Finessing the problem of evil

From a Facebook exchange:

That's a simplistic caricature of reprobation. The fact that the reprobate end up in hell doesn't mean that's the purpose of God creating them. If a soldier throws himself on a grenade to shield is comrades, that's the last thing he does, but it's not as if he was born for that sole purpose.

You repeat the same oversimplification. According to reprobation, the reprobate are hellbound in part because they were predestined to hell. But that doesn't mean they were born with that sole end in mind. To the contrary, the reprobate have an important role to play in world history and sacred history. In addition, they are damned because they are wicked. Culpability is a necessity (albeit insufficient) condition for reprobation.

To begin with, it's no different from Augustinianism or classical Thomism, both of which are highly predestinarian. If you're posing a philosophical question about whether libertarian freedom is necessary to be blameworthy, that's a hotly contested issue in the philosophical literature. Are you going say God is worse than the devil based on disputed philosophical conjectures?

You're raising a philosophical objection, but you're not prepared to defend your position philosophically. And you're prepared to blaspheme God based on a philosophical objection which, by your own admission, you lack the competence to defend. Reprobation doesn't make eternal suffering the "foundation of creation and salvation." Why not say unconditional election makes eternal bliss the foundation of creation and salvation? The point, though, is that evil is not an unplanned evil. God has a good reason for the foreordination of the fall, otherwise it was within his power to preempt it. There are certain kinds of good, second-order goods, that are made possible by evil. You and I wouldn't exist in an unfallen world. You and I are the product of chains of events leading up to us that include many intervening evil variables. So there are tradeoffs.

i) I'm saying you want to have to both ways. You want to have the benefit of a philosophical objection without the hard work of philosophical argument to justify your objection. You raise a philosophical objection, but then play the "I'm a simple man card". 

ii) The deny that God planned evil means that evil caught God off-guard. If God foresaw evil as a result of his creative fiat, then he intended the consequences of his own actions. That's logically unavoidable. 

iii) Yes, God is responsible for whatever happens. But there's a difference between responsibility and culpability. Responsibility is a necessary but insufficient condition of culpability. The former doesn't entail the latter. And to say God is responsible for whatever happens doesn't make him solely responsible. He's not the only agent. 

iv) The comparison with slaves and murdered children fails to take guilt into account. So your comparison is amoral. 

v) So you deny that God will the long-term consequences of his own actions? 

God doesn't will evil for evil's sake, but he wills evil for the compensatory goods. Do you think God willed the crucifixion of Christ?

vi) Certain kinds of goods require evil. If a child dies of leukemia, and the parents make a replacement child, the new child wouldn't exist apart from the tragedy of the first child's death. 

vii) You've presented no argument for the claim that double predestination is arbitrary.

"it's possible for God to foresee evil without intending either it or its consequences, and to act and plan in a manner that provides for it."

i) It's not just a case of God foreseeing the consequences of an action, but the consequences of his own actions. Does God not intend the consequences of his own creative/providential actions? Is it an divine accident that those actions have those end-results? Like an uncoordinated house guest who breaks an antique flower vase by inadvertently bumping into it and knocking it over?

ii) Perhaps you're using "intend" in the specialized sense of double effect theory, where the evil is a necessary but indirect side-effect of the action. If so, Calvinism can draw the same distinction.

Mind you, it's disputable in the double effect literature whether the dichotomy between intended and foreseen outcomes is stable. 

"I'm using 'responsibility' and 'culpability' interchangeably."

You can do that if you wish, but there's an important conceptual distinction inasmuch as responsibility for an action may be either praiseworthy or blameworthy. 

"I'm actually kind of concerned now by what you mean by those cases being 'amoral'."

It's amoral for you to compare cases of innocent suffering with just punishment.

"God wills only good, otherwise He is not God."

But God can will good indirectly.

"Of course He didn't will the Crucifixion"

Was the crucifixion an unplanned event? If God planned it, how can God not intend or will his own plans? 

How is your denial consistent with Acts 2:23 & 4:27-28? (Not to mention that the Greek is probably using proginosko in the idiomatic sense of prior choice.)

"That the 'replacement' child is a good in no way makes the earlier child dying of leukemia not an evil."

Unresponsive to the argument inasmuch as I never said the death of the first child was not an evil. To the contrary, it was a necessary evil for the second-order good of the replacement child to transpire.

If we were living in an unfallen world, we could discuss what God is prepared to plan with respect to evil with greater speculative freedom because evil would just be an abstraction and the debate would be hypothetical. But in a situation where God and evil actually coexist, that takes certain explanations off the table. At this stage we must play the hand we were dealt, which curtails the range of available theodical options. Lots of Christians act like they can artificially buffer God from complicity in evil, but given the fact of evil along with divine creation and providence, that logically commits us to certain positions, like it or not, and forecloses certain escape routes.