On the Problem of Evil
The following is the transcript of a public lecture I delivered at a southern university on the problem of evil. The talk offers an overview of the problem and the basics of how Christianity has typically grappled with the issue. I then look at two additional considerations. The first is Leibniz’s claim that our world is the best of all possible worlds, which I suggest is not so easy for traditional Christians to avoid. The second is a list of lingering questions that I believe are under represented in the literature but should receive greater attention. To all my subscribers, thank you for subscribing. To my paid subscribers, thank you for your support. And to any visitors, please consider subscrining and supporting my work!
My talk today is on the problem of evil. I’ll begin by stating what the problem is. David Hume offers an elegantly simple statement of the issue: “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”1 The problem, in short, attempts to create a strong disjunctive in which either God exists and evil does not or evil exists and God does not. And, so the argument goes, because the “existence” of evil is apparent, God’s non-existence is equally evident.
On the one hand, God’s relationship to evil is not a new problem. Ancient philosophers, prophets, apostles, and Church fathers alike have all grappled with the matter. The more formal grappling with the problem as we think of it today began in 1711 with G. W. Leibniz’s Essays on the Goodness of God. In this work, Leibniz coins the term “theodicy” from the Greek words θεος (God) and δικη (justice). The term signifies a formal defense of the goodness of God in the face of evil, which is precisely what Leibniz famously attempts. Of course, Leibniz was not the first “defender of God,” nor would he be the last, as the literature on this topic has only grown in the 300 years since he published his Theodicy.
I myself have spent a fair bit of time on the problem of evil. I first became interested in the topic when I was an undergraduate, primarily because I saw it as the centerpiece of atheology. For those unfamiliar with this term, it refers to anti-proofs. Just as the theist offers proofs for the existence of God, the problem of evil is the main anti-proof of the atheist. The problem of evil thus merits the theist’s attention, a conclusion I believed then and still believe today. I dedicated my master’s thesis to the problem as addressed by Augustine and Aquinas; I dedicated my doctoral dissertation to Leibniz’s theodicy; and the topic continues to influence my research program today, as my current publications have as their culmination (amongst other things) a book on the problem as it relates to the metaphysics of the Eastern Church fathers.
In the time allotted, I will share three aspects of my findings on the problem. First, I will highlight what I find to be the most common and important trait of Christian theodicies, namely, a proper understanding of omnipotence and, by extension, the free will defense. Second, I’ll look at Leibniz’s controversial claim that our world is the best of all possible worlds. In particular, I will explain why I am unconvinced that traditional Christians can avoid this conclusion.2 Third and finally, I will touch on those deficiencies I see in the current catalog of defenses of God and how this has prompted my own work on addressing these deficiencies.
We begin with the essentials of Christian theodicy. When dealing with the problem of evil, there are two roads Christians have historically avoided. The first is to deny that evil exists. Here, I should offer a clarification. Christians have always rejected the idea that evil is a substance that derives existence from God. Hence, from its earliest writers, Christianity has spoken of evil as a corruption or a privation of some good. The physical evil of blindness, for example, is not an additional thing added to the eye but a corruption or privation of the good of sight. So, there is a certain sense in which Christians have denied that evil “exists,” if by this we mean that evil is a substance. It is not, and thus, “it” is not created by God. All that God creates is good. Evil is nothing but a distortion of substances that are otherwise good. Yet, Christians have also always insisted that created substance is inherently susceptible to distortion or corruption. In a word, creatures are mutable, and this capacity for change includes the possibility of change for worse. Hence, while Christians have always denied that evil exists in any substantial way, Christians have never denied that evil (i.e., the corruption of created substance) is a present reality.3
A second road that Christianity has historically foregone is to relinquish the goodness of God. One could make this concession either by suggesting that divine goodness evolves over time, growing and improving (as argued by process philosophy),4 or by suggesting that God is somehow beyond good and evil (as argued by pantheism).5 Yet, Christianity has historically rejected both claims, maintaining that God is Good and is unchangeably so.6
The third road, which Christianity has most frequently treaded, centers on God’s omnipotence. The concern here is not to deny omnipotence but to rightly define the term. To quote Thomas Aquinas, “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.”7 This statement reflects Aquinas’ realist conviction that definitions are not mere mental constructs but identifications of a thing’s essential properties.8 For example, a circle is a two-dimensional geometric shape with a flowing circumference on which all points are an equal distance from a common center. This is not “our” definition of circle, but the definition of circle; it is absolute. The thing that the utterance “circle” refers to is that type of geometric shape and no other. In keeping with this conviction, laws of math (which follow from the definitions of numbers) and laws of logic (which follow from the laws of identity and contradiction) are indicative, not of mere mental constructions by man, but of reality as such — realities the mind identifies and abstracts from things, rather than inventing and imposing them on things. Contradictions and incompatibilities, therefore, are real features of reality as such. That reality which we identify with the utterance “circle” is incompatible with that reality which we identify with the utterance “square,” not because we have made it so, but because it is so in itself. Hence, these structures are just as real to God as they are to man. For this reason, Aquinas presumes that logical contradictions, such as p = not-p, are not things; they are semantic gibberish — words slapped together in a way that is meaningless. So, when Aquinas suggests that contradictions fall beyond the bounds of omnipotence, he is not suggesting that there is a category of thing “out there,” as it were, that God is incapable of actualizing because he “lacks the juice.” Rather, he is suggesting that contradictions are not things at all. They are nonsense, invented by creatures through meaningless word combinations. And, as C. S. Lewis puts it, placing “God can” in front of nonsense is of no help. For “nonsense remains non-sense even when we talk it about God.”9
Another way of making the same point is this. Before discussing whether God could cause something to exist, we must have something in mind. We can discuss whether God can create unicorns because the concept is a meaningful one. The properties of a unicorn include four-footed, equine, one-horned, et cetera, and this set of properties is contradiction-free, offering a coherent possibility. Thus, having before us a logically possible something, we can commence discussion of whether God could grant existence to such a thing. Contrast this with a “square circle.” The term “square circle” indicates a two dimensional geometry shape with a flowing circumference on which all points are an equal distance from a common center but which does not have a flowing circumference because it has four sides of equal length and thus not all its points are an equal distance from a common centre. Such a combination of words is as meaningful as gobble, gobble. No discussion of whether God can make “this” can be had because no intelligible “thing” (or possible thing) has been offered for discussion.10
Aquinas’ position is not unique. The position takes center stage in Christian thought as early as the Arian dispute. As is well known, the heretic, Arius, argued that there was a time when God was without a Son, and then God chose to create his Son. Arius was thus charged with claiming that the Son of God is mutable, that he derives his existence from matter, that his moral goodness is accidental and could be corrupted, and a host of other things. What is particularly illuminating is that Arius denied all of these charges. Yet, the pro-Nicenes insisted that despite Arius’ rejection of these charges, he was bound to such conclusions. Why? Because creatures are, of metaphysical necessity, mutable, material, corruptible, and so on. In other words, according to the pro-Nicenes, there are metaphysical limitations to what God can do. He cannot, for example, create a second God. Arius, in speaking of God creating an immutable, incorruptible, immaterial creature, is talking about God creating square circles — gobble, gobble. 11
Defining omnipotence thusly is supremely relevant to answering the problem of evil beceause it goes to the heart of the most common feature of Christian replies to the problem, namely, the free will defense. The free will defense submits that creatures, not God, are the cause of evil. For God has given to man and to angels the power of self-determination, a power we have misused, distorting ourselves and the world around us, bringing evil into our world. This defense aims to challenge the central presumption of the atheologian, namely, that an omnipotent being should be able to create free creatures that always freely do the good.
The appeal to free will is uniform among the Church fathers, and in its most sophisticated articulations, the appeal places beyond the bounds of omnipotence the creation of a will that lacks free self-determination. Augustine, for example, submits in book 5 of City of God that the will of natural necessity is free.12 In other words, God cannot create a will without free self-determination anymore than he can create a circle without a flowing circumference; for freedom is essential to what the will is. Without freedom, it is not a will.
This rather basic point has received analytic embellishment in recent decades in the work of Alvin Plantinga. As Plantinga points out, if free choice entails self-determination of the agent, then God cannot actualize free acts unilaterally. Though God must supply existence to the acting agent and even to the act itself, the inherent freedom of the act requires that the creature voluntarily participate if the act is free. In this light, Plantinga argues for a distinction between logically possible worlds and actualizable worlds. A logically possible world has a very low bar to cross, namely, the proposed world contains no contradiction. Thus, we can speak of a possible world in which Johnny eats breakfast tomorrow (possible world 1) and a possible world in which Johnny does not eat breakfast tomorrow (possible world 2). Both are logically possible worlds, since there is no contradiction in Johnny either eating or not eating. However, to actualize one of these worlds, not only must God will to actualize it, but Johnny must choose to participate as well. In this light, though both worlds are logically possible, both may not be actualizable for God. To explain, let us say that God knows that if Johnny is granted existence and choice (i.e., free self-determination), he will freely choose to eat (possible world 1). Is it then possible for God to actualize the world in which Johnny freely chooses to not eat (possible world 2)? It would seem not. For, if God decrees that Johnny eats breakfast tomorrow despite Johnny’s choice to not eat, then the result of this decree is neither possible world 1 nor possible world 2, but possible world 3: Johnny involuntarily eats breakfast tomorrow. Possible world 2 remains unavailable to God.13 (And we might add that it is not obvious that possible world 3 is free of contradiction, since, as Augustine argues, Johnny’s will is by natural necessity self-determining; hence the violation thereof at the heart of possible world 3 may constitute a formal contradiction and thus amount to “gobble, gobble” — that is, a semantic world that is unavailable to God because it does not rise to the level of a coherent possibility.)
The importance of Plantinga’s point is this. According to the atheologian, if a world without evil is logically possible, then an omnipotent being should be capable of bringing about such a world. Yet, granting the distinction between logically possible worlds and actualizable worlds, this is not the case. Not all logically possible worlds are actualizable, even for an omnipotent being. And, it may well be that no actualizable worlds are without evil if the creatures in them are self-determining beings who do in fact choose evil.
Now, as I said, a right definition of omnipotence and a free will defense are relatively uncontroversial starting points in the history of Christian theodicy. Next I would like to look at a feature of Leibniz’s theodicy, the reception of which has been far less uniform amongst Christians, to say the least. The claim I have in mind is his contention that our world is the best possible world. (Insert a groan of disbelief from audience here.) Suffice it to say, this claim has raised quite a few eyebrows from theists and atheists alike. Yet, the more time I’ve spent with Leibniz on the point, the more I’m convinced that his conclusion, rightly understood, is difficult if not impossible for traditional Christians to avoid.
I’ll begin by explaining how the conclusion unfolds.14 The argument builds on faculty psychology, according to which the intellect offers judgments about the good. For example, if I find myself hungry, my intellect may judge the satisfaction of hunger to be good and then offer judgments regarding the best means by which to satisfy that hunger. Yet, faculty psychology recognizes that making a judgment about the good does not cause me to act. I may, for example, make a judgment that exercise is a good on which I should act, but acting on this judgment is another matter. I trust everyone here knows what it’s like to judge something to be good, only to fail to act on that judgment. (Anyone unfamiliar with this phenomenon, pray for me, a sinner.) Hence, faculty psychology distinguishes the intellect, or judging faculty, from the will, or acting faculty.
Keeping this distinction in mind, we find two main reasons why creatures fail to do the good. First, we are fallible and thus may fail to judge rightly. For example, I may have a deficient understanding of nutrition and thus deem a big mac to be a good means of providing nourishment. After all, it has vegetables, protein, and grains. (Lest you think this implausible, I once knew a man who made such judgments.) Or, I may have a right understanding of nutrition, but I may be corrupt and thus value pleasure — a lower good than nourishment — to a greater degree than I ought.
Now, if we grant that God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and incorruptible, as Christians typically have, then we cannot ascribe to him any of the conditions by which creatures fail to do the good. If God is omniscient, then he cannot misjudge the good. Rather, of metaphysical necessity, God knows the good and indeed the best in all cases. Moreover, God, being omnibenevolent and incorruptible, cannot fail to regard every good proportionate to its goodness, granting to it no more nor less esteem than it is due.
Once these points are granted, Leibniz’s conclusion follows quite naturally. God, being omniscient, cannot fail to know the good and indeed the best in all cases. And, God, being omnibenevolent and incorruptible, cannot fail to regard every good proportionate to its goodness and thus incline toward the best above all competing goods. We must conclude, then, that, of metaphysical necessity, whatever God wills at any instance, it is the best. 15
Now, before we object to the hubris of this Modern rationalist, I think it is worth noting that Leibniz is not the first to offer this conclusion. Consider the following quote: “Providence … is that will of God by which all existing things receive suitable guidance through to their end. But, if providence is God’s will, then, according to right reason, everything that has come about through providence has quite necessarily come about in the best possible manner and that most befitting God, so that it could not have happened in a better way.” These words belong not to Leibniz but to John of Damascus, an eighth-century Church father. He offers this statement on providence in his summary of the consensus of the fathers before him. Leibniz, in his Dissertation on Predestination and Grace, cites this very chapter from John of Damascus and credits him with the key insights of his theodicy.16 In other words, the position Leibniz defends in his theodicy is not the invention of his own genius but is a reception and defense of a view that receives formal articulation in John of Damascus, that was less formally articulated by the Eastern fathers before him, such as Chrysostom, and that was later reiterated by figures, such as Thomas Aquinas.17
As intriguing as this intellectual genealogy is, the question arises, Might the conclusion be avoided? I personally see very few ways of doing so. Three come to mind. First, one could deny classical faculty psychology. Second, one could deny that talk of “the good” in reference to God’s choices is meaningful. Or, third, one could deny that talk of “the best” is cogent.18 All three routes have been opted for by opponents of Leibniz, but I’m unconvinced that any of the results are either desirable or successful escape hatches.
The first route — rejecting faculty psychology — has typically led to one of two alternatives. One alternative is to redefine freedom as an arbitrary act, or one that proceeds from will without regard for reason. This would rescue us from Leibniz’s conclusion — should we desire rescue — but it would bind us to the conclusion that God had no reason for making our world. I’m not sure why this would be more desirable than saying he made our world thusly because it is best.
The second alternative is to collapse will and intellect, arguing that action is simply the last step in the mental process of judging the good. This has typically led its proponents to determinism (or the denial of free will).19 Putting aside the fact that determinism was uniformly rejected by the Church fathers, the more important point for our purposes is that this alternative does not rescue its proponents from Leibniz’s conclusion. If anything, it strengthens it. For, on this view, God cannot help but do what he knows is best. At least Leibniz can (and does) say that God need not act on his final judgment. It’s only if he acts that he does the best. A determined God can do no other than what he has in fact done.20
So, what of the second escape? As mentioned, this route attacks talk of the good in reference to God’s options. One could do this by pitting God against the good. Here, we can find help from Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue, which yields the question: Is God good because he does the good? Or is the good good because God does it? By opting for the latter, we could reject the idea that there is a good for God to know, since the good is whatever God does.
I see two rather serious problems with this strategy. First, we are again left with the conclusion that God acts for no reason. For we cannot say, in any meaningful way, that God acted thusly because it was good. Such a statement becomes a tautology. Second, and more to the present issue, this route again lands its proponent in Leibniz’s conclusion. For, if God’s doing something makes that something good, how can we avoid the conclusion that the making of our world and all of God’s actions therein are maximally good (or best)? What is meant by the statement, God always does the best, is different on this telling than on Leibniz’s, but I don’t see how the conclusion could be rejected.
The more promising escape route is the third, namely, to reject the idea that there is such a thing as a best possible world. One version of this argues that there are an infinite number of possible worlds, so there can be no “maximum” to constitute the best. The second version suggests that if there is some maximum goodness that a world can have, then it is likely that more than one possible world has this degree of goodness, and so, no one world is best.
In my assessment, neither version of this retort works. To the first version, Plantinga has given us reason to think that there are limits to the number of actualizable worlds, even if possible worlds are infinite in number. Yet, even if we grant that the number of actualizable worlds is infinite — or practically infinite — the conclusion that there is no maximum good does not follow from this premise. In geometry, we find asymptote figures where an infinite length makes only a finite progress in breadth. The infinite length does not tells us that that the progress is infinite as well. So, I see no reason to think that if there were an infinite number of actualizable worlds, this should require that the progress they make in goodness is infinite as well.
As for the second version of this escape route, that there may be multiple worlds with comparable goodness and thus no best, the concept of world utilized in the argument is too limited. Let us say that there is a maximum level of goodness that a possible world can possess. And let’s say that God finds 50 actualizable worlds that possess this maximum degree of goodness. Might God actualize all 50 possible worlds simultaneously in different dimensions? If the answer is Yes, and I see no reason to answer otherwise, then those 50 worlds would constitute “the world” on Leibniz’s use of the term. For by “world” Leibniz means creation.
In the end, I simply don’t see a clean escape route from Leibniz’s conclusion. If the only escape that works is to claim that God arbitrarily makes our world, this strikes me as a high price to pay. And, frankly, I’m not sure why I would be paying it. Is it really that embarrassing to suggest that God made the best world available to him? What’s embarrassing about that?
Here, I’m being a bit coy, as I do have a suspicion why so many are resistant to Leibniz’s conclusion. The resistance resides in two rather severe misreadings of his claim. The first misreading is that God deems certain evils to be good. I’ll call this the aesthetic reading in which the darkness of Auschwitz, for example, enhances the light of other aspects of history; thus God prefers a world with this good-evil contrast to a world without it. The second misreading we might call the utilitarian one in which God is indeed the author of evil, but he is justified in causing any number of horrors because his evil means have good ends.
I’m more than sympathetic to resistance of this kind. For both misreadings make God the author of evil, suggest that in some way God prefers the presence of evil to its absence, and attempt to white wash evil with the goods that accompany it. To be perfectly transparent, I see no better label for such claims than blasphemy. Not only do I find the Church fathers echoing the sentiment that such a view is blasphemous, but Leibniz does as well. Leibniz dedicates a substantial portion of his Theodicy to answering objections from his interlocutor, Pierre Bayle, nearly all of which display some form of the above misreadings, and Leibniz repeatedly rebuts such an understanding of his claim.
The proper reading of Leibniz involves the distinction between the antecedent will of God and the consequent will of God. Leibniz takes this distinction directly from John of Damascus. The basic point is that God, being perfectly good, inclines toward every good proportionate to its goodness and recoils from every evil proportionate to its lack of goodness. So, any good we might name God wills, considered in itself. And any evil we might name God wills not, considered in itself. Such is the antecedent will of God. Yet, the things of our world never exist in isolation. The existence of human beings is a good, and, on this view, God wills its antecedently because it is good. But the existence of human beings carries entailments. A human being requires an oxygen-rich environment, food suitable to his digestive system, very narrow temperature control, and a host of other things. If we consider all the needs of human existence — and what those things needed in turn entail — it does not take long before we arrive at an entire universe, filled with innumerable interconnected beings. Thus, the good of making man can never be considered in isolation. To choose to make man is to choose to make all the beings man requires. Were this not enough, consider two further points. First, the universe that man requires may well be incompatible with certain other possible beings that are good and that God also wills antecedently. Granting this hypothetical incompatibility, then to choose to create man, with his universe, is to choose to forego these other possible beings that God also wills. Second, because man is a self-determining being, granting the free will defense, to choose to make man is to permit the possibility of evils that God antecedently wills not. Such considerations bring us to the consequent will of God. Though God antecedently wills evil good and repels every evil, this does not mean that God can bring about every good and prevent every evil. Hence, he must choose which goods to actualize and which evils to permit. Such is the consequent will of God.
The consequent will of God also brings us to the what Leibniz calls incompossibility and concomitance. Incompossibility refers to two possibilities that, though possible in themselves, cannot be brought about simultaneously. For example, if Plantinga is correct that God cannot actualize free creatures refraining from evil unless they willfully refrain from sin, then the result is that there are two goods that God antecedently wills, namely, the existence of free creatures and the prevention of every evil, but both goods cannot be willed consequently. They are incompossible. God must, therefore, embrace one to the exclusion of the other — either create free creatures and permit evil or prevent evil by not creating free creatures.
Concomitance is the flipside of incompossibility. Whereas incompossibility identifies those possibles that cannot be brought about simultaneously and thus mutually exclude one another, concomitance refers to those possibles that entail one another and thus one cannot be brought about without bringing about the other as well. To use one of Leibniz’s own examples, let’s say that there is a guard who stands at watch in a town during a time of war. He knows that if he abandons his post, the result will most likely be that the town is invaded, its defenses breached, and its people slaughtered. Yet, he also knows that two men, who hate one another, presently sit in the town pub. If left to themselves, they will most likely kill one another. The guard wills neither evil, but he cannot prevent both. To will to protect the town and prevent the evils of invasion is to will (permissively) the death of one of the two men. This evil attaches by concomitance to the guard’s duty to the town. But to will to prevent the death of the two men is to will (permissively) the evils of invasion. This evil attaches by concomitance to the good of the guard intervening at the pub. The end result is that the guard cannot avoid permitting evil of one kind or another, since evil attaches to both choices by concomitance.21
These distinctions (antecedent vs. consequent will and incompossibility vs. concomitance) are meant to dispel both the aesthetic and utilitarian misreadings of Leibniz’s theodicy. Beginning with the aesthetic misreading, if we take Leibniz (or John of Damascus) to be suggesting that God somehow prefers evil to its prevention, then we have misunderstood the argument. The case is quite the contrary. Every evil, considered in itself, or antecedently, is repelled by God. However, if that evil is found to attach by concomitance to a good that God does will, then, though he continues to repel that evil, he may permit it for the sake of the good.
Lest we read this last point in the utilitarian manner, we must consider the doctrine of double effect as it applies to concomitance. According to medieval moral philosophy, on which Leibniz draws, good ends do not justify evil means. If one has a good end in mind and an evil means, then the deed is immoral. However, if every available choice entails evil, then the morally upright choice is to will that which entails the least evil possible. For in this case, the means aims at minimizing evil (not introducing it), given that evil attaches to both choices, and therefore, the act is upright, consisting of good means and good ends. Think, for example, of Leibniz’s guard illustration. The guard does not will either evil, but he does not have available to him a means to which no evil attaches. Hence, seeing that evil results regardless of the chosen means, the morally upright deed is that which maximizes the good and minimizes the evil permitted.22
This is what is being claimed in reference to God. Our world represents that world in which goods are maximized and evils are minimized as far as is possible, even though a great many evils are still permitted because they attach by concomitance to the host of goods in our world. Plantinga’s argument regarding actualizable worlds offers one such example, according to which moral evils may well attach by concomitance to the creation of free creatures. C. S. Lewis, too, offers an argument in The Problem of Pain according to which the creation of conscious creatures may well require multiplicity, a neutral environment, and physical laws that entail the possibility of physical evil, or pain.23 And Leibniz offers his own thought experiments as well.
For the final bit of this talk, I want to highlight those areas in which I find lingering deficiencies in the current defenses of God. I believe that all of the foregoing offers a very good start to the Christian theodicy. However, questions linger in my mind that have yet to receive sufficient attention (and thus solution) in the current literature.
One such question is this. Why is it that free will requires the ability to choose evil? I ask because the traditional Christian understanding of God is that He is free, but that he cannot perform evil. In this light, isn’t free will and moral perfection compatible? And, if it is, then why does God not create free creatures who have both? I see this as a serious blind spot in the present free will defenses. Neither atheists nor theists seem to notice the discrepancy, but I have, and I have yet to find in the literature an adequate reply.24
A second issue that I do not believe has been sufficiently addressed is why the Fall of man or angels multiplies the evils of our world. It is one thing to suggest that God creates beings that are capable of evil, but why is it that when these beings perform evil, the entire world is dragged into sickness, death, and demonic oppression. Or, more to the point, why is it that the sin of such beings passes on a corrupt nature that binds future offspring to further evil. Is there some necessity in why the world is this way? If so, what is that necessity? If not, why has God apparently structured the world such that a single evil causes evil to multiply exponentially.
A third question that has received attention, but I’m unsure it has received a sufficient answer, goes to the matter of original sin mentioned above. If it is in fact the case that the offspring of Adam are bound by moral necessity to sin, as Augustine, for example, suggests, then how is it that we can be held accountable for sinning? The Church fathers themselves admit that there are two conditions for moral culpability: knowledge of what I must do and the ability to do it or not. It would seem that the latter condition fails to apply in our case. So, how is God just in condemning us who are morally crippled and for whom redemption is beyond the grasp of our natural will?
A fourth question concerns the doctrines of hell and predestination. It is rather commonplace in historical Christian thought to associate the good of a thing with its final cause or teleological end — the eye for seeing, the ear for hearing, and so on. Thus, physical evils concern a divergence from or hindrance to the physical members reaching their final cause, and moral goods involve a free divergence from one’s final cause. Yet, according to certain versions of predestination, God has willed that a great many people — even the majority of humanity — will not reach their final cause, and the doctrine of hell likewise indicates that God has willed the same. According to all that has been said about God’s relationship to evil, however, God cannot will evil affirmatively. How, then, do we reconcile such doctrines with the goodness of God?25
Some of these questions have received more attention than others. The questions surrounding predestination and hell have been the focus of ample debate. Whether the solutions offered are desirable or adequate is another matter, but the issues are not new. The questions concerning original sin have received less attention, by contrast, and my question concerning freedom and moral determination is virtually nonexistent in the literature.26
My own work has been moving increasingly in a direction of addressing these questions, and specifically at doing so by drawing on the Eastern Church fathers. I have noticed that the majority of current literature displays a Western, Augustinian sensibility, and thus the catalog of replies available to whatever questions one might ask tend to favor Western sensibilities. Yet, suffice it to say that I have been finding much richer answers in the Eastern fathers, and these tend to press in directions that might be rather unexpected to the Augustinian mind.
Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Penguin, 1990), 108.
This particular claim is the subject of my forthcoming Cambridge book, an outline of which can be found in my substack post, “The Inevitability of Leibniz.”
The claim that evil is a privation of good is often credited to Augustine (see, e.g., Augustine, De civitate dei, 14.11). However, Augustine himself credits “the Platonists” (likely Plotinus) with this insight in book VII of his Confessions, and the concept is rather standard across the Church fathers, East and West. For an example of a NeoPlatonic articulation of the view, see Plotinus, Enneads, I.8, 7-8.
Common representatives of process philosophy include Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin, and John Cobb. The view gained traction in some corners of biblical studies, especially Old Testament studies. See, e.g., the work of Robert Gnuse.
For a summary of pantheism and its understanding of the God-world relationship, see my post, “On God-World Relations (1 of 6).”
On this point as a feature of the Nicene confession, see my my letter, “Does Christianity have Metaphysical Commitments, According to the Eastern Church Fathers? (1 of 2).”
Aquinas, ST, I, q.25, a.4.
For a brief overview of realism, see my my letter, “On Belief in Fairies.”
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (Samizdat University Press, 2016), 12.
For a more thorough discussion of realism and medieval modal logic, which I am here describing, see my letter, “On Belief in Fairies.”
For more on this, see my letter, “Does Christianity have Metaphysical Commitments, According to the Eastern Church Fathers? (1 of 2)” or any of the following publications: “Athanasius of Alexandria”; “The Metaphysical Idealism of the Eastern Church Fathers”; “On the Metaphysics of God and Creatures in the Eastern Pro-Nicenes”; “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible.”
Augustine, De civitate Dei, 5.10. Augustine makes the point in response to Cicero’s claim in De divinatione that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free self-determination.
Platinga argues this at length in The Nature of Necessity, VII-IX and in brief in God, Freedom, and Evil, I.a.4-8.
I expound the following points at length in my dissertation, In Defense of Leibniz’s Theodicy, chs. 3-4.
For more on the nuances of what precisely Leibniz means by this, see my letters, “Leibniz on Middle Knowledge and the Best (1 of 2)” and “Leibniz on Middle Knowledge and the Best (2 of 2).”
Leibniz, Dissertation on Predestination and grace, 3a. The relevant chapter in John of Damascus is De fide orthodoxa, 2.29 (PG 94:963a-970b). Leibniz also appeals to John Chrysostom, “Homily 1” in Homiliae XXIV in Epistolam ad Ephesios.
On Aquinas’ use of the concept as it relates to divine providence and evil, see Eleonore Stump, “Providence and the Problem of Evil,” in Christian Philosophy, ed. Thomas P. Flint (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 51-91, esp. 59-60.
I explore these alternatives in In Defense of Leibniz’s Theodicy, ch. 6.
For a treatment of determinism and its various manifestations, see my letter, “On Free Will.”
Many read Leibniz as having a determined God. On why I maintain that the determinist reading of Leibniz is incorrect, see my letters, “Leibniz on Middle Knowledge and the Best (1 of 2)” and “Leibniz on Middle Knowledge and the Best (2 of 2).” For an extensive treat of the topic, see my In Defense of Leibniz’s Theodicy, passim.
To see the practical, or existential, application of such doctrines to a concrete instance of evil, see my letter, “To a Woman Who Lost Several Children.”
Stump explores this feature of medieval moral philosophy with regard to Aquinas in “Providence and the Problem of Evil,” passim.
See Lewis, The Problem of Pain, ch. 2.
Since delivering this talk, I published an article on this problem and the answer afforded by the Eastern fathers. See my essay “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible.”
For a treatment of the nuances of predestination and how the doctrine, in certain hands, can and does slip into attributing evil to God, see my letter, “On Predestination, John Piper, and the ‘New Calvinists’.” As for the doctrine of hell, I discuss important differences between East and West on this topic in my letters, “Hell, Hades, and Christ’s Descent (1 of 2)” and “Hell, Hades, and Christ’s Descent (2 of 2),” as well as the related topic of universalism in “On Apokatastasis and Universal Salvation.”
The exception is my own work, cited in note 24 above.