Never thought anything negative about it at all, sobornost

Really some wonderful posts here. Lots of great insightful points,Cindy; and, Matt, your letter from God really spoke to me. You truly have the soul of a poet! I loved your limerick (which I, for one, hadn’t heard before), Sobornost!

Nothing new to add, for now, some thoughts are (I hope) crystalizing but just wanted everyone to know how much I appreciate you all.

Steve

^^^^^^^^^^
Aw - we are all so very pleased to have you here

Glad my post spoke to you, Steve

Blessings to you

Great thoughts, Matt

And what a wonderful missive from our Daddy to you and to all of us, I think. We can’t see the battle raging around and within us and that makes it all the more difficult a fight. And all the while we are battling, we feel in ourselves that we are cowards and weaklings and do-nothings. I think the ‘taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ’ is the hardest one of all. It IS a battle and when you fight it, dear dear brother, you are a mighty man of God – far greater than you appear to be, particularly than you appear to be to yourself.

Blessings, Cindy

Thanks sister, I appreciate the encouragement

Blessings to you

Matt

Hey guys! Sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you. I’ve just moved apartments and my computer has contracted a virus. It’s currently in the shop. Let me get right down to business and try to address some of these points.

The point you make here, alec, is I think the key to understanding the problem of evil - namely, that only in a universe with evil are certain (I do not say all) goods possible.

The analogy here, to me, doesn’t hold. According to open theism, the free willed actions of creatures are, to God, unknowable. If he cannot know them, I see no possibility to make a prediction regarding them either. Now WE, as humans, certainly do this. We know that it is not likely for random child A to be a serial killer. But this is only because we have observed thousands and thousands of children, none of which became serial killers. From God’s perspective though, open theists are committed to saying that he has no knowledge whatsoever of the free willed choices of anyone before they make them. Therefore, before he brought forth his entire creation, he had no idea what each would do. For all he knew, each WOULD become a serial killer. So combining the ideas of uncertainty with respect to God’s future knowledge and that of probability is to me incoherent.

It also doesn’t work because, theoretically, even if God didn’t know if child A would be a serial killer, it was still POSSIBLE. Now, you’re effectively back at the same point regarding God’s permission of evil. He still knew that evil was a possible outcome of going through with creation. So, unless you want to say that God had no idea of what evil was (an interesting thought, actually), then he still went ahead and created the universe anyway. In other words, he knew it was POSSIBLE to have a Holocaust. He even thought it were possible to have a far worse one than really happened. Yet he still made the universe. So the end still justified the means - “free will” still justified all these tremendous evils (even if they were only possible.)

And this is the point I was driving home. Here is a moral value you ascribe to God that you don’t have yourself. Why stop someone from murdering your child if you view the value of free willed choices in the same way that God views them in regard to the Holocaust?

Your last sentence is bingo. Although I wouldn’t say “as bad.” I would say however that the distinction between “causing” and “permitting” breaks down when you’re talking about God’s will. In either case, he is working towards goals and using various means to justify his end.

If I understand you correctly you’re saying above that God doesn’t intervene to stop free willed choices because that would prevent other people from intervening to stop them. While I do think that’s true, why wouldn’t God, when he saw that some people weren’t going to stop them, stop them? I agree that on the open theist view this may be sometimes impossible. But other times it would be perfectly possible. Driving down the interstate one day I saw a dog run out in the road and get hit on the hind end by a car going about 50 miles an hour. The car kept driving and the dog half ran half limped away towards the wood in terrible agony, howling. God COULD have prevented that. Unless you want to posit some sort of constant cosmic interaction of free willed spirits. But if that’s the case I don’t see how God could be doing anything at all ever. I can’t imagine a possible situation in which he COULD intervene without overriding something’s free will.

If this were so, would you not be giving up one of your initial propositions that all your moral intuitions come from God?

What I meant in that quote you have to Cindy is that I see no moral value whatsoever in the mere CONTINGENCY in a willed action. I think all the value comes from the DIFFICULTY under which the action is done. I think this is the ultimate mistake of the free will defense - it has subsituted the idea of contingency for difficulty. That is like saying if I flip a coin and it lands on heads, there is some moral quality about the heads landing versus the tails - as if heads is morally “better” than tails. I don’t think that’s true at all. After many years of reflecting on free will, I think that it is this conflation throughout the field of free will theology that is the most deep rooted. The confusion is understandable, because the experiences in our life of contingency and difficulty are so often linked, but I believe it to be a mistake to identify contingency alone as having any moral value whatsoever.

This is a very important question. It actually took me becoming an atheist (though I am one no longer) to understand this point and become, in a sort of way, a heathen or headonist. I was as Thomas Jefferson called himself “an Epicurean.” The idea of disobedience and obedience existing in God’s plan simply for the sake of punishment or reward became totally foreign to me. I just could not see how an all good God would invent such things for their own sakes. Surely people do actions because they think them good ideas, because they think they will have good consequences. In fact it is impossible to do anything otherwise; one HAS to see the good in an action they’re doing. So to think that God would command things to be done which his creation did not see the good in doing, at bottom, FOR THEMSELVES, would to think that God created creatures that he commanded to defy their very nature - an impossibility.

Yes, I think this possible. But the key is to really get the parameters on the problem of evil in most fundamental fashion. There are two points that must be kept before one’s mind at all time: that God does all good, and that he couldn’t do as much good unless he did as he did. In other words, it would be LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for do as much good unless he did as he did. Thinking this way eliminates the idea of superfluous evil. So, to delve deeper into your thought above, why wouldn’t God just create beings already perfect, or already overwhelmed with feelings of joy and perfection?

I think all evil is caused by God (either permitted or directly caused, the distinction breaks down when talking about the Almight’s will), and it is caused to bring forth goods that would otherwise be impossible. What sort of goods would not be possible without evil? The two the apostle Paul seems to speak most about when dealing with this problem: victory and salvation. Without evil we would have nothing to be victorious over, nothing which would give us a crown, and neither would we have anything to be saved from and to feel complete deliverance regarding. In life we see loved ones die and go we know not where. We are uncertain about the afterlife and, for as much as we say we believe, no one knows for sure. No one is free from doubt. Without such a great doubt, without such a great fear of never seeing our loved ones again, it would be impossible to experience the feeling of “death is NOT the final separation.” We could never understand what it meant to be saved from the worry of oblivion (and we shall never know this the way we need to to be maximally happy until the next life). The same goes for victory. We should never experience the joy in triumph, in overcoming, unless we experienced hardship here.

Now I think some people who hold this same position of mine err in that they say that we “must” know evil in order to know good. Some people say that without the contrast, no knowledge of good would be possible. I don’t believe this is so. I do believe that the contrast spoken of is a certain TYPE of knowledge of good, but not the only. There are certain goods which only evil will allow us to experience, as I’ve tried to explain above. But there are many others that don’t involve evil at all - a good meal, a beautiful sunset, sex. It is my position that God’s purpose is to expose us to a spectrum of goods and not to limit us to only one type. Think of all the different goods we experience, the substraction of any one of which would limit our experience of good in some way. So, while I do think we need a knowledge of evil to experience SOME goods, I don’t think for every good one must have experienced evil to appreciate it (I don’t have to eat mud to know that cake tastes good when I bite into a piece.)

I like the way that Don Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz) indirectly addresses the problem of evil, and this latest post reminded me of it. Don sees God’s activity as akin to writing a great story, in which we all have parts. In a good story, in order for the story to function properly, in order to have a protagonist, you have to have an antagonist. In other words, good would be meaningless unless there was a contrasting backdrop of evil; not for its own sake, but in order to drive the story forward, and make it a good story.

Libertarian free choice to me undermines the idea of rationality. When you make a decision, have you EVER made one for any other reason other than that you thought it was a good idea at the time? Now, you may have been short sighted, stupid, or lazy, but didn’t you prefer, at that very moment of choice, to be those things? LFW, the way I see it, implies that a person can see the goodness in an act and still not do it for NO reason at all.

I’ve never claimed I believe God is evil. I think evil is a moral action that comes from depraved motives. God never has depraved motives, therefore he cannot be or do evil. His acts TO US, seem evil, but what I’m really saying is that God causes us hardship or difficulty or pain.

Our entire interaction on this thread is revolving around how evil came about. Please - share!

I don’t object to any of this. Would you agree with me then that, fundamentally, God allows evil in order to bring forth greater good (i.e. the eternal bliss of the universe?) And that without the evil that there is, the end he is going to attain would be impossible?

The admonition is all part of God’s method of correcting his creation and saving it from evil.

I don’t think this detracts from anything I’m saying at all. We do not know exactly how things will be, but we know that evil actions will be punished, sin overcome, etc, and that knowledge is a motive for us to do good. Once the motive is strong enough, it will rule our thoughts so that we do not do such things, worry about such things, etc.

Perhaps it would be better if you explained to me what part about Paul’s admonition, given determinism, would be FALSE?

Do you mean that God, rather than actively hardening Pharaoh’s heart, simply allowed him to harden himself? And that God knew that God’s requests towards him to let his people go would only cause Pharaoh’s own free will to revolt against God, and, in this way, God “hardened him”? As if I said “I pissed Pharaoh off,” meaning, not that I MADE him pissed, but my actions (which could have been very noble, etc) caused HIM of his OWN to get pissed?

I used to think that - but (and I’m not an inerrantist, but you brought up Scripture) Paul’s logic to me is not this way at all. Indeed, one must strain the text exceedingly to make it say other than it says. The apostle is very explicit - God has actively CAUSED Pharaoh’s hardness of heart, in the same way he ACTIVELY has mercy on whoever he will. It seems to me that Paul is aware of the apparent implication in this idea - that there is injustice with God - and RESPONDS TO this objection by appeal to God’s ownership over creation. Now, since I do not believe in eternal Hell and I think that God uses all temporary evils to cause the greatest good for his creation - a good that would otherwise be impossible - and since I think Paul teaches this as well, particularly in Roman’s the appeal to divine authority is perfectly fine. He is effectively saying, as I read him, “Who are you to tell the All Knowing, All Good Being of the cosmos how to act? If he is going to bless each creature beyond measure, can he not bless them in the ways that he will?” If Paul did NOT think this then there would be a huge problem.

Actually, practically speaking, it may not make a difference the language used here - whether God “allowed” Pharaoh to harden his own heart or that he actively hardened it himself. I’ve argued elsewhere with alec that such a distinction is really inconsequential regarding God’s will and the existence of evil and sin. Even if you’re right and it was Pharaoh’s own LFW, he still KNEW that Pharaoh would do evil and bring judgment upon himself, and he still ALLOWED all that to take place, presumably for a higher purpose/good.

I really think we’re in much more agreement than may have before been thought.

Hi, Chris

This will be short as I’m up against time constraints. Yes, I think from what you’ve said that we’re not far apart except perhaps in semantics. One thing:

What I meant is that hardening can also be translated “strengthening.” (I’m told.) Therefore the evil intent of Pharaoh which he may have feared to do, he is given the courage to carry out. We all may have evil intent that we’re afraid to carry through because of our fear – mainly of repercussions, consequences, etc. So Pharaoh did all that was in his heart, which he may have feared to do otherwise.

So my theories as to how “evil” came about. Mind, I can’t corroborate any of this scripturally so I don’t talk of it often, but if you’ll receive it in the spirit of a mere whim, I’ll share.

God created the world from Nothing. (I’ll capitalize to emphasize that I will treat it as a “thing” for greater ease in discussion. I might also refer to it as chaos though that’s a little closer to Something.) As He fills all in all, there was no Nothing, so He had to create it. Someone else (perhaps Allen? I’m not sure) said that God opened up a wound in Himself in which to create something “not God.” The “not God” was “Nothing” and became “Chaos.” It was from this Nothing or Chaos that God wrested His creation. The Chaos resisted, “desiring” to remain as it was, but God persisted. Chaos tends toward disorder, breakdown, in other words, death and dissolution. God means it to become, and will have it become “Something.” That is the fight.

It was impossible for God to create the Something Other without first creating the Nothing, and the Nothing – the dissolution – is an evil thing for it is utterly opposed to the will of God, which is life. Chaos is what happens to our bodies as we age. Gradually order gives way to chaos (physically speaking) and we die. But God’s way is to push through the Chaos into LIFE. The evil or Nothing or Chaos is a necessary intermediary step. Jesus entered into the Chaos in His death and He defeated it. He laid claim and owned every spot where His sandal trod (as Abraham did). He expanded the Kingdom into death and Chaos itself and turned it inside out. The work of the devil is to revert to chaos, but the work of the Cross is to enter this enemy “territory” and claim it and convert it and thus “destroy” it by causing it to BE.

Please keep in mind that it is midnight here and I have been awake since 6:30 am and besides have had two glasses of wine! If I’ve said this badly I’ll try again tomorrow. And I never said it’s scriptural, but I think it might be just a little bit Barthian, if I said it right.

Blessings, Cindy

I’m not sure I can keep up with this thread Good points and posts all round, on a very convoluted topic. So far, though, I have to stick with the theodicy I outlined in my early posts. I couldn’t accept that God deliberately chose, caused or stands back from the evils of the world - and I would rather trim down His omniscience and omnipotence to accommodate that than trim down His omnibenevolence. Thus do I favour Open Theism + Cosmic Warfare rather than Calvinism. Not that I claim to have all the answers by a long shot, but I prefer to hold onto to God’s goodness rather His power.

Finally able to get back to this thread. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you’ve posted, Chrisguy, and I would agree that we’re closer to in our views than it might seem. I think we’re talking past each other when we speak of free will and will get to that in a minute. I also don’t think you’re as much of a determinist as you claim! (Will get to that as well)

First off, I want to outline why I think God created us humans and what at least one of his purposes is, and will touch on “free will” as well:
We are born with no choice in the matter, to parents we do not choose and in a culture and environment we have no say in. We have needs and desires as a baby which change as we grow. We are educated by parents, teachers, religious leaders, popular culture, our environment etc. We have a “moral sense”, I’ll call it moral intuition that is informed by our education but, I believe, at root is derived from God. This is initially incompletely formed, vague and largely dependent on instruction from our parents such as “hitting your brother is wrong”. As we grow this changes and becomes more principal-based than rule-based.

When we make decisions to act this moral sense may come into play. In most decisions such as “should I wear my blue shirt or the red one?”, there’s no moral issue at stake. In others, such as “I’m late leaving for work-- should I speed and get there on time or be late?” it may. Obviously many factors will come in to a “moral decision”, fear of punishment, my desires, mood, upbringing (“my parents had no problem speeding if they really needed to”), and the moral intuition will come in to play in this mental calculus as well. At times, the moral intuition will line up with the other factors, i.e. “I really have no desire to torture this baby and besides it’s just wrong.” Other times there may be a real conflict. As an example, imagine a single young man in his twenties, (I’ll call him “Earl”), goes out with some friends one evening. They go to dinner, have a few drinks and it’s time to go home. One of Earl’s friends is an attractive young woman who has expressed her interest in him before but is really not his type. She’s had a bit too much to drink and is really coming on to him. Earl is tempted to sleep with her, even though he knows he has no long term interest in her and this will result in pain for her. His hormones are raging, he knows what some of his friends would do in this situation, however, his moral intuition tells him this is wrong. Both sides are fairly evenly matched. There is a real battle going on and Earl’s fighting it. The true Earl is at the center of the storm. He’s influenced by all these factors but Earl has the final say. He truly can resist the urge to do wrong or give in. It’s difficult but, in this case, the moral intuition wins out, he ignores her advances, goes home, “and the angels rejoice”. This type of moral or spiritual battle is of great importance to Earl’s moral and spiritual development. Having sided with right, it becomes easier to the next time. He can gradually becomes a person who wouldn’t do that sort of thing. On the flip side, giving in to the temptation makes it easier “to give in” the next time, his moral intuition therefore becomes degraded, weaker and blunted. I believe God wants us to become people who will always choose right no matter what the circumstances and this is part of his method. (“Be ye perfect…”)I also believe the Holy Spirit helps us in these battles. Certainly he helps Christians and I suspect non-Christians who are truly trying to do right.

Even small moral battles can be important, such as deciding whether to help mom with the dishes after she’s had a long hard day versus going off to play a video game. Of course, the reason for choosing the “good” is also important. Choosing good out of fear, in hope of a reward, or simply to feel good about yourself would not have the same beneficial effect and could lead to the danger of spiritual pride. There is probably a little of those motives mixed in to any moral decision, but the point is to do right because one ought to. As a person consistently chooses to do right in these types of spiritual battles, the foundation of the “moral intuition” may become apparent. The root is love, agape. The best, the most developed, moral intuition is based on love, not arbitrary commands of God, but love like His. A soldier who drags injured comrades off the battlefield in the face of enemy fire is not thinking of some reward. The Congressional Medal of Honor he may be given was not a thought at the time. He does what he does because it’s right, because of love.

Moral evil exists because humans are free to fight these spiritual battles and to choose evil. The point is the battle, the decision and not so much the action. However, if there was no chance of the evil action, the action wouldn’t even be considered. The battle wouldn’t occur. Stopping someone who has already chosen the evil action, however, does not interfere with his* choice* (which he’s already made) to do evil. If God intervened every time someone chose to do evil, however, it would prevent the kind of moral battle I’m speaking of.

I’m wondering, Chrisguy, if these battles and the conflict involved correspond to the “difficulty” you mentioned as opposed to contingency when speaking of “free will”?

Now as far as you being a determinist, I wonder if that’s really true?

To be given a crown, a reward, implies moral responsibility. The person who receives the reward has done something praiseworthy. If the actions were due solely to circumstances outside the individual’s control such as genes, teachers, environment etc, what is there to praise? The influences all worked within the individual to end up with actions he had no real control over. We don’t praise robots for doing what they’ve been programmed to do.

Now, to wrap up with theodicy. From what I’ve written above, you can see that I believe moral evil is a result of the moral or spiritual “battle” I’ve described when individuals choose “wrong” instead of “right”. God intervening to stop the wrong would prevent this process. As far as natural evil goes, I remain a bit unsure, but came across this paper by TJ Mawson, “The possibility of a free-will defence for the problem of natural evil”, there’s a PDF of the paper at commonsense atheism.com. The paper is a real “brain melter” but he brings up some good points and seems to be on to something. You might have to google it to find it on the site.

I’m going to end with a quote from Tom Talbott, again in The Inescapable Love of God:

All the best,
Steve

Is that a skunk Steve?

A honey badger, actually.

I admit, I struggle with the idea of free will. I go back and forth thinking it’s absurd or the best explanation of what I experience in my daily life. I freely confess, whatever may really be the case, I certainly FEEL free, particularly in moral circumstances.

I think this may here be key to developing a coherent theodicy based on free will. So far the points you’ve made that bear repeating are:

• Not all choices need be free choices for the universe to be meaningful in the way free will makes it meaningful
• God desired to make creatures which “grew” in their understanding of good and evil - he wanted beings which “developed” into perfect creatures.
• God wanted this process to occur through, in part, the creatures’ own agency, so he gave them free will.
• In order for free will to be meaningful in the highest sense God intended, there must be some “pain” or “difficulty” or “evil” to overcome - a creation in which there was never any hardship to face would be one in which the deepest levels of freedom did not exist - or else the type of free will which God thought most meaningful would not exist (can you really be called free if every choice you make is one you have no resistance in making?)

I think I’m beginning to comprehend the free will defense. However, a point that is increasingly clear to me and one I think is misconstrued in those who use this as a theodicy is that NOT ALL EVIL/PAIN/DIFFICULTY IS THE RESULT OF FREE WILLED CHOICES. I think this was the biggest hurdle for me in understanding the FWD. There are many observable evils which cannot be traced back to any moral being whatsoever (at least on the surface of things). This brings up the problem of trying to show how God, even granting he wished his creatures to have free will, would allow certain evils to ever occur. In the case of the Holocaust, if he was omniscient and knew that Hitler would commit the terrible acts he did, then why not somehow thwart his coming to power? Why not have him lose his job, or stumble and hit his head and have amnesia?

The answer from my new/tentative free willed theodicy is that maybe it is only in the face of certain evils will the free willed creation learn the lessons of life/come to a deeper knowledge of good and evil. Let me explain.

If we consider that learning is a willed process, we will see that it requires an effort on the part of the learner. If we think that God wanted certain beings which learned of themselves, and grew of themselves to be like him, or to really “get life” and see things the way he sees them, it would follow that he could not MAKE them learn. He could help them, but, since the strength would have to come from themselves and since they were free, he couldn’t cause them to learn any old way. And, if we think also that this process of learning was to be of true value in God’s eyes, that is, if the creatures were to commit acts of the deepest worth - true free acts in the moral sense - such choices must be accompanied by DIFFICULTY or PAIN, in some meaning of the term. If no acts had any pain or difficulty that accompanied them, then the type of free willed actions and choices that are most meaningful would not occur. Or, at any rate, at least A CERTAIN TYPE OF MEANINGFUL ACTION would never occur (it may no be coherent to call different actions “most meaningful.”) A type of good that God wanted in his creation - namely, the free willed triumph over difficulty - would be absent. The key here is that the learning process would NECESSARILY REQUIRE PAIN IN ORDER TO BE OVERCOME. The pain must be present else the conquest is not attained.

Now, another point of confusion was thinking of free will in terms of right or wrong choices. I could not see how the “wrong” choices of a being should have any ramifications for another, and I could not see the whole point in creating beings that were tempted to “wrong” and them proclaiming them “guilty,” particularly if they’re created already with a propensity to “fall away from perfection.” But if free will is thought about in terms of a creation which is in the process of being made INTO perfection, it makes perfect sense.

So, from this theodicy, the problem of evil would be answered thusly: evil exists as a necessary hurdle to be overcome in the attainment of the knowledge of God, perfection, eternal life. The type of action required of us requires evil to be present in some degree. Without evil there would be nothing GAINED from one’s action in the sense of personal acquisition of knowledge. One could be created with perfect knowledge of God, I suppose, but then again that same being could not be said to have “attained” anything. God apparently wanted us to be FREE and gave us the “dignity of causation.” In short, what God wanted was “actions made in the face of difficulty.”

The critics who say that God could have made free creatures that were still free but never experienced pain are right - God could have, it seems to me, or he could have made the growing in knowledge process inherently pleasurable, like eating or having sex. But (and keep in mind there are many acts which we do that God made to be such inherently pleasurable), God wanted certain acts (though not all) to be made in the face of evil because such an act produces a good otherwise impossible (personal conquest.)

One could still maintain that no evil was superfluous. Even horrendous evils exist in order to educate mankind and give them a deeper understanding of the knowledge of good and evil and to help them attain a deeper more thorough victory over evil.

I think that this quote sort of highlights the misunderstanding that I had. I think it is false to say that creating a being in a state of perfection is incoherent. Christian theology teaches there are angels who constantly behold the face of God. I see no incoherence in the idea of a universe being created in a state of bliss and enjoyment of God without ever having been exposed to evil. But such a universe would not be one which OVERCAME evil, nor one which ATTAINED TO the perfection that it had. I kept trying to make beings which were perfect from the get go equivalent to creatures who had attained their perfection with some causation on their own part and were exposed to evil, and was wondering why God made the latter instead of the former. In reality, the two beings are not equivalent at all so the question does not hold.

I can imagine 3 options God had in creating the universe.

One in which there was evil, and it was never overcome (Hell would exist here.)
One in which there was no evil, and nothing was overcome.
And one in which there was evil, and in which it was overcome.

God perhaps thought option 3 the most valuable to create. And free will would come into play here as a necessary quality of existence, without which the word “overcome” would have no meaning.

I still think it helpful to think in terms of a variety of goods being bestowed on us. God’s purpose in created us was not ONLY to give us free will. That is but ONE good and there are many which do not require free will to enjoy - indeed, which free will may even preclude us from enjoying.

I think I am coming around to this idea of the free will defense.

Hi Chrisguy,

Good points as usual. I think you’re right that evil was, if nothing else, anticipated as a possibility, and to be honest, a likely possibility whether viewing God from the classical or open theist perspective. To be honest, I think he anticipated evil as likely and used it for greater good. There are certainly many “goods” that I can see coming from battling evil and Christian writers that I respect can see us gaining some “good” in the face of evil, whether it be natural evil such as illness or moral evil such as abuse, maltreatment by another human.

There are obviously many nuances to “free will” and the moral intuition I mentioned can be deformed or stunted by effects beyond one’s control such as parents, culture, brain development etc. I think this is one reason Jesus said “Judge not, that ye be not judged”. You mentioned the importance of “difficulty” or “pain” in the choices we make and I agree that overcoming that is the basis for any reward we may attain to. As far as those that fail, that become more degraded and sink into a mire of selfishness and evil, well, I think that’s where UR comes in to play. Despite their lack of progress, God has a plan for them. It may be painful, but he still loves them, brought them into being and will bring them to him using whatever methods he needs.

This is a big question and I have no great answer. I think he has limited his power in order to give us “free will”. One could argue that he may be intervening to prevent even worse atrocities than the holocaust but there is no way to prove that. I think, by and large, this is a “free will world” and God rarely if ever acts directly to prevent evil. I think he uses other humans and influences Christians through the Holy Spirit, but as far as directly stopping evil, I don’t see it.

That may be, you mentioned the angels, but we really don’t know how the angels were created. They may be simply more advanced beings that have gone through a similar process to ours, perhaps in another dimension, universe etc. Assuming there are angels and that they were created ex nihilo then there must be something special, some extra good achieved by confronting and overcoming evil. Perhaps (and if I am remembering scripture correctly, they do) the angels look-up to the saints that have overcome.

Steve

I can’t remember ever saying that I think evil was anticipated as a possibility. If I was unclear, I apologize. I’ve stated above in the thread that I find the idea of “probability” incompatible with God’s knowledge in the case of open theism. I think it incoherent to say that God doesn’t know free acts AT ALL and at the same time to affirm that he has the ability to predict them to any degree of success whatsoever. I went into the point more above, and refer you there for more, if you like. July 10, at 7:33.

I could never believe in God - at least a good God - if I believed in eternal Hell. Free will does not seem a problem to UR either because, even granting there were such “transworldly fallen beings” which would in fact deny God forever or eternally reject becoming good, God would not create them.

(Of course, on open theism, God would not know which beings would be like this. For all he knew, the entire creation would freely reject him forever. Unless you jettison the idea of true libertarian freedom, I do not see how open theists can say that God knows for sure that anyone will “be saved.”)

What do you think about this idea: beings which have the ability to fight/overcome evil are MORE FREE than beings which, having never experienced evil, do not have the ability to overcome it? Perhaps God values the first sort of beings, if not more than the second, at least in such a way that justifies his creating them? It may be God desires the existence of BOTH kinds of beings. Maybe he likes variety.

Hi Chrisguy,

This is not especially important to me. If evil was a certainty in in the mind of God in the world he created, I can accept that. I don’t think it was something he created, but the result of creating independent creatures with free will. He may well have known that evil would result from this, and certainly has some responsibility in this, but would at least have preferred that his cratures refrained from evil. He may well have known that evil was a certainty if he created creatures with free will. (and I think he did know this.) Does this make him the author of evil? Hmmmm… difficult question , but I think not. I do agree that the presence of evil serves a multitude of purposes in developing the creatures God has made–in “soul-making” if you will. In the case of suffering innocents, however, any benefit is in the afterlife. I am sure the suffering of Christ fits in here somewhere, (especially for the suffering innocents) but I am not enough of a theologian to tease that out at this point.

I think you’re on to something here. It appears that freedom is highly valued by God–To the point that he is very reluctant or perhaps has made himself unable to intervene in the case of even the worst sort of moral evil. The 'greater good" achieved by this is is hard to see from our human perspective, but I’m sure we will appreciate it when we see the “end of the story”. Your idea of God liking variety is a good one and I think ties in to evolution and the multitude of creatures created by that process , every one of which he loves, remembers and had a plan for.

I would agree 100%. The idea of rejecting God forever is extremely difficult to believe in beings that are “fully informed” as Tom Talbott puts it. What reason is there for them to resist his will and his love? That being said, I can see God remaking the will or essence of a resisting creature before committing them to ECT of annihilation. i tend to think of the mothers of people like Ted Bundy in these circumstances. She still loves her son and I believe less than God. She wants her son to be good in spite of the atrocities he’s committed. and I believe God wants no less.

Steve

One other thing, Chrisguy.

I think you could also use this type of theodicy to explain natural evil which the standard Free Will Defense doesn’t do very well.

Steve

wow, that’s interesting? Are you saying that relationships must be ultimately restored? what is ECT?