This is not a complete answer to the author of sin charge, simply because the author of sin objection is not one objection at all but a family of objections. It has as many different versions as there are objectionable relations to sin that the traditional view might be thought to entail God bears. It might be argued that the traditional view entails that God is the cause of sin, or that God intends sin, or that God desires that sin occur, or that God fails to love the damned. Each of these charges must be treated individually (for a variety of responses, see the collected essays in Alexander and Johnson 2016). Here it may suffice to point out that with respect to each individual charge it is not obvious both that theological determinism entails that God bears the property and that God’s bearing the property would be incompatible with divine perfection. For instance, as the above author-storyteller model makes clear, theological determinism does not entail that God causes evil in the same way that created agents cause evil, and if the traditional privation theory of evil is true, then theological determinism does not entail that God causes evil at all. Nor it is clear that, on the correct view of creation, theological determinism entails that God intends any evil at all; perhaps God selects the possible world he wishes to create all at once, so to speak, intending only the good aspects of creation and merely foreseeing (as an unintended side effect) all the evil that is caught up with it (White 2016). God may even love the damned and decide to decree their damnation, if there is a sufficiently great good that cannot be brought about without it; a general may, consistent with perfect love, order his son (a captain in his army, whom he loves) to a certain death in defense of a city in order to prevent the greater tragedy of the city’s sacking (Johnson 2016). The question is whether there is such a great good; and this is the ordinary, axiological problem of evil.
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