Whatever is, is right?

dmitry chernikov said...

“So, when you see X number of murders committed per 100,000 people, you say to yourself, ‘I guess God wanted a world with (exactly) so many murders!’ Is it possible that God would prefer fewer murders/denominations and that it is precisely our job to minimize the number of them (to the extent compatible with other goals)?”

Hi Dmitry,

There is no yes or no answer to your question. We need to break it down.

1.Does God will evil? Depends on what you mean. There is evil in the world. But unless you believe the world was necessitated, then God willed the existence of the world. And this means he willed the existence of a world with evil. So, in a sense, he willed the existence of evil. In a sense, he wills evil.

If he hadn’t willed this state of affairs, he could have prevented this state of affairs by never making the world in the first place.

2. Is evil inevitable? I don’t know of any theological tradition that goes quite that far. Usually, a theological tradition will say that evil is conditionally necessary. According to freewill theism, it isn’t necessary that human beings exist, but if they exist, it’s necessary that they exercise libertarian freedom. Or, according to supralapsarian Calvinism, the fall isn’t intrinsically necessary, but it is a necessary means of attaining certain second-order goods.

So, on either account, there is still a sense in which God wills evil. He could prevent evil by preventing an evil state of affairs. By not creating libertarian agents in the first place. Or by preventing the fall.

3.Plantinga floated the thesis of transworld depravity. On this thesis, every possible world is infected with evil. But even if you accept his thesis, this doesn’t mean that evil is inevitable. For God was a liberty to refrain from instantiating any possible world. There could be nothing rather than something. So even on transworld depravity, there’s a sense in which God wills evil.

Mind you, I don’t think that transworld depravity is plausible. I only introduce this for the sake of argument, for the sake of completeness, to run through every alternative, so that we can see how, on any construction, there’s a sense in which God wills evil.

If we define libertarian freedom as the freedom to do otherwise, then I find it implausible to say it’s inevitable that a free agent will commit evil. Inevitability implies determinism.

Chances are, I might have a winning streak at Vegas, but if every roll of the dice comes up sixes, casino security is going to deposit me in the trunk of an unmarked car, drive me to a pond in a remote location, and give me free swimming lessons.

4.To use your example, it lay within God’s power to create a world without murder. So there’s a sense in which God wills murder. That conclusion is unavoidable.

5. In what sense does God will murder? He doesn’t will murder for murder’s sake. Rather, he wills murder as a means to an end. Murder serves a purpose in his overarching plan.

God also has a very different purpose for ordaining murder than the murderer. The murder’s intent is generally evil. I say “generally” since there are some cases of justified homicide.

There are also times when good can come of evil. There is a possible world in which the expectant mother of Stalin is murdered. It’s evil to murder her. Yet her murder would have spared millions of innocent lives.

6.Is it God’s will that we minimize the number of homicides? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.

In terms of the decree, our specific knowledge of God’s decretive will is retrospective rather than prospective.

(We also enjoy a generic knowledge of the decree by divine revelation.)

We don’t know in advance what God has decreed. If I successfully prevent a murder, then God decreed that I prevent that murder from occurring. If I try, but fail to prevent a murder, then God decreed that I fail to prevent that particular murder.

My abstract knowledge that God has predestined every event doesn’t keep me from trying to prevent various evils, because I don’t know what God has predestined to take place.

That’s why we regulate our lives, not by God’s decretive will, but by his preceptive will.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I did know that God had foreordained the murder of some contemporary. In that event, it would not be my duty to warn the murder victim.

Mind you, this raises questions of coherence. One of the key differences between fatalism and predestination is that, in predestination, God doesn’t tip his hand, so the victim isn’t trying to escape his fate. There’s an implicit incoherence in fatalism, for once you’ve seen the grand plan, you can choose to stay in bed that day. If the oracle of doom is too detailed, it thereby invites evasive maneuvers.

7.Finally, I was targeting Armstrong’s facile argument that you can single out some consequence that you deem to be unacceptable, then reason back from that “unacceptable” consequence to infer God’s will. In this case, that God couldn’t possibly will “20,000 denominations,” therefore: Roman Catholicism must be true.

But there’s a sense in which God clearly did will “20,000 denominations.” Therefore, Armstrong will need to use a far more discriminating argument to make his case.