Abstract
It is often argued that the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect God is inconsistent with, or at least highly improbable in light of the undeniable fact that there is evil in the world. According to van Inwagen’s defense story, however, the existence of evil in fact is to be expected on the assumption that our ancestors freely turned away from God. The age of evil, according to van Inwagen’s defense, will end only if we freely return to living in loving union with Him. We are going to show that any defense story that is based on van Inwagen’s understanding of “God”, “love” and “freedom” is unreasonable.
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Notes
- 1.
See van Inwagen 2006, 81: “In what follows, I am going to suppose that God is everlasting but temporal, not outside time. I make this assumption for two reasons. First, I do not really know how to write coherently and in detail about a non-temporal being’s knowledge of what is to us the future. Secondly, it would seem that the problem of God’s knowledge of what is to us the future is particularly acute if this knowledge is foreknowledge.”
- 2.
See van Inwagen 1998; 2014, 267–286; and in particular 2006, 82: “Even an omniscient being is unable to know certain things – those such that its knowing them would be an intrinsically impossible state of affairs. […] That is, such a being must yesterday have had no beliefs about what I should do freely today.”
- 3.
See Mackie (1955, 200) for a clear formulation of the logical problem of evil: “In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently adhere to all three.”
- 4.
It only has to be possible in a broad logical sense, true for all anyone knows, if God exists, so to speak, and to allude to sufficient, morally justifiable reasons for Him allowing evil to exist. We are not sure whether van Inwagen demands that a defense has to be plausible in a weak or a strong sense of plausibility. See van Inwagen 2002, 30: “A ‘defense’ in the weakest sense in which the word is used is an internally consistent story according to which God and evil both exist. Sometimes the following two requirements are added: The evil in the story must be of the amounts and kinds that we observe in the actual world, and the story must contain no element that we have good scientific or historical reasons to regard false. A theodicy is a story that has the same internal features as a defense, but which the theodicist, the person telling the story, puts forward as true or at least highly plausible.” See also van Inwagen 2001, 66–67: “[…] a defense will ascribe to God some reason for allowing the possibility of evil in his creation (for example, creaturely free will is a very great good, a good so great that its existence justifies the risk of its possible abuse). It will go on to say that this source, whatever it may have been, produced not just some evil, but vast amounts of horrendous evil, and it will, finally, ascribe to God another reason for not simply removing from his creation by fiat the vast amounts of evil that issued from the Source of Evil, a reason for allowing the vast amounts of horrendous evil produced by the Source to continue to exist.”
- 5.
See van Inwagen 2006, 86–88: “God not only raised these primates to rationality – not only made of them what we call human beings – but also took them into a kind of mystical union with himself, the sort of union that Christian hope for in Heaven and call the Beatific vision. Being in union with God, these new human beings, these primates who had become human beings at a certain point in their lives […] also possessed what theologians used to call preternatural powers. […] There was thus no evil in the world.”
- 6.
Although van Inwagen does not have a positive theory of what exactly free will is, we will ignore this and presuppose an intuitive understanding of incompatibilist free will; see van Inwagen 2006, 77.
- 7.
See van Inwagen (2006, 87–88): “its object is to bring it about that human beings once more love God. And, since love essentially involves free will, love is not something that can be imposed from the outside, by an act of sheer power. Human beings must choose freely to be reunited with God and to love him, and this is something they are unable to do by their own efforts. They must cooperate with God.”
- 8.
See also van Inwagen 2001 and 2006, 14–15: “[God] cannot remove all the horrors from the world, for that would frustrate his plan for reuniting human beings with himself. And if he prevents only some horrors, how shall he decide which ones to prevent? Where shall he draw the line? […] I suggest that wherever he draws the line, it will be an arbitrary line.”
- 9.
On this account of free will, human suffering is then considered to be due to the abuse of free will. It is not God or God’s moral perfection (benevolence) that is responsible for the existence of evil in the world. It is important to note that not only the genuine perception of the efficaciousness of our free choices is important, but also the actual reality of our deciding as well as the experiences leading to and resulting from it, especially in terms of responsibility for oneself and others. Without the corresponding reality, our decisions would not be morally relevant. It follows that although it would lie within the logical and metaphysical boundaries of God’s omnipotence and omniscience to prevent suffering from actually taking place as a consequence of the abuse of free will or to let the whole process of atonement happen in a kind of nightmare, God’s goal of free and loving responses of humanity requires Him not to do so.
- 10.
See van Inwagen 2005, 147: “You will misunderstand what I have been saying if you think I claim to have shown that my belief in God is rational; I have presented no argument for that thesis, and, indeed, I know no plausible argument for it. […] My project was rather to defend the following conclusion: the fact that my belief in God is not based on statable or publicly available reasons is not a good reason for thinking that my belief in God is irrational.”
- 11.
See van Inwagen 2006, 162: “I do affirm this: that general moral principles, if they have truth-values at all, are necessarily true or necessarily false, and that God has no choice about the truth-values of non-contingent propositions.”
- 12.
See van Inwagen 2009, 230: “Could a morally perfect being promise that an event x would happen if that being knew that the probability that x would not happen was very small but not 0 – say, 0.0000000000013? I’m not entirely happy about this, but it seems to me that I am going to have to [?] answer ‘Yes’ if, as I do, I accept the following five propositions: God does not foreknow the free acts of human beings; God knows everything about the future that is causally determined […]; If it is causally underdetermined whether an agent will do x or y, there is a non-zero probability that the agent will do x and a non-zero probability that the agent will do y; Each human being is able to freely reject God’s offer of salvation; God has promised that some human beings will be saved.” – It seems to us that the low probability of failure picked by van Inwagen is unmotivated and arbitrary: Any probability, even a high probability, is consistent with the propositions van Inwagen is committed to.
- 13.
Cf. van Inwagen 2005, 205: “The first three chapters of Genesis are a mythico-literary representation of actual events of human pre-history.”
- 14.
See van Inwagen 2006, 89: “Anyone who does not want to live in such a world in which we are the playthings of chance, had better accept God’s offer of a way out of that world.”
- 15.
See van Inwagen 2006, 86–87: “A certain frame of mind had become dominant among them, a frame of mind latent in the genes they had inherited from a million or more generations of ancestors. I mean the frame of mind that places one’s own desires and perceived welfare above everything else, and which accords to the welfare of one’s immediate relatives a subordinate privileged status, and assigns no status at all to the welfare of everyone else. And this frame of mind was now [after the fall] married to rationality, to the power of abstract thought […]. The inherited genes that produced these baleful effects had been harmless as long as human beings had still had constantly before their minds a representation of the perfect love in the Beatific vision. In the state of separation from God, and conjoined with rationality, they formed the genetic substrate of what is called original or birth sin: an inborn tendency to do evil against which all human efforts are vain […] however we struggle, in the end we give in and do evil.”
- 16.
In favor of this speaks that, as it appears, van Inwagen makes no categorical difference between the state of union before the fall and the communion which he assumes to be achieved by the atonement in the future. This atoned reunion is seemingly, apart from its potentially endless duration, of course, meant by van Inwagen to be a re-establishment of how things were in the beginning, the motif of recurrence is repeatedly called upon (by “potentially endless” we mean that insofar as there will be a reunion with God and creaturely free will is to be part of it and that even if the knowledge of life without God will be preserved, there always has to be a chance to fall from God’s grace again). Otherwise one could raise the question if there could have been a true Beatific vision without the conditions given by autonomously made free choice and love that possibly have been fulfilled without precedent evil.
References
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Göcke, B.P., Schneider, C., Sindermann, A. (2018). Van Inwagen on the Problem of Evil: Is His Defense Story Reasonable?. In: Jansen, L., Näger, P. (eds) Peter van Inwagen. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70052-6_11
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