Robbie Hoque

The normatively relativised logical argument from evil (NRLA) of John Bishop and Ken Perszyk (2011) argues that belief in a personal omniperfect God is incompatible with any redemptive theodicy in which God both contrives the conditions of our earthly suffering and rescues us from these conditions by means of and for the sake of relationship with God, since any such union would be less than perfectly good as a personal relationship. Their argument is normatively relativised because the claim that such a relationship is defective has force if the theist is committed to values which entail this normative claim. For Bishop and Perszyk, this is so with a theological ethics that has the notion of right relationship at its centre, which they think follows from a theology that understands God’s goodness primarily in terms of the attribute of love. On this view, love is supremely good personal relationship experienced for its own sake as a good in itself, God creates the world to enter into such relationships with other personal beings, and eternal union with God is the highest human good. The NRLA is a logical argument from evil because, according to Bishop and Perszyk, any sophisticated theist would endorse a theological ethics of this sort, rather than evade the NRLA with a utilitarian response. Therefore, the best theistic explanations of evil will always be internally inconsistent. I argue that the NRLA looks persuasive against redemptive theodicies and defences committed to a theology of divine love, but fails as a logical argument because an explanation of evils may be derived from an alternative conception of God’s goodness without sacrificing a theological ethics of right relationship. To support the first part of this argument I develop a parallel between the God of Eleonore Stump’s theodicy of redemptive suffering and a person with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a psychological disorder in which an abuser harms a victim under their care to manipulate others into praising the abuser for their apparent caregiving. The analogy adapted to illustrate the NRLA has the abuser contrive the conditions of their victim’s suffering so that rescuing them from these conditions may cause the victim to love the abuser, a parallel that Stump’s distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will fails to evade. Building on intuitions about the wrongness of such relationships, I employ a Rawlsian comparison of the world of Stump’s theodicy and two other possible worlds a loving God might be expected to create for the purpose of uniting with us, to examine which one a rational human agent deciding under a veil of ignorance would prefer to be actualized in if given a choice. The comparison shows Stump’s divine-human union to be less than supremely loving, because on a theological ethics of divine love the Rawlsian agent should expect Stump’s God to be more supportive and less demanding in contriving the conditions of this relationship. To show how the NRLA fails as a logical argument I employ a distinction made by J.L. Schellenberg (1993) between divine love and benevolence to derive a response from the latter. In this solution, a benevolent God who selflessly desires the good wants to maximise the goodness of a world created because a world where other goods exist apart from the being of God is better than one where only God exists. God is not simply a utilitarian, however, because maximising created goodness in part consists in the flourishing of personal beings like us. Divine-human relations are therefore essential, but not the kind valued in a theological ethics of divine love. Rather, the rightness of God’s relationships may be understood in terms of what might be expected of the best kinds of relations between a benevolent king and his subjects. On this view, the King acting for the good of his subjects enters into various forms and levels of relations with them that are constitutive of the flourishing of his kingdom, but these are not the sole end for which the kingdom was created, while the King’s great power and wisdom removes him too far from his subjects for his relations with them to be supremely good as personal relationships. Employing this analogy, I discuss the desiderata of divine-human relationships in a theological ethics of divine benevolence, and outline how such ethics could cohere with a free will explanation of evil, suggesting that God’s creation of earthly suffering might not be gratuitous with respect to the purpose of maximising created goodness.

Enhanced agency theodicy is a new afterlife-centred solution to the problem of evil which I show has greater explanatory power than two influential rivals, the soul-making and redemptive suffering theodicies of John Hick and Eleonore Stump. Derived from the concept of an omniperfect God, enhanced agency theodicy is also potentially compatible with notions of divinity, human nature and the afterlife in Islam. Central to this solution is a good-maximising view of God’s purpose and an analysis of the kind of environment such a God might be expected to create: a realm of enhanced agency where self-aware embodied persons with freedom and goodness of will have the greatest possible scope for agency. An earthly life with the freedom to set our wills toward good or evil is created to develop and test our capacity to flourish in this dynamic afterlife, where neuro-physical flexibility and a durably good will are needed to thrive. To bring as many as possible into this realm, and so maximise its goodness, our earthly environment is structured with various features, including a human nature that is innately good yet potentially bad depending on how we use free will, and an ungovernable and unpredictable natural order that constrains the power of evil social systems to corrupt this nature and which makes mortal life a genuine test of goodness of will. This positive view of human nature and our freedom to preserve or corrupt its essential goodness combines a neuroscientific account of free will with dualistic holism, where the immaterial dimension of being is the source of our goodness of will, moral sense and desire for truth. Enhanced agency theodicy is contrasted with the solutions of Hick and Stump with respect to four main difficulties concerning the role of the afterlife in explanations of evil: 1) the normatively relativised logical argument from evil challenges how a heavenly divine-human union could be supremely good as a personal relationship when God both contrives the conditions of our earthly suffering and rescues us from these conditions by means of and for the sake of personal relationship with God; 2) problems of heavenly freedom argue that free will theodicies that rely on a good afterlife to outweigh or defeat earthly evils are inconsistent when they claim that freedom with respect to good and evil choices is a great good, while also maintaining that a heaven with no freedom to make such choices is supremely valuable; 3) problems of hell and post-mortem suffering focus on whether belief in a perfectly good God is compatible with the continuation of suffering in forms of afterlife outside of heaven; 4) the fate of creatures without free will concerns the post-mortem existence of young children, the severely cognitively disabled and animals in theodicies that make free will central to achieving a good afterlife. Hick and Stump fail to evade these problems due to their reliance on Christian concepts of divine love, a fallen human nature and its heavenly redemption through union with God, while enhanced agency theodicy’s construction outside this framework of ideas provides for coherent answers to each of these challenges. The study endorses Graham Oppy’s proposal to progress the debate on God and evil with an inference to the best explanation comparison of naturalism and theism as rival worldviews. To minimise epistemic bias I suggest how Oppy’s methodology can be amended to ensure no single worldview is presupposed when explanations are compared. Enhanced agency theodicy is found to satisfy two of three success conditions proposed to assess its candidacy for such an evaluation, the sufficient probability of its explanation of evil and its high probability on theism. For the third condition, the theodicy’s high probability on an actual tradition of theism, I outline its potential coherence with Islamic conceptions of divinity, human nature and the afterlife, to prepare future work to determine their compatibility. If this can be established, a detailed description of the Islamic worldview that includes enhanced agency theodicy may be the formulation of theism best placed to challenge naturalism in an evaluation of worldviews.

Free will theodicies that rely on a good afterlife to explain how earthly evils are ultimately outweighed or defeated are challenged by what Simon Kittle has termed the lack of value problem concerning heavenly freedom: that a heaven with no freedom to make good and evil choices is not a supreme good that could justify God’s creation of evil. I take up Kittle’s suggestion that this problem can be addressed by a choice-based account of heavenly freedom which gives some idea of how the types and number of choices an agent might face in heaven add up to a level of freedom that it would be desirable to have. While Christian notions of a loving God’s desire for divine-human union typically prioritise non-choice-based accounts of how heavenly existence perfects our wills for union with God, I argue that a good-maximising view of an omniperfect God’s creative purpose provides for an account of heaven as a realm of enhanced agency that answers Kittle’s challenge by outlining the types of goods that might exist in this afterlife and how choices between them could be supremely valuable.