Abstract
One historically significant model of God holds that God is a perfect being. Analytic philosophers of religion have typically understood this to mean that God is essentially unsurpassable in power, knowledge, goodness, and wisdom. Recently, however, several philosophers have argued that this is inconsistent with another common theistic position: the view that for any world that God can create, there is a better world that God could have created instead. The argument runs (roughly) as follows: if, no matter which world God creates, there’s a better creatable one, then God’s action in creating a world is necessarily surpassable. And if God’s action in creating a world is necessarily surpassable, then God is necessarily surpassable. If this argument is sound, it reveals a serious flaw in an important model of God. In what follows, I set out this argument, and I then distinguish and evaluate four replies. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.
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Notes
Grover has recently distanced himself from this latter claim, noting that the former alone is problematic for theism (2004: 103, 105).
Strictly speaking, possible worlds can neither be created nor destroyed, so convention has it that worlds are “actualized”. God cannot refrain from actualizing a world: even if God creates nothing, the resulting world (populated only by God and whatever other uncreated necessary existents there are) is the actual world. In what follows, I assume—for simplicity only—that all worlds have objective axiological status, that all worlds are commensurable and comparable, and that there are no ties.
Two clarifications are in order. First, this proposition may sound consequentialist, but it is not wedded to any particular account of the relationship between the goodness of outcomes and the goodness of actions. For more in this vein, see Conee (1994: 821). Second, the consequent of P1 claims that it is possible for an action to have been ‘better’, and the consequent of P2 claims that it is possible for a being to have been ‘better’. While Rowe (1993, 2004) understands these claims to concern moral surpassability, Sobel (2004: 468ff) takes them to concern rational surpassability. Everything below is consistent with both interpretations.
It is important to see that this argument does not reduce to the traditional problem of evil. First, as noted, it proceeds entirely a priori, while arguments from evil generally contain at least one a posteriori premise about the existence, scope, or distribution of evil. Second, this argument concludes that an essentially unsurpassable God is impossible—a much stronger conclusion than arguments from evil can warrant. Third, this argument could be advanced even if evil were metaphysically impossible. It is an argument from improvability, rather than from evil.
Grover (1988) recommends this. Alternatively, one might hold that there is more than one unsurpassable actualizable world.
I do not mean to suggest that these concerns are unanswerable, but they are powerful and must be taken seriously by the defender of EDU-theism.
Hasker (2004) takes this route.
“All of these arguments assume that God has complete control over how much good he does by creating. Only in this way can Rowe and Leibniz take it that differences in worlds’ goodness must express differences in their creators’ wisdom or goodness. If a creator need not get quite the world it wants, then even if two equally wise and good creators try to actualize just the same states of affairs, they need not get the same resulting world. If they need not, it is just false that different worlds entails different moral [or rational] stature” (Leftow 2005a, 168).
“In many cases, the difference in worlds’ moral value consists in creatures’ right and wrong acts, or the moral good inherent in creatures’ doing certain acts. In these cases, divine activity can account for the whole moral difference between worlds only if it can wholly account for creatures’ doing what they do. It wholly accounts for this iff God causes creatures to act” (Leftow 2005a, 172). And, of course, if creatures have libertarian freedom, then it is false that God causes creatures to act.
Suppose that the actual world contains libertarian-free creatures who all could have done much better, morally, than they did. If so, this world could presumably have been better—in other words, the antecedent of P1 is true. But thus far we have no reason to think the consequent of P1 true: God’s action in actualizing this world and the free agents it contains need not be impugned by the creatures’ misuse of their freedom. So goes the argument against P1 in Leftow (2005a, b).
Leftow appears committed to this, although he concedes that some worlds without libertarian-free creatures surpass some worlds which contain them (2005b, 280).
A rough analogy: the actions of libertarian-free children are not properly considered part of the product of their parents’ child-actualizing action.
Of course, these actions are under divine control in that God could destroy such creatures, or fail to create them—but this sense of ‘control’ is not relevant. Leftow (2005b) considers Molinism: the doctrine according to which there are unalterable contingent truths (known by God) about how libertarian free creatures would act in various possible circumstances. On Molinism, God can control creatures’ actions without causing them: by actualizing the world in which his favoured creaturely counterfactuals of freedom obtain. But Leftow (2005a, 174) urges that Molinism precludes genuine creaturely moral responsibility, and is hence unacceptable to theists.
Stories along these lines are sometimes called theodicies, sometimes defences (depending on whether they are asserted to be true, or merely possible). They are typically criticized for failing to specify a sufficiently plausible account of how God is, or might be, justified in doing less than God can. I set such criticisms aside here, since in the next section I will show, on purely formal grounds, that these stories cannot establish that P1 is false.
Consider Leftow’s variant of P1:
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(7a)
Necessarily, for all xy, if in W x actualizes world W and in W* y instead actualizes W*, and W* is a morally better world than W, and nothing else distinguishes these actions morally, y’s action in W* is morally better than x’s action in W (2005a: 171, emphasis added).
Leftow takes it that the ‘moral differences’ between worlds are fully attributable to the actions of libertarian-free creatures (172), and he assumes that nothing other than these differences distinguishes the actions of x and y morally. But, as I argue here, the latter assumption is unreasonable: there may well be other ways to distinguish the moral characteristics of the world-actualizing actions of x and y.
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(7a)
Richard Swinburne takes this view (1979: 114), and it is his reason for endorsing NBW.
Worlds can contain entities which bear aesthetic properties, and perhaps God’s ability to create (quantitatively) more of these, or (qualitatively) more beautiful entities, is without limit. Equally, perhaps entire worlds bear aesthetic properties, and perhaps there is no limit to what God can do with respect to these.
Norman Kretzmann takes Aquinas to hold that God could make each thing in the world a better instance of what it is (1991: 229–249.) Perhaps there is no upper bound on what an omnipotent being can do in this regard.
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I thank Bernard D. Katz, Elmar Kremer, and Jordan Howard Sobel for stimulating discussion of many issues germane to this paper. I thank Paul Bali, Nathan Ballantyne, Luke Gelinas, and Andrew Hunter for helpful comments on earlier drafts. These drafts were presented to (a) the Mini-Conference on Models of God, within the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting (San Francisco, CA, April 3–5, 2007); and to (b) the Society of Christian Philosophers Midwestern Division Meeting (Notre Dame, IN, April 20–22, 2006). I am grateful to all my interlocutors on those occasions, especially Mike Rea and Charles Taliaferro, and to Jeanine Diller, for her exemplary work in organizing the former conference. Finally, I am grateful for the generous research support I received from (a) Ryerson University’s SSHRC Institutional Grant (2005–2006), and from (b) the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2005–2007).
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Kraay, K. Divine Unsurpassability. Philosophia 35, 293–300 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9084-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9084-6