A Naturalistic Intrinsic Value Theodicy

The theodicy explored in Chapter 13 is naturalistic in the sense that it does not appeal to the existence of good things or events or processes that cannot be studied using the natural sciences. More specifically, unlike most of the theodicies that are typically discussed in the literature, this one does not involve any claims about human survival of death, the existence of a soul, libertarian human freedom, or divine intervention, miraculous or otherwise. The theodicy explored here involves the following claims: Everything that exists is intrinsically valuable to some degree; the universe as a whole is a thing of immense intrinsic value; the immense intrinsic value of the universe as a whole provides God with a justifying reason for creating it; the evil in the world is offset by the intrinsic values of the creatures affected together with the intrinsic value of the world that comes from its regularity.

Moral Indulgences

Chapter 5 introduces the concept and explores the permissibility of moral indulgences. Roughly speaking, an agent is morally indulgent when they do something that, absent a defeater, is wrong, and, in order to offset this, do something that is supererogatory and more good than the bad action was bad. The chapter proceeds to explain why and when being morally indulgent is permissible. For some cases, being morally indulgent appears permissible (as when one buys a large carbon offset after polluting more than one’s fair share), while for others, it appears impermissible (as when murdering one but, otherwise unrelatedly, saving two to make up for it). The explanation for when being indulgent is permissible appeals to universalizability of the sort found in forms of Kantianism, contractualism, and rule consequentialism. Finally, the chapter explores the implications for what God should do, and why, if there are no unsurpassable possible worlds.

God and Gratuitous Evil

In Chapter 3 of this volume, Klaas Kraay presented a critique of William Hasker’s necessity-of-gratuitous-evil defense against the evidential problem of evil (the NGE defense). Hasker’s response here in Chapter 4 contends that the defense survives all of Kraay’s objections. Most important of these objections is the contention that there is far too much gratuitous evil to be accounted for by Hasker’s defense.

Unrestricted Actualization and Perfect Worlds

God unrestrictedly actualizes a state of affairs just in case God predicts that some state of affairs obtains. Unrestricted actualization ensures, inter alia, that, necessarily, God can actualize a morally perfect world—whether or not those worlds include libertarian free agents—and can actualize any possible future—whether or not that future is open. Chapter 11 addresses a series of thoughtful objections from Bruce Langtry on the possibility of unrestricted actualization (Chapter 10 in this volume).

What If God Makes Hard Choices?

Chapter 2 explores the implications for classical theism of the possibility that God makes “hard choices.” A choice between two actions is hard if the chooser believes that each action is better than the other in some respects, but believes neither that one action is better overall than the other nor that the two actions are equally valuable overall. Even an omniscient God might be forced to make hard choices if, as seems plausible, “better than,” “worse than,” and “equal in value to” do not exhaust the relevant value relations that one action can bear to another. This chapter seeks to show that, if God does make hard choices of a certain sort, then God can be essentially perfectly rational and still have morally significant freedom. This is important because maximal praiseworthiness both requires morally significant freedom and, like perfect rationality, is required for divinity in the classical sense.

Organic Unities and the Problem of Evil

Chapter 9 constitutes a critical examination of Noah Lemos’s contribution to this volume (see Chapter 8). It addresses Lemos’s defense of G. E. Moore’s principle of organic unities against three objections. The first objection concerns what is involved in contributing to the intrinsic value of a state of affairs; the second concerns a kind of evaluative schizophrenia; and the third concerns the concept of evaluative inadequacy. Lemos’s response to the third objection is examined at length, and it is argued that this response may not succeed in defeating the objection, in which case the problem of evil may not be as easy to solve as some theodicists have suggested,

Prediction and Providence

Chapter 12 responds to Michael Almeida’s chapter in this volume, “Unrestricted Actualization and Perfect Worlds: A Reply to Langtry.” It concludes that Langtry’s main claims in his own chapter in this volume, “Unrestricted Actualization and Divine Providence” are undamaged by Almeida’s remarks.

Unrestricted Actualization and Divine Providence

Chapter 10 critiques Michael Almeida’s case for God’s having providential options involving unrestricted actualization. Almeida holds that as well as strong actualization and weak actualization, there are two other approaches to world-actualization open to God: restricted actualization and unrestricted actualization. The latter consists in God’s bringing about a finite person’s freely performing an undetermined action merely by God’s predicting it. The alleged availability of unrestricted actualization yields a novel libertarian account of divine providence, incorporating, for example, the thesis that necessarily God can actualize every morally perfect world, i.e., every world in which there are significantly free beings, each of whom performs morally significant actions and “goes right” with respect to each of them.

Organic Unities, Summation, and the Problem of Evil

Many attempts to respond to the problem of evil appeal to the concept of an organic unity. The first part of Chapter 8 explains Roderick Chisholm’s views on organic unities, the concept of defeat, and how he thinks they bear on the problem of evil. The second part examines three prominent and recent objections to the principle of organic unities. Roughly, the objections are that (1) the principle of organic unities is incoherent, (2) it leads to “evaluative schizophrenia,” and (3) the examples that allegedly support it, do not, in fact, do so. It is argued that these objections give us no good reason to reject the principle of organic unities.

Why Did The One Not Remain Within Itself?

God’s creative act, if genuinely free, would ground the existence of creatures without necessitating them. Since God is perfectly responsive to reason, his freely creating requires that he have an adequate but non-coercive reason to create. A coercive reason for an act is one that outweighs the reasons for any alternative act, whereas an adequate reason is one that is not outweighed by the reasons in favor of any alternative act. How, in the absence of an offsetting reason not to create, is God’s adequate reason not also a coercive reason, i.e., one that would necessitate creation? Chapter 7 argues that God’s creating and God’s remaining within himself each have to be understood as determinate manners in which God may affirm his own unsurpassable goodness. Cantorian reflections are then deployed to explain how God’s extra, i.e., un-offset, reason to create does not give him more of a reason to create than to not create. Finally, God’s actual reason to create is identified.