Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy

8. God’s Choice: Reflections on Evil in a Created World (1984)

e i g h t God’s Choice: Reflections on evil in a Created World (1984) This short essay applies the central principles of the previous essay to the problem of evil in the world. It seemed an obvious philosophic move to make. I do not claim that it exactly solves even the narrowly defined problem laid out here, but it blunts it by showing that the most natural way in which we feel the difficulty involves wrong thinking on our part. The essay is, I believe, fairly accessible. “Why did God create a world with so much evil in it?” In the face of the evils surrounding us, anyone who believes in the existence of a God who is infinitely powerful, knowing, and good, finds this question arising spontaneously and repeatedly. although I have cited this question, I have no intention of trying to answer it—not only because evil is the most formidable of problems, but because the question, as I have put it and in its natural context, 101 Originally published as “God’s Choice: Reflections on evil in a Created World,” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 4 (1984): 370–77. Reprinted with permission. 102 Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy simply should not be asked. It is an unallowable question, because it takes for granted at least one of the following two illegitimate presuppositions : (1) It may presuppose that God is a kind of Divine Playwright who has prescribed every action to take place in the world. I speak here about cosmic and human history: not only about falling sparrows and hairs on our heads but about human moral decisions for good or evil. a Divine Playwright would be the direct author of every act, including morally evil acts. such a view is both philosophically implausible, since it makes God the sole free agent, and also religiously repugnant, since it makes God the author of moral evil. I therefore dismiss it. (2) alternatively, and more likely, the question may presuppose that apart from God’s free decision to create the universe—ontologically antecedent to deciding actually to create—God knew precisely what would take place in human history if He should decide to create, and that He then (so to speak) decided to go ahead and create that universe anyway. I do not see how this second presupposition can be defended, in view of principles that I shall briefly develop. and since the original question makes no sense except in terms of one or the other of the above presuppositions, I reject the question altogether. God’s choice, I shall argue, was not among diverse competing possible cosmic histories (like leibniz’s “possible worlds”), but essentially a choice whether or not to create a universe containing free agents.1 to construct my essential argument, I need only identify a few rather obvious metaphysical (or cosmological) principles. I owe them in part to the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, but also to reflection on what seems to be the metaphysical structure of becoming as I experience it. the reader is invited to consider whether these principles do not describe his or her own experience. If they seem to, more than their opposites, that is for the present sufficient, since first principles are philosophically at the end—or rather at the beginning—of the line: you take or you leave first principles, you don’t demonstrate them. should any of these principles be rejected, however, I fail to understand what other ones could more reasonably be put in their place. the principles that I have in mind all pertain to the relation between actuality, potentiality , and possibility; between what is and what might be, including God’s Choice: Reflections on Evil in a Created World 103 the capability of the actual to be other than it is. these principles will not found a whole metaphysical view, but only a fragment of a cosmology , a partial metaphysics of our space-time world. The First Principle, which might be called the Principle of Determinateness , is that settled actuality (past actuality, whether immediate or remote) is determinate, exact, unambiguous. thus, Dickens’ novel, David Copperfield, consists in a well-defined set of words in a particular order. In this respect the completed novel markedly differs from the vaguer outlines of it that gradually grew in Dickens’ mind. similarly, mozart’s Forty-First Symphony, taken as a musical score, is (if we may assume...