God, Reason and Religions pp 75-91 | Cite as
Theodicy, our well-being, and God’s rights
Abstract
The evils of the world — the things intrinsically bad, such as pain and suffering and wrongdoing — seem to be such as an omnipotent and perfectly good God would not allow to occur. Theodicy is the enterprise of showing that appearances are misleading, that the existence of God (omnipotent, and perfectly good), is compatible with the occurrence of this world’s evils, and (more strongly) that their occurrence does not provide evidence against the existence of God.1 God is omnipotent, which is normally taken to mean that he can do anything logically possible. Fairly obviously, therefore, most recognise, he could prevent the evils of the world if he so chose. So the task of theodicy becomes the task of showing that it is compatible with his perfect goodness, that he allow them to occur. I suggest that God could allow evils to occur, compatibly with his perfect goodness, if four conditions are satisfied with respect to them. First, most obviously, if God is to allow an evil e, it must be that allowing e contributes to making possible some good g. More precisely, it must be logically impossible for God to bring about g in any other morally permissible way than by allowing e (or an evil equally bad) to occur. Note that I write ‘allowing e to occur’, not the stronger ‘bringing about e’. It may be that, as the traditional free will defence claims, free choice between good and evil is a great good. What that requires is allowing the agent the choice between bringing about good and bringing about evil, not his actually bringing about the evil. But it must be naturally possible for the agent to bring about the evil — i.e. it must be compatible with the prior state of things, both of the physical universe and of the direct action of God, that the agent bring about the evil. There are, I believe, other goods which God can make possible only by himself actually bringing about evils.
Keywords
Moral Obligation Free Choice Great Good Moral Vision Typical MemberPreview
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Notes
- 1.Some writers have used ‘theodicy’ as the name of the enterprise of showing God’s actual reasons for allowing evil to occur, and have contrasted it with a ‘defence’ against the argument from evil to the non-existence of God, which merely shows that the argument doesn’t work (see, e.g., Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, p. 192). Given this contrast, my concern is with ‘defence’ rather than with ‘theodicy’, a defence which consists is showing that there are available to God reasons enough to justify him in allowing evils to occur and so that their occurrence does not count against his goodness and so his existence as defined. I am not, however, claiming that the reasons which I give are his actual reasons. I believe that my use of ‘theodicy’ is that normal to the tradition (before 1974) of discussion of these issues.Google Scholar
- 2.Alternatively, the comparative condition might include some ‘maximin’ element — that it be not possible that e exceed g by more than a certain amount, or that any individual suffer more than a certain amount of evil during his existence. I am not concerned for present purposes with the exact form of the condition. Anyone who thinks that there are no limits to God’s knowledge of the (to us) future actions of free agents, can clearly omit the word ‘expected’. If god knows for certain what will happen, his actions need not be guided by probabilities.Google Scholar
- 3.See, for example, S.J. Wykstra, ‘The Humean obstacle to evidential arguments from suffering: On avoiding the evils of “Apperance”’, Internationaljournal for the Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 73–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 4.I plan eventually to write a full-length book on theodicy to be entitled Providence, which will include the results of several separate papers and book chapters which I have written on the subject. A few of the paragraphs of this paper are the same as those of another paper, being published at about the same time but covering aspects of theodicy —’ some main strands of Theodicy’, in D. Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil (Indiana University Press). This latter paper is concerned to show that for many typical members of main classes of observable evils, my conditions (1) and (2) are satisfied.Google Scholar
- 5.See my The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 202-214; as defended against critics and expanded in ‘Knowledge from experience, and the problem of evil’ (in ed. W.J. Abraham and S.W. Holtzer, The Rationality of Religious Belief, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).Google Scholar
- 6.This good, others have recognised, exists as a this-wordly good, quite apart from any reward for patriotic behaviour which might accrue in the after-life. The hope of such reward was not a major motive among Romans and Greeks who died for their country. ‘The doctrine of a future life was far too vague among the pagans to exercise any powerful general influence’ (W.E.H Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, Longmans, Green and Co., 1899, Vol 2, p. 3), ‘The Spartan and the Roman died for his country because he loved it. The martyr’s ecstacy of hope had no place in his dying hour. He gave up all he had, he closed his eyes, as he believed for ever, and he asked for no reward in this world or in the next’ (ibid, Vol 1, p. 178). The well-known lines of Horace dulce et decorum pro patria mod ‘it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country’ (Odes 3.2.13), were written by a man whose belief in personal immortality was negligible — see the famous ode 3.30 in which he sees his ‘immortality’ as consisting in his subsequent reputation; and seems to convey the view that dying for one’s country was a good for him who died. It was of course a Socratic view that doing just acts was a good for him who does them (see Plato, Gorgias 479).Google Scholar
- 7.The example was originally put forward by William Rowe in his ‘The problem of evil and some varieties of Atheism’, American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979), pp. 335-41, as an example of an apparently pointless evil.Google Scholar
- 8.John Rawls developed this theory of justice by asking his readers which moral and legal principles they would see as the correct ones if they were planning a society in advance without knowing which people they would be in it and what role they would play in it. See his A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 17-22.Google Scholar
- 9.On this as one of the purposes of prepositional revelation, see my Revelation (Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 71.Google Scholar
- 10.Acts 20.35Google Scholar
- 11.Mark 10. 42-5.Google Scholar
- 12.Acts 5.41.Google Scholar
- 13.I Corinthians 9.18.Google Scholar
- 14.John 3.19.Google Scholar
- 15.Of course if the assumption is false, the qualification becomes unnecessary.Google Scholar
- 16.Cambridge University Press, 1989. I state their views using my terminology, e.g. ‘beneficiary’.Google Scholar
- 17.Op. cit, p. 32Google Scholar
- 18.They do claim (pp. 26ff.) that we should regard competence as a ‘threshold concept, not a comparative one’, i.e. people as either fully competent or not competent, not as competent to different degrees. But the context of their discussion makes clear that what they are saying is that human-made judge-operated law needs to make a sharp dichotomy, to treat people either as competent or incompetent, because it could not operate with a mere comparative classification. But that allows that an omniscient being could operate with such a classification.Google Scholar
- 19.Op. cit., pp. 117f.Google Scholar