Dembski on freedom and evil

To my knowledge, William Dembski is not a Calvinist. That makes his comments on various permutations of the freewill defense all the more interesting:

“The Cross is God’s answer to evil. But whence evil?…Since everything is created by God, a will that turns against God is one of his creations. But a good God presumably created a good will. How, then, could a good will turn against God? I’m not sure that any final answer can be given to this question. Invoking freedom of the will is little help here. Certainly, freedom of the will contains within it the logical possibility of a will turning against God. But why should a good will created by a good God exercise its freedom in that way (for instance, Christian theology teaches that there are good angels whose wills never turned against God)?” The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (B&H 2009), 27.

“Elliot Sober also feels the force of this problem: ‘It is often claimed that some evils exist because human beings have free will and sometimes freely chose actions that are wrong. Free will is supposed to be such a wonderful thing that a benevolent God would have given us this great benefit even though it brought with it a considerable cost. Like a number of other philosophers, I don’t see why having free will rules out always freely choosing to do the right thing. If a sinner can have free will, why can’t a saint?’” ibid. 201n1.

“We can imagine a world far more violent than ours in which many more people die annually of natural disasters. Alternatively, we can imagine a world far more halcyon than ours in which no one dies of natural disasters because the whole world is a serene tropical paradise…As suggested earlier, why didn’t God simply place us on a less dangerous planet where earthquakes don’t ravage human life? Or was this not an option for the Creator, and if not, why not? What are we to make of divine providence in a world with the freedom to crush us? Why, in most classical Christian liturgies of the Christian churches, do we pray for favorable seasons and good crops if the freedom of creation means that the land is going to do what it will regardless? Or does God constrain the freedom of creation? But, if so, why doesn’t God place tighter constraints on this freedom in relation to evil?” ibid. 30-31.

“Contemporary strategies for redressing the Fall consistently run aground because they attribute at least some of the evil that humanity suffers to factors other than human guilt. In such approaches, God lets humanity suffer evils of which it is entirely innocent–evils for which it is not responsible and which it therefore does not deserve. For a good God to permit such evils thus presupposes a limitation on God’s power and knowledge. For presumably, if God’s power and knowledge were up to the task, he would be both able and morally obligated, as a matter of justice to prevent evils of which we are innocent from afflicting us. This is why process and openness theologies have become increasingly attractive. They give us a God who means well but is limited in stemming the tide of evil,” ibid. 32.

“Kushner, in offering these reflections, no doubt means well–just as his God means well. But he fails to address the obvious question: Did God, as Creator, set up the conditions by which the laws of nature, evolution, and human freedom lead to painful things? If not, what sort of Creator is he? And if so, how is God any less complicit in our pain?” ibid. 33.

“So, according to Campolo, God was at one point all-powerful but then gave up his power so that humans could experience free will. But now, like King Lear, God, having ceded his power, witnesses the wreckage of his kingdom and can’t do anything about it. Campolo’s self limiting God raises several questions:

1. Isn’t God culpable for voluntarily limiting himself and thereby allowing evil to run amuck? To say that free will was worth the cost seems hardly fair since humans are the ones picking up the tab.
2. Why should human free will require natural evil? It’s easy enough to imagine a far safer world in which we retain our free will.
3. What are we to make of the biblical teaching that God performs miracles? If God can intervene in the world miraculously, then why doesn’t he use that power more frequently and effectively to reduce our suffering (rather than just crying about Pakistani earthquakes)? And if he can’t perform miracles, what does that do to biblical exegesis?” ibid. 33-34.

“Such a God wrings his hands over the world’s evil and, like an ineffectual politician, tries haltingly to make the world a better place. To our hardier theological forebears, this God would have seemed pathetic (to say nothing of heretical). But each age constructs gods in its own image, and in this touchy-feely age, a diminished God who shares our vulnerabilities and weaknesses is all the rage,” ibid. 34.

“Gregory Boyd, a proponent of open theism, has in fact written an entire book on the evils that may, in his view, properly be ascribed to Satan: Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy. In that book, Boyd shifts to Satan the responsibility for natural evil. Yet, in making that shift, Boyd embraces a dualism that Lewis would have rejected. Because open theism contracts the power and knowledge of God, God does not have Satan on a leash as he does in classical theism. Thus, for Boyd, Satan becomes an independent center of evil activity. This is not quite a Manichean dualism, in which good and evil are ontological equals (Satan for Boyd is still a created being). But it’s close. Moreover, it’s not clear how Boyd’s theodicy absolves God of evil since as Satan’s Creator, he must have realized the possibilities of evil inherent in his creation,” ibid. 38-39.

“By the way, I’m no fan of middle knowledge…. Philosophically, I object to middle knowledge because it hinges on assigning determinate truth-values to counterfactual conditionals, a property these conditionals can’t reasonably be said to possess. If John F. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, he would have been reelected in 1964. Is this counterfactual conditional true? Given Kennedy’s popularity, it seems likely that he would have been reelected. Given his sexual indiscretions, a scandal might have prevented him from being reelected,” ibid. 215n14.

“On the assumption that humans have libertarian free will, how does God figure out what we would do in a given circumstance? Sure, God will know our range of options. But if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, how does God know all the free actions of voters as they cast or refrain from casting their ballots’ for JFK? Does God determine the action of voters? That would defeat the whole point of middle knowledge, which is to avoid the hard theological determinism of Calvinism. But if God has no determinative role in human action (and many passages of Scripture suggest that he does, e.g., Prov 21:1), is God’s knowledge of the action of free agents in particular circumstances simply a surd? In other words, it simply is the case, with nothing further making it true, that free agents act in one and only one way in a given circumstance. While there may be no logical contradiction in treating middle knowledge as a surd, that hardly comments it,” ibid. 215.

“Theologically, I object to middle knowledge because it seems to compromise grace. The big selling point of middle knowledge for theodicy is that it portrays God as doing everthing he can to break the grip of evil over fallen creatures. If God has middle knowledge, God knows what a given creature would do in every conceivable circumstance. Thus, if God is also truly loving, he will employ his middle knowledge to arrange circumstances so that the creature derives maximal benefit.

“Here’s the difficulty: the problem of evil is so insidious that the free will of some free creatures will never shake it. Many free creatures, if we are to believe Scripture, will use their freedom to embrace evil and consign themselves to hell. What starts out as a way of killing two birds with one stone-God appears to get a theodicy and we humans appear to get free will–thus winds up providing neither. If middle knowledge is correct, for free creatures that perpetually abuse their freedom, under no conceivable circumstance will such creatures turn from evil to good–no matter how much of God’s grace gets applied to turn the tide of evil in their lives.

“But think what this means. Here is a creature incapable of being touched by God’s grace, a creature so completely trapped that try what God may, that creature will never escape evil. Call this a free creature if you will, but this free creature of the Arminians is functionally equivalent to the reprobate creature of the Calvinists…Both creatures have been determined to remain in evil, one for the noble-sounding reason that the creature’s free will unremittingly chooses evil, the other for the ignoble-sounding reason that God, for the sake of his glory, chose the creature to remain interminably in evil,” ibid. 215-16.