Netanel Ron

The idea that God faces us with hardships to test our responses is well supported in the Bible and the Quran and it is widely believed by theists outside of academia. Nevertheless, “test theodicy,” as I will call it, has hardly been engaged with in analytic philosophy of religion, and Jeremy Koons suggests that this is because philosophers feel that it is not promising, a feeling that Koons attempts to vindicate through various criticisms. In this article, I reconstruct a strong test theodicy and try to show that whatever reason there might be for giving test theodicy only little attention, it should not be because it is unpromising.

תאודיציות שואפות להסביר מדוע אל כל-יכול, יודע-כל, וטוב עשוי לאפשר את קיומם של הרוע והסבל בעולם. אני שואב השראה מרבי משה חיים לוצאטו ומפתח "תאודיציה של בניית עולם". הרעיון המרכזי הוא שהאל רצה שברואיו יהיו שותפים בבריאת העולם ויממשו את עצמם כבוראים קטנים בצלם אלוהים. לכן, האל ברא עולם בלתי שלם בו יש הרבה סכנות ואנשים רעים, והאל השאיר לברואיו את המשימה להשלים את המלאכה וליצור אוטופיה בכוחות עצמם. בכוחה של תאודיציה זו להסביר את קיומו של כל מופע של רוע שאנו מכירים בעולם, וכל כמות שהיא של רוע, וכל זאת בלי להיעזר בדוקטרינות שנויות במחלוקת לגבי בחירה חופשית.

Theodicies aim at explaining why an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God might enable the existence of evil and the suffering it causes. I draw on an idea from 18th-century Italian Jewish philosopher and kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto to develop a “world-building theodicy”. The main idea is that God wanted his creatures to participate in the creation of the world and manifest themselves as godlike mini creators. Therefore, God created an unfinished world full of natural dangers and evil-doing people, leaving creatures to develop the world into a utopia through their own hard work. This theodicy is designed to account for all types of worldly evil and any finite amount, all without controversial doctrines about free will.

Theodicies attempt to explain why evil and suffering might exist in a world governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God. Some theodicies focus on pointing out benefits that suffering seems necessary for, though in many cases the benefits are primarily for someone other than the sufferer. Some philosophers find it morally objectionable for God to let one person suffer in order to benefit someone else, and this is thought to be a weakness of some otherwise promising theodicies. I discuss two moral concerns in this context: a mere-means-to-an-end concern and a concern about horrendous evils remaining undefeated. I argue that incorporating a doctrine of reincarnation may help some theodicies resolve both of these moral concerns, giving theodicists reason to turn towards such doctrines.

Non-player characters, or “NPCs", are characters in video games and in tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons who are controlled by the game itself or by the storyteller, rather than by one of the players. NPCs in the real world would appear as normal living creatures, yet they would lack phenomenal consciousness. According to a popular theodical approach, God enables evil to exist because it is necessary for bringing about a greater good. However, some theodicies are built around greater goods that are obtainable even if conscious creatures hardly ever suffer and instead instances of evil mostly affect NPCs who conscious creatures cannot recognize as such. I characterize these theodicies as “NPC-inviting theodicies”, as they invite the thought that God should make NPCs exist in the real world to bring about plentiful goods with hardly any creaturely suffering. Examples of NPC-inviting theodicies include several free-will theodicies and the soul-making theodicy. I argue that NPC-inviting theodicies cannot explain why God would enable conscious creatures to undergo a great deal of suffering rather than NPCs, and I show this to be problematic for those theodicies in three ways. I then consider four possible responses on behalf of NPC-inviting theodicies.

Some free-will defenses appeal to the intuition that the love of creatures who God causally determined to love him is less valuable than the love of creatures who chose to love God freely, in the libertarian sense. I challenge that intuition directly. I attempt to discredit the intuition in question by demonstrating that no analogies regarding human-related cases can support it. In each case I treat, I argue either that the case is disanalogous to God’s case, or that granting the lover libertarian free will wouldn’t make the love in question more valuable.