try to do something without choosing or intending to do it.
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responsible for whether or not the other partner finds the marriage defective in these ways. Moreover, it is a necessary truth that if a marriage is healthy and fulfilling then the two spouses have caused it to be healthy and fulfilling. Yet if (3) is true and in W1 there are marriages, then in W1 neither husband nor wife shares with the other partner the moral responsibility for its being the case that they cause the marriage to be continually healthy and fulfilling, and so and of great positive value in their lives. For there was never any chance that they would fail to do so, and this fact was fixed by the fact that, ex hypothesi, God exists. Furthermore the truth that the marriage is healthy and fulfilling does not depend on the partners’ distinctive personal traits—even though the exact processes by which its healthy and fulfilling state is maintained do so depend. Alongside marriage, consider parenting. In W1 all adults and many children know that although thinking carefully about how one’s child is coping, listening closely to what they are saying, being there when they need you, making sure that the house is a physically safe environment, and all the skills and dispositions bound up with good parenting are in various ways important, nevertheless they make not the slightest difference to whether one’s child suffers, or undergoes dysfunction. In the actual world these things make a great deal of difference. In the actual world parents, together with teachers and others, have high levels of moral responsibility for the growth of children in intellectual and technical skills, in knowledge, and in virtue. But not every parent, however well intentioned, is skilled in parenting. All too often parents hold mistaken beliefs about how learning occurs, or they do not know how to communicate well with children, or they are insensitive to unfulfilled needs that are hampering the child’s ability or willingness to learn, or they are too busy or too tired to make much of an effort. All too often the result is that the child’s potential interest in the natural world, or the past, or other societies, or good literature, is left undeveloped or even stifled, and they do not learn many important intellectual skills or acquire qualities like practical wisdom, breadth of curiosity, and self-control. Such cases normally constitute a major collective failure by the adults who bore responsibility for educating the child. It is very bad indeed that the child is missing out on the development of these skills and personal virtues. I am not claiming that in societies where children learn very little mathematics, or are taught very little about other societies, the
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children must be leading stunted lives. Anyone constructing a theory of the intellectual skills and interests which are most central to eudaimonia—the good life for a human being, human flourishing—must find the right level of description of the skills and interests. Obviously there can be trade-offs—for example, underdevelopment of theoretical enquiry might be compensated for by great practical wisdom. But we can still say that when children or teenagers have low levels, relative to their age, of a range of learning-related personal qualities—especially practical wisdom, self-control, and interest in their natural and social surroundings—they are at this stage of their life dysfunctional in significant respects. But if (3) is true then in W1 ex hypothesi there is no dysfunction. Therefore in W1 children always develop a range of the relevant good personal qualities. Parents and other adults are not morally responsible for whether children develop an adequate range of these qualities, even if they are morally responsible for making a causal contribution to the children’s developing them. And whether children develop an adequate range of qualities does not depend on the parents’ distinctive personal traits, even if just which good personal qualities are developed does so depend. My talk of marriage and parenting was merely by way of illustration: perhaps there are settled worlds in which the rational creatures are not human, and in which marriage and parenting do not exist. Yet it is hard to envisage any flourishing community of rational creatures lacking intimate interpersonal relationships, and the nurture of immature persons in stable relationships with mature ones.
7 . 4 T H E I N F E R E N C E F RO M ( 3 ) A N D ( 4 ) TO ( 5 ) : O PE N T H E I S T A N D M O L I N I S T A N A LY S E S Little needs to be said about the Open Theist view of why (3) and (4) imply (5). It is obvious that if Open Theism is true then God cannot both bring into existence rational creatures who are free and morally responsible with respect to causing dysfunction and suffering, and also strongly or weakly actualize their causing no suffering or dysfunction. The argument for saying that if (3) were true then in settled worlds whether or not there was any suffering or dysfunction would not depend on people’s distinctive traits can be taken over from Section 7.3.
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Consider now the Molinist approach. Let (B) be the proposition According to the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom there is a possible set of circumstances which God could have strongly actualized and given which there would have been many free creatures but they never caused suffering or dysfunction. My argument proceeds via a dilemma. Molinists regard (B) as either contingently true or contingently false. If Molinism is true and (B) is false then, as a matter of contingent fact, God could not have brought into existence many free creatures and weakly actualized their never causing suffering or dysfunction.¹⁰ In those circumstances, if (3) were true and God brought rational creatures into existence then God would strongly actualize rational creatures’ never undergoing suffering or dysfunction. In that case Molinists, being libertarians, are committed to saying that clauses (i) and (ii) of (5) are true; and reasoning similar to that presented in Section 7.3 would establish the truth of clause (iii) of (5). So let us provisionally assume that (B) is true, and let us see where that assumption takes us. Consider some settled world, W2, in which (B) is true. Notice that given that (3) is true, it is necessarily true, and therefore true in W2. In W2 God exists and (B) both state major structural constraints on how things work: for according to Molinists, the truth of each true counterfactual of creaturely freedom is metaphysically prior to God’s deciding to bring anything into existence, and therefore does not depend on any decisions that any rational creature makes. Accordingly, since (3)&God exists&(B) entails that people never cause suffering or dysfunction, it follows that in W2 whether or not people cause suffering or dysfunction is not up to them. For each particular person it is inevitable on all occasions that he or she does not do so. Therefore in W2 people are not free and morally responsible in refraining from causing or causally contributing to suffering or dysfunction. Molinists can employ arguments offered in Section 7.3, with only minor changes, in order to argue that (3) entails that in settled worlds whether or not there is any suffering or dysfunction does not depend on individual rational creatures’ personalities, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, or intentions. ¹⁰ Section 1.8.3 offered Molinists an account of the concept of omnipotence with respect to world creation which would enable them to maintain that God is nevertheless omnipotent.
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7 . 5 A S H O RT R E M A R K A B O U T P R E M I S S ( 6 ) I am inclined to think that (6) is obviously true, and that no one is likely to dispute it. If I am wrong, then the error will be redressed in Section 7.8, which argues at length that freedom, moral responsibility, and self-direction with respect to suffering and dysfunction would be worth a lot of (and therefore some) suffering and dysfunction. Given that Sections 7.3 and 7.4 established that (3) and (4) jointly imply (5), and given that Premisses (6) and (7) are true, (8) follows, and so we have a reductio ad absurdum of (3). Accordingly, we can reject (1). The next three sections tackle the truth that the world contains a lot of suffering and dysfunction.
7 . 6 T H E C O R E A RG U M E N T C O N C E R N I N G S U F F E R I N G A N D DY S F U N C T I O N : S E C O N D PA RT
7.6.1 The Argument (1∗ ) Necessarily, even if there is no non-defeasible moral side constraint which requires an omnipotent, omniscient being to ensure that rational creatures undergo no suffering or dysfunction, considerations based on consequences but not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe make it a fundamental moral requirement that such a being ensure that rational creatures do not undergo a lot of suffering or dysfunction. [Assumption for reductio] ∗ (2 ) Necessarily, R is a fundamental moral requirement of morally right action and morally virtuous character, applying to R is not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe if and only if an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being possesses strong reasons all-things-considered, not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe, for acting in accordance with R. [Premiss]. ∗ (3 ) Necessarily, if there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being then he possesses strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he might make, that if he were to bring rational creatures
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(4∗ ) (5∗ )
(6∗ ) (7∗ )
(8∗ )
(9∗ )
God, the Best, and Evil into existence then he would ensure that they did not undergo a lot of suffering or dysfunction. [From 1∗ , 2∗ ] Let settled worlds be all and only those worlds in which there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being and he brings into existence rational creatures. [Stipulation] It follows that in all settled worlds (i) rational creatures do not undergo much suffering or dysfunction, and (ii) rational creatures have a low degree of freedom and moral responsibility in refraining from causing individual instances of suffering or dysfunction, and (iii) whether or not rational creatures undergo a lot of suffering or dysfunction depends only to a small extent on individual rational creatures’ personalities, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, or intentions. [From 3∗ , 4∗ ] In each settled world the value that has thereby been lost is very great, and greater than the disvalue of there being much suffering and dysfunction. [Premiss] Necessarily there is no non-defeasible moral side constraint which requires an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, if there is one, to make a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he might make, to ensure that rational creatures do not undergo much suffering or dysfunction (and which therefore defeats the specified considerations bound up with freedom, etc.). [Premiss] Therefore in all settled worlds, the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being lacks strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he might make, to ensure that rational creatures undergo not much suffering or dysfunction. [From 5∗ , 6∗ , 7∗ ] But (8∗ ) is logically incompatible with (3∗ ). Since we should accept that (3∗ )&(4∗ ) entails (5∗ ), and since we should accept premisses (6∗ ) and (7∗ ), we should reject (3∗ ). Then, having rejected (3∗ ), we should reject (1∗ ).
7.6.2 ‘A Lot’ and ‘A Low Degree’ There is a need to specify what counts as ‘a lot of suffering and dysfunction’ and ‘a low degree of freedom’, in the context of the core argument.
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Michael Tooley points out that if we suppose that the existence of evil is logically compatible with the existence of God, then we will have no idea of how much evil to expect if God exists: For if evil can be necessary for a greater good that outweighs it, the idea of worlds that are larger and larger, either in space or in time, strongly suggests that one cannot place any upper limit on the quantity of evil that might be found in a world created by God.¹¹
Nevertheless we can sensibly employ relativized notions of ‘much’ and ‘a lot’. Whether 20 spelling mistakes counts as a lot of spelling mistakes obviously depends on the length of the document in which the mistakes occur, and on the degree of proficiency in English spelling that could reasonably be expected of its author. What counts as a lot of humanrelated evil, for purposes of theodicy, should be understood as relativized to the size of the human population in the relevant geographical areas and during the relevant time period (which we can take to be the earth and, say, the last 150,000 years, respectively). Even when understood as relative in this way, ‘much’ and ‘a lot’ are very vague; but this fact does not render them useless. The concept of freedom employed in (5∗ ) may differ from freedomas-absence-of-coercion. Nevertheless light can be shed on the meaning of (5∗ ) by reflecting on the following pair of cases, in which people can properly be said to have a low degree of freedom to perform actions of a certain kind. In both cases, a robber confronts you at gunpoint and threatens to shoot you unless you stop and hand over your money. In Case 1 you comply with the robber’s demand. In Case 2 you run for it and, although the robber fires at you, by sheer fluke the bullets are intercepted by a falling tree branch, and you get away. Consider your position at the moment when the robber has just made his threat but before you have reacted. We cannot say flatly that in Case 2 you were unfree to keep your money and run away, since this is what you voluntarily succeeded in doing. We cannot say flatly that in Case 1 you were free to keep your money and run away, since this is a paradigm case of your being coerced into stopping and handing over your money. We cannot say that at the crucial moment of decision your degree of freedom in Case 1 differed from your degree of freedom in Case 2, for that would make your degree of freedom at a given time dependent ¹¹ Michael Tooley, ‘The Argument From Evil’, Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), 92.
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upon what happened, fortuitously, at some later time. What we should say is that in both cases you have a low degree of freedom.¹²
7.6.3 The Significance of the Core Argument A little more should be said about the significance of the entire core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction. As explained in Section 1.4, if either theological compatibilism or Molinism is true then Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence are both true. In that case God never acquires new reasons, arising from contingent developments, for believing that it is morally impermissible for him to take some action which would otherwise have been morally permissible. So Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence jointly imply that if (1∗ ) is false and (7∗ ) is true then possibly it is morally permissible for God to refrain from ensuring that there is not much suffering or dysfunction. Therefore if it is necessary that if God exists then either Theological Compatibilism or Molinism is true, (5∗ ), (6∗ ), and (7∗ ) yield a theodicy (in the sense explained towards the end of Section 7.1), in terms of freedom, moral responsibility, and the role of one’s own personal traits in shaping events, for the general truth that the actual world contains a lot of suffering and dysfunction. But what if Open Theism is, or were, true? In that case, even if (1∗ ) is false and (7∗ ) is true, might there be non-fundamental considerations—ones that depend on contingent circumstances that arise during the history of the universe¹³—in virtue of which it was in fact morally impermissible, and so incompatible with being maximally virtuous, for God to allow a lot of suffering and dysfunction? The conceptual space to accommodate such a suggestion is there. But it is difficult to fill it out in a satisfactory way. Consider the following schema: (i) It is morally impermissible for God to do X. [Fundamental, logically necessary principle] (ii) God’s allowing rational creatures to undergo a lot of suffering and dysfunction would amount to, or would constitute, his doing X. ¹² I owe the foregoing point to Lawrence Crocker, Positive Liberty (Nijhoff, 1980), 27. ¹³ I am treating all logically necessary moral truths as fundamental. Some people might disagree, claiming that some necessary moral truths depend somehow upon others. I will not pursue this issue here.
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[Contingent premiss, depending on how the history of the universe unfolds] (iii) Therefore it is morally impermissible for God to allow rational creatures to undergo a lot of suffering and dysfunction. [Contingent, non-fundamental moral statement] It is easy to identify various substituends for X such that (i) is true and (ii) might have been contingently true. For example, let X be Break an unconditional promise; there might have been some identifiable first pair of rational agents to, whom God promised that they and all their descendants would not undergo much suffering or dysfunction. But what can be substituted for X so as to yield a necessarily true (i) and a contingently true (ii) which we in fact do not have strong reasons for doubting? Initial ideas such as Act in a non-benevolent way and Act callously will not work, since quite apart from misgivings about whether (ii) becomes true under the proposed substitution, surely if the resulting (ii) were true then its truth might not depend—indeed, it is natural to suppose that its truth would not depend—on any specific contingent facts about the history of the universe. Thus it is prima facie plausible to suppose that if Open Theism is true, then there are no non-fundamental considerations making it morally impermissible for God to allow a lot of suffering and dysfunction. Therefore there are good reasons for holding that if Open Theism is true and (1∗ ) is false and (7∗ ) is true then, as a matter of contingent fact, it is morally permissible for God to refrain from ensuring that there is not much suffering or dysfunction. This conclusion complements the one already reached concerning the implications of Theological Compatibilism and Molinism. We can conclude that if (1∗ ) is false and (7∗ ) is true then it is morally permissible for God to refrain from ensuring that there is not much suffering or dysfunction.¹⁴ There is reason to believe that this conclusion is a contingent truth: after all, it is a contingent matter whether if God exists he exercises tight or loose control over the universe, and my argument concerning the implications of Open Theism employed a contingent premiss.¹⁵ ¹⁴ As usual, I am ignoring the possibility that Theological Hard Determinism is true: that God exists and has strongly actualized all human choices and actions, and that people are never free or morally responsible in acting. ¹⁵ This premiss was that there is no substituend for ‘X’ which yields a necessarily true (i) and a contingently true (ii).
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If so, then premisses (5∗ ), (6∗ ), and (7∗ ) yield a theodicy for the general truth that the actual world contains a lot of suffering and dysfunction. This can be so despite the truth of Marilyn McCord Adams’s emphasis on the limited value of appeals to free will and related goods in theodicy. She argues that even people who wickedly perpetrate horrors are not fully morally responsible for them.¹⁶ She adds: Suppose a terrorist threatened to torture and behead ten people unless we always put our pencil down exactly one inch from our desk’s edge—something it is, strictly speaking, within our power to do. Imposing such disproportionate consequences on our actions puts us under too much pressure and so does not exalt but crushes human agency.¹⁷
I agree. I have already emphasized, however, that the core theodicies offered in this chapter are limited in scope. They do not purport to address the horrors that Adams’s two most recent books are tackling. Therefore their success in fulfilling their aims is not rendered doubtful by Adams’s critique of more ambitious and wide-ranging appeals to free will.
7 . 7 T H E I N F E R E N C E F RO M ( 3 ∗ ) A N D ( 4 ∗ ) TO ( 5 ∗ ) This section can be fairly brief, since its strategy is quite similar to that already employed in arguing that (3) and (4) jointly imply (5). Firstly, consider how things should look to Theological Compatibilists. Assume that (3∗ ) is true while (3) is not true, and consider some settled world, W3, which contains some suffering and dysfunction. Compare In W3 there is not much suffering or dysfunction with In W3 few people ever play a set of tennis while wearing a cloak. Given that (3∗ ) is true, God might easily have had a different intention with respect to the latter, but not with respect to the former. Both states of affairs are strongly actualized by God. But in W3, even though lots of people are free to play a set of tennis while wearing a cloak, and are morally responsible for whether they do so, people have—on average, so to speak—a low degree of freedom to cause suffering and dysfunction, and a low degree ¹⁶ Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 35. ¹⁷ Ibid. 37.
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of moral responsibility for whether there is suffering or dysfunction. There might be individuals who caused an amount of suffering and dysfunction that was well above the average, and who were free and morally responsible in doing so, but such individuals would be rare. The proposition People cause, or causally contribute to, a lot of suffering or dysfunction is logically incompatible with (3∗ )&God exists. Since (3∗ ), if true, is necessarily true, it follows that this proposition is logically incompatible with God exists. But the existence of God is a major structural feature of reality. Hence given that (3∗ ) is true, in every settled world it is inevitable that people do not cause, or causally contribute to, a lot of suffering or dysfunction, and in general people have a low degree of freedom to do so, and have a low degree of moral responsibility with respect to whether they do so. Reasoning offered in Section 7.3 can easily be adapted to show that (3∗ )&God exists implies that in settled worlds whether or not there is a lot of suffering or dysfunction does not depend at all on individual rational creatures’ personalities, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, or intentions. It is obvious that given Open Theist assumptions, (3∗ ) and (4∗ ) imply (5∗ ). Consider now the Molinist approach. Let (C) be the proposition According to the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom there is a possible set of circumstances which God could have strongly actualized and given in which there would have been many free creatures but they did not cause much suffering or dysfunction. The argument proceeds via a dilemma. Molinists should regard (C) as either contingently true or contingently false. If Molinism is true and (C) is false then, as a matter of contingent fact, God could not have brought into existence many free creatures and weakly actualized their not causing much suffering or dysfunction. In those circumstances, if (3∗ ) were true and God brought rational creatures into existence then God would strongly actualize rational creatures’ not undergoing much suffering or dysfunction. In that case Molinists, being libertarians, are committed to saying that clauses (i) and (ii) of (5∗ ) are true; and reasoning similar to that presented in Section 7.3 would establish the truth of clause (iii) of (5∗ ). So let us assume that (C) is true, and let us see where that assumption takes us. Since (3∗ )&God exists&(C) entails that people do not cause much suffering or dysfunction, and given that (3∗ ) is necessarily true while God exists and (C) both state major structural constraints on how things work, it follows that whether or not the population collectively causes a lot of suffering or dysfunction is not up to the population: it is
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inevitable that it does not do so. So consider some settled world, W3, in which (C) is true. We can conclude that in W3 individual people typically have a low degree of freedom and moral responsibility in refraining from causing an above-average amount of suffering and dysfunction. Furthermore (3∗ ) and God exists —and therefore their conjunction with (C)—jointly entail that in settled worlds whether or not there is a lot of suffering or dysfunction does not depend at all on people’s distinctive personal traits. 7 . 8 A C A S E F O R P R E M I S S ( 6∗ ) Premiss (6∗ ) is concerned with the comparative disvalue of its being the case that rational creatures have a low degree of freedom and moral responsibility in refraining from causing individual instances of suffering or dysfunction, and also of its being the case that whether or not there is a lot of suffering or dysfunction does not depend on individual rational creatures’ personalities, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, or intentions.
7.8.1 Eudaimonia, Mutual Vulnerability, and Trust The following considerations, while far from decisive, surely render (6∗ ) fairly plausible. It is convenient to formulate them in terms of human beings. The most important point to recognize is that eudaimonia is partly constituted by sharing in a more-than-low degree of moral responsibility regarding such matters as the well-being of one’s spouse, children, and friends, and is also partly constituted by its being the case that one’s own distinctive personal traits play a vital role with respect to whether one’s spouse, children, and friends enjoy high levels of well-being and whether they undergo a lot of suffering or dysfunction. Here are a couple of considerations which reinforce the foregoing truth. The first concerns mutual vulnerability in friendship and love. If (3∗ ) is true then in all settled worlds intimate relationships rarely involve becoming vulnerable to the other: not to the other’s distress, because there will be little; not to the other’s inexperience, insensitivity, or fumbling, because even if these occur quite frequently it is guaranteed that by and large they do not cause much serious harm to other people, directly or by impairing the relationships between them. In our world, mutual vulnerability to each other is a precious gift that friends and
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lovers bestow on each other, and a priceless aspect also of parent/child relationships. Its value is not derivative from the existence of harm in the way that the value of anaesthetics is. Instead, the value of mutual vulnerability is derivative from the value of intimacy in friendship and in love, and partly derived from the closely allied value of trust in friendship and love. This brings us to the second consideration, which concerns trust. In general, the significance and quality of one’s trust in some person or process to achieve some outcome is greater in proportion to how much is at stake depending on whether the desired outcome occurs, and is less in proportion to the extent to which one judges it prudent to make back-up arrangements to prevent major damage if it does not occur. If (3∗ ) is true then in all settled worlds divine planning has ensured that back-up arrangements are always in place, and are known to be in place, to prevent there being much suffering or dysfunction. With rare exceptions, what is at stake when someone trusts another person to achieve or safeguard some desired good is limited to whether various worthwhile but optional benefits are obtained and aims fulfilled, and whether various regrettable but mild losses are avoided. The existence of trust in interpersonal relationships—even between buyers and sellers, let alone trust between friends, and relatives—is not merely of instrumental value (like one’s trust that a rope will not break). If marriage and friendship typically involved little need for trust, not merely because of one’s great confidence in the good character and competence of the other partner, but because, typically, not much could go badly wrong whatever the character and level of competence of each partner, then marriages and friendships would not thereby be better. The spouses and friends would be missing out on an important ingredient and nutrient of intimacy. Trust is partly constitutive of the good life for individual human beings, and of communities. If (3∗ ) were true, there would be much less scope for trust than there is in the actual world. In the actual world, there are things regarding which we lack moral responsibility, and our lack of moral responsibility with respect to them does not depend on our own distinctive personal qualities. Some of these, like your lack of moral responsibility for whether you touch your left elbow with your left hand, are trivial. Others, such as your lack of moral responsibility with respect to whether you win the Olympic marathon, are not exactly trivial—it would be a great achievement if you did it—but (assuming that you are not a world-class runner)
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your self-esteem, and the esteem that others have for you, are surely not adversely affected thereby: there are many alternative bases for self-esteem, and respect by other people. In contrast, the key points about (3∗ ) concern the diminishing of the moral significance in people’s lives of their own personalities, beliefs, reasoning, intentions, and actions, and also the implications of having little free will and moral responsibility concerning suffering and dysfunction, for the meaning of their personal relationships with other people, and their assessment of what is good-for-its-own-sake in their lives. As indicated at the end of Section 7.3, perhaps there are settled worlds in which the rational creatures are not human, and in which marriage and parenting do not exist. Yet it is hard to envisage any flourishing community of rational creatures lacking intimate interpersonal relationships embodying mutual vulnerability and high levels of trust and esteem.¹⁸ My line of argument does not imply the false and disgraceful claim that various goods bound up with the Nazis’ possession of freedom to cause suffering sufficed to justify God’s allowing the Nazis to cause the enormous suffering undergone by their victims. It implies very little about any actual, individual cases, and it does not imply that the goods it cites outweigh any amount of suffering and dysfunction, distributed in any way.
7.8.2 Weighing Competing Considerations: An Illustration We might get some guidance concerning Premiss (6∗ ) by considering a hypothetical example.¹⁹ Suppose that there were two alternative procedures by which doctors could save the life of your newborn daughter. The only relevant difference between them is this. If one procedure were performed your daughter would have normal eyesight and hearing but greatly diminished free will and moral responsibility in some important respect—for example, given that she was alive and healthy, she would inevitably enter into several romantic relationships, and would be strongly inhibited from doing so with any man whose ¹⁸ Section 7.9, without retracting anything said in this section, will refine it. ¹⁹ Plainly, appeals to practical intuitions in contexts such as this are of limited value, and need to be treated very cautiously. Nevertheless illustrations can be heuristically useful, and this is my modest hope here.
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physical appearance, personality, and values were significantly different from her father’s. If the other procedure were performed then she would always have very poor eyesight, though her hearing could be improved by repeated surgery involving considerable post-operative pain; she would have a normal endowment of free will and moral responsibility with respect to romantic relationships. No doubt you would feel very uncomfortable about making such a choice, but we can suppose that you are stuck with it, given that you will not veto both operations and so let your daughter die, and given that you cannot transfer the burden of the decision to someone else. It might be suggested that the alternative goods (and privations of the good) involved are incommensurable. But this is implausible, because it seems appropriate to ask, ‘If the second procedure were performed, just how bad would your daughter’s eyesight be?’ and ‘If the first procedure were performed, would the loss of free will in the relevant respect lead her to have an unhappy life?’. Let me now further stipulate that if the second procedure were performed then even with spectacles your daughter would be very near-sighted and able to read only very slowly, that even with a hearing aid she would have great difficulty in participating in normal spoken conversations with non-deaf people, and that no one knows the probability of your daughter’s having an unhappy life given that the first procedure is performed. What you have to take into account is therefore, on the one hand, the bad effects of the poor eyesight, and either the bad effects of poor hearing or else the disvalue of the post-operative pain resulting from operations to correct the poor hearing, and, on the other hand, the badness-for-its-own sake of considerably diminished free will and moral responsibility in the relevant area. Perhaps people who actually have very poor eyesight or hearing should be asked what decision they would recommend in such difficult circumstances. But it is not unreasonable to judge that although poor eyesight and hearing is a grievous handicap, and prolonged postoperative pain can be very distressing, they would not constitute an impairment of your daughter’s very personhood, a diminution of her future dignity, in the way that having merely low degrees of freedom, moral responsibility, and self-government in the relevant area would, and therefore you should authorize the second procedure. In the foregoing example, the choice reflects the chooser’s otherregarding value judgements. To the extent that you would be inclined
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to choose the first operation, you judge that the goods of a normal degree of free will and moral responsibility in the relevant area of your daughter’s life outweigh the disvalue of her having both very poor eyesight and hearing and also outweigh the disvalue of her having very poor eyesight together with somewhat poor hearing and some additional pain. You judge that with respect to your daughter’s life the relevant goods outweigh a lot of dysfunction together with a significant amount of pain. Given that (3∗ ) and (4∗ ) jointly imply (5∗ ), and that Premisses (6∗ ) and (7∗ ) are true, we should reject (3∗ ), and therefore reject (1∗ ). The process of reaching this conclusion has amounted to providing a theodicy for the general truth that rational creatures undergo a lot of suffering and dysfunction.
7 . 9 S U F F E R I N G , DY S F U N C T I O N , A N D H E AV E N The argument so far has not involved the idea of an afterlife in which people live in heaven, understood as a very good set-up (possibly on a transformed earth) such that God guarantees the complete absence from it of suffering and dysfunction. Nevertheless theists when discussing evidential arguments from evil frequently appeal to the epistemic possibility of heaven, and of course belief in heaven is a part of Christianity, Islam, and at least some streams within Judaism. It might be thought that someone who believes in heaven cannot advance the core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction. The argument suggests that heaven must lack some very great goods this present earthly life contains. If these goods are all that important, why are they absent from heaven? Or better: given that heaven is very good and does not contain suffering or dysfunction, surely God could have and should have dispensed with the suffering and dysfunction, and brought about heavenly conditions from the beginning? Earlier sections of this chapter have argued that Premisses (1) and (1∗ ) are false. If God decides to ensure—that is, to strongly or weakly actualize—the (complete or near-complete) absence of suffering and dysfunction from heaven, he does not do so because there is a fundamental moral requirement that he do so. Nevertheless we should carefully consider the following proposition:
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(F) Necessarily, if there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being then he has strong reasons all-things-considered, not dependent on taking any decisions about whether rational creatures will exist, let alone about the details of individual people’s lives, for resolving that if he were to bring rational creatures into existence and to strongly or weakly actualize, or even merely allow, the existence of suffering and dysfunction, then he would also ensure that there was an everlasting afterlife in heaven, containing no suffering or dysfunction. It is true of every person S that S causes suffering or dysfunction in heaven is logically incompatible with (F)&God exists. But (F), if true, is necessarily true, and the existence of God is a major structural feature of reality: neither of them is an accident. (Even if you think that the word ‘Necessarily’ should be removed from (F), you should acknowledge that if the conjunction of God exists with the amended (F) is true then it identifies a feature of reality which is at least as securely basic as the equations of general relativity, or There are stars.) Hence no one is free in heaven to cause suffering or dysfunction, and it is inevitable that no one does so. Moreover this truth does not depend on any actual human’s distinctive personal traits. Although (1) and (1∗ ) are false, (F) can nevertheless be true, for two reasons: (i) If its antecedent were true then the value that would thereby be lost would be lost merely from one stage of human life. and (ii) While it is true of each person S that S causes suffering or dysfunction in heaven is logically incompatible with (F)&God exists, it can nevertheless also be true of each person S that whether S has an afterlife in heaven, and therefore whether there is a stage of S’s life history in which S lacks free will and moral responsibility in the relevant respects, depends on S’s previous free choices and on S’s personality, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, and intentions. If in the actual world human life has a heavenly era, then that era contains great goods that this present era lacks—especially goods bound up with what is traditionally called the beatific vision of God—but does not contain great evils that this present era has. The losses involved with the absence from heaven of free will, moral responsibility, and
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self-government with respect to suffering and dysfunction are, however, mitigated by three considerations. The first was foreshadowed two paragraphs ago: although in heaven people lack free will and moral responsibility regarding causing and failing to prevent suffering and dysfunction, they lack it as a result of their own free, informed consent, given before they enter it. (Let us assume that if heaven contains people who disbelieved in heaven when they died then they are subsequently given a free choice of whether to enter heaven, knowing that living in heaven will involve both being repentant of past wrongdoing and also having fellowship with God.) In this respect, the residents of heaven can be compared to air passengers who have boarded a flight as a result of their own free decision to do so, and have no reason to regret having done so, but who cannot leave the aircraft while it is flying and therefore are not free to leave it then. Secondly, the goodness of heaven is enhanced by past states of affairs made possible by the past free will with respect to suffering and dysfunction. We are in general familiar with the point that the value of a present state of affairs may be enhanced by the history of how it came to be as it is. Obviously the degree and kind of value of the state of affairs Zena’s possessing the painting now hung on her bedroom wall is very much affected by whether she stole the painting, bought it, was given it as a wedding present by her son, or painted it herself. The degree and kind of value of the state of affairs Zena’s standing on the summit of this mountain is very much affected by whether she climbed the mountain or was helicoptered to the top. Similarly the degree and kind of value of People in heaven having such-and-such moral virtues is enhanced by the fact that these people were not handed the virtues on a platter, but each had to develop them as a result of their own attempts (perhaps aided by friends) to act wisely and rightly in the face of distractions, temptations, and other obstacles, including their own pain and dysfunction, and also the temptation to cause pain and distress to other people (which could not have survived the knowledge that such attempts would inevitably fail).²⁰ Furthermore, the value of People in heaven existing in loving friendship with each other is enhanced by the fact that many of these friendships have been forged under shared adverse circumstances, in which commitment to ²⁰ There may be exceptions to the generalization: perhaps in heaven those who die in infancy, and also dissolute people who repent at the last minute, are handed the virtues on a platter.
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shared, good values and aims has been seriously tested by suffering and dysfunction, or at least the danger of them. The aims of this section do not require, and I have not advanced, the claim that the earthly and heavenly goods cited outweigh the amount of suffering and dysfunction contained in the actual world, or that they morally justify God’s allowing Hitler and Stalin to cause the harm they did. Let me recapitulate. The core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction cites certain considerations as explaining why an omnipotent, omniscient being would be morally justified in bringing into existence a universe in which he allowed rational creatures to undergo a lot of suffering and dysfunction. The core argument needs to be augmented by an account of why these very considerations would not persuade him to allow a lot of suffering and dysfunction in every stage of the history of rational creatures, including the afterlife in heaven (if there is one). My answer is that an omnipotent, omniscient being, deliberating about his options in advance of bringing anything into existence would see that it would be better, if he brought humans into existence, that the two main stages of the world’s history contained different mixes of goods: •
•
in the first stage large measures of free will, moral responsibility, and self-government with respect to causing suffering and dysfunction accompanied by some, or even a lot, of suffering and dysfunction; in the second stage, no suffering or dysfunction and no free will, moral responsibility, or self-government with respect to suffering and dysfunction, but a certain enhancement of the goods occurring in it, and mitigation of the losses incurred by the absence of other goods from it, arising from the fact that there had been a first stage involving free will, moral responsibility, and self-government with respect to evil.
Chapter 4 argued that if there are prime worlds and God creates a world then the actual world is prime. This implies that if there are prime worlds and God creates a world then it would not have been better, all-things-considered, if God had brought about heavenly conditions from the beginning of human history. Theological Determinists and Molinists who believe that there are prime worlds will find in this chapter some material which might help them defend the view that it would not have been better, all things considered, if God had brought about heavenly conditions from the beginning of human history.
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7 . 1 0 D I S T R I BU T I O N , M O R A L D E S E RT, A N D E QUA L I T Y
7.10.1 Moral Desert This section uses conclusions reached earlier in the chapter, to argue briefly for two further theses. The first of these is that it is not a moral requirement on an omnipotent, omniscient being, not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe, that he ensures that if rational creatures undergo suffering and dysfunction then it is distributed in accordance with the people’s moral standing—that is, that, other things being equal, a less virtuous person undergoes more suffering and dysfunction than a more virtuous person, and a person who has committed more serious moral wrongs undergoes more suffering and dysfunction than a person who has committed less serious moral wrongs. This claim does not entail that God is justified—let alone explain why God is justified—in allowing the distribution of suffering observed in the actual world. If God had a non-defeasible moral duty to distribute any suffering and dysfunction in accordance with people’s moral standing then (as can be seen from the second half of Section 7.6) it would be a fundamental moral duty, and God would possess strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he might make, that any suffering and dysfunction was distributed in the specified way. Now it is not in general a requirement of distributive justice, constituting a side constraint on action, that persons in authority distribute benefits and burdens to individuals in their care in accordance with the individuals’ overall moral standing. Justice does not require that parents who allocate household chores to their children do so in proportion to the moral standing of each child. Nor does it require parents who must choose which of their children (of any age) is to be rescued, when they cannot all be rescued, to choose on the basis of moral desert. Furthermore, justice does not require that a social system distribute burdens needed to secure important goods for society in accordance with the moral standing of citizens and resident aliens. Consider, for example, quarantine, taxation, and military conscription in wartime. Punishment is no exception: offenders are punished roughly in proportion to the seriousness of their offence as the offence and
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its degree of seriousness are specified in law, and these are justifiably influenced by factors other than the objective moral guilt of this offender for committing the particular act in the particular circumstances. Is there nevertheless a fundamental moral side constraint on God, requiring him to ensure that any suffering or dysfunction is distributed in accordance with people’s overall moral standing? Mainstream Jewish and Christian thought, at least, is committed to saying No, on the grounds that God possesses the moral right to be merciful and gracious to people, and does not have a moral duty to treat morally equivalent people equivalently. Perhaps mainstream Jewish and Christian thought is mistaken on this point, but it would require a lot of argument to dislodge the prima facie attractiveness of the idea, given that we think that society has the moral right to treat morally equivalent people differently. So let us suppose that the fundamental non-deafeasible moral duty under discussion is based on considerations to do with consequences. If God had such a duty then in all worlds in which he existed and rational creatures underwent a lot of suffering and dysfunction it would be distributed in accordance with individuals’ moral standing. Someone’s intervention could be causally pivotal with respect to whether someone else underwent more, or alternatively less, suffering, only indirectly, by affecting the other person’s moral standing. The value that would thereby be lost would be very great. There are two main reasons why this would be so. Firstly, unless people were massively deceived in the relevant respects, they would typically be aware that suffering and dysfunction were being distributed in accordance with individuals’ moral standing (though there would be a small degree of uncertainty owing to moral disagreement). In that case there would be a substantial reduction in moral autonomy. Because people would have very strong reasons of self-interest for conforming their actions to ethical requirements, they would be less likely to act from the right kinds of respect for moral considerations. There would be a substantial reduction in people’s degree of freedom to perform morally wrong actions and to let themselves slide into this or that moral vice—in the sense in which in most situations normal people are less free knowingly to seriously injure themselves than they are knowingly to seriously damage their furniture. But reduction in moral autonomy and freedom to perform morally wrong actions and (arguably) to slide into vice involves a loss of value. Secondly, the good life for a human being is partly constituted by sharing in a non-low degree of moral responsibility regarding such matters as the well-being of family and friends, and by participating in
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relationships suffused by trust: these are not mere means to or preconditions of further ends. But if God had a fundamental moral duty of the supposed kind, there would be very major reductions in these goods. Here is one example: young children. Let us agree (pace Augustine) that children up to, say, three years old cannot sensibly be ascribed either moral virtue or moral vice, and have an unblemished moral record, however ‘naughty’ and aggressive towards their siblings they are. In that case these children will not undergo pain or dysfunction until they get older, and their parents and other adults will have no moral responsibility with respect to this truth, and the children will not need to trust others to preserve them from serious harm. In the actual world, children require loving, patient, perceptive attention in order to flourish: the absence of such attention causes temporary, and often long-term, psychological dysfunction. So in the scenario envisaged, either human nature would be different in this respect, or else family and other carers would not ever fail to provide loving, patient, perceptive attention to young children. What we must now do is compare the badness-for-its-own-sake of there being a lack of proportionality with the loss of value explained above. Is it bad-for-its-own-sake that proportionality does not obtain? Is it, perhaps, a kind of axiological defect, not derived from justice, which is a bit like the axiological incongruity involved in Beethoven’s becoming deaf? Even if there is some truth lurking here, there does not seem to be any way of arguing that the badness-for-its-own-sake of the lack of proportionality is at least as great as the great loss of value bound up with the considerations involved above. Therefore we should cautiously conclude that it is not a fundamental moral requirement on God that he ensures that if there is suffering and dysfunction then it is distributed in accordance with people’s moral standing.
7.10.2 Equal Distribution? I will now argue against the view that God is morally required to ensure that if there is a lot of suffering and dysfunction then it is distributed equally. One initial problem with the view being rejected is that it needs a lot of clarificatory work. Here are three ways that equal distribution could be instantiated: (1) All individuals undergo the same total amount of suffering and dysfunction, irrespective of their different lengths of life.
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(2) During every day (alternatively: during every month, year, etc.) all individuals who are alive on that day undergo the same amount of suffering and dysfunction. (3) All individuals have the same ratio of the amount of suffering and dysfunction undergone in one’s life divided by the number of days one is alive. The first of these alternatives is logically independent of each of the others, and although the second entails the third, the third does not entail the second. None of the three is attractive, even supposing that some clear interpretation of the expression ‘amount of suffering and dysfunction’ is available. Assuming that the view being rejected can be explicated in a satisfactory manner, how plausible is it? There is no need to argue in detail against it here, since obviously if the arguments advanced in Section 7.10.1 succeed, then a very similar strategy will dispose of the equal-distribution view.
7 . 1 1 O B J E C T I O N S F RO M A LT E R N AT I V E G O O D S
7.11.1 The Objection Defending (1∗ ) The general strategy of the core argument faces two closely related objections based on the idea of alternative goods. Here is the first. Let ‘P’ refer to the proposition Human beings undergo a lot of suffering and dysfunction and also refer to the corresponding state of affairs, depending on the context. Let us agree that necessarily if it were a fundamental moral requirement on God, based on considerations concerning consequences, that he ensure that P not obtain, then all settled worlds would lack certain goods G, identified earlier in this chapter. (In fact, ‘G’ and similar symbols will be used in some contexts to refer to goods which may or may not be instantiated, and in other contexts to refer to states of affairs of the form This good’s being instantiated.) Let us also agree that G&P is better than non-G&non-P. This truth, the objector says, does not constitute a good reason for rejecting (1∗ ). For there might be alternative goods G∗ such that God’s allowing P is not a logically necessary condition of G∗ , and non-G∗ &G&P is inferior to G ∗ &non-G&non-P, in which case, despite the fact that G&P is better than non-G&non-P, the theodicy provided fails to justify God’s allowing P to obtain. For example, in some worlds containing God there are
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non-human people who lack G but who are more intelligent, creative, generous and courageous than humans are capable of being. God could have brought it about that there are people fulfilling this description. The objection fails. To see why, consider firstly the supposition that there are worlds in which G∗ and G and P are co-instantiated. This supposition appears to hold in the example given at the end of the preceding paragraph. For surely there will be worlds containing nonhuman people who undergo a lot of suffering and dysfunction and have non-low degrees of freedom and moral responsibility with respect to suffering and dysfunction, and whose distinctive personal traits make a difference to how much suffering and dysfunction there is, but who are also more intelligent, creative, generous, and courageous than humans are capable of being. Since, ex hypothesi, God’s allowing P is a logically necessary condition of G, and G&P is better than non-G&non-P, it is plausible to suppose that in the example given (and also presumably in a wide range of other cases) G∗ &G&P is better than G∗ &nonG&non-P. God has good reasons to bring it about that G∗ . In that case God has good reasons all-things-considered for bringing it about that G&G ∗ obtains, and therefore allowing P, than he has for ensuring that G ∗ &non-P obtains, and thereby preventing G from obtaining. If so then (1∗ )—stated at the beginning of Section 7.6—is false. What if some G∗ is proposed such that there are no worlds in which G∗ and G and P are co-instantiated? It is hard to think of non-trivial examples. If it is suggested that even if no example occurs to us, nevertheless it is epistemically possible that there is some such good, then it can be retorted that it is also epistemically possible that that there is some good G∗∗ , compatible with G, such that G∗∗ &G&P is better than G ∗ &non-G&non-P, This possibility reinstates the core argument against (1∗ ).
7.11.2 The Objection Bypassing (1∗ ) We should now tackle a second objection to the general strategy of the core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction, based on the idea of alternative goods. The objection does not purport to defend (1∗ ). Instead, it denies that my attack on (1∗ ), including especially my arguments in favour of (5∗ ) and (6∗ ), amounts to providing a theodicy for P. The crucial issue, the objector says, is not whether (1∗ ) is true. It is not whether there is some possible world in which God is morally
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justified in allowing P to obtain. Instead, the crucial issue is whether consideration of consequences justifies God’s having allowed P to obtain in the actual world. We should take into account what we know, and what we have reason for believing, about which goods are instantiated in the actual world, and which are not. Consider the proposition entertained a few paragraphs ago, that there is some good G∗∗ , compatible with G, such that G∗∗ &G&P is better than G∗ &non-G&non-P. The fact that God could have brought it about that G∗∗ was instantiated would be of help in defending a theodicy based (as mine is) on G only if there were strong reasons for holding that G∗∗ is instantiated in the actual world. (In the defence of (1∗ ), earlier in the section, such reasons were not required, and they were conspicuously absent.) The objection might be seen as resting on the idea that there is no justification for creating a world in which P obtains if there are better creatable worlds in which it does not obtain. But if ‘create’ is used to mean ‘strongly or weakly actualize’, it is far from clear that God could have created a world that both contains little or no suffering and dysfunction and is better than the actual world. Most Open Theists will deny it, on the grounds that all worlds better than the actual world contain free choices and actions by rational creatures, and these worlds are not creatable. Molinists should hesitate. It is worth remembering that neither the core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction nor the first objection from alternative goods employed the idea of God’s creating a world. So let us construe the objection as resting on the premiss that God would be unjustified in allowing P if he could have prevented P while ensuring that the general human condition was far better overall than it actually is. Let us also, charitably, assume that the objector is not attacking the core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction on the grounds that it did not justify God’s allowing the kinds and amounts of suffering and dysfunction we find in the actual world. The core argument did not attempt to carry out that task. The objector’s claim must be that various contingent premisses, not pertaining to specific amounts and kinds of evil but instead pertaining to other truths about the actual world, somehow defeat the theodicy provided for P. Is my attack on (1∗ ) irrelevant to the main game? At the end of Section 7.6.3 I argued against the proposition that there are nonfundamental considerations—that is, considerations arising from contingent states (other than, say, the true CCFs, if there are any)—making
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it morally impermissible for God to allow a lot of suffering and dysfunction. I concluded that if (1∗ ) is false and (7∗ ) is true then possibly it is morally permissible for God to refrain from ensuring that non-P obtains. But this, I pointed out, was consistent with there being some contingent truth in virtue of which it was in fact morally impermissible for God to so refrain. I argued that in fact there is no such truth. Admittedly, a proposition can be necessarily true even though the only currently available argument for its truth has one or more contingent premisses.²¹ Nevertheless in the absence of a proof that necessarily if God exists either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, it is prima facie reasonable to believe that it is a contingent truth that it is morally permissible for God to refrain from ensuring that non-P obtains. Hence my conclusion that it is morally permissible for God to allow a lot of suffering and dysfunction pertained to a subset of all the possible worlds in which God exists—a subset of which the actual world is a member. The conclusion was not merely that there is a possible world in which God is justified in allowing P: it was that in the actual world God is justified in allowing P. Therefore to bear on the theodicy put forward in this chapter an objection from alternative goods must reject one of the premisses or attack one of the inferences contained in the core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction. (Presumably it does so by denying that (5∗ ), (6∗ ), and (7∗ ) jointly imply (8∗ ).) But this means that the second objection collapses into the first, discussed in Section 7.11.1. Here are two additional criticisms of the second objection. Firstly, let A1 be the overall state of human life obtaining in the actual world. Suppose that there is some creatable world which includes an overall state of human life A2 which in turn includes non-P. Suppose also that A2 is far better than A1. In that case God could have prevented P while ensuring that the general human condition was far better overall than it actually is. Does it follow that God is unjustified in allowing P? Surely not. Perhaps there are one or more prime worlds, they all include P, and the actual world is prime. Perhaps there are no prime worlds, yet for every possible general overall state of human life which God could have strongly or ²¹ The contingent I employed in Section 7.6.3 was that in the sub-argument (i)–(iii) concerning open theism any substituend for ‘X’ which turns (i) into a contingent truth and (ii) into a contingent proposition is such that we in fact have strong reasons for doubting the truth of the resulting (ii).
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weakly actualized, and which includes non-P, and which is far better than A1, there is some even better general overall state of human life which God could have strongly or weakly actualized and which contains P. The objector needs somehow to dismiss these two conjectures. Otherwise the objector cannot sustain the premiss that God would be unjustified in allowing P if he could have prevented P while ensuring that the general human condition was better than it is. Secondly, the objector faces a dilemma. On the one hand, she can say that all that matters in assessing alternative divine actions is the net level of goodness that results from them (or, if ‘level’ sounds too quantitative, their rank in a partial ordering of the consequences under the relation better than). In that case the relevance of evil is merely that, other things being equal, it depresses net value. If the objector asserts that God would be unjustified in allowing P if he could have prevented P while ensuring that the general human condition was far better overall than it is, then the objector must surely also be willing to assert that God would be unjustified in allowing, say, someone to remain ignorant of classical music if he could introduce the person to classical music and thereby improve that person’s life without having a detrimental effect on anyone else’s. Thus the work done by evil in the objection is merely to make plausible the view that if the actual world belongs to an infinite actualizable hierarchy of better and better worlds then the actual world is not good enough, and if the actual world belongs to a hierarchy of prime members then the actual world is not prime, and that therefore the arguments of Chapters 3 and 4 generate an objection to the existence of God. But I have addressed this objection in Chapter 5, and argued that it fails. On the other hand, the objector can deny that all that matters in assessing alternative divine actions is the net level of goodness that results from them, and maintain that evil should receive separate, special weight in the assessment. If the objector adopts this position, then she faces a challenge: to explain why God’s actions cannot be justified, not by the level of goodness resulting from them, but by some specific package of goods that makes it well worth putting up with P. This point can be explained in terms of an example. Suppose that a father took his twelve-year-old daughter for a week’s bushwalking in Tasmania. She suffered from fatigue and manifold discomforts at levels which are pretty well inevitable on such a trip. But these hardships were outweighed by the pleasures of the walk and by the enhancement of her self-confidence and physical skills. Did these goods suffice to justify the father’s subjecting her to the hardships? Here is the argument
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against: Instead of taking her bush-walking in Tasmania, he could have taken her for a holiday in Thailand. A holiday there would have been largely free from hardships. The pleasures of the holiday in such a beautiful setting, together with the enhancement of the girl’s understanding of and interest in Asian cultures, would have been at least as valuable as what she gained from the bushwalking. So what justifies the father’s letting the daughter in for the fatigue and discomforts? Not the level of benefit she obtained, since ex hypothesi that level could have been obtained without them. What counts is that the specific benefits were well worth the fatigue and discomforts. I conclude that both objections from alternative goods fail. 7 . 1 2 T H E C O R E A RG U M E N T C O N C E R N I N G W RO N G In what follows, when ‘wrong’ is used as a noun it will be used as a mass noun, covering choices, intentions, actions, and omissions that are morally wrong. Let us say that someone ‘possesses free will with respect to wrong’ if and only if they are free to engage in wrong and are free to refrain from it. It will always be serious wrong which is under discussion. The rest of this chapter tackles the second of the two tasks set at the beginning: to argue that if God were to exist then he would have good reasons, all-things-considered, for bringing into existence a universe in which he allowed a great many cases of wrong. Sections 7.2 to 7.8 have not already performed this second task, since not all cases of wrong are cases of causing suffering and dysfunction, or of failing to prevent suffering and dysfunction when one could do so. Nevertheless my treatment of the second task will be a mere sketch, since the strategy by which I propose to carry it out runs parallel to the strategy employed in connection with suffering and dysfunction. The core argument concerning wrong divides into two parts, the first corresponding to the candidate fundamental requirement that God ensure that there is no wrong, and the second corresponding to the candidate fundamental requirement that God ensure that there is not much wrong. Both parts proceed by reductio ad absurdum. For the sake of brevity, the second part will be omitted, in the hope that the reader will be able to see how it goes, given clues provided by points made earlier. Here is the first part:
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(a) Necessarily, even if there is no non-defeasible moral side constraint which requires an omnipotent, omniscient being to ensure that there is no wrong, considerations based on consequences but not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe make it a fundamental moral requirement that such a being ensure that there is no wrong. [Assumption for reductio] (b) Necessarily, R is a fundamental moral requirement applying to an omnipotent, omniscient being and not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe, if and only if an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being possesses strong reasons allthings-considered, not dependent on any contingent truths about the universe, for acting in accordance with R. [Premiss] (c) Necessarily, if there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being then he possesses strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he might make, that if he were to bring rational creatures into existence then he would ensure that there was no wrong. [From (a), (b)] (d) Let settled worlds be all and only those worlds in which there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being and he brings into existence rational creatures [Stipulation] (e) It follows that in all settled worlds (i) there is no wrong, and (ii) rational creatures are not free and morally responsible in refraining from wrong, and (iii) whether or not there is any wrong does not depend on individual rational creatures’ personalities, values, beliefs, tastes, or reasoning. [From (c), (d)] (f) In each settled world the value that has thereby been lost is very great, and greater than the disvalue of there being some wrong [Premiss] (g) Necessarily there is no non-defeasible moral side constraint which requires an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, if there is one, to make a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he made, to ensure that there is no wrong (and which therefore defeats the specified considerations bound up with freedom, etc.). [Premiss] (h) Therefore in all settled worlds the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being lacks strong reasons all-things-considered for
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making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he made, to ensure that there is no wrong. [From (e), (f), (g) ] (i) But (h) is logically incompatible with (c). Since we should accept that (c)&(d) entails (e), and since we should accept premisses (f) and (g), we should reject (c). Then, having rejected (c), we should reject (a). I will assume that (g) is plausible in the light of the discussion of non-defeasible divine duties contained in Section 6.4; and I will assume that (b) is so obviously true as to need no defence here.²²
7 . 1 3 T H E I N F E R E N C E F RO M ( C ) & ( D ) TO ( E ) ; PREMISS (F) It is obvious that (a) and (b) jointly entail (c). I assume that if God exists then either Theological Compatibilism or Molinism or Open Theism is true. It can then be argued that for each of these positions its adherents should agree that (c)&(d) implies (e). I will not work through the argument here, since it runs parallel to my treatment of the inference from (3) and (4) to (5); the adjustments needed are simple. Nevertheless it is worth dwelling just a little on the significance of what I am arguing with respect to the Theological Compatibilist standpoint. Assume that a human choice or action’s being determined is logically compatible with its being free; assume moreover that an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being’s strongly actualizing a particular human choice or action with the intention that the choice be made or the action performed is logically compatible with its being free. Despite this, I am claiming, if (c) is true then in no settled world do the human beings have free will and moral responsibility with respect to wrong. ²² If the core argument concerning wrong is sound, then one would expect there to be some error in the line of thought presented by Graham Oppy, in section 8 of his paper ‘Arguments From Moral Evil’ (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 56 (2004), 59–87). Indeed, there is. In Oppy’s argument 1, if proposition 4 is to follow from premisses 1–3, then proposition 2 must read: ‘Necessarily, all universes in which everyone freely chooses the good are non-arbitrarily better than any universes in which someone sometimes freely chooses the bad’. But this is very implausible. For example, many of the universes consisting of only one created person who always freely chooses the good will surely be inferior to many of the universes containing a large number of people who always freely choose the good along with one person who sometimes freely chooses the bad. A similar problem arises in argument 2. So both arguments fail.
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John Mackie and Antony Flew famously asked: Why could God not have made [human beings] such that they always freely choose the good?²³ Given Theological Compatibilism, it is evident that God could indeed have done so. There are criteria for applying ‘can do otherwise’ and ‘inevitable’, appropriate to talk of free will, such that merely being determined by God is compatible with its being the case that human beings can do otherwise than they in fact do: their choices and actions need not be inevitable. This admission is perfectly consistent with what Section 7.3 provides the basis for my maintaining: that theological compatibilists should also say that necessarily if both (a) and God exists were true, and God brought rational agents into existence, then they would always refrain from wrong, but they would not be free and morally responsible in refraining relative to these same compatibilist criteria for applying ‘can do otherwise’ and ‘inevitable’. Premiss (f) seems obviously true. But if anyone were to dispute its truth, then I would appeal to considerations similar to those advanced in Section 7.8 for Premiss (6∗ ). What I have to say about heaven and wrong is similar to what I said in Section 7.9 about suffering, dysfunction, and heaven.²⁴ 7 . 1 4 M O R E S PE C I F I C K I N D S O F W RO N G This section extends the core argument concerning wrong by arguing that steps (a)–(h) can be reiterated, replacing throughout the phrase ²³ J. L. Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, Mind, 64 (1955), 200–12, and Antony Flew, ‘Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom’, in A. Flew and A. MacIntyre (eds.), New Essays in Philosophical Theology (SCM, 1955); cf. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Clarendon, 1982), 164 ff. ²⁴ Richard Swinburne opts for the view that people in heaven are unfree with respect to wrong. Having reaffirmed his commitment to Open Theism by saying that ‘This world order is a very dangerous and costly experiment which its author might be expected to bring to a halt one day’, and having asserted ‘the virtual inevitability of wrongdoing and suffering if humans are to have the great good of free and efficacious choice’, he says: ‘The great goods of Heaven, as pictured in the Christian tradition, include that deep awareness of God which, combined with even moderately good desires, logically rules out any of its inhabitants having the good of being able to reject the good’. Why, then, was God justified in not giving us this deep awareness of himself (along with whatever other goods are present in heaven) immediately? Swinburne’s answer is that it was good that the (free) choice to seek this deep awareness of God be made here on earth—that is, in the presence of distractions and temptations to pursue lesser goods instead and affirmed over the course of a life here on earth; he refers readers to supporting arguments earlier in his book. (Providence and the Problem of Evil, p. 250. The quotations are all from pp. 250f.)
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‘wrong’ by various phrases of the form ‘wrong of kind K’. Hence for some kinds, at least, it can thereby be established that God does not have strong reasons all-things-considered which arise from the distinctive features of that kind, and which add to the rational weight already deriving from the fact that the kind involves wrong, for ensuring that there is not much evil of those kinds. The point of showing this is that it yields a significant extension to the current conclusion of the core argument: it can now be asserted that in all settled worlds the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being lacks strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he made, to ensure that there is no wrong of kind K. Furthermore, considerations advanced in Section 7.6.3 suggest that suitably formulated propositions corresponding to (e), (f), and (g) yield a theodicy for the general truth that the actual world contains a lot of wrong of kind K. Some kinds of wrong entail the existence of suffering or dysfunction—for example, torturing someone. Let us move on, however, to discuss wrong which does not involve suffering or dysfunction. This section tackles only one kind of wrong, choosing to betray someone; perhaps a more or less similar treatment can be given of at least some other kinds. It should be plain that arguments earlier in this chapter yield a strong case for saying that the more narrowly focussed versions of premisses (c) and (d) jointly entail (e∗ ) In all settled worlds (i) no one ever chooses to betray anyone else, and (ii) people are not free and morally responsible in refraining from choosing to betray other people, and (iii) whether or not anyone ever chooses to betray anyone else does not depend on individual rational creatures’ personalities, values, beliefs, tastes, or reasoning. What needs more attention is the correspondingly restricted version of (f): (f ∗ ) In each settled world the value that has thereby been lost is very great, and greater than the disvalue of there being some choosings to betray. Let W4 be a world in which God has acted strong reasons all-thingsconsidered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he made, to ensure that no one ever decides to betray anyone
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else. In W4 clauses (i)–(iii) of (e∗ ) are all true. Therefore in W4 people do not deserve respect for the fact that they do not decide to betray their spouse by, say, committing adultery, even if many of them deserve respect in virtue of the process by which they avoid deciding to commit adultery. Any kind of commitment which generated a non-defeasible obligation of continued loyalty would absolutely guarantee the nonoccurrence of a decision to betray that commitment.²⁵ So the significance of commitment to other people would be profoundly reduced.²⁶ So much for the value of free will concerning choosing to betray, understood in terms of the loss that would be constituted by its absence from human life. On the other hand, the badness-for-its-own-sake of widespread choosing to betray is also considerable. Let Beryl be a person who is, in the actual world, free to betray others. People who love her each have reason to feel sad when she actually betrays someone else; they each have reason to feel disappointed that she has rendered herself less worthy of their esteem. In even deciding to betray a friend, Beryl tarnishes, perhaps even defiles, much of the good that she and her friend have brought to each other: the present and future significance of the past good is adversely affected.²⁷ For deciding to betray someone in some specific way is itself a kind of betrayal of the other person, whether or not the decision is ever implemented. Yet a large part of the esteem that has been lowered, and of the good that has been tarnished, and of the grounds that Beryl’s friends would have for feeling disappointed in her, depended on the fact that Beryl was free to betray the friend! Having entered into friendship and sustained it up to (and perhaps after) the decision to betray, the companionship, encouragement, and wise counsel that each of Beryl and her friend continued to bring to each other were free gifts. Suppose that Beryl had not been free to desert her friends when they needed her to be there for them and she could be there, and not been free to intentionally demoralize her friends or intentionally lead them astray with bad advice, or even to decide to betray her friends in one of these ways; suppose also ²⁵ I assume that God would ensure that for all worlds such as W4, even if in some of them people can engage in wrong, in none of them is anyone ever placed in circumstances where they know that they can avoid betraying someone only by doing something morally wrong. ²⁶ This is a non-causal consequence of the situation. (That an act of parliament renders certain conduct illegal is a non-causal consequence of it; that it succeeds in deterring people from behaving in a certain way is a causal consequence of it.) ²⁷ Again, the point here concerns a non-causal effect, distinct from the possible causal effect which would consist in a change in the perceived significance of the past good.
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that Beryl’s continued loyalty to her friends was not only outside her control but also independent of her personality, values, beliefs, tastes, reasoning, and desires. In that case Beryl would not have deserved as much esteem by her loved ones as she did, and the good in the friendship that was preserved from being tarnished would have been worth less. The badness-for-its-own-sake of merely deciding to betray someone in some specific respect, and of many cases of actually betraying them in that respect, is to a great extent constituted by a loss of value, a lessening in the value of certain goods that have been embodied in the relationship. Yet the value of these goods apart from the decision to betray would not have been as great if clauses (i)–(iii) of (5∗ ) had been true. So suppose that we are deciding whether to favour, on the one hand, a package comprising freedom to choose to betray together with the goods involved in cases of freedom to choose to betray but no actual choosing to betray, plus the disvalue involved in cases of freedom to choose to betray together with actual choosing to betray. The considerations set forth in the preceding two paragraphs suggest that we should considerably discount the initially apparent weight of the second package. I will assume that the foregoing considerations can be developed to cover the supposition that while God may allow some choosing to betray, he has strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, independently of taking any other decisions, to ensure that there is not much of it. Thus a plausible case can be made out for the proposed extension to the conclusion of the General Theodicy for Wrong.²⁸ ²⁸ The strategy exemplified by this chapter has been in my mind for so long that I cannot now remember which intellectual influences have been strongest. Most readers will recognize that I have benefited considerably from reading Richard Swinburne’s work. My treatment, however, differs from his in several important respects. For instance, Swinburne invokes libertarianism, and indeed his arguments often implicitly presuppose that Open Theism is true, whereas God, the Best, and Evil remains neutral between Theological Compatibilism, Molinism, and Open Theism. Many good points made by Swinburne are omitted from this chapter, not because their value is doubtful, but because I am trying to complement what he says rather than to repeat it. Although Peter van Inwagen (in The Problem of Evil (Clarendon, 2006)) declares that he is not offering a theodicy, various arguments in the book provide important insights which might well contribute substantially to a theodicy for various truths about evil; yet I have not relied on them here.
8 Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God This chapter does not identify and classify all significantly distinct evidential arguments from evil against the existence of God, or even all those that have been advanced in, say, the last thirty years. Instead, it states and assesses some that are especially instructive.
8 . 1 TO O L EY ’ S 1 9 9 1 A RG U M E N T
8.1.1 The Core Argument Michael Tooley sets his own argument from evil in the context of a wide-ranging and illuminating discussion both of the structure of such arguments and of various attempts to defend theism against them.¹ I will not summarize Tooley’s article, but will rather state his core argument and engage with enough of what he says to justify my claim that the core argument fails. The core argument is familiar from the work of earlier writers, notably William L. Rowe.² Here it is: (1) Cases where animals die agonizing deaths in forest fires, or where children undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, are cases of intrinsically undesirable states of affairs that an omnipotent and omniscient person could have prevented without thereby allowing an equal or greater evil, or preventing an equal or greater good. ¹ Michael Tooley, ‘The Argument From Evil’, Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), 89–134. ² William L. Rowe, ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (1979), 335–41, esp. p. 336.
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(2) An omniscient and morally perfect person would prevent the existence of any intrinsically undesirable state of affairs whose prevention he could achieve without either allowing an equal or greater evil, or preventing an equal or greater good. (3) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being.³ Premiss (2) entails that if we consider the suffering on some occasion of some particular person or animal, this very instance of suffering, or the non-prevention of this very instance, must be required either to prevent an equal or greater evil or else to avoid preventing some greater good. To help us see this, let ‘evil 1’ be some particular instance of suffering, and let us rewrite Premiss (2) as follows: (S) OmnPerf would prevent evil 1 if he could do so, unless his doing so would require that either (i) he allows some evil at least as bad as evil 1, or else (ii) he prevents some equal or greater good. Consider what might be thought to be the more liberal premiss (Alt-S) OmnPerf would prevent evil 1 if he could do so, unless his doing so would require that either (i) he allows that one or another of evils 2, 3, . . . n occurs, where each of evils 2, 3, . . . n is at least as bad as evil 1, or else (ii) he prevents some equal or greater good, or else (iii) he prevents some equal or greater good unless he allows that one or another of evils 1,2, . . . n occurs, where each of these evils is at least as bad as evil 1. Plainly if clause (i) of Alt-S is satisfied then clause (i) of S is satisfied; and clause (ii) of Alt-S is the same as clause (ii) of S. Furthermore, if clause (iii) of Alt-S is satisfied then either clause (i) is satisfied or clause (ii) is. Hence Alt-S is no less restrictive than S. Nevertheless Premiss (2) does not entail, with respect to each particular instance of evil, that either there is some specific (non-disjunctive) good whose attainment requires God to allow that very instance, or else there is some specific (non-disjunctive) equal or greater evil whose prevention requires that God allows that very instance. This truth adds considerably to the premiss’s plausibility. ³ Tooley, ‘Argument from Evil’, p. 95.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 193 Tooley devotes a lot of space to supporting (1), which he calls ‘the crucial premiss’, but says very little in favour of (2). Premiss (1) has been the focus of extensive debate, to which I have little to add apart from some points that are more conveniently made in the next section, with respect to Rowe’s 1996 argument. Here I will, for brevity’s sake, concede (1) to Tooley, and dispute (2).
8.1.2 Objections to the Core Argument’s Second Premiss Here are four objections to (2). Firstly, since Tooley himself holds that reasons pertaining to justice can defeat considerations to do with consequences,⁴ he must admit that if there are cases in which an evil can be prevented only by committing a serious injustice, then even if preventing the evil will have the best overall causal consequences, the agent should not prevent the evil. For example, suppose that each of A and B will undergo considerable pain unless they receive a certain medicine, but there is insufficient medicine available to treat both A and B. On the one hand, if A were untreated then he would undergo more severe pain than B would if B were treated; on the other hand, B owns the medicine and wants to be treated with it. There is an omniscient being who lacks the power to alter the foregoing truths. Arguably this being would act wrongly by stealing B’s medicine and administering it to A. Obviously the foregoing counter-example arises only because (2) concerns what any omniscient, perfectly good being, even one quite limited in power, would do. Accordingly, let (2) be improved by inserting the word ‘omnipotent’ before ‘omniscient’. The remaining objections to (2) apply to the amended version. The second objection concerns whether even an omniscient being can have knowledge of counterfactuals whose consequents specify essentially undetermined events.⁵ (Arguably quantum physics has yielded a posteriori knowledge that there are essentially undetermined events, and arguably free choosings are essentially free and therefore, if libertarianism is correct, essentially undetermined.⁶) Suppose there occurring one of two essentially undetermined, intrinsically undesirable states of affairs ⁴ Tooley, ‘Argument from Evil’, pp. 112–13. ⁵ The discussion of omniscience in Chapter 1 is directly relevant to my argument, here. ⁶ We should distinguish between what is essential to a particular event, this choosing to do X, and what is a necessary condition of its being true that this person would have chosen to do X on this occasion.
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S1 and S2 is logically necessary for achieving some good G which outweighs each of S1 and S2, although neither S1 nor S2 is logically necessary for G. S1 is worse than S2; S1 and S2 are the only relevant evils; and G is the only relevant good. Premiss (2) implies that in this situation an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being—‘God’, for short—would prevent S1 if and only if it were the case that if he prevented S1 but not S2 then S2 would obtain. But just about all philosophers—except, perhaps, some Molinists—think that, given that S1 and S2 are essentially undetermined, it is not true that if God prevented S1 but not S2 then S2 would obtain. What might be true is that if the being prevented S1 but not S2 then S2 would probably obtain. This second objection is based on the assumption that the non-Molinist consensus is correct. Suppose that if God prevented S1 but not S2 then G would probably obtain, and that if he prevented S2 but not S1 then G would probably obtain. God knows this. But when he considers the degree of probability involved, and compares the values of S1 and S2, he might realize that the expected utility of his preventing S1 is lower than the expected utility of his not doing so but preventing S2 instead. If so then God would surely decide to refrain from preventing S1, which ex hypothesi is a worse evil than S2. If so, then (2) is false. Tooley acknowledges that if the universe is indeterministic then ‘not even an omniscient being can always know what would happen in a given situation were he not to intervene’. He responds by arguing that even if, in Rowe’s example, it is not causally determined that the fawn will suffer an agonizing death, it will still be extraordinarily likely that this will occur if there is no intervention, and knowledge of this latter fact would enable an omnipotent and omniscient being to prevent the evil in question⁷
But this response leaves intact my own foregoing argument for the conclusion that even if there is a sense in which the omniscient and omniscient being ‘can’ prevent the evil in question, omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness do not jointly guarantee that the being will do so. The third objection involves agent-centred prerogatives.⁸ Suppose that there occurring one of two evil states of affairs S1 and S2 is logically necessary for achieving some good G which outweighs each of S1 and ⁷ Tooley, ‘Argument from Evil’, p. 107. ⁸ The term ‘agent-centred prerogative’ is explained in Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Clarendon, 1982).
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 195 S2; but neither S1 nor S2 is logically necessary for G. S1 and S2 are the only relevant evils; and G is the only relevant good. S1 and S2 involve different people. The individual involved in S1 is a volunteer. Not only is S1 worse than S2, but The first individual’s voluntarily undergoing the greater degree of distress (or whatever) is a worse state of affairs than The second individual’s non-voluntarily undergoing the lesser degree of distress. Given this situation, nevertheless many non-consequentialists will be receptive to the idea that the first individual might have an agent-centred prerogative to voluntarily undergo the greater degree of distress in order to achieve G, in preference to the second individual’s undergoing it; and it might be compatible with God’s moral perfection (even if it is not a requirement of justice) for God to respect the first individual’s wish. If so, then (2) is false, since God could prevent S1 without either allowing an equal or greater evil, or preventing an equal or greater good.⁹ The fourth objection to (2) involves the presence of indeterminacy. For how many hours must you exercise in order to be fit enough to run 10 kilometres in 30 minutes? Answer: many hours, depending on your initial level of cardiovascular fitness, the nature and intensity of the exercise you undertake, and so on. Suppose that values are supplied for all these variables. There may still be no minimum number of hours that you must exercise in order to achieve your goal. Exercising for more than 5 hours may be clearly necessary; exercising for 1000 hours may be clearly more than is necessary; but there may be no dividing line between the necessary and the more than necessary. Similarly, how much evil of some kind k must God allow in order to achieve some good G? For many < k, G > pairs the answer may be that there is no minimum quantity of k which is necessary: for any quantity of k which is more than what God must allow in order to achieve G there is some lesser quantity of k which is more than what God must allow in order to achieve G. (This point does not require that there is an infinite series of smaller and smaller quantities of k, converging on some amount which is less than what God must allow in order to achieve G. Rather the point rests on vagueness, typified by the well-known presentation of the sorites paradox in terms of the baldness example.) Surely in the foregoing circumstances God would satisfice by choosing some amount of k which is low enough—that is, not very much greater ⁹ The argument in this paragraph is consistent with what Section 4.5 says about God and agent-centred prerogatives. In choosing to permit the worse state of affairs, S2, God is not thereby choosing an inferior world instead of a better one.
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than some other amount of k that is also more than what God must allow in order to achieve G. If so, then (2) is false.¹⁰ For a specific, though controversial, illustration of the point let k be Human suffering and let G be Such-and-such a degree of human moral responsibility with respect to whether or not people suffer. (Chapter 7 did not argue that God’s allowing human suffering is a logically necessary condition of human moral responsibility for whether or not people suffer. What I claimed was merely that (in the numbering adopted there) (3∗ ) and (4∗ ) entail (5∗ ).) Perhaps someone can replace (2) by some related principle that evades all of the foregoing objections. But even if this can be done, can it be done in such a way that the conjunction of the replacing premiss with Tooley’s (1) entails (3)? (Tooley’s strategy is to produce a core argument which is deductively valid, and then subsidiary arguments, often nondeductive ones, to support the premisses of the core argument.) Once the revised version of (2) is in place, revisions to (1) may then turn out to be needed in order to yield a deductively valid core argument. But even if (1) as it stands is highly plausible, will the revised version of (1) be highly plausible? It is anyone’s guess.¹¹
8.1.3 Tooley’s Claim about Our Total Available Evidence There is one other important claim in Tooley’s paper that should be scrutinized here. Tooley recognizes that his subsidiary arguments in favour of (1) fall short of being proofs, and that therefore known truths about evil make it, at most, prima facie unreasonable to believe in the existence of God. Perhaps objections based on evil and undermined or overridden by other considerations. He therefore considers whether our total available evidence (including known truths about evil, but also a huge body of other information) makes it unreasonable to believe that God exists. He claims that it does. Tooley’s reason for saying so is that in order to overturn the strong prima facie case against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and ¹⁰ Essentially the same point is made by Peter van Inwagen in various places—most recently in his book The Problem of Evil (Clarendon Press, 2006), 101f. Van Inwagen’s argument has been attacked by Jeff Jordan (‘Evil and Van Inwagen’, Faith and Philosophy, 20 (2003), 236–9) and by Jim Stone (‘Evidential Atheism’, Philosophical Studies, 114 (2003), 253–77; esp. pp. 268 ff.) I do not believe that these criticisms succeed. ¹¹ My discussion of logical arguments from evil, in Chapter 6, is relevant to this matter.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 197 perfectly good being what is required is a strong case in favour of the existence of such a being. Is there such a case? Tooley argues: [No version of the cosmological argument involves] any claims about the moral character of the object in question, let alone the claim that it is a morally perfect person. But in the absence of such a claim, how could such arguments, even if they turned out to be sound, serve to undercut the argument from evil? . . . [Given] the mixture of good and evil that one finds in the world, the argument from order can hardly provide support even for the existence of a designer or creator who is very good, let alone one who is morally perfect. So it is hard to see how the teleological argument, any more than the cosmological, can overturn the argument from evil . . . A similar conclusion can be defended with respect to other arguments, such as those that appeal to reported miracles, or religious experiences. For while in the case of religious experiences it might be argued that personal contact with a being may provide additional evidence concerning the person’s character, it is clear that the primary evidence concerning a person’s character must consist of information concerning what the person does and does not do.¹²
Tooley is wrong about what is claimed in various versions of the cosmological argument. Having stated the Five Ways, Aquinas goes on to investigate the nature of a first cause, of an unmoved mover, etc., and argues that such a being must be perfectly good, as well as having other relevant properties such as knowledge and will. He thereby justifies his otherwise perplexing claim, at the end of each of the individual Ways, that what has been proved is the existence of God. Thus the first three Ways should be recognized as the opening stages of three overlapping cosmological arguments for the existence of God, arguments which include the discussion of divine goodness. Leibniz argues that the sufficient reason for the existence of the universe must possess ‘sovereign goodness’, a quality which includes justice and excludes all imperfection. Clarke argues that the supreme cause’s selfexistence, absolute independence, and omnipotence imply that ‘he must act always according to the strictest rules of infinite goodness, justice and truth, and all other moral perfections’.¹³ The cosmological arguments ¹² Tooley, ‘Argument from Evil’, p. 103. ¹³ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part; the Five Ways are stated in question 2, article 3, while divine perfection and divine goodness are discussed in question 6; G. W. Leibniz, The Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on Reason (1714), sect 9, available in his Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L. Loemker, 2nd edn. (Reidel, 1969), 636–42 (sect. 9 is on p. 639); Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, and Other Writings (1704), ed. Ezio Vailati (Cambridge University Press, 1998), sect. 12 (the sentence quoted is on p. 84).
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of Aquinas, Leibniz, and Clarke, if they were sound, would certainly remove any presumption against theism arising from the evidential objection from evil. The issue is not whether one or more of them is sound. Instead, it is whether Tooley is correct in claiming that no version of the cosmological argument, even if it were sound, could undermine or override the argument from evil. What Tooley says about design arguments is a mere gesture at an argument; no doubt he is relying on Hume.¹⁴ Consider, however, the fine-tuning argument, which starts from data provided by physical cosmology, not including anything about the history of the human race, and concludes that there is a creator-designer of the universe. Suppose that someone, following the path blazed by Swinburne, argues that we should prefer the hypothesis that the creator-designer is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, because this hypothesis is simpler than the view that the creator-designer has a finite degree of power and knowledge, and is not especially good. What happens when we now take into account the fact that the history of our planet exhibits a mixture of goods and evils? Tooley seems committed to the claim that our total evidence, including both the cosmological data and observed evils, cannot yield a high probability for the hypothesis that the creator-designer is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Since Tooley embraces the coherence and applicability of epistemic probability conforming to the calculus of probability, it is fair to express the point in the following way. Let e1 be the cosmological data, e2 be all our information about intrinsically undesirable states of affairs, k1 our background knowledge, and h the proposition that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good creator-designer. Suppose that Pr(h/e1&k1) >> 0.5 and Pr(h/e2&k1) << 0.5. Why should we believe that the conjunction of these premisses entails, or even establishes a presumption that Pr(h/e1&e2&k1) < 0.5? There are many counter-examples to the salient pattern of inference exemplified here. For example, let us assign new meanings to the probabilistic sentences in the following way. Let e1 now be It has been reported on the television news bulletin that Felicity won the tennis match, e2 be Felicity lost the first set 1 game to 5, k1 be background knowledge, and h be Felicity won the tennis match. It may well be the case that Pr(h/e1&k) >> 0.5 and Pr(h/e2&k) << 0.5, yet Pr(h/e1&e2&k) > 0.5. ¹⁴ David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779: pt. 10).
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 199 Tooley remains free to claim that while Pr(h/e1&k) >> 0.5 and Pr(h/e2&k) << 0.5 do not jointly entail Pr(h/e1&e2&k) < 0.5, it is nevertheless true that Pr(h/e1&e2&k) < 0.5. But this needs to be argued. Could religious experience defeat an evidential argument from evil? Tooley answers: [While] in the case of religious experiences it might be argued that personal contact with a being may provide additional evidence concerning the person’s character, it is clear that the primary evidence concerning a person’s character must consist of information concerning what the person does and does not do. So . . . even if there were veridical religious experiences, they would not provide one with a satisfactory defense against the argument from evil.¹⁵
Tooley’s word ‘primary’ presumably means something like ‘overriding’. But why should we believe that information about what someone does and does not do always outweighs all other evidence, derived from direct contact, concerning the person’s character? The only information you have about Diana’s actions might initially incline you to think that she is foolish. But having talked to her you might find that she is very self-aware, has great insight into human nature and the wide range of problems that arise in everyday life, and offers very good advice. You might well be justified in concluding that she is in fact very wise, and that her apparently foolish actions must have had some unknown justification. Of course, you may be mistaken on the latter point: wise people sometimes do foolish things. It remains true, however, that the evidence in favour of saying that Diana acted foolishly may be overthrown by evidence concerning what she says about matters other than these actions. In fact there are few contemporary philosophers whose belief that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being is based solely on a design argument, or solely on religious experiences involving personal contact with some being. Swinburne, for example, incorporates many considerations into his elaborate cumulative case for the existence of God. To sum up: Tooley’s core argument from evil contains a false premiss and therefore does not constitute a strong prima facie argument against the existence of God. Moreover even if it turns out that Tooley’s core argument can be repaired with plausible revised premisses, and ¹⁵ Tooley, ‘Argument from Evil’, p. 103.
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transformed into a strong prima facie case against the existence of God, Tooley comes nowhere hear showing that his case is not overturned by currently available arguments in favour of the existence of God. 8 . 2 ROW E ’ S 1 9 9 6 A RG U M E N T Rowe’s 1996 paper ‘The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look’ constitutes a major revision of his earlier presentations on the topic.¹⁶ Rowe’s paper bears on two important questions. Firstly, does undisputed information about the kinds, amounts, and distribution of evils and goods in the world contribute significantly towards an agnostic position which leans in the direction of atheism, independently of any serious examination of theodicy? Secondly, if it does, and if in addition we come to realize with respect to many particular instances of evil that no good we know of justifies God, if he exists, in permitting them, should we then regard ourselves as fully justified in believing and asserting that God does not exist? I will, like Rowe, be concentrating mainly on the second question, to which his paper answers Yes.
8.2.1 The Argument from the Fawn and Murdered-child Examples Rowe starts by focussing on two particular instances of evil. The first involves a fawn burned in a forest fire and undergoing several days of intense pain before dying. In the second a small child is raped, beaten, and murdered. That cases like these in fact occur is beyond dispute. Rowe argues: P: No goods we know of justifies an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being in permitting these two particular instances of evil Therefore Q: No good at all justifies an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being in permitting them Therefore not-G: There is no omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being.¹⁷ ¹⁶ The 1996 paper is contained in Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument From Evil, (Indiana University Press, 1996). Page references will be to the Howard-Snyder collection. ¹⁷ In this section ‘G’ denotes the proposition that God exists, whereas in Chapter 7 ‘G’ was used to denote various goods.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 201 Rowe explains that P is to be understood in such a way that not-G entails P, and that the expression ‘goods that we know of’ is to be understood as including goods that we have some grasp of, even though we have no knowledge at all that they actually occur. He holds that a specific good justifies God in permitting the fawn and murdered-child instances only if the good both outweighs them and is such that God could not bring it about without having to permit them, or evils at least as bad.¹⁸ In section VII of the paper he argues in favour of P and defends P from various objections. When discussing the argument from P and Q to not-G, and an argument proceeding directly from P to not-G, Rowe makes statements of epistemic probability, employing Bayes’ theorem and related principles that are underwritten by the axioms of the probability calculus. It is important that he carefully specify the background knowledge, k, which can legitimately be used in this task. Rowe restricts k to information shared by most theists and non-theists who have given some thought to the problem of evil; k includes the key truths about the fawn and murdered-child cases, and truths identifying other instances of evil, together with a lot of general knowledge about kinds and amounts of evil, but does not include P, Q, G, their negations, or such propositions as An omnipotent, omniscient being would be unjustified in permitting the fawn and murdered-child instances. Various propositions included in k will have evidential impact on G—for instance, information about cosmological fine-tuning, information about the multitude of appalling evils in the world. Rowe initially works with the assumption that the positive and negative impacts of these somehow balance each other out, so that Pr(G/k) = 0.5; he acknowledges that, for the most part, theists will say that this estimate is too low, and atheists will say that it is too high.¹⁹ Rowe calls the assumption that Pr(G/k) = 0.5 the level-playing-field assumption. It corresponds to what he calls square agnosticism, the position of someone whose total relevant evidence is k, who understands the proposition God exists, who does not believe it and does not believe its negation, and who leans neither towards it nor towards its negation. A non-square agnostic ¹⁸ Rowe does not in this paper actually include the phrase ‘or evils at least as bad’, but his previous publications indicate that he would agree that it should be included. ¹⁹ The words ‘for the most part’ acknowledge the fact that some theists and some atheists disdain to consider arguments for and against their views, while others are opposed merely to the use of quantified probability estimates.
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is a person who neither believes nor disbelieves that God exists, but who believes that all things considered one position is somewhat better supported than the other. Rowe begins by arguing that P makes Q more likely than it otherwise would be, and then argues that P makes G less likely than not—that is, that Pr(G/P&k) < 0.5. This second step employs the obviously true premisses Pr(Q/P&k) < 1, Pr(P/k) < 1, and Pr(P/not-G&k) = 1, together with the convenient assumptions that Pr(G/k) = 0.5 and Pr(P/G&k) = 0.5, and then proceeds via the probability calculus in an apparently straightforward way to the conclusion that Pr(G/P&k) = 0.333, which of course is less than 0.5.²⁰ Although there are significant problems with this stage of Rowe’s overall case, I propose, for the sake of argument, to grant that Pr(G/P&k) < 0.5.²¹ Rowe wraps up this stage of his paper with a similar argument to the effect that Pr(Q/P&k) > 0.5. In section VI of the paper Rowe defends the working assumption that Pr(P/G&k) = 0.5 from Steven Wykstra’s arguments to the contrary. Rowe points out that he is now in a position to simplify the structure of his core argument. Instead of proceeding inductively from P to Q and deductively from Q to not-G, he can bypass Q and proceed directly from P to not-G. Rowe recognizes that even granted that Pr(G/P&k) < 0.5, it might be questioned whether P&k is a good prima facie reason to believe not-G. Maybe P&k is instead a good reason to withhold judgement on whether God exists while leaning in the direction of not-G. Rowe points out that while, given the foregoing calculations, P does not lower G’s probability sufficiently to move one from ‘square agnosticism’ to ‘square atheism’, P does make it more rational to believe G than to believe not-G, since given that Pr(G/P&k) < 0.5, Pr(G/P&k) is closer to 0 than it is to 1. ²⁰ Rowe’s argument requires that G be not an a priori, logically necessary truth—contrary to the opinion of Anselm, Descartes, and others. While this statement can be inferred from the ‘convenient assumption’ that Pr(G/k) = 0.5, its status in the argument is more than that of a convenient assumption. If G were an a priori, necessary truth, and epistemic probability is understood either as partial entailment or as a degree of belief by an ideal epistemic agent who is omniscient about a priori, logically necessary truths, then according to the probability calculus it would be true that Pr(G/k) = 1, and therefore that Pr(G/P&k) = 1. ²¹ Michael Tooley raises objections to Rowe’s reasoning, in sections 3.4.2 and 3.4.3 of his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the problem of evil.
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8.2.2 Extending the Argument so that it yields Atheism Rowe now extends his case with atheism as his goal. He says: As I suggested in an earlier essay, there are two basic types of argument from evil, one beginning from the fact that there exist evils ‘that seem to us to serve no good whatsoever, let alone one unobtainable by omnipotence,’ and the other that starts ‘from the somewhat less complex fact that the world contains vast amounts of intense human and animal suffering.’ In reaching any overall conclusion as to the force of the evidential argument from evil on the rationality of belief in God, we need to consider arguments of the second type as well. And the important point for our purposes is that unlike the argument I’ve presented—resting as it does on a statement, P, which is not a part of k—arguments based simply on the existence of evils we know to occur are based on statements already contained in k. For k includes information about the kinds, amounts, and distribution of evils and goods in the world. Since I do think that arguments based on our shared information about the kinds, amounts, and distribution of evils and goods in the world do have merit, I earlier noted in an endnote that my view is that Pr(G/k) < 0.5. What bearing would this have on the argument that I have given in this chapter? It would mean that Pr(G/P&k) < 0.333. How much less would depend on how low the probability of G on k is and how low the probability of P given G and k is. If Pr(G/k) = 0.2 and Pr(P/G&k) = 0.25, Pr(G/P&k) would be <.06. Of course, even if we were to agree to all this, we would not have answered Wykstra’s point that my argument from P to not-G does not suffice to leverage us from square agnosticism to square atheism. For, since we are no longer taking Pr(G/k) to be 0.5, we are not beginning with square agnosticism. But if we were then to introduce k as k minus the information about the kinds, amounts and distribution of evils and goods in the world, we could then say that given Pr(G/k ) as 0.5, the combination of the two sorts of arguments from evil may suffice to move us from square agnosticism to square atheism.²²
Despite the fact that in the last sentence of the quotation Rowe uses the expression ‘may suffice’ rather than ‘suffices’, and despite the fact that the final paragraph of the essay seems to conclude merely that ‘it is irrational to believe in theism’,²³ it is plain that Rowe should be regarded as arguing for atheism. For in the passage quoted Rowe is assigning himself the task of answering Wykstra’s point that his argument from P to not-G does not suffice to leverage us from square agnosticism to square atheism, and is saying that to do this he will ²² Rowe, ‘The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look’, 273f. ²³ Ibid. 282.
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revise his statement that Pr(G/k) = 0.5 and employ the premiss that Pr(G/k) is considerably below 0.5. But obviously this premiss should be conceded only by philosophers who already hold that, given only information in k, it is irrational to believe in theism. As an argument for atheism Rowe’s strategy has some prospects of success, but as an argument for the weaker conclusion stated in the paper’s final paragraph the strategy would be circular. Rowe does not explicitly give us even a vague estimate of what probability range amounts to square atheism. Let us take square atheism to correspond to the view that the probability of G relative to the total available evidence is less than 0.06. This figure is not unfairly low to Rowe, since the quotation above indicates that he thinks he can defend an estimate below 0.06. I am told that statisticians’ rule of thumb is that, other things being equal, a hypothesis is to be rejected if and only if its probability relative to total evidence is no higher than 0.05.²⁴ Rowe is in effect withdrawing his former, temporary level-playingfield assumption and replacing it with a new one, according to which when we strip out all our undisputed information about evil, the probability of G relative to the resulting body of knowledge is 0.5. Adding the undisputed information about evil, but excluding P and similar propositions, lowers the probability of G to well below 0.5. Rowe adopts a working estimate of 0.2, which corresponds to an agnostic position leaning significantly towards not-G. In that case, what happens when we bring in P? The probability of G relative to the conjunction of P with all our other information will be even lower than 0.2; low enough, Rowe thinks, to yield square atheism. But why should we accept Rowe’s working estimate of 0.2? In the passage quoted Rowe says that his reasons for thinking that Pr(G/k) = 0.2 depend on the fact that the world contains not merely the fawn and murdered-child instances but vast amounts of intense human and animal suffering, and that these reasons do not depend on P. But in this paper he does not say anything more about just how his reasons show that Pr(G/k) is much lower than 0.5. ²⁴ It might be objected that this rule of thumb is unreasonable in the light of the lottery paradox, and that accordingly atheism should be reinterpreted as constituted not by the belief that God does not exist but instead by a very low degree of belief. But it is not clear that belief and disbelief that God exists encounter any difficulty similar to the lottery paradox, and anyway the objection, if correct, would call into question the way Rowe sets up the issues in his paper.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 205 It might be suggested that a clue is to be found in an earlier paper, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, referred to in the foregoing quotation. There he says: Intense human and animal suffering in a world supposedly under the control of [an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being] is like the presence of dirt in a room supposedly under the control of a powerful being who aims at making the room clean and attractive—its occurrence tends to disconfirm the existence of such a being.²⁵
This can presumably be restated as the argument: If G were true, God would possess strong prima facie reasons for ensuring that there was no intense human or animal suffering. Therefore the occurrence of such suffering disconfirms the existence of God. But suppose that we were entitled to believe: It is not probable that there are no truths, logically independent of G, such that these truths would provide God, if he exists, with defeaters for his strong prima facie reasons for ensuring that there was no intense human or animal suffering. In that case the foregoing argument would be undermined. After all, consider the hypothesis that Smith is a rational egoist. If the hypothesis were true, Smith would have strong prima facie reasons for not marrying someone whose income is much lower than his own. Yet if there are rational egoists, then presumably they often get married to people whose income is a lot less than their own. This is because financial considerations are often overridden by other self-interested considerations. Now suppose that Smith does marry someone whose income is much lower than his own and we are not entitled to assert that probably in Smith’s case financial considerations are not overridden by non-financial considerations of self-interest. In that case surely our information about Smith does not disconfirm the hypothesis that he is a rational egoist. Suppose it were just as probable as not that for each instance of human or animal suffering there were some greater good such that even God could not have obtained the good without allowing that case of ²⁵ Rowe, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Cornell University Press, 1986), 246.
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suffering, or some other evil at least as bad. Then even given that if God exists he has strong prima facie reasons for ensuring that there is no intense human or animal suffering, we would not be entitled to assert that the suffering disconfirms the existence of God. Hence the argument quoted from Rowe’s paper ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’ can be seen as resting on the suppressed premiss (P∗ ) It is more probable than not that for each instance of human or animal suffering there is no greater good such that even God could not have obtained the good without allowing that instance, or some other evil at least as bad. That this is so receives some support from Rowe’s explicit appeal to such a premiss in his earlier paper ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’. There his core argument has as its first premiss: There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some great good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.²⁶
He illustrates this premiss by the fawn example, and adds, in further support: It seems [even if it were reasonable to believe that there are greater goods suitably related to the fawn instance,] quite unlikely that all the instances of intense suffering occurring daily in our world are intimately related to the occurrence of greater goods or the prevention of evils at least as bad, and even more unlikely, should they somehow all be so related, that even an omnipotent, omniscient being could not have achieved at least some of those goods (or prevented at least some of those evils) without permitting the instances of intense suffering that are supposedly related to them.²⁷
P∗ is broader than Rowe’s premiss P in the argument from the fawn and murdered-child instances, but is otherwise quite similar to it. Thus if Rowe’s figure of 0.2 is based on the argument quoted from ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’—the argument that talks of dirt in a room—this estimate depends on a P-like premiss, rather than being independent of it. So Rowe’s reasoning in the passages quoted from ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’ and ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’ cannot legitimately be used to explain why Pr(G/k) = 0.2, seeing that k should not include any P-like assumptions such as P∗ . ²⁶ Rowe, ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’, p. 2. ²⁷ Ibid. 5.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 207 Is there some other argument, involving reference to the vast amount of evil that has existed, but not involving any P-like premiss, for holding that Pr(G/k) = 0.2? Instead of speculating about this matter, it will be more profitable to advance the discussion by simply conceding to Rowe that his figure of 0.2 is reasonable without appeal to any P-like assumption, and investigating whether a strong case for square atheism might then be developed by bringing in a P-like premiss concerning the full range of evils that has existed, while sticking as closely as possible to the way Rowe set out his treatment of the fawn and murdered-child instances, and P.
8.2.3 Arguing in the Spirit of Rowe’s Proposal In fact I will consider three alternative main premisses for the argument. (1) Let Ea be a proposition listing all known instances of evil, and providing just enough empirical information about each instance to enable the instances to be roughly and partially ordered via the axiological relation worse than; and let Ea say that it lists all known instances of evil. Call each item on the list, as identified therein, a conjunct of Ea. Let P1 be No combination of goods each of which we know of justifies God in allowing Ea to be true. Then the first alternative main premiss is Ea&P1. (2) Let Eb specify everything known about what kinds of suffering there are and how much suffering there has been of each kind, and providing just enough general empirical information about different categories of sufferer (for example, children) to enable the conjuncts of Eb to be roughly and partially ordered via the relation worse than. (Notice that Ea and Eb are logically independent of each other.) Let P2 be No combination of goods each of which we know of justifies God’s allowing Eb to be true. Then the second alternative main premiss is Eb&P2. (3) Let Ec be the (comparatively very short) proposition The world contains a huge amount of intense human and animal suffering, much of it in no way due to human actions and omissions, and much of the human suffering occurring to quite innocent victims, and let P3 be No combination of goods we know of justifies God’s allowing Ec to be true. Then the third alternative main premiss is Ec&P3.
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8.2.4 Assessing the Argument from Ea&P1 As will become apparent below, there is no need, to achieve the aims of this section, to deny the truth of P1. Let K be information shared by most theists and non-theists who have given some thought to the problem of evil, excluding Ea, Eb, Ec and their respective conjuncts, and excluding also P1, P2, P3, other P-like statements, and statements which are epistemically posterior to these. Our immediate task is to assess whether Pr(G/P1&Ea&K) is low enough to justify atheism. Bayes’ theorem assures us that Pr(G/P1&Ea&K) =
Pr(G/Ea&K) × Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) Pr(P1/Ea&K)
Consider now the numerator on the right-hand side of the equation. Since we are using this equation to help us estimate Pr(G/P1&Ea&K), Pr(G/Ea&K) is to be estimated independently of P1—that is, independently of any information or assumption about whether all the instances of suffering identified in Ea are such that God’s allowing them is justified by goods we know of. Let us, merely for the sake of argument, follow Rowe’s own lead and set this figure at 0.2, thereby starting from an agnosticism which leans towards not-G.²⁸ What is to be our estimate of the ratio of Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) to Pr(P1/Ea&K)? Here we need to reconsider exactly how P1 should be formulated. In order to do so, let us return to Rowe’s original premiss P.²⁹ Rowe points out that since not-P asserts that God exists and that some good known to us justifies him in permitting the fawn and murdered-child instances, it follows that not-G entails P.³⁰ Rowe further clarifies the content of P when he says that P expresses the negation of the proposition God exists and there exists a good we know ²⁸ Rowe worked with the assumption that Pr(G/k ) = 0.2. While his k is not logically equivalent to Ea&K, setting Pr(G/Ea&K) as 0.2 seems fair and in the spirit of Rowe’s procedure. ²⁹ The discussion of P in the next few paragraphs is indebted to William P. Alston, ‘Some ( Temporarily) Final Thoughts on Evidential Arguments from Evil’, in HowardSnyder (ed.), Evidential Argument from Evil, pp. 313–14. ³⁰ Rowe adds that it is important not to confuse P with No good we know of would justify God (if he exists) in permitting E1 and E2, which is not entailed by not-G. He needs to say that not-G entails P in order to be able to assume that Pr(P/not-G&k) = 1.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 209 of and that good justifies him in permitting the fawn and murdered-child instances. Rowe acknowledges that God’s permitting each of the fawn and murdered-child instances might be justified by a combination of goods. In his ‘Reply to Plantinga’ Rowe explains that in the sense he intends we ‘know of’ a combination of goods that justifies these instances only if we know of each of the goods included in the combination.³¹ On this understanding let us stick as close to Rowe as possible and identify my P1 with the following proposition: Either God does not exist, or else it is not the case that there is a combination of goods such that we know of each of the goods included in the combination and which justifies God in allowing Ea. Obviously Rowe would want to assert that Pr(P1/Ea&K) is very high. Let us, for the sake of argument, agree with him and set the value at 0.99. Consider now Pr(P1/G&Ea&K). Let D be the second disjunct of P1 as formulated above. The probability calculus includes a ‘rule of elimination’, which Rowe himself employs on his p. 268. This rule licenses the assertion that Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) = [Pr(D/G&Ea&K) × Pr(P1/D&G&Ea&K) ] + [Pr(not-D/G&Ea&K) × Pr(P1/not-D&G& Ea&K) ].³² Since G¬-D entails not-P1, Pr(P1/not-D&G&Ea&K) = 0. Furthermore, since D entails P1, Pr(P1/D&G&Ea&K) = 1. Therefore Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) = Pr(D/G&Ea&K). So let us try to estimate Pr(D/G&Ea&K). Call any truth in virtue of which God, if he exists, is justified in allowing Ea an Ea-justifier. Assume, as Rowe would, that if there are Ea-justifiers then each of them involves a list of actual goods suitably related to the instances of evil listed in Ea, whether or not ³¹ William L. Rowe, ‘Reply to Plantinga’, Nous, 32 (1998), 545–52. ³² The rationale for the assertion in the text emerges from the more elementary principles that for any propositions h1, h2, and e, Pr(h1/e) = Pr(h1&h2/e) + Pr(h1¬-h2/e), and that Pr(h1&h2/e) = Pr(h2/e) × Pr(h1/h2&e).
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we know of each good. (So an Ea justifier, while it needs to be true, need not be known to be true.) Each Ea-justifier, in justifying God’s allowing Ea, justifies his allowing every conjunct in Ea. In any Ea-justifier, call any conjunct which justifies God’s allowing some particular case of evil C, and which itself has no redundant conjuncts a Ca-justifier. Assume, as Rowe would, that G&Ea entails There is at least one Ea-justifier. If G&Ea is true, then D is true if and only if all Eajustifiers identify at least one good we do not know of. What is the probability, given G&Ea&K, and therefore given that there is at least one Ea-justifier, that all Ea-justifiers identify at least one good we do not know of? Let us approach this question by considering the probability of the negation. Here we must distinguish carefully two distinct claims: For every individual case of suffering in Ea it is probable, relative to G&Ea&K, that all its Ca-justifiers identify goods all of which are ones we know of. It is probable, relative to G&Ea&K, that for every individual case of suffering in Ea all its Ca-justifiers identify goods all of which are ones we know of. It is the second claim that is important in the present context. Yet even if we find the first claim fairly plausible, surely we should find the second a lot less plausible. After all, you may know that every student in your subject has a very good academic record. Therefore even if you do not know any of the students well, you believe of each student that it is probable relative to your current evidence that this student will pass your subject. Nevertheless if your class is a large one then you would be irrational to believe that it is probable, relative to your current evidence, that every student will pass the subject. There does not seem to be any strong reason for supposing that if there are one or more Ea-justifiers then all of them involve only a few goods, such as free will, compassion, and forgiveness. Indeed, for all we know every Ea-justifier includes a great many dissimilar Ca-justifiers, each of which involves a great many goods. Hence it is highly plausible, given our current human cognitive limitations, that Pr(D/G&Ea&K) is high. Hence even if Pr(P/G&k) is fairly low —remember that k includes information about the fawn and murdered child instances—nevertheless
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 211 we should estimate Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) to be high. I see no good reason for supposing that it is much lower than Pr(P1/Ea&K).³³ Rowe might resist my claim that Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) is high, just as he resisted Wykstra’s claim that Pr(P/G&k) is high. According to Rowe, we have reason to believe that every intrinsic good involves conscious experience; this thesis—call it T—cuts down dramatically the scope for possible ignorance of intrinsic goods. T is controversial. For example, it is disputed by people who affirm the ‘sanctity’ of all life, including non-conscious beings such as trees, and also by people who affirm the goodness-for-its-own-sake of there being wilderness areas. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we accept T, and accept that it is probable, relative to G&Ea&K, that every intrinsic good involves conscious experience. Suppose also that we are well placed to survey all the goods that involve current conscious experiences of human beings and of horses, dolphins, and so on. Nevertheless it is doubtful that T gives us strong reasons for assigning a high probability, relative to G&Ea&K, that there are no relevant goods involving currently existing non-terrestrial beings, or our descendants born a million years from now, or ourselves in an afterlife, whose conscious experiences involve goods of which we have little or no inkling. After all, each of us remembers how our own personal experience, in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, has opened up awareness of values of which we previously had little or no inkling.³⁴ It might be objected that hypotheses about non-terrestrial conscious beings, and so on are ad hoc. Yes, but I am not assuming that they are true: merely that Rowe is not entitled to assume that they are not true. But without such an assumption, even if T is true it casts little doubt on my claim that Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) is high. ³³ The foregoing argument can be adapted to handle a challenge based not on P1&Ea but instead on P1∧ &Ea, where P1∧ is the proposition For a great many conjuncts of Ea, no combination of goods we know of God’s justifying allowing that conjunct to obtain. Once we distinguish It is probable, relative to G&Ea&K, that P1∧ is true from the quite different proposition For a great many conjuncts of Ea, it is probable, relative to G&Ea&K, that no combination of goods we know of God’s justifying allowing that conjunct to obtain, it is plain that while the former is plausible, the latter is not. After all, for all we know, if God exists then corresponding to any collection of a great many conjuncts of Ea there are a great many dissimilar Ca-justifiers, each of which involves a great many goods. Why would we expect to know of all the goods involved in most of the relevant Ca-justifiers? ³⁴ This point is not vulnerable to the criticisms that Rowe makes in his 1996 paper, pp. 274–6, of Wykstra’s appeal to the so-called parent analogy.
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Could Tooley come to Rowe’s assistance on this matter? In ‘The Argument from Evil’ (discussed in my Sect. 8.1) Tooley argues that it is very unlikely that there could be some property with which we were all perfectly familiar, which was of great moral significance, but which never struck any human, at any time, as having any moral importance at all. He then argues that although it is possible that there is some morally significant property with which we are not acquainted, the discovery of a new morally significant property is an extremely rare occurrence. The history of moral progress has consisted not in the recognition of more good-making and bad-making properties, but instead in a gradually increasing ability of people to respond appropriately to ones previously recognized. So it is very unlikely that new morally significant properties will be discovered, and unlikely that such properties will be collectively sufficient to justify an omnipotent, omniscient being’s allowing all the evils in the world which appear, in the light of our current moral knowledge, to be unjustified.³⁵ It is hard to assess Tooley’s premiss that the discovery of a new morally significant property is an extremely rare occurrence, without knowing what he counts as a newly recognized right-making or wrong-making property, morally speaking. For example, recognition of income-tax evasion and insider trading and computer hacking does not precede the recent invention of income tax and stock exchanges and networked computers. Are these wrong-making properties? Are they morally significant properties? It might be said that they are not newly discovered—for example, income-tax evasion is simply a kind of being dishonest, a wrong-making property that has been known of for thousands of years. But we would not say that the property being a quasar was not first discovered in 1965, because it is simply a kind of the property being an extra-terrestrial object, which has been known of for thousands of years.³⁶ The differences between various ways of being dishonest are often morally significant. If Tooley were to succeed in clarifying and defending his historical claims, they still would not help Rowe. For surely even if they supported a low estimate for Pr(P1/Ea&K), they would do little to support a low ³⁵ Tooley, ‘Argument from Evil’, pp. 114–15. ³⁶ What Tooley needs to conclude, in order for his historically-based argument to help Rowe, is that the discovery of a new kind of good or kind of evil is an extremely rare occurrence. But this proposition seems to be in even worse shape than the claim about morally significant properties. How broadly or narrowly are the kinds to be individuated, for Tooley’s purposes?
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 213 estimate for Pr(P1/G&Ea&K). It is as if Tooley is highlighting the fact that our background information includes the proposition that we have never discovered a non-human embodied being who understands arithmetic, and using this as the basis for a low estimate for the probability, relative to the conjunction of our background information with the proposition A spaceship from a distant solar system has just landed in Melbourne, of the proposition There are non-human embodied beings who understand arithmetic. Hence I can safely rely on my earlier argument for saying that Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) is high. Let us, for the sake of discussion, set it at 0.8. In that case, we obtain the following calculation: Pr(G/P1&Ea&K) =
0.2 × 0.8 = 0.162 0.99
According to these figures, Pr(G/P1&Ea&K) is only slightly lower than Pr(G/Ea&K)—which we supposed to be 0.2—and so appealing to P1 will not produce a posterior probability low enough to yield square atheism. (After all, 0.162 is well over twice 0.06.)³⁷ The foregoing analysis suggests that if we supplement the fawn and murdered-child instances with all the other conjuncts of Ea, and employ premiss P1, then even if we accept Rowe’s premiss that Pr(G/Ea&K) is low enough to justify a non-neutral agnostic position which leans towards not-G, probabilistic arguments of the kind which Rowe employs in his 1996 paper will not enable him to mount a strong prima facie case for square atheism.
8.2.5 Assessing the Argument from Eb&P2 I will be brief in my treatment of the argument from Eb&P2. Remember that Eb specifies not particular cases of evil but rather everything known about what kinds of evil there are, how much evil there has been of each kind, and all our general knowledge about different categories of beings who undergo evil. P2 declares that either God does not exist, or else it is not the case that there is a combination of goods such that ³⁷ It might be suggested that the strength of the support that P1 provides for G in contrast to not-G should be measured by the ratio Pr(P1/G&E&K)/Pr(P1/not-G &E&K). Let us not worry about various difficulties that face this proposal. Obviously it does not tell against my main conclusion in this section. Since the numerator is 0.8 and the denominator 1, my view as stated in the main text stands.
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we know of each of the goods included in the combination and which justifies God in allowing the truth of Eb. Call any truth in virtue of which God is justified in allowing Eb an Eb-justifier, and call any part of an Eb-justifier which justifies God’s allowing some specific clause of Eb, C, and which has no redundant parts a Cb-justifier. The problem with the argument from Eb&P2 is very similar to the problem with the one from Ea&P1. Our task is to estimate the value of Pr(G/P2&Eb&K). Although Eb contains a lot less detail than Ea, it still contains a huge amount of information. Should we have a high degree of expectation, given G&Eb&K, that all general states of affairs included in Eb will turn out to have Cb-justifiers all of which involve goods all of which we know of ? My earlier discussion of a similar question concerning Ea and Ca-justifiers suggests that the answer to this question is No. For all we know, every Eb-justifier includes a great many dissimilar Cb-justifiers, each of which involve a great many goods. Therefore Pr(P2/G&Eb&K) is high, Even if Pr(P2/Eb&K) is even higher, the ratio of the former to the latter will surely be fairly high, with the result that Pr(G/P2&Eb&K) will not be a lot lower than Pr(G/Eb&K).
8.2.6 Assessing the Argument from Ec&P3 Let us now consider the argument from Ec&P3 against the existence of God, where Ec is The world contains a huge amount of intense human and animal suffering, much of it in no way caused by or in principle preventable by human actions and omissions, and much of the human suffering occurring to quite innocent victims, and P3 is Either God does not exist or no combination of goods we know of justifies God’s allowing Ec to be true. Call any truth which justifies God in allowing Ec an Ec-justifier. It is conceivable that God exists and every Ec-justifier is, like Ec itself, fairly simple in content. But in the absence of any successful, general theodicies for human and animal suffering which is in no way caused by or in principle preventable by human actions and omissions, there seems to be no reason to suppose that if God exists then every Ec-justifier is fairly simple in content. After all, the proposition A large-scale war started in Europe in 1914 is fairly simple in content, but its complete explanation is very long and complicated. And if God exists and has strongly or weakly actualized All red-haired plumbers living in Melbourne stumbled yesterday, then there may well be no simple, illuminating explanation of why he has done so; maybe the shortest explanation is
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 215 the conjunction of the respective shortest explanations for each of the individual plumbers. Similarly, theists, agnostics, and atheists may lack grounds for confidence that if God exists there are Ec-justifiers which are a lot shorter than the huge conjunction of particular states of affairs which makes Ec true, and each of which makes the corresponding conjunct of Ec true. Hence given G&Ec&K there are no solid grounds for believing that all Cc-combinations consist of goods all of which we know of. Therefore those agnostics who initially accept Ec&K and hold that Pr(G/Ec&K) = 0.2, and who are now considering whether an appeal to P3 should persuade them to move to square atheism, should estimate that Pr(P3/G&Ec&K) is high. Even if Pr(P3/Ec&K) is higher, the ratio of the former to the latter will surely not be a lot less than 1. Pr(G/P3&Ec&K) =
Pr(G/Ec&K) × Pr(P3/G&Ec&K) Pr(P3/Ec&K)
We are adopting, for the sake of discussion, Rowe’s figure of 0.2 for Pr(G/Ec&K).³⁸ If we suppose, say, that Pr(P3/G&Ec&K) = 0.75 and Pr(P3/Ec&K) = 0.999, we obtain the result that Pr(G/P3&Ec&K) = 0.15. Those agnostics who were initially leaning towards not-G will feel justified in leaning more heavily towards it as a result of taking P3 into account, but they should not adopt atheism. Should we also consider one single argument, whose premisses are Ea, Eb, Ec, P1, P2, P3, and K? The strategy I employed with respect to each of the three separate arguments—from Ea&P1, from Eb&P2, and from Ec&P3—will yield a conclusion similar to those obtained with respect to the three separate arguments. Obviously the conclusion I have reached, that the arguments from Ea&P1, from Eb&P2, and from Ec&P3 are unsuccessful, is of much broader significance than the evaluation of Rowe’s case for atheism. In reaching the foregoing conclusion I did not make use of the main conclusions of Chapter 7, and the arguments offered for them. Let us summarize these conclusions in the following proposition: (J) It is morally permissible for God, if he exists, to allow there to be a lot of suffering and dysfunction, and a lot of wrong. Furthermore, ³⁸ Plainly if Rowe wanted to start from the premiss that Pr(G/Ec&K) << 0.2, then it would be easier for him to argue that P3 lowers the probability of G to below 0.06, but success would be correspondingly less interesting.
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Appeal to J would usefully supplement my main case against Rowe. Suppose that we are considering whether the state has been morally justified in causing a lot of distress to an innocent woman. Suppose we can identify goods in virtue of which the state is justified in causing at least some aspects of that distress—for example, we discover that a significant amount of it has arisen from her husband’s imprisonment, which is justified in view of the desirability of visibly upholding justice and deterring crime. If so, we thereby decrease the probability that there is no combination of goods which justifies the whole of the adverse effect of the state on her.
8 . 3 T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M H O R R I F I C A L LY B A D LIVES In Chapter 6 I considered the following candidate logical argument from evil, which I will call the argument from horrifically bad human lives: (L) Necessarily, it would be morally permissible for God to allow very severe suffering to occur to a person only if the suffering, together with the other very bad states in her life, were outweighed by very good states in her life. If God exists then he acts in accordance with this side constraint. (M) There are people who throughout their lives undergo horrific suffering which greatly outweighs any good states their lives contain; for example, children who for the whole of their short lives have been subject to severe physical and emotional abuse. [Premiss] (not-G) Therefore God does not exist. Many theists reject L, on the grounds that God’s punishing some people by consigning them to everlasting severe suffering is compatible with his perfect goodness. But let us assume that L is true, for the sake
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 217 of argument.³⁹ Philosophers who do so, and want to retain G, must reject M. To do so, they must claim that while the first of the following propositions is true, the second is also true: (N) There are people who throughout the life-stage between their first becoming sentient and their death undergo horrific suffering which greatly outweighs any good states their lives contain during this period (O) If (N) is true then these people have a very long post-mortem life-stage which lacks suffering and whose goodness outweighs the suffering undergone earlier. Obviously O does not imply that providing a very good post-mortem life-stage suffices to justify God’s allowing the earlier suffering. Many theists, including professional philosophers, hold that O is true, and that they have good reasons, based on divine revelation, for believing it to be true. Many agnostics will abstain both from believing O and also from believing not-O. If O is true then M is false. Now in anything which counts as a good logical argument from evil, the contingent premisses must be widely known to be true and be unlikely to be doubted by anyone whom the proponent of the argument is trying to persuade. Therefore L and M do not jointly provide a good logical argument from evil against the existence of God. Do they constitute a good evidential argument from evil against the existence of God? Appeal to O, it might be said, should not reduce the confidence that non-theists have in M, since O is ad hoc: there are no good arguments, independent of assumptions including theism, for the existence of an afterlife at all, let alone a very good one. Nevertheless it is now apparent that M is not properly regarded as one of our items of evidence. It is rather an intermediate conclusion reached on the basis of N together with our background evidence. I will analyse the issues using the probabilistic methods employed by Tooley and by Rowe. Bayes’ theorem assures us that Pr(G/N&k) =
Pr(G/k) × Pr(N/G&k) Pr(N/k)
³⁹ L is not all that distant from Section 7.9’s proposition (F ), to which I cautiously assented.
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We need some specification of the contents of the background evidence, k. Plainly, it does not include G, not-G, L, M, N, O, or various propositions which are epistemically posterior to these. Should we take it to include testimony concerning the suffering and deaths of other people, information about the general reliability of those who have provided the testimony, and biochemical information concerning, say, both the human body and the HIV virus? On the one hand, if the answer is Yes then clearly Pr(N/k) is very high, and so is Pr(N/G&k), as is apparent in the light of the Cartesian assumption that it is necessarily true that God, being perfect, does not massively deceive us all. So everything hangs on the value of Pr(G/k). Thus we are left, inconveniently, having to reformulate the argument from horrifically bad lives as one whose premisses are L and k, and whose conclusion is not-G. (No doubt we would split k into two parts, k1 and k2, where k1 includes the testimony concerning the human suffering, dysfunction, and death, the relevant medical information, and so on, while k2 consists of the remainder.) On the other hand, if the answer is No then Pr(G/k) will be a bit higher than it otherwise would be, both Pr(N/G&k) and Pr(N/k) will be very low, and the efficacy of the argument from horrifically bad lives will depend not on the values of Pr(N/G&k) and Pr(N/k) but on their ratio. I will work with a formulation of the argument based on a No answer. If L is true then it is a necessary, a priori truth. For it is of the form Necessarily p, and any arguments offered in its favour will surely be a priori ones. I have been assuming that epistemic probability is to be explained either in terms of partial entailment, or else in terms of degrees of belief that would be held by an epistemically ideal agent—one who while not knowing all truths is omniscient about necessary, a priori truths and infallible in drawing logical inferences. In either case the addition of necessary, a priori truths to the evidence cannot increase or decrease any epistemic probabilities.⁴⁰ For example, Pr(G/L&N&k) = Pr(G/N&k). Nevertheless you and I are not epistemically ideal agents, and so our ⁴⁰ Some philosophers are more restrictive, maintaining that it is only if a statement is a logical truth, or (alternatively) is either analytic or a mathematical truth, that its addition to the evidence does not change probabilities. But this restrictiveness makes little sense if we understand epistemic probability as partial classical entailment, where, for example, any statement entails a logically necessary statement whether or not the necessary proposition is analytic. And if instead epistemic probabilities are explained by degrees of belief held by agents who are omniscient about all tautologous, analytic,
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 219 belief that L is true can justifiably affect our estimates of the values of various epistemic probabilities, such as Pr(G/N&k). Yet while the necessary truth of L enables us to see that G is logically incompatible with M, and gives us no reason to suppose that G is incompatible with N, it tells us nothing about whether there is some other necessary truth in the light of which an incompatibility between G and N becomes obvious. So how can L help us much in estimating the value of Pr(G/N&k)? Perhaps it does so by showing that defenders of theism need to resort to the ad hoc, and therefore antecedently improbable, hypothesis O, concerning goods occurring in a post-mortem life. But discussion of Pr(O/k) can be bypassed, for the following reason. If L is necessarily true, as we are supposing, it is necessary that, if G is true, then N is true only if O is true. Hence Pr(N/G&k) = Pr(N&O/G&k). According to the probability calculus, Pr(N&O/G&k) = Pr(N/O&G&k) × Pr(O/G&k). Given that L is necessarily true, it is plain that as long as Pr(O/k) > 0—and it undoubtedly is—Pr(O/G&k) = 1. So at this stage the crucial question seems to concern the value of Pr(N/O&G&k). At this point, however, we should take into account the proposition J, which sums up the main conclusions of Chapter 7: (J) It is morally permissible for God, if he exists, to allow there to be a lot of suffering and dysfunction, and a lot of wrong. Furthermore, it is morally permissible for God, if he exists, to allow suffering and dysfunction to be distributed unequally, and in ways that do not reflect individuals’ moral standing. As Section 7.11.2 pointed out, unless it is necessary that if God exists then either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, there is a strong case for saying that it is contingently true that it is prima facie reasonable to believe that it is contingently true that it is morally permissible for God to refrain from ensuring that there is not much suffering or dysfunction. Hence J is contingently true. Accordingly, our background evidence k should be supplemented with J. Since J is contingent, surely Pr(N/O&G&k&J) > Pr(N/O& G&k).⁴¹ I concede that Pr(N/O&G&k&J) is lower than Pr(N/k&J). and mathematical truths, there seems to be no good reason for baulking at the further idealization involved in specifying omniscience about all a priori, necessary truths. ⁴¹ If J were necessarily true, then surely coming to accept J would properly raise our estimate of Pr(N/O&G&k).
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Do we have good reasons for supposing that Pr(N/O&G&k&J) is a lot lower than Pr(N/k&J)? The arguments offered for the truth of J, and the argument contained in the last paragraph of Section 8.2.6, explain in detail why not. 8 . 4 S C H E L L E N B E RG ’ S 2 0 0 0 A RG U M E N T Many philosophers doubt the epistemic appropriateness of using the probability calculus to expound, attack, and defend evidential arguments from evil against the existence of God. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to consider a recent argument from evil which is not presented in probabilistic terms and which does not lend itself easily to being attacked using probabilistic arguments of the kinds employed above. Accordingly, I will examine J. L. Schellenberg’s paper ‘Stalemate and Strategy: Rethinking the Evidential Argument From Evil’.⁴² There is another reason for paying attention to Schellenberg’s paper. It arises from the fact that the paper avoids discussion of what it is morally permissible or impermissible for God to do, and focuses on other considerations, bound up with divine empathy for sufferers, concerning what God would do. In this respect the paper advances well beyond other arguments against theism discussed in this book. If Schellenberg’s strategy succeeds then some reconsideration of my argument near the end of the previous section seems necessary: for, it might be said, even if my Chapter 7 is entirely successful in establishing its main conclusions (summarized in proposition J), we have much weaker grounds than I supposed for thinking that Pr(N/O&G&k&J) is not much lower than Pr(N/k&J). Here is a summary of the main line of Schellenberg’s argument: (1) Someone with maximal empathy and maximal proximity to horrific suffering would have a negative, oppositional reaction to it that was maximally strong. So if God ever encountered such suffering he would seek to eliminate it and to prevent it from occurring again. Indeed, he would prevent horrific suffering from ever coming into existence in the first place. (2) God might see that certain ‘greater’ goods for creatures depend on the permission of horrific suffering. But God could still secure ⁴² J. L. Schellenberg, ‘Stalemate and Strategy: Rethinking the Evidential Argument From Evil’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (2000), 405–19.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 221 valuable lives in the absence of such goods. God would not countenance horrific suffering even for the sake of a greater good, so long as the prevention of that suffering did not stand in the way of their deepest good. For his empathy-induced opposition to horrific suffering would prevail. (3) Hence individuals who are aware of horrific suffering, and who have on hand neither a good theodicy nor a strong argument for theism, are justified in believing (a) If God exists then evil does not exist. (4) The argument for the foregoing conclusion has not employed the premiss (b) There is no good reason for God to permit horrific suffering. Of course people who accept (a) are committed to (b), but they do not need to provide independent grounds for (b). (5) An objector might say: (c) It would not be all that surprising if there were reasons actually providing an unknown justification for God to permit horrific suffering. But simply asserting (c) appears question-begging, since if Schellenberg’s arguments for (a) succeed in justifying (a), then it would be surprising if there were reasons inducing God to permit (a). In the absence of a convincing specification of God’s reasons, the objector might argue in favour of (c) by talking about human cognitive limitations which suggest that there may be values we cannot conceive of, and then claiming that if some such values were to figure in God’s reasons for permitting horrific suffering, it is likely that we would not know it. But this falls well short of showing that there may be unknown values providing a reason for God to permit horrific suffering.⁴³ The conclusion stated in paragraph (3) of the summary stands. To evaluate 1–5 we need to unpack them. By ‘empathy’ Schellenberg means the ability to enter deeply and sympathetically into the experience of another, along with being given to compassion. God knows not only the truth-value of various propositions concerning people who undergo horrific suffering: he knows what it is like to experience what they experience. ⁴³ The objector’s reasoning is akin to the following fallacious argument: For all I know, there is some way of conducting underground nuclear tests that are undetectable from more than a few kilometres away. If such methods were being used by the Swiss government in conducting underground nuclear tests, then it is likely that we would not know it. Therefore for all I know the Swiss government is employing such a method to conduct underground nuclear tests that no one else can detect.
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Is compassion towards all cases, or at least typical cases, of horrific suffering entailed by omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness? Some people deny that compassion (as distinct from benevolence) is even compatible with God’s perfect goodness—for example, on the grounds that compassion is an emotion, and emotions are too bound up with subjectivity, change, and embodiment for God to have them. Another line of thought, derived perhaps from much Greek ethics, is that, whatever the status of compassion towards close friends who are suffering, compassion towards strangers and people of low social status is an undesirable departure from the mental self-possession and poise which are vital parts of human excellence of character. A fortiori, divine compassion towards sufferers in general would be a departure from divine excellence of character. Some people would add that the view that being disposed to compassion is a virtue owes its prevalence largely to the influence in western cultures of Christianity and Judaism, and in eastern cultures of Buddhism. A third argument requires us to focus on the connections between emotions and reasons for action. Human emotions often give people reasons for action which they would not have had if they lacked the emotion—for example, romantic love/spending a lot of time with the beloved person. How about God? At least some philosophers hold that God acts in response to reasons generated solely by contingent circumstances concerning creatures or his own past acts, together with objectively weighted comparisons of objective values; and these are said to be necessary truths, independent of any contingent circumstances, including any contingent character traits and other dispositions of God. If so, then surely it follows that even if God is benevolent he does not possess emotions such as compassion. For what role would God’s emotions have in his life if they did not often give him reasons to act which he would not have otherwise had, and if they did not often strengthen reasons derived from other considerations? Perhaps Christian and Jewish believers should say that God acts frequently on reasons which are partly generated by compassion and other contingent qualities which are in harmony with but are not entailed by omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness. If so, then Schellenberg’s argument may be interpreted or adapted in such a way as to give rise to a special challenge to Christianity and to Judaism. This book, however, is confining its attention to the generic doctrine that the universe was brought into existence by an omnipotent, omniscient,
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 223 and perfectly good being. Abstracting from any supplementary beliefs dependent on (supposed) divine revelation, what should theists say? Instead of trying to resolve these questions, let me try to get clear about what Schellenberg said and implied. At one stage he discusses the view that it is because empathetic human minds are finite and likely to be overwhelmed by contact with horrific suffering that they tend to have a strong negative response to it; God, however, being unlimited and having a long-term view of things, may well respond differently. Schellenberg replies: That horrific suffering has the effects it does have in the empathetic is a function not of our limited capacities but of its recognized importance: those who are empathetic have indeed the more developed capacities required to achieve such a recognition and convey it to the rest of us (who are often a little slow in this department), as well as to work unstintingly to remove or to prevent horrific suffering in the light of it, which would perhaps be difficult if such suffering simply ‘overwhelmed’ them.⁴⁴
Here the emphasis is entirely on the cognitive role of the empathy. Empathy enables people to recognize the pre-existing axiological importance of horrific suffering when we encounter it. Although Schellenberg does not talk specifically about compassion at this point, obviously he can accommodate the view that compassion has a valuable motivational role. But it is safe to say that in his view compassion typically does not generate reasons for action which were not already there independently of the emotional response. Because God knows intimately what it is like to suffer, God recognizes the axiological importance of horrific suffering and therefore its normative importance—that is, its giving important reasons for action. There is no indication that Schellenberg holds that empathy-induced horror at intense and prolonged suffering makes God more strongly disposed to prevent such suffering than does his mere recognition that he has maximally strong reasons for preventing it. The function in the argument of talk of God’s maximal empathy and maximal proximity to horrific suffering must be to explain and highlight the fact that God has a maximally strong disposition to prevent horrific suffering, in virtue of his recognizing that its nature gives him maximally strong reasons for preventing it. I will proceed on the basis of this understanding of the paper. ⁴⁴ Schellenberg, ‘Stalemate and Strategy’, p. 407.
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It is not entirely clear what ‘maximally strong’ amounts to. Schellenberg himself concedes, in principle, that God might permit horrific suffering if preventing it stood in the way of creatures’ deepest good.⁴⁵ Thus he regards it as no contradiction to suppose that in reaching some decision a maximally strong general opposition to horrific suffering, based on maximally strong reasons for preventing it, might be overridden by other considerations with respect to some specific choice situations. He holds, however, that the only other consideration that could in principle defeat God’s maximally strong reasons for preventing horrific suffering is that preventing it stood in the way of creatures’ deepest good. God would not otherwise permit horrific suffering, even to secure some non-greatest but still outweighing good.⁴⁶ I will call these points the two crucial claims, because of their importance in the paper. We need to identify exactly what arguments Schellenberg offers for them. Let us survey the material Schellenberg presents on his pp. 408–10 which might somehow contribute to such an argument. He says: (i) Think of a caring mother, that paragon of empathy. The horrific suffering of her child demands and determines her response in the face of everything else she knows. When confronted with such an evil she does not concern herself with the question of what distant goods it may serve: the only good she then seeks is the end of this suffering. Analogy suggests that her attitude of unqualified opposition to horrific suffering would be shared by God . . . (ii) [But, an objector may say] the mother only allows the horror of her child’s suffering to determine her response ‘in the face of everything else she knows’ because her knowledge does not include awareness of any great good for her child, or for other intelligent or sentient beings, that depends on suffering. If things were different her response might not be the same. Maybe. We must add, however, that it is only if a caring mother sees that the good of her child or of other creatures depends on his horrific suffering that she could fail to prevent it, given the opportunity to do so. (iii) Theists believe that the greatest and deepest good any personal being can experience is a positive, ongoing (indeed, unending) and growing relationship with God. ⁴⁵ Schellenberg, ‘Stalemate and Strategy’, 408–10.
⁴⁶ Ibid.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 225 (iv) Divine permission of horrific suffering is not required for there to be persons who experience this greatest of all goods. (v) Assured of this, God’s inexhaustible empathy would generate an unqualified opposition to horrific suffering. Accordingly, he would not concern himself with what other goods horrific suffering might serve. The foregoing train of thought does not present a clear, consistent portrait of the caring mother. On the one hand, we are told that she has an attitude of unqualified opposition to her child’s horrific suffering, and that when confronted with the suffering she does not concern herself with the questions of what distant goods it may serve. On the other hand it is conceded that maybe if (and only if ) she became aware of some ‘great’ good for her child, or for other intelligent or sentient beings, that depends on her child’s horrific suffering, she might not prevent the suffering. The concession undermines the force of the caring-mother analogy. Consider a couple of cases in which a loving, empathetic mother might fail to prevent her child’s horrific suffering, given the opportunity to do so, even though she sees that the greatest good of her child, or of other creatures, does not depend on the child’s horrific suffering. These cases are admissible in the light of the concession contained in step (iii). The mother can prevent her child’s horrific suffering only by her directly causing serious harm to some innocent third person, who would become permanently blind. or The mother is a judge, and her child will probably be kidnapped and terrorized unless she secures the acquittal of a corrupt politician who, if acquitted, will probably retire from politics and live quietly on his ill-gotten gains. She believes that she has a very strong duty to uphold justice by deciding legal cases on their merits. The argument from analogy provides inadequate support for the two crucial claims. But the argument from analogy is the only argument given in the paper in favour of the two crucial claims. In that case the overall strategy of the paper collapses. For it has become plain that the first half of the paper does not provide strong, direct support for (a), the proposition If God exists then evil does not exist. In consequence, Schellenberg is deprived of his reason for dismissing as question-begging the claim, made by Alston and other so-called sceptical
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theists, that it would not be all that surprising if there were reasons actually providing an unknown justification for God to permit horrific suffering. It is worth pointing out that even if Schellenberg had shown that God would not countenance horrific suffering, even for the sake of a greater good, so long as the prevention of that suffering did not stand in the way of their deepest good, this result would not have threatened my inferences in Chapter 7’s core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction, from (5), (6), and (7) to (8), and from (5∗ ), (6∗ ), and (7∗ ) to (8∗ ). Reflecting the fact that the core argument was aimed merely at providing a theodicy for the general truth that human beings undergo a lot of suffering and dysfunction, (8) and (8∗ ) are silent about whether God has or lacks strong reasons all-things-considered for making a general decision, not dependent upon any other decisions he made, to prevent cases of horrific suffering. The individual authors discussed above are all highly respected, formidable philosophers. I do not know of any arguments that have better prospects than any of those discussed here.⁴⁷ Nevertheless there may be some such argument. So the conclusion of this chapter must ⁴⁷ It is perhaps worth mentioning Paul Draper, ‘Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists’, Nous, 23 (1989), 331–50, repr. in Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil (Indiana University Press, 1996). Draper’s paper does not succeed in stating a strong prima facie case against the rationality of theism, let alone stating a strong case for atheism. One major problem with the paper is that although Draper appeals to various other empirical truths in the course of his argument, he formally sets up the issues without assigning any role to background evidence. Let T be theism, HI be Draper’s hypothesis of indifference, and O be various truths about pain and suffering. Draper’s main conclusion is that Pr(O/T ) < Pr(O/HI). This is an extraordinarily weak conclusion (though he adds the claim that it is doubtful that there are arguments in favour of the existence of God which would rehabilitate theism in the face of his own argument). To see this, let Ta be If there are swans then most of them are black, let HIa be If there are swans, then most of them are white, and let Oa be There exists at least ten white swans. Although Pr(Oa/Ta) < Pr(O&O∗ /HI). Tooley himself declares that Hume was correct in arguing that the observed mixture of good and bad states of affairs is better explained by the hypothesis that the universe was created by an omnipotent and omniscient but non-benevolent deity than by the hypothesis that the creator is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good; but he does not argue this in detail.
Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 227 be not only limited in scope, but also advanced in a tentative manner. Although theists should continue to be uneasy about the threat posed by evidential arguments from evil, the uneasiness is about what menaces may lurk on the other side of a fog-shrouded hill, rather than about a dangerous foe clearly seen advancing towards them.
Glossary Italicized expressions are defined elsewhere in the Glossary. absorbed: An absorbed evil is an evil state of affairs which is explained and justified by an outweighing good for which the evil is logically necessary. aggregative theories of the value of a world identify certain basic value states and assign positive or negative numbers as measures of their value, and then specify a mathematical function of these values (and possibly of other variables as well) which measures how good the world is. ‘Alpha:’ a name used to rigidly designate the actual world Better Outcome/Action: the doctrine that, other things being equal, in bringing about the better overall outcome one acts in the better way CCF: see counterfactuals of creaturely freedom commensurable: Two worlds are commensurable with each other if and only if each is either better than, inferior to, or ranked equally with the other. comprehensive knowledge: the doctrine that all states of affairs that actually obtain are known infallibly by God, and there is never a time at which God exists but does not then know about any state of affairs that actually obtains comprehensive providence: The doctrine that God exists, and everything that occurs is either intended by God or is an unintended consequence of what he intends. God plays an active causal role that guarantees both that his intentions are fulfilled and that their unintended consequences occur counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are propositions of the kind ‘If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs S1 . . . Sn then he would thereby weakly actualize the state of affairs Bj’, where ‘Bj’ specifies one or more free choices and actions by rational creatures.
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create: God creates a world if and only if either he strongly actualizes it or else he weakly actualizes it. God can create a world if and only if he has the intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities needed to create it, and has the opportunity to create it, and it is logically possible that he create it. creatable hierarchy: a set S of worlds such that each member of S is commensurable with each other member, and God can create any member of S, and there is no world outside S which is both commensurable with each member of S and which God can create dysfunction: serious problems such as paralysis, blindness, mental retardation, and breakdowns in family life entailment thesis: the doctrine that the proposition ‘For every creatable world there is another one that is better than it’ entails the proposition ‘There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being’ epistemo-practical sense: the sense of the ‘can’/‘cannot’ pair in which the ability to do something can be precluded by lack of knowledge evidential argument from evil: one which is not a logical argument from evil fundamental: An agent has a fundamental moral duty with respect to some individual or group if and only if the duty is independent of contingent features of the individual or group. grounding principle: the doctrine that that all contingent truths, including conditionals, require suitable metaphysical grounds heaven: A very good set-up for people who have survived death, such that God guarantees the complete absence from it of suffering and dysfunction logical arguments from evil fulfil or purport to fulfil the following conditions: they are deductively valid; there is at least one contingent premiss concerning evil; all the non-contingent premisses are plausible; all the contingent premisses are widely known to be true, and are unlikely to be doubted by anyone whom the proponent of the argument is trying to persuade. maximal: A world is maximal if and only if there is no world better than it.
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Molinism: the doctrine that libertarianism, comprehensive knowledge, and comprehensive providence are all true open theism: the doctrine that God exists, and libertarianism is true, and comprehensive knowledge and comprehensive providence are both false PPC: see prevolitional probabilistic counterfactuals prevolitional probabilistic counterfactuals are propositions of the kind ‘If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1 . . . Sn then as a result all and only C1 . . . Cn would probably obtain’. prime member: A world W is a prime member of a creatable hierarchy H if and only if W is a member of H and there is no better member. A world is prime if and only if it is a prime member of some creatable hierarchy. Prime Actually: the doctrine that it is logically necessary that if God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, and there is exactly one creatable hierarchy and it has at least one prime member and God creates a world, then God creates a prime world Prime Actually Strengthened: the doctrine that it is logically necessary that if God exists and there are prime worlds and God creates a world then God creates a prime world Principle B: the doctrine that if an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world it could create, then it would be possible for there to be a being morally better than it replace: God replaces world V by world W if and only if: W is actual, V contains state of affairs x but not event y while W contains y but not x, God strongly actualizes the occurrence of y and the non-occurrence of x, and if God had not so acted then V would have been the actual world. rigidly designate: A name or definite description is being used to rigidly designate an item if and only if it is being used in such a way that it refers to that item in every possible world in which it refers at all. satisfice: choose or seek an outcome that is good enough settled worlds are worlds in which God brings into existence rational creatures.
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square agnostic: a person who understands the proposition God exists, who does not believe it and does not believe its negation, and who leans epistemically neither towards it nor towards its negation strongly actualize: A person strongly actualizes a state of affairs if and only if she causes it by performing an action which determines it. theological compatibilism: the doctrine that theological determinism is true and that many human beings are free and morally responsible with respect to many of their choices and actions theological determinism: the doctrine that God has strongly actualized the actual world by strongly actualizing every contingent state of affairs, except any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all God’s actions which strongly actualize states of affairs TopCAIH world: a world such that, given that the worlds can be ranked with respect to human cultural achievement and individual happiness, God cannot create any world which is higher in the ranking weakly actualize: A person weakly actualizes non-conjunctive state of affairs x if and only if neither she nor anything else strongly actualizes x and yet she performs some single action that both makes a salient causal contribution to x’s occurrence and is such that if she were to perform it then x would obtain. A person weakly actualizes a conjunctive state of affairs (other than a world) if and only if she weakly actualizes each of the conjuncts. God weakly actualizes a world if and only if there are counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true in the world and God weakly actualizes some states of affairs in the world and he either strongly or weakly actualizes every contingent state of affairs in the world except the obtaining of the CCFs and any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all his actions bound up with bringing the universe into existence. world: a logically possible world, understood as a possible all-inclusive state of affairs
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Index The expressions ‘df’ occurring after a page number or range of page numbers indicates that the meaning of the relevant expression is explained in that place. absolute duties 138df, 137–44 absorbed evils 134df, 134–35 Adams, M 46, 142–43, 149n, 166 Adams, R 103–04, afterlife 143–144, 172–75, 217 agent-centred prerogatives 99–100, 107, 194–95 aggregative theories of value 48–49df, 50–56, alternative goods 179–184 Alston, W 208n, 225 Anselm 202 Aquinas, T 42, 197 Augustine, 178
cosmological argument 197–8 create, creatable 3df, 27–29df, 63–64, 70, 92–93, 110, 136 creatable hierarchies 70df, 84–85, 90, 96–97, 101, 107–09, Crocker, L 164
background knowledge 201, 203, 218–19 basic value states 48–51, 79 Basinger, D 54n beneficence 104–05 betrayal 188–90 Better Outcome/Action 92df, bushwalking example 183–84
empathy 221df, 220–225 Entailment Thesis 70df, 70–78, 85–89 epistemic probability 218–20 equality 178–79 eudaimonia 80, 168–70, 177–78 evidential arguments from evil 134, 144, 191–227 evil 4–5, 42–46df, 121, 125, 130–227
causing 137n, 140–41, 152 CCFs (counterfactuals of creaturely freedom) 20–21df, 22–25, 30, 33–34, 64, 101–02, 123, 136, 160 children 138–42, 158–59, 176, 178, 191, 200, 213 Clarke, S 197–98 commensurable and incommensurable worlds 70df, 84 Comprehensive Knowledge 10df, 12–15, 21, 23, 25 Comprehensive Providence 9–10df, 21, 23, 25 contingent traits and limitations of God 11, 24–25, 28–40, 97–102,
decision theory 75–77, 82–83 Descartes 156, 202, 218 design arguments 198–99 distribution of evil 176–79 Dostoevsky, F 137–38 Draper, P 226n dysfunction 148, 149df,
Flew, A 187 Fine, K 41n Flint, T 24–25, 31–33 Frankfurt, H 29 Franklin, J 16n Freddoso, A.F. 20, 24 fundamental moral requirements 150df, 150–51, 161–62, 176–79 God 7–9df, passim God’s deliberation and decisions 10–11, 14, 18–19, 21, 24–26, 106 God’s emotions 222
236 grace 103–04, 177 grounding principle 15df Grover, S 85n Hasker, W 26, 28, 37–39, 98n Hazen, A 54 hedonist theories 43–44, 50–51, 79, 94 heaven see afterlife higher-order goods and evils 132–34 horrific evils 137–44, 216–226 Howard-Snyder, D&F 81n human capacities, achievements and happiness 118–121, 123–25 human intentions 157 Hume, D 98 Hurka conflict 85–8 indeterminacy 195–96 individuals’ personal traits 151, 155–56,158–60, 167–70 initial conditions 12df, 13, 26 intentions, God’s 10–11 intrinsic powers 28df, 33–34 intrinsic goods 211–12 Jordan, J 85n, 91n, 196n Journet, C 43 Kekes, J 43 Kraay, K 78n law of conditional excluded middle 23–24 laws of nature 13, Leibniz, G 43, 56, 60–61, 97–98, 197–98 level playing field assumption 201, 204 limiting counterfactuals argument 101–02 logical arguments from evil 130df, 130–47, 196n, 216–17 logical probability 15–16, Long, A.A. 43 longevity example 75–77, 79, 82 loss of value argument 94df, 97 loyalties 106 McCloskey, H.J 42n, 135–37 Mackie, J.L. 131–35, 187
Index marriage and parenting 157–59 massive congitive error 156–57, 177, 218 Mawson, T 104–05 Maximal Actually 110df maximal worlds 48df, 56–61, 63–64, 109–10 mere addition 59df metaphysically prior 11df, 20–21, 160 mutual vulnerability 168–69 Mill, J.S. 5, 104 Molinism 15, 19–25, 28, 30, 34, 64–69, 101–102, 111–113, 119, 122–26, 136, 160, 164, 167–68, 194 moral desert 176–78 moral duties 77, 92–95 143 moral theory 78–79 morally significant properties 212 Morris, T 29, 93n Nagel, T 98n necessity 40–41, 131, 151 Neiman, S 42 Nelson, M 57n newborn daughter example 170–72 non-aggregative theories of value 49–50 non-cognitivism 41, 45–46 non-fundamental moral considerations 164–165 Nozick, R 150n nuclear tests example 221n objections to theism 44, 111–47, 191–227 omnipotence 29–34, 33–34df, 61, 131–32 omniscience 37–40, 39df, 61, 194 open theism 26–27, 35–36, 64, 68–69, 125–29, 136, 159, 164–165 Oppy, G 186n Parfit, D 51, 59 perfect goodness (moral unsurpassibility) 7, 9, 34, 61, 84, 86–87, 91–92, 94–95, 104, 131–32, 135, 143 Phillips, D.Z. 5, 138 physical probability 16n
Index Plantinga, A 24 PPCs (prevolitional probabilistic counterfactuals) 13–14df, 15–19, 25–26 premium worlds 126df Prime Actually 90df, 90–109 Prime Actually Strengthened 109df, 111, 119 prime worlds 70df, 90–121, 175 Principle B 71–73, 84 principle of sufficient reason 25 prison examples 67–68, 216 Quinn, P 91n rational egoist example 205 rationality 75–77, 82–84, 88, 91 religious experience 199 replacing a world 126df, 126–127 Repugnant Conclusion 51, 53 Restall, G 54–56 risk 93, 127 Rover example 117 Rogers, K 13n Roth, J 148 Rowe, W.L. 70–75, 78–81, 83–85, 91n, 191, 194, 200–216 satisficing 74–83, 87, 95–97, 112, 122–123, 128, 136, 195–96 Scheffler, S 99–100, 194n Schellenberg, J.L. 144–47, 220–226 Schlesinger, G 121n secret police example 155–56 self-sacrifice 106–07, 194–95 settled worlds 151df
237 Sobel, J.H. 7n, 88–89 square agnosticism 201df, 202 square atheism 203–04, 213 Stocker, M 50 Stone, J 196n strongly actualise 11df, 13, 19–20 Surin, K 4–5 Swinburne, R 16n, 26, 38–39, 187n, 190n, 199 theodicy 4–6, 148df, 148–90 theological determinism 11–12df, 15, 17, 19, 25, 28, 34, 60–64, 69, 111–113, 119, 122–26 theological compatibilism 19df, 60–64,152–59, 164, 166–67, 186–87 theological hard determinism 165n Tillich, P 6n time stream 10df Tooley, M 45n, 121n, 142n, 163, 191–200, 202n, 212, 226n TopCAIH worlds 120df trust 169 Valentyne and Kagan 57n value 43, 48df, 48–57 Van Inwagen, P 190n, 196n Wainwright, W. 81n, 103n weakly actualise 20–21df Wielenberg, E 34n, 85–87 Williams, B 94 world 3df, 40–41, 103 wrong 184df, 184–190 Wykstra 202–03, 211
