Trakakis on the problem of evil

Paul Manata drew my attention to an article by Nick Trakakis on the problem of evil: "Does Hard Determinism Render the Problem of Evil even Harder?"

Before I quote some passages, I'll make a few comments:

1. I don't think formulating the principle of plenitude in hierarchical terms is the best way to describe the principle. Up to a point you can arrange the differences in hierarchical terms, but I think that misses the key principle.

The key principle is threefold: (i) there are many possibilities; (ii) many possibilities are incompossible; (iii) apropos (i-ii), many goods are incommensurable goods.

For example, we frequently think of an individual human life as a cluster of different possible timelines. If I'd been born in a different place or time, I'd turn out significantly different.

And a number of these alternate timelines might have been just as good (or better than) the life I actually had. But these are incommensurable goods. Although a number of abstract timeliness are possible, only one timeline at a time is concretely realizable.

So, at an individual level, one good excludes another good.

However, it's possible to realize alternate, incommensurable goods in a variety of different creatures with different lives. This variety cannot be instantiated within the confines of any one life, but it can be instantiated distributively in a variety of different individuals (or "things").

2. Apropos (1), for all we know, there are parallel worlds in which different scenarios play out. Or there may be some possible worlds which the saints in glory are allowed to access–like a futuristic amusement park or theme park in SF stories.

Of course, this is pure speculation. However, any treatment of the problem of evil, whether theistic or atheistic, has a speculative component. For an atheist to say there's no conceivable or plausible reason for a good God to permit the range of evils we see is a highly speculative contention.

3. He raises a stock objection to the soul-making theodicy: "For even if there are some people whose character is strengthened and transformed through the challenges and dangers they encounter, there clearly are many others who either make little progress due to dying young or even regress after finding themselves in terribly adverse circumstances."

He offers a universalist solution. But, of course, there's also a Calvinist solution. Simply put, everyone needn't be an ultimate beneficiary of evil. Only a subset of humanity (the elect) constitutes the intended beneficiary. That's perfectly coherent.

Of course, this raises questions of fairness, but he already sketched a solution under 3.4 ("Divine grace").

Contrast theodicy

In its epistemic guise, the view is that, just as we could not learn what the colour red is without experiencing the contrast between it and other colours, so too if we had no experience of evil we would have no knowledge, understanding, or appreciation of the good.

Perhaps we could not understand (or at least deeply or fully understand) what it means for something to be morally good or evil unless we had some experience of evil. Or even if we could understand what it means for something to be good or evil (without having experienced evil), we might not be able to understand or appreciate a whole range of significant goods, such as kindness, courage, patience, and even love. At the very least, then, it seems plausible that the less intense the contrast between the good and the not-good, the less epistemic access we would have to the moral fabric of reality.

The principle of plenitude

The kernel of the principle is the idea that a world containing a rich variety of beings is more valuable than one containing only one sort of creature. The natural world is thus pictured as consisting of a great hierarchy of beings, beginning at the lowest end of the scale with inanimate objects (e.g., rocks, stars), then ascending to living things that lack sentience (e.g., trees, plants), and thence to living things that are sentient but not intelligent (e.g., animals), thence to living things that are both sentient and intelligent (e.g., humans), and finally to intelligent beings that are immortal (e.g., angels). At the summit of the hierarchy stands God. And it is usually added that God has chosen to create a world of this sort because it is intrinsically better that many kinds of beings exist, rather than just one kind of being or the best kind of beings. Given this value-judgement, it is no longer obvious that God is not morally justified in creating a world that displays the variety and complexity found in the actual world.

Divine grace

According to some theologians influenced by the Calvinist tradition, every good thing that comes our way should be seen as an utterly gratuitous gift from God. No matter how hard we may work or how virtuous we may think we are, we do not deserve or merit anything from God. God is not obligated to reward or praise us, and yet he does as a matter of divine grace. This line of thought can be appropriated by the divine determinist with a view to providing further insights on God’s providential governance of the world. For if everything is an unmerited gift of God’s, then perhaps our temporal sufferings are required to make us aware of this fact. More specifically, suffering has the power to shatter one’s presumption of self-sufficiency (‘I can do this entirely on my own’) and the concomitant inflated sense of one’s moral worth (‘I deserve full recognition for having achieved this’). Our temporary sufferings are, in other words, intended to instill in us an attitude of humility as well as a sense of absolute dependence on God. This theme is a constant in the theodical literature – Pascal, for example, often talks of God withdrawing his presence from us so that we may recognize the wretchedness of life on our own – and it is a theme that the divine determinist may have recourse to when constructing a theodicy.

Soul-making

Hick adds, however, that any world that makes possible such personal growth cannot be a hedonistic paradise whose inhabitants experience a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. Rather, an environment that is able to produce the finest characteristics of human personality – particularly the capacity to love – must be one in which ‘there are obstacles to be overcome, tasks to be performed, goals to be achieved, setbacks to be endured, problems to be solved, dangers to be met.

The aesthetic solution

Barry Whitney has developed an aesthetic theodicy grounded in the observation that ‘despite our finite, vulnerable, and precarious nature as human beings, we have an inherent creativity, an inner drive that seeks meaningful experiences.’ Whitney adds, however, that we not only have this need for meaning and value, but we also have the opportunity to experience it at every moment, even in the bleakest situations. Such an experience is described as aesthetic in character, ‘since it is the experience of intensity and harmony, and [an] experience which strives toward and incorporates unity amid diversity, harmony amid the chaos.’ On this view, a significant measure of disorder or chaos (but not complete disorder or chaos) is required if we are to enjoy the best possible aesthetic experiences which render life meaningful and exciting, rather than boring and predictable.

Freewill defense

J.L. Mackie’s response to the free will defence is worth recounting:
I should ask this: if God has made men such that in their free choices they
sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not
have made men such that they always freely choose the good? If there is no
logical impossibility in a man’s freely choosing the good on one, or on several,
occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the
good on every occasion. God was not, then, faced with a choice between
making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would
sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility
of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Clearly, his
failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both
omnipotent and wholly good.

Felix Culpa

There is the idea, implicit in the lines of the O felix culpa! hymn, that the condition of post-lapsarian humanity is in some way better than the original state of blessedness enjoyed by Adam and Eve, since the fall has made possible the greatest good of all: redemption...As Paul Helm elaborates,
The state of pardon and of renewal is one of greater worth or blessedness than
a faultless original position. Isaac Watts’ lines
In him the tribes of Adam boast
More glories than their father lost

express the thought that not only was there strict justice in the atonement, and not only is there the prospect of renewal in it, but the states of forgiveness and of renewal and all that these imply are a greater overall good than a state of primitive innocence.

A second element in the felix culpa motif that can be put to good use by the divine determinist involves the idea that the fall is intimately connected with God’s special manifestation of his love through the incarnation of Christ. On this view, the fall is either the only way or the most fitting way for us to be provided with the kind of disclosure of divine love made available in Christ’s life, death and resurrection. In line with this view, the divine determinist may add, in response to Mackie’s challenge, that a ‘fallen’ world enables God to reveal himself, and in particular his grace and mercy, more fully than in a world in which no-one needs renewal or salvation. To quote from Helm once more:
If one supposes that it is a good thing for God to display his mercy and
grace, and that both the universe and its creator benefit if God manifests his
forgiveness and grace, then this also provides a reason for permitting evil. . .
In the permission of moral evil lies the prospect of God’s own character being
revealed in ways which, but for the evil, it could not be.

Similar sentiments are expressed by Melville Stewart, who in ch. 7 of his The Greater-Good Defence: An Essay on the Rationality of Faith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), makes much use of the felix culpa notion in building a greater-good defence for God’s permission of evil. Particularly instructive is Stewart’s reference to the biblical parable of the prodigal son (in Luke 15:11–32) as illustrating the above point regarding the manifestation of divine love in a fallen world: ‘[T]here is a special insight into the father ’s love on the occasion of the return of the profligate son. There is another dimension of love unknown by the obedient son, because there was no occasion for its manifestation in a meaningful way. Moreover, we should not be surprised that the father loved the obedient son. But love comes in a special way to the
profligate son.’ (159)

Molinism

A neglected but deep flaw in the Molinist account concerns its ability to deliver the goods of free will that have been squandered by the divine determinist. The problem, specifically, is that God’s strategy of actualizing a world on the basis of information obtained from various counterfactuals of creaturely freedom – that is to say, the counterfactuals that spell out what would result from all possible combinations of creatures if they are created with libertarian freedom – turns God into a manipulator of his creatures’ behaviour and hence removes, or at least diminishes, their free will.

To see this, consider a parallel situation in which a father is deciding whether to send his son to school A or school B. The father, let’s assume, knows (with certainty or infallibly) that if he were to send his son to school A then the boy would begin associating with the ‘wrong crowd’ and would therefore take up a life of crime, whereas if his son were to attend school B he would grow into a well-educated and responsible adult. The father, in this situation, does what he thinks best and sends his son to school B, and the outcome many years later is just as he expected. I’m not suggesting that the father is in any way open to rebuke. But notice that he has carefully engineered his son’s moral development in a way that is crucially different from the kind of protection generally afforded by parents. Most parents make decisions on behalf of their children – such as which school their children shall attend, what foods they shall eat, what time they shall go to bed—in the hope or confident expectation that their children will benefit as a result. But the father, in the envisaged scenario, has no such hopes, for he knows what the outcome of each of his options (school A or school B) will be. Insofar as he relies on this knowledge when making his decision, he is manipulating or setting up his son’s environment in such a way that it becomes inevitable that his son will develop in a particular direction. Even if the son does develop freely in the environment he finds himself in, his moral and psychological growth has a contrived quality given that his father has guaranteed, in advance, that this developmental process will not be derailed, but can progress in only one direction.

There is, in addition, a further problem plaguing the Molinist account. It is an unfortunate fact about our world that there are innumerable people who regularly exercise their freedom in evil ways and as a result lead thoroughly miserable lives and die unrepentant. Let’s christen one of these unfortunate souls ‘Paul’. If God is equipped with middle knowledge and so knew exactly what would happen if Paul were created, then why did he go ahead and create Paul anyway? What goods, in order words, can be invoked to justify God’s creation of Paul? Soul-making is not an option since Paul’s life is one of moral disintegration, and a heavenly afterlife is also ruled out given Paul’s immoral character.

Open theism

But this is to reduce God to a reckless risk-taker who is content playing Russian roulette with our lives. For even if the probabilities are a mixed bag, the more free creaturely actions (or indeterminate events, more generally) that are involved, the greater the number of probabilities that need to be factored into the equation, and this of course means that the probability that any given outcome would result from the conjunction of these free actions will be so small as to afford little or no guidance-control for God. As Thomas Flint puts it,
[T]he open theists myopic God might try to guide events, might try to work out
his plan, but it is hard to see how knowledge of probabilities (if mixed) will
give him much guidance. Indeed, any long-range plan, or even any short-
range one that involves many free creaturely actions, will be such that God
will have little idea as to whether or not he can really bring it off. God will
join mice and men in the category of those whose best laid schemes gang
aft a-gley. Hence, the degree of providential control on this openist account
seems remarkably weak.

http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000259/article.pdf