Abstract
William Rowe in his Can God be Free? (2004) argues that God, if there is a God, necessarily chooses the best. Combined with the premise that there is no best act of creation, this provides an a priori argument for atheism. Rowe assumes that necessarily God is a ‘morally unsurpassable’ being, and it is for that reason that God chooses the best. In this article I drop that assumption and I consider a successor to Rowe’s argument, the Argument from Arbitrariness, based on the premise that God does not act arbitrarily. My chief conclusion will be that this argument fails because, for all we know, there can be non-arbitrary divine choices even if there is no best act of creation.
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Notes
I call it this because not ignoring these excellences would be a case of vicious perfectionism, ‘making the best the enemy of the good.’
We could use the term ‘perfection,’ but perfection seems to imply the highest degree of some quality such that the higher the degree the better, so I use the term ‘excellence’ instead. By an excellence I mean a property that contributes unconditionally to the value of an act or an agent, as the case may be. By an unconditional contribution I mean one that does not presuppose some defect. I am assuming that God has many excellences, but we may reconcile this to a weak doctrine of divine simplicity by saying that all these excellences are consequences of the simple divine essence.
I say ‘judged’ because I am not here restricting attention to the divine case. I assume that God judges infallibly and hence in the divine case the phrase ‘judged by the chooser to be’ may be deleted.
Technically, the equivalence classes of choices form a partially ordered class that is not totally ordered. Here two choices are equivalent if they are equally good, like the bales of hay in the Buridan’s ass example. The partial ordering ≤ is defined by [x] ≤ [y] just in case y is either better than x or x and y are equally good, where [u] denotes the equivalence class of u.
In this context, I do not restrict the comparison to good acts: one bad act is better than another if it is less bad.
There is sometimes an objective procedure for linearization of the non-linear ordering. It occurs if the derived relation of being neither better nor less good is itself an equivalence relation. In that case we may linearize by treating that derived relation as precisely the equal-value relation. This procedure will in general fail because that derived relation is not always transitive.
For the purposes of theodicy it is good to make as few controversial assumptions as possible. Hence, it is appropriate to consider both the case in which God creates just one, maybe infinite, universe and that in which God can create many of them. The chief difference is that in the latter case even the most fundamental laws of nature could vary.
Possible universes may be classified into types in finer or coarser ways. Here I am supposing there is some appropriate classification. I am also supposing that the class of all possible types of universe is a set rather than a proper class. (Compare David Lewis’ concession that there is a limit on the cardinal number of possible worlds Lewis 1986: 102–4.)
Clearly there are some issues that need further investigation concerning how, if at all, proper classhood puts limits on divine knowledge and power. In this connection I note that O’Connor mentions the idea of God creating a proper class of universes (2008: 119). What I here reject is the thesis that God could perform a single creative act resulting in a proper class of universes. This is because I assume that that God can survey a class of outcomes of possible acts of creation in order to choose between them. Proper classes cannot be members of classes. So the possible act of creation cannot itself have the structure of proper class of universes, as it would if it were the sum of members of a class of universes. (This last step in the inference follows because ‘universe’ is a count noun not a mass noun, so any mereological sum of them has a natural structure as a class.)
I am neither endorsing nor rejecting the thesis that God could perform a proper class of acts, for I am here considering a single divine choice about one act of creation. I note though that the strong doctrine of divine simplicity endorsed by classical theists implies that God performs only a single act and hence could not create a proper class of universes.
The possibility of such divine self-limitation is heterodoxical and requires us to deny that God is essentially omnipotent (Forrest 2007).
Not quite irrelevant, however. I submit that for each individual there is a derived three-point scale, consisting of a positive, negative, or zero balance of joy over suffering, which God will act to maximize. To do so requires an afterlife.
References
Forrest, P. (2007). Developmental theism: From pure will to unbounded love. Oxford University Press.
Hasker, W. (2005). Can God be free?: Rowe’s dilemma for theology. Religious Studies, 41, 453–462.
Howard-Snyder, F., & Howard-Snyder, D. (1994). How an unsurpassable being can create a surpassable world. Faith and Philosophy, 11, 260–268.
Lewis, D. (1986). On the plurality of worlds. Blackwell.
O’Connor, T. (2008). Theism and ultimate explanation: The necessary shape of contingency. Blackwell.
Rowe, W. (1993).‘The problem of divine perfection and freedom.’ In E. Stump (Ed.), Reasoned faith (pp. 223–232). Cornell University Press.
Rowe, W. (2004). Can God be free? Oxford University Press.
Schlesinger, G. (1977). Religion and scientific method. Reidel.
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I presented a version of this paper at the April 2010 Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion workshop at San Antonio. I would like to thank the organizer, Mike Almeida, and all who participated in the discussion. I would also like to thank the referees who pointed out several serious errors in an earlier draft.
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Forrest, P. On the Argument from Divine Arbitrariness. SOPHIA 51, 341–349 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0287-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0287-8