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G O D , T H E B E S T, A N D EV I L

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God, the Best, and Evil B RU C E L A N G T RY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Bruce Langtry 2008

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Langtry, Bruce. God, the best, and evil / Bruce Langtry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13: 978–0–19–923879–8 1. Providence and government of God—Christianity. 2. Theodicy. 3. Good and evil. I. Title. BT135.L37 2008 214—dc22 2008000548 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923879–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements Chapter 3 is a heavily revised version of part of my paper ‘God and the Best’, Faith and Philosophy, 13 (1996), 311–28, while Chapter 4 is derived from ‘God and Inﬁnite Hierarchies of Creatable Worlds’, Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006), 460–76. Chapter 5 incorporates material from ‘Can God Replace the Actual World by a Better One?’ Philosophical Papers 20 (1991), 129–54. Footnotes in these papers thank people for helpful discussion. I also thank my colleague Graham Priest, who read a draft of Chapters 1 and 2 and made helpful comments. American philosophers and philosophy departments have been very hospitable during my visits there. In particular, I thank David Luban and Judith Lichtenberg (Maryland), Al and Kathy Plantinga (Notre Dame), Mic and Martha Detlefsen (Notre Dame), Bill Rowe (Purdue), John Kleinig and Tziporah Kasachkoff (CUNY), and Marilyn and Bob Adams (then at Yale) for their warm welcome. Australian philosophers have constituted a wonderful community in which to spend my working life. I count myself blessed indeed to have been a member of the philosophy departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of Tasmania, and the University of Sydney. The churches and other Christian groups of which I have been a member have been intellectually stimulating, spiritually challenging, and rich environments for the ﬂourishing of long-lasting friendships. I thank my wife Elizabeth Willis, and my children Emily, Tom, and Felicity for their loving tolerance over a great many years. This book is dedicated to my mother, Zena Pearl Langtry, to my sister, Marilyn Huckel, and to the memory of my father, Stanley Gordon Langtry. Bruce Langtry University of Melbourne 2 July 2007

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Contents 1. Introduction: Problems, Concepts, and Background Theories 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11

The aims and structure of this book Moral criticisms of the project ‘God’ Theological Determinism Molinism Open Theism Creation and creatability Omnipotence Omniscience Possible worlds and moral necessity The concept of evil

2. God and Worlds than which there are None Better 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Are there worlds having inﬁnite value? Inﬁnite value and maximal worlds Maximal worlds in the absence of quantitative value What God can do: compatibilist analysis What God can do: libertarian analyses

3. Divine Choice from Inﬁnite Hierarchies of Creatable Worlds 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Context and aims Rowe’s positive arguments for the Entailment Thesis An argument in favour of satisﬁcing Worlds that are good enough Finite and inﬁnite creatable hierarchies: implications for Rowe 3.6 Other recent supporters of the Entailment Thesis

1 1 4 6 9 19 26 27 29 37 40 42 48 48 56 57 60 64

69 69 71 74 78 83 85

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4. World Creation when there are Prime Worlds 4.1 Prime Actually and Better Outcome/Action 4.2 Risk of serious loss 4.3 Overriding moral duties 4.4 The less good is good enough 4.5 Contingent desires and underlying personality traits 4.6 Divine grace and beneﬁcence 4.7 Loyalties and commitments 4.8 Self-sacriﬁce 4.9 Divine choice given creatable hierarchies of both kinds 4.10 Divine choice given several creatable hierarchies, all containing prime members 4.11 Corollaries of foregoing conclusions

90 90 93 93 95 97 103 106 106 107 109 109

5. Empirical Objections to Theism, not based on Evil 5.1 A dilemma for theological determinists and Molinists 5.2 The argument from there being prime worlds 5.3 The argument from there being no prime worlds 5.4 An objection to open theism

111 111 113 122 125

6. Logical Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 6.1 Mackie’s 1955 argument 6.2 McCloskey’s 1974 arguments 6.3 Absolute moral duties 6.4 Schellenberg’s 1993 argument

130 131 135 137 144

7. Theodicy for Two General Truths about Evil 7.1 Aims and opening considerations 7.2 The core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction: ﬁrst part 7.3 The inference from (3) and (4) to (5): theological-compatibilist analysis 7.4 The inference from (3) and (4) to (5): Open Theist and Molinist analyses 7.5 A short remark about Premiss (6) 7.6 The core argument concerning suffering and dysfunction: second part

148 148 149 152 159 161 161

Contents 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14

The inference from (3∗ ) and (4∗ ) to (5∗ ) A case for Premiss (6∗ ) Suffering, dysfunction, and heaven Distribution, moral desert, and equality Objections from alternative goods The core argument concerning wrong The inference from (c)&(d) to (e); Premiss (f) More speciﬁc kinds of wrong

ix 166 168 172 176 179 184 186 188

8. Evidential Arguments from Evil, against the Existence of God 8.1 Tooley’s 1991 argument 8.2 Rowe’s 1996 argument 8.3 The argument from horriﬁcally bad lives 8.4 Schellenberg’s 2000 argument

191 191 200 216 220

Glossary

228

Bibliography

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Index

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1 Introduction: Problems, Concepts, and Background Theories 1 . 1 T H E A I M S A N D S T RU C T U R E O F T H I S B O O K The biblical authors wrestled with many perplexing problems concerning God and his actions towards human beings.¹ These included: What has God revealed about his character, powers, and long-term intentions? How far does the scope of his love extend? When will God act to rescue righteous people from evil, to vindicate them in the face of evildoers, and thereby to vindicate his own justice? How will God eventually succeed in combining justice with mercy? Jewish and Christian pastoral workers face other problems: How can we help people to see that God can confer meaning, or at least an enhanced meaning, on their lives? How can we reassure shattered people that God loves them, despite what has happened to them? How can we reassure other individuals that God will forgive them, despite what they did? How will God be able to help various people retain their moral integrity, in the face of very strong temptation? These are not the questions that animate this book. Although they have provided part of the background motivation for a good deal of philosophizing, and although philosophical insights might be of help in dealing with them, they are not primarily philosophical questions. God, the Best, and Evil has three closely interrelated main aims: (1) to explore some implications of divine omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness for God’s providential policies, and in particular to investigate whether God is in some sense a maximizer; ¹ I will be using masculine pronouns to apply to God, for reasons explained by Peter van Inwagen in The Problem of Evil (Clarendon, 2006), 21f. Moreover this convention will be extended to cover talk of omniscient or omnipotent beings, and of world creators, even when these hypothetical beings are not identiﬁed with God.

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(2) to assess the strength of objections to the existence of God, based on the apparent fact that God could have created a better world than this one; (3) to assess the strength of objections to the existence of God, based on evil. The book manages to reach some substantial conclusions without taking a stance on various important issues—for example, whether human freedom is compatible with God’s determining all human choices and actions. This feature may contribute to its interest. Given its second and third aims, the project cannot rest on the assumption that God exists. Any sentences in my own voice which appear to presuppose that God exists should therefore be understood as employing some hidden device beﬁtting the context, such as an antecedent clause ‘If God exists then . . .’. Although the book does not comment on the credibility of this or that speciﬁc theistic religion, it is worth making a couple of remarks about the relevance of the problem of evil to the assessment of theistic religions, and vice versa. Firstly, it is possible that the credibility of God exists in the face of evil cannot be properly assessed without assessing the credibility of various religious packages of which it forms a part. It might turn out that ignoring the context of religious belief and practice would be like trying to assess the merits of certain propositions about magnetic attraction, and the strength of various objections to these propositions, in complete abstraction from broader theories of electromagnetism and their use in the design and operation of electrical devices: an unwise and probably fruitless way of proceeding. For all we know in advance, looking carefully at this or that theistic religion may enable us to discover that theism can be ﬁlled out with conceptual or explanatory resources that weaken objections based on evil—resources that would be hard to discover merely by reﬂection on the proposition God exists. Secondly, it might turn out that certain speciﬁc theistic religions encounter more severe theoretical difﬁculties with respect to evil than does the mere proposition that God exists. If morally perfect does not entail loving, the belief that God is both morally perfect and loves human beings comes under greater strain than the claim that he is morally perfect. Furthermore, certain beliefs that might play a useful role in the defence of theism will be inconsistent with the theology of this or that speciﬁc religion.

Introduction

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Having made the foregoing points, I will ignore them in most of what follows. It is theism that I will be discussing directly, rather than Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or theistic varieties of Hinduism. Here is a guide to how God, The Best, and Evil unfolds. Chapter 1 outlines the project, defending its moral propriety, and explaining some key concepts and theories (such as Molinism and Open Theism) which will be used or discussed later on. Since there is extensive disagreement about how best to understand various key terms, and about the presuppositions and implications of various key theories, some sections of Chapter 1 will turn out to go well beyond stage-setting, and to contain complex philosophical argument. From now on ‘world’ will be used as an abbreviation of ‘logically possible world’, where a logically possible world is an all-inclusive state of affairs,² while ‘universe’ will be used to apply to the whole whose parts range from galaxy clusters to subatomic particles, as well as all minds other than God’s, whether or not these minds are physical. The a priori investigation of God’s providential policies depends on one’s understanding of what options God has, and what options he has depends on the structure of the array of worlds. Chapter 2 begins the investigation. It starts with a discussion of whether any world has inﬁnite value, discusses whether for every world there is at least one better world, and concludes that even if there are worlds than which there are none better, we cannot infer that if God exists then the actual world is one of them. Let us say that God creates a world if and only if he causes it to be actual by exercising tight providential control with respect to (nearly) every contingent state of affairs it contains. Employing this terminology, Chapter 3 considers the proposition that there are one or more hierarchies of worlds such that, with respect to each such hierarchy, for every member of it which God can create there is a better one which God can create. I do not believe that we know whether this proposition is correct. But William L. Rowe holds that it is, and he (along with various other recent authors) argues that if it is then God does not exist. Chapter 3 argues that this latter claim is mistaken. ² One possible world does not include other possible worlds, since if it did then the resulting ‘all-inclusive state of affairs’ would be inconsistent; inconsistent states of affairs do not count as states of affairs at all, any more than inconsistent possible worlds are possible worlds. (Here is not the place to engage with protests from dialetheists.)

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Chapter 4 argues that if there are one or more worlds such that God cannot create a better world, and God creates a world, then he creates one of these worlds. Chapter 5 addresses the second main aim of God, the Best, and Evil by stating and refuting a serious empirical objection to theism, an objection which is distinct from the problem of evil. The discussion draws on arguments stated in earlier chapters. Chapters 6–8 address the third main aim of the book. Chapter 6 discusses ‘logical’ arguments from evil against the existence of God. Each of these is, or purports to be, such that the argument is deductively valid, all its non-contingent premisses are plausible, it has at least one contingent premiss concerning evil, and its contingent premisses are all widely known to be true and are all unlikely to be doubted by anyone whom the proponent of the argument is trying to persuade. None of the logical arguments discussed succeeds in establishing its conclusion. Chapter 7 offers theodicies for two general truths about evil; namely, that human beings undergo a lot of suffering, weakness, paralysis, blindness, mental retardation, phobias, delusions, and so on, and that there are a great many serious cases of morally wrong choosing, acting, and failing to act. Chapter 8 states some recent evidential—that is, non-logical—arguments from evil against the existence of God, and ﬁnds them to be unsuccessful. 1 . 2 M O R A L C R I T I C I S M S O F T H E P RO J E C T It is obvious that the universe contains evil, that there is a lot of it, and that some of it is horriﬁc. Newspapers, history books, autobiographical essays, and eyewitnesses’ spoken testimony present us with vivid and disturbing examples. I will make no attempt here to evoke their power by quoting appropriate material, or by trying to evoke dismay and grief by my own descriptive efforts. Some philosophers and theologians have advanced moral criticisms of attempts, such as mine in Chapters 6–8, to discuss theoretical issues concerning evil in an emotionally detached manner, abstracting from engagement with the details of people’s experience as victims of severe evil. Kenneth Surin attacks all treatments of theodicy which, like mine, abstract from ‘the radical and ruthless particularity of human evil’. ‘To regard theodicy as a purely theoretical and scholarly exercise is to

Introduction

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provide—albeit unwittingly—a tacit sanction of the myriad evils that exist on this planet.’ Presumably Surin would make the same criticisms of relevant philosophical writings by Michael Tooley, John Mackie, and other opponents of theism. Surin quotes with approval D. Z. Phillips’s remarks that ‘to ask of what use are the screams of the innocent, as Swinburne’s defense would have us do, is to embark on a speculation we should not even contemplate’, and that such speculation ‘is a sign of a morally corrupt mind’.³ Surin’s attack should be rejected. Cool discussion in philosophy journals of war, tyranny, and psychosis is morally legitimate for the same reasons that cool discussion in history and psychology journals of these topics is morally legitimate. A theoretical discussion of the causes and effects of the First World War, abstracting from the suffering of particular victims of the war, need not insulate academic historians and doctors from distress and perplexity in practical contexts—for example, when they must comfort close friends whose child has just died—nor need it stop them from contributing to humanitarian relief efforts. Similarly with philosophers. Some moral critics of theodicy evidently hold that the moral superﬁciality and imperceptiveness of contemporary philosophical writing in theodicy should be so obvious to fair-minded people that the theodicists must be either insincere or suffering from morally impaired faculties.⁴ But the absence of a morally deep account of key moral concepts, and morally sensitive descriptions of particular, actual moral situations, is a defect in a speciﬁc project only if either writing which embodied moral depth and sensitivity was required to achieve the aims of the project, or else the arguments offered are undermined by considerations which people of greater perceptiveness would have identiﬁed. The fact that in addition to the questions which a project addresses there are other good questions which the project does not address is a defect only if failure to address the good questions should undermine readers’ conﬁdence that the conclusions reached in the project are correct. Contemporary philosophical work in theodicy aims to refute certain objections to the existence of God based on evil, and to explain why God allows, or might allow, so much evil to exist. Theodicy and attacks on speciﬁc attempts in theodicy are largely carried out employing methods ³ Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Blackwell, 1986), 50–3, 83–4. ⁴ Some such belief seems to underlie remarks by J. S. Mill on pp.186f of his Three Essays on Religion (Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1874; rep. Gregg, 1969).

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used in other areas of philosophy in the broad analytical tradition: fairly sophisticated resources from metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, along with fairly elementary moral philosophy. Participants are well aware of epistemological criticisms of such methods, especially when applied to discussions of God. Adopting a controversial starting point is not always a ﬂaw in a philosophical enterprise, even one in moral philosophy: those engaged in the enterprise justiﬁably assume that it may be interesting and important even if it is not self-contained. It is sometimes said that assessing God’s policies and actions is morally wrong because we do not have the moral standing to do so: God is not accountable to us; we have no authorization to deliver a verdict convicting or acquitting him of malicious or negligent government of the universe. But tackling the main aims of this book, identiﬁed in Section 1.1, does not involve calling God to account, or delivering a verdict on his actions and omissions. The second and third aims are epistemological. As I pointed out in Section 1.1, the argument will make no essential use of the assumption that God does exist, and therefore will not conclude either that God has done y justiﬁably or that he has done y unjustiﬁably. To the extent that moral judgements about God are made in the course of the discussion, they are hypothetical in content—for example, if God were to exist, then he would be justiﬁed in doing x but would not be justiﬁed in doing y. As for the ﬁrst main aim, surely rejecting the moral appropriateness of addressing it would commit one to rejecting the moral appropriateness of signiﬁcant parts of Christian theology, where suggestions concerning God’s reasons for action in this or that context are often discussed and adopted or discarded in the light of assessment of the adequacy of the alleged reasons. (I am not in a position to comment on the theology of non-Christian theistic religions.) Most people who believe that God exists see that the evils around us, and the apparent suboptimality of the scheme of things, constitute intellectual challenges that need to be taken seriously. 1.3 ‘GOD’ God, the Best, and Evil assumes, without argument, that afﬁrmations concerning God have substantial, controversial metaphysical implications. As found in the writings of mainstream authors such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz, they are not to

Introduction

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be interpreted as attempts at ﬁction or myth, or as disguised expressions of moral values and policy commitments, or as moves in some language game to which history and moral evaluation belong but from which metaphysics is excluded. This assumption is, obviously, consistent with recognizing that many statements about God are best interpreted as involving analogical predication or metaphor. This section does not try to deﬁne the word ‘God’ by providing an illuminating list of conditions which are together synonymous with it. For one thing, the most obvious candidate deﬁnitions of this kind simply do not work. Consider three examples. Firstly, deﬁning ‘God’ as ‘the rational agent who brought the universe into existence’ would rule out as self-contradictory the widespread view that although God did bring the universe into existence, he would still have been God even if he had not done so. It would rule out the view that if the universe had been brought into existence by a very feeble and stupid rational agent, then that agent would not have deserved the label ‘God’. Secondly, deﬁning ‘God’ as ‘the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being’ would impede substantial debates currently taking place amongst theists, on such topics as whether God is omnipotent and omniscient, as distinct from supremely powerful and knowledgeable. Thirdly, deﬁning ‘God’ as ‘the being who is objectively worthy of worship’⁵ runs counter to the intelligibility of the atheist who declares that God, if he existed, would be contemptible (in virtue of the ways he treats people). The foregoing points hold both if we conceive of the deﬁnition as capturing the meaning of ‘God’ as used by most ordinary English speakers, and also if we conceive of the deﬁnition as introducing a precise technical sense of the word alongside the everyday sense. We should abandon the attempt to formulate a deﬁnition in terms of a phrase synonymous with ‘God’. For a great many purposes we will successfully explain what we are talking about by saying that (if God exists) God is the rational agent who brought the universe into existence and who is, either non-temporally or at all times, very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very good. This is similar to the procedure adopted by the Compact Oxford Dictionary when it explains the ﬁrst of several uses of the word ‘water’ by saying that water is ‘the liquid which forms the seas, lakes, rivers, and rain, and ⁵ This account has recently been revived by J. H. Sobel, Logic and Theism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9–11, 17.

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is the basis of the ﬂuids of living organisms’: the explanation succeeds, even though we must admit that it is logically possible that the earth’s seas, lakes, rivers, and rain have been made of some liquid other than water but superﬁcially similar to it—similar enough that it could also have formed the basis of the ﬂuids of living organisms. Admittedly, Neoplatonists and pantheists do not think of God in the way just speciﬁed. Neoplatonists say that God is not a being; instead, talk of God is talk of an abstract principle which both is bound up with supreme value and also possesses creative power of some kind. Pantheists say that God is identical with the universe, or is an aspect of it. But I think that theists who came to believe that either Neoplatonism or pantheism was true would and should say that the God they had previously believed in did not exist, and that they were now using the word ‘God’ in a different (though not unrelated) sense.⁶ The explanation ‘God, if he exists, is the rational creator of the universe and is, either non-temporally or at all times, very powerful, very knowledgeable and very good’ itself requires interpretation. Are the phrases ‘rational agent’ and ‘very knowledgeable’ here being used with the same meaning as when we say that human beings are rational agents and very knowledgeable, or are they here being used with some other meaning? Different people who describe themselves as orthodox theists, and who offer the explanation of ‘God’ that we are discussing, would answer differently. I will not take a stance on the question. For the problem of evil is normally presented as a problem concerning the logical and epistemic relationships between agreed truths about evil and various central afﬁrmations about God, and this problem will be pressing both for theists who take those afﬁrmations literally and for those who think that some component terms are being used non-literally. After all, if you discover that a friend has deserted you in your hour of need, then you will perceive a challenge to your declaration that he or she is a tower of strength, metaphorical as the last phrase is. ⁶ In this connection it is worth drawing attention to the views of Paul Tillich, who declares that God is not a being, but is ‘being-itself ’—that is, ‘the power of being in everything and above everything, the inﬁnite power of being’. Hence God is not a person: he is the ground of everything personal, carrying within himself the ontological power of personality. Tillich contrasts his own view with ‘ordinary theism’, which thinks of God as a completely perfect person who resides above the universe and stands in causal relations to it. He comments: ‘The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern’ (Systematic Theology, i (Nisbet, 1953), 261, 264, 271).

Introduction

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If we bypass deﬁnition involving synonymy, and instead offer an explanation of ‘God’ in the way that I have done, then we preclude a clear-cut answer to the question, ‘What exactly is entailed by the proposition that God exists?’ This is hardly an objection to an explanation of the term as used in everyday discourse. Wittgenstein, Quine, and Putnam have taught us that often, in important cases, there are no clear-cut answers to such questions. Nevertheless treating ‘God’ in this way is inconvenient in two respects. It creates a need for frequent separate speciﬁcation of what features of God are under discussion, what features of God are under challenge from such-and-such an objection. Furthermore, philosophical literature on the problem of evil over the last ﬁfty years has been overwhelmingly directed to discussion of the bearing of evil on the proposition that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, and the word ‘God’ is frequently used with this theoretical loading—that is, with these features built in. These inconveniences will be removed in this book by the stipulation that from now on, unless there is local indication to the contrary, sentences such as ‘God exists’ are to be understood as accompanied by a latent statement to the effect that God is the rational agent who brought the universe into existence and who is, either non-temporally or at all times, omnipotent, infallibly omniscient, and perfectly good; the word ‘theism’ will be used for the view that God exists and that the foregoing is true of him. 1 . 4 T H E O LO G I C A L D E T E R M I N I S M God, the Best, and Evil remains neutral between three leading positions with respect to divine providence: theological determinism, Molinism, and Open Theism. Sections 1.4–1.6 do not provide arguments for or against these positions, but instead contain brief explanations of them, and some points about what their adherents should say which will turn out to be important for discussion later on.

1.4.1 Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge Many philosophers afﬁrm both of the following doctrines: Comprehensive Providence: Everything that occurs is either intended by God or is an unintended consequence of what he intends. God plays

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an active causal role that guarantees both that his intentions are fulﬁlled and that their unintended consequences occur.⁷ God is in complete control of all that occurs. All of God’s decisions are reached before he implements any of them. Comprehensive Knowledge: All states of affairs that actually obtain are known infallibly by God, and there is never a time at which God exists but does not then know about any state of affairs that actually obtains. Subsequent discussion in this chapter will reﬁne the foregoing statements, and consider how they are related to the doctrines of divine omnipotence and omniscience. Let us say that a time stream is a whole whose parts are intervals of time each of which either overlaps or precedes or follows each other part. Contemporary physics suggests that our own time stream does not go back much longer than fourteen billion years. For this reason, amongst others, theists might be wary about locating God’s states in our time stream. We should consider the possibility that God is a timeless being, and also the possibility that he is in a time stream other than our own. Theists who adopt the last alternative will say that in God’s time stream there is no time before which God did not exist, and that God has existed for an inﬁnite number of ﬁnite, equal, and non-overlapping time intervals in his time stream. Comprehensive Knowledge implies that God never takes new decisions: his decisions are timeless, or else he has always intended to do what at any speciﬁed time he intends to do.⁸ For if God took new decisions, then he would not know them in advance: for there is no point in deliberating about what to do if you already know what your decision will be. If Comprehensive Knowledge is true, then whether or not God is timeless, and whether or not, if he is in time, he is in the same time stream as us, his decisions should be thought of as being reached simultaneously, each a part of an overall package; and talk of God as deliberating and then deciding what to do should be regarded as ⁷ It will emerge below that the word ‘guarantee’ covers at least two alternative relations between God’s causal contribution and its consequences. According to theological determinists, God’s total causal contribution is always logically sufﬁcient for its consequences. According to Molinists, in the case of some of the consequences God’s causal contribution is not sufﬁcient, but the conjunction of God’s causal contribution with the truth of the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom is. ⁸ The strategy of this book does not require me to assert and does not require me to deny that comprehensive knowledge implies that God lacks the power to take new decisions.

Introduction

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a metaphorical way of speaking of the reasons that God has for his intentions. Thus if Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence are both true, then before God brought anything into existence he surveyed the possible worlds, considered and rejected the option of bringing into existence some universe over which he exercised only loose control and with respect to which he would have only partial knowledge, selected one world the one as over which he would in fact exercise comprehensive knowledge and comprehensive providence, and said ‘Let this one be actual!’.⁹ God’s reasons for his intentions cannot include any truths that are causally dependent on his having the intentions (though of course they can include the truth that if he were to implement a certain option then such-and-such would result). Admittedly, situations arise in which part of your reason for causing an event is that you know that if you do not do so then it will occur anyway—for example, when your action would pre-empt some other cause. But obviously if Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge are true, then God’s intentions are not formed in such a situation. Whether there are any events involving stars, rivers, or human beings is, ex hypothesi, completely up to God. It would be irrational, because in a sense circular, to identify as God’s reason for intending that some state of affairs obtain (or even for permitting it to obtain) some consideration that indispensably includes the premiss that it will in fact obtain. Let us say that a person strongly actualizes a state of affairs if and only if the person causes it by performing an action which determines it. Let us use the expression ‘metaphysically depend’ in a broad sense, in which one way that y can metaphysically depend on x is for x to be a causally necessary condition of y. Then we can say that x is metaphysically prior to y if and only if y metaphysically depends on x but x does not metaphysically depend on y. Theological Determinists afﬁrm Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence. They believe that God has strongly actualized the actual world by strongly actualizing every contingent state of affairs, except any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all God’s actions which strongly actualize states of affairs. The ⁹ Some philosophers hold that necessarily if God is in our time stream and there occur undetermined events, then God lacks infallible foreknowledge of them. So they hold that if God is in our time stream and God has comprehensive knowledge, then there are no undetermined events, and hence Comprehensive Providence is true.

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‘except’ clause, and perhaps other ‘except’ clauses to be discussed later, should now be regarded as included in the doctrine Comprehensive Providence. Some theological determinists believe that God brought the universe into existence a ﬁnite time ago, and strongly actualized the obtaining of the fundamental scientiﬁc laws, which are all deterministic: since the beginning of the universe each of its states has been determined by its earlier states. Other Theological Determinists do not believe this, on the grounds that while the universe would be fully deterministic if it were a closed system, in fact God intervenes and strongly actualizes various states of affairs that are not determined by earlier states of the universe. From now on let the phrase ‘initial conditions’ be understood as neutral between these views: initial conditions are either states of the universe when it ﬁrst came into being, or else are states occurring at some later time but strongly actualized directly by God.

1.4.2 Divine Knowledge of Counterfactuals Adherents of comprehensive providence typically agree that God does not directly strongly actualize each contingent state of affairs in his chosen world, but instead, with respect to a great many states of affairs, if not all, he strongly actualizes them indirectly: they are causal consequences of states of affairs he strongly actualizes directly. For example, God is said to have parted the Red Sea by sending a strong wind to hold back the waters. If God is deliberating about whether to strongly actualize state of affairs A by strongly actualizing state of affairs B, he needs to know whether if he were to strongly actualize B then A would obtain. The italicized sentence is called a counterfactual conditional (or counterfactual, for short). The expression is unfortunate since the antecedent may turn out to be true—that is, be not contrary to fact. Nevertheless, I will stick with the established terminology. The semantics and epistemology of counterfactuals are philosophically challenging topics. Theological determinists might hope to circumvent most of the difﬁculties by conﬁning their attention to conditionals of the kind: (1) If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs S1 . . . Sn then he would thereby indirectly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs A1 . . . Aj,

Introduction

13

where S1 . . . Sn are the laws of nature and initial conditions. Now if the laws were deterministic, the antecedent would entail the consequent. So there would be no mystery about how counterfactuals such as (1) can be true, nor about how God knows which ones are true. But we have good empirical grounds for believing that in fact the laws of nature are not deterministic. (If the laws of nature connecting the match’s being struck (and the circumstances in which it is struck) to its lighting are indeterministic, then God can still strongly actualize the match’s lighting, but he surely cannot do so by strongly actualizing the match’s being struck.) For this reason alone, Theological Determinism needs other counterfactuals, in addition to those of kind (1). There is also a second and deeper reason. In the absence of some strong and undefeated argument for saying that it is necessary that if God exists then he strongly actualizes every contingent state of affairs (except any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all his actions bound up with bringing the universe into existence) we should suppose that God faces a choice between doing so and not doing so. The worlds in which he does not do so will include worlds in which he strongly actualizes the laws of nature but not all the initial conditions of the universe yet all subsequent states of affairs are determined by the initial conditions; they will include worlds in which God strongly actualizes the laws of nature and the initial conditions but many of the laws are indeterministic and God does not intervene directly to strongly actualize all states of affairs that are not determined by the initial conditions and the laws; they will also include worlds where God exists but there are laws that he does not strongly actualize; and so on. But in many of these worlds there are true counterfactuals. Therefore God, in surveying the range of possible worlds in which he exists, knows of many counterfactuals that there are many worlds in which they are true even though their truth is not guaranteed by his own providential decisions. Theological Determinists should all agree that God, in deliberating about his overall providential options, needs to know propositions of the kind: (2) If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1 . . . Sn then as a result all and only C1 . . . Cn would probably obtain.¹⁰ ¹⁰ Katherin Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 71, 77 ascribes to Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas the view that God’s knowledge is nonpropositional, and endorses this view herself. I have not enquired into what account these authors would give of God’s ‘deliberations’ about means.

14

God, the Best, and Evil

Let us call such propositions prevolitional probabilistic counterfactuals —‘PPCs’ for short. God needs knowledge of which ones are true if he is to seriously consider whether to make extensive providential decisions that result in states of affairs that he does not strongly actualize or in any other sense guarantee to obtain. This is so whether or not he in fact strongly actualizes the actual world. Given the role they have to play in guiding God’s choices before he takes any creative or providential actions, the truth of the true PPCs must be supposed to be metaphysically and (for God) epistemically prior to God’s actual providential decisions. From now on let us take this supposition to be built into the term ‘PPC’. It might be thought that God could avoid the need for knowledge of the foregoing kinds by constructing a decision tree, illustrated by the following diagram. The top row (A1, B1, C1 . . .) contains God’s possible original decisions; row 2 represents possible states of affairs obtaining in response to the corresponding alternatives in row 1; row 3 represents God’s possible decisions given the corresponding decision in row 1 and state of affairs in row 2, and so on. God simply has to choose the path that corresponds to his preferred overall outcome. Each complete path speciﬁes a world, and the chosen path corresponds to the actual world.

A1

x2

a3 b3 g3

y2

d3

e3

B1

C1

etc.

etc.

z2

z3

h3 q3

etc. etc. etc.

But God’s merely understanding the foregoing structures of possibilities does not sufﬁce to enable him to decide what to do at row 3 if

Introduction

15

(say) he were to adopt resolution A1 and y2 were to occur. Theological Determinists—at least, those who do not insist that it is logically necessary that if God exists then Theological Determinism is true—should acknowledge that in choosing between his global options God needs knowledge of PPCs.

1.4.3 Are True Prevolitional Probabilistic Counterfactuals Possible? One difﬁculty concerning the logical possibility of true PPCs arises from the principle, widely urged by Theological Determinists against Molinism, that all contingent truths, including conditionals, require suitable metaphysical grounds. Call it the grounding principle. If it is hard to locate suitable grounds for counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, it will be just as hard to locate them for PPCs. (The expression ‘counterfactual of creaturely freedom’ will be deﬁned in Section 1.5.1.) Theological Determinists who adhere to the grounding principle, and who agree that God might have taken decisions that resulted in there being states of affairs that he does not strongly actualize or in any other sense guarantee to obtain, have only one viable recourse: to declare that there are true PPCs and they are all logically necessary. The most promising way to uphold this claim is by saying that PPCs, previously identiﬁed as having the form (2) If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1 . . . Sn then as a result all and only C1 . . . Cn would probably obtain, should be understood as possessing the deep structure (2∗ ) The logical probability that all and only C1 . . . Cn obtain as a result of God’s directly strongly actualizing all and only S1 . . . Sn, given that God directly strongly actualizes all and only S1 . . . Sn, is considerably greater than 0.5. If PPCs are logically necessary, then they do not need metaphysical grounds. Statements of logical probability are purportedly a priori and true in virtue of their contents. Logical probability is often explained in terms of the idea of partial entailment, or the idea of degree of belief by an ideally rational person. Whether the concept of logical probability is philosophically coherent has been a matter of debate for nearly

16

God, the Best, and Evil

a hundred years. So has whether it is useful in handling signiﬁcant epistemological issues.¹¹ Here are three plausible groups of candidates for the status of true logical-probability statements apt for incorporation into a fully-ﬂedged PPC. Firstly, there are statements which seem to be undergirded by mathematical laws of probability—for example: The logical probability that this ball is white, given that it is drawn at random from an urn containing 99 white balls and one non-white ball, is 0.99. Secondly, there are those that seem to be undergirded by essential properties of natural kinds—for example, some people think that the physical probability that a randomly selected uranium atom will decay within a speciﬁed time interval is a logically necessary feature of uranium, known a posteriori, and if they are correct then this truth will undergird a corresponding logical-probability statement.¹² Thirdly, there are PPCs that seem to be undergirded by possibilities involving contingent, indeterministic laws of nature. For example, consider a proposition p saying that, as a matter of contingent fact, the physical probability of x obtaining given that y obtains is 0.7; then there will be a corresponding logical-probability statement The logical probability that x obtains, given both that God strongly actualizes p’s being true and also that y obtains, is 0.7.¹³ If there are true logical-probability statements of these three kinds, then some of them will involve statements about free human actions. The most plausible examples concern what free human agents will do given that they are playing simple games (such as backgammon) in a skilful, rational manner and considerations outside the game are excluded. But the foregoing examples, important though they are, do not provide much basis for conﬁdence that there are many true PPCs whose consequents include speciﬁcations of free human actions in the unconﬁned and complex situations of social life. ¹¹ Philosophers of religion are familiar with Richard Swinburne’s defence of the concept—for example in his book Epistemic Justiﬁcation (Clarendon, 2001). See also James Franklin, ‘Resurrecting Logical Probability’, Erkenntnis, 55 (2001), 277–305. ¹² Here is the a priori statement: The logical probability that x will decay within a time interval of duration d, given that x is a randomly selected atom of uranium and that the physical probability of a randomly selected atom of uranium’s decaying within a time interval of duration d is N, is N. The word ‘physical’ here means ‘concerning the natures of things and situations (whether or not immaterial entities are involved)’. ¹³ There is also a fourth, elementary group, typiﬁed by The logical probability that all daughters are female relative to any evidence statement is 1, and by The logical probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, given that it has always risen in the past, is less than 1.

Introduction

17

Theological Determinists who reject the logical possibility of true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, and who hold that it is contingent that if God exists then Theological Determinism is true, must maintain one of two alternative positions: (1) There are many true PPCs whose consequents include speciﬁcations of free human actions in the open-ended circumstances of everyday life. God uses these in comparing his global options concerning deterministic worlds containing free agents with his options concerning indeterministic worlds containing free agents. (2) There are no true PPCs, or few of them, whose consequents include speciﬁcations of free human actions in the open-ended circumstances of everyday life. Therefore when God is assessing his providential options in advance of taking any decisions, he cannot compare, on the one hand, the human actions that would certainly result from his strongly actualizing this or that set of deterministic laws and initial conditions with, on the other hand, the human actions that would probably result from his strongly actualizing these or those indeterministic laws and initial conditions.

1.4.4 God’s Position if there are Many True, Suitable PPCs Let us explore the ﬁrst alternative. Suppose that suitable true PPCs are available, and that God is deliberating about whether to strongly actualize R1 . . . Rn, where these would be indeterministic laws of nature and initial conditions. How much does he know about what would probably happen if he were to strongly actualize R1 . . . Rn? Suppose that the logical probability that C1 obtains as a result of God’s directly strongly actualizing all and only R1 . . . Rn, given that God directly strongly actualizes all and only R1 . . . Rn, is very high indeed, but less than 1. The relevant logical probability with respect to the conjunction C1&C2 will be less than it is for each of the conjuncts. As we add more and more states of affairs to the conjunction, there will quickly come a point at which the relevant logical probability is low. It might be argued: Suppose that God, from an everlastingly past standpoint in our time stream or from a standpoint outside it, is considering rich and complex worlds whose histories are not strongly actualized by him, as desirable alternatives to many that are. The considerations about diminishing probabilities raised in the previous

18

God, the Best, and Evil

paragraph imply that God’s knowledge of PPCs will give him very little information that would be of use to him in comparing a plan according to which he directly or indirectly strongly actualizes particular free actions of particular people with a plan according to which he does not do so—or in comparing a plan involving his strongly actualizing valued general patterns of free action with a plan according to which these valued patterns will hopefully come about as a result of indeterministic processes. (The second of these points is apparent if we let ‘C1, C2’ etc. denote kinds of action and so ‘C1&C2& . . .’ denotes a highly complex pattern of human activity: probabilities will decrease.) Even if there are true PPCs, adopting an indeterministic policy in the absence of true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom would be very much a leap into the dark. God, in contemplating such a policy, might well be conﬁdent of his ability to respond to new incoming information about events as it reaches him, and to ﬁnd his way through to some kind of satisfactory outcome.¹⁴ But before his overarching initial decision he could envisage only very vaguely what that satisfactory outcome would turn out to be. The foregoing argument does not establish its pessimistic conclusion about God’s ability to foresee outcomes before taking any action. Two points need to be made. Firstly, while it is true that the logical probability of a conjunction of states of affairs C1&C2& . . . relative to a speciﬁed R1 . . . Rn will decrease as we add more conjuncts, it is also true that as we add more conjuncts to C1&C2 . . . the conjunction R1&R2 . . . can be extended indeﬁnitely, beyond Rn. Probability theory leaves it quite open whether there are true logical-probability statements licensing the assertion that however many particular free creaturely actions we envisage, there will be some set of decisions God can take, outside our time stream or within it but everlastingly past, such that if God were to implement those decisions then those particular free creaturely actions would very probably be performed. Secondly, God, in deliberating about whether or not to adopt a deterministic overall plan, would realize that an indeterministic policy with respect to particular free actions by particular people could be combined with a deterministic policy with respect to general but ¹⁴ Obviously if God occupies a time stream other than ours, he does not respond to events as they occur; that is, as they become present or past relative to him—they don’t. Still, if it is logically possible for events in one time stream to cause events in another, then surely it is logically possible that different events in our time stream cause God to acquire information about them at different times in his, in such a way that the order in which items of information are received is the same as the order in which the events occur.

Introduction

19

non-universal patterns of free action. How is this possible? Well, it can be determined that either A will obtain or B will, but not determined which of them will obtain. Expert tennis players can ‘determine’ their victory against novice players, despite being unable to ‘determine’ the sequence of individual free actions constituting the match. Even if God thought that adopting an indeterministic policy with respect to particular free actions would involve a substantial risk of failure, as well as a good chance of success, in obtaining particular desired actions and resulting events, God could still be assured of the fulﬁlment of his more general aims by strongly actualizing the desired patterns of free action—as long as they did not require that everybody or nearly everybody freely act in such-and-such a way.

1.4.5 God’s Position if there are Few or No True, Suitable PPCs Theological Determinists will say that if suitable true PPCs are unavailable then God would realize, when comparing deterministic with indeterministic approaches, that if he were to start out seeking the occurrence of various particular actions by particular people, then an indeterministic approach to these actions would involve acting in ignorance of outcomes. It is hard to see how in these circumstances God could be rational in adopting really important aims concerning particular actions of particular people. But he could still adopt important general goals and guarantee their fulﬁlment by strongly actualizing the desired non-universal patterns of free action. Many Theological Determinists have been silent about whether theism is logically compatible with indeterminism, and speciﬁcally with libertarian free will. They have relied on theological arguments for saying that God has in fact strongly actualized all that occurs, whether or not he could have chosen to exercise looser control over what goes on. Some Theological Determinists believe that human beings make many free choices and perform many free actions: let us say that these philosophers are Theological Compatibilists. 1.5 MOLINISM

1.5.1 Basic Ideas Molinists agree with Theological Determinists that the propositions Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge are both

20

God, the Best, and Evil

true. They believe that human beings typically possess freedom with respect to many choices and actions, and that such freedom is incompatible with determinism,¹⁵ and incompatible speciﬁcally with God’s strongly actualizing the relevant choices and actions. Nevertheless they hold that God plays an active causal role that guarantees both that his intentions are fulﬁlled and that their foreseen unintended consequences obtain. Molinists’ distinctive ideas are derived from work of the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian and philosopher Luis de Molina.¹⁶ Prominent contemporary Molinists include T. P. Flint and A. F. Freddoso. Some terminology needs to be introduced. Let us say: (1) A person weakly actualizes non-conjunctive state of affairs x if and only if neither any other person nor any other state of affairs strongly actualizes x and yet this person performs some single action that both makes a salient causal contribution to x’s occurrence and is such that if he or she were to perform it then x would obtain.¹⁷ (2) A person weakly actualizes a conjunctive state of affairs (other than a world) if and only if the person weakly actualizes each of the conjuncts. (3) Molinists will agree that propositions of the kind If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs S1. . .Sn then he would thereby weakly actualize the state of affairs Bj, where ‘Bj’ speciﬁes one or more free choices and actions by rational creatures, are of two kinds: those whose truth is metaphysically prior to ¹⁵ There is a technical problem here. Arguments originating with Harry Frankfurt have persuaded many libertarians that your freely eating an apple is compatible with its being determined that you eat an apple, as long as the determining state of affairs did not in fact play a causal role in bringing about the event-token that consisted of your eating the apple. This point was reﬂected in my own deﬁnition of the expression ‘strongly actualize’ in Section 1.4.1. The libertarian assertion ‘Determinism is incompatible with free action’ should be regarded as short for a more complicated formulation. ¹⁶ Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, ed. A. J. Freddoso (Cornell University Press, 1988). ¹⁷ Suppose that a physician both diagnosed lung cancer and somewhat weakened the patient’s constitution by unsuccessfully trying to retard the development of the cancer. What the physician did, that is the two actions together, causally contributed to the patient’s dying prematurely and was such that if the physician were so to act then the patient would die prematurely. But Molinists would not want to say that the doctor weakly actualized the patient’s dying prematurely. My use of the expression single action, and of talk of conjunctive and non-conjunctive states of affairs, is aimed at ruling out the example. Presumably there are non-conjunctive states of affairs; but there is no need to produce examples of them here. If A and B are states of affairs, then there is a state of affairs A&B, of which A and B are conjuncts.

Introduction

21

God’s providential decisions and actions, and those whose truth is metaphysically posterior to them. Let us call the propositions of the ﬁrst kind counterfactuals of creaturely freedom [hereafter ‘CCFs’].¹⁸ (4) God weakly actualizes a world if and only if there are CCFs true in the world and God weakly actualizes some states of affairs in the world and he either strongly or weakly actualizes every contingent state of affairs in the world except the obtaining of the CCFs and any contingent states of God himself that are metaphysically prior to all his actions bound up with bringing the universe into existence. Molinists hold that when God is deliberating about his overall providential options in advance of having taken or implemented any decisions, he uses knowledge of true counterfactuals, including CCFs, to guide him in formulating candidate comprehensive plans, and in choosing which of these plans he should implement. By strongly actualizing his chosen initial conditions he implements the chosen plan and thereby makes the propositions Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge true, consistently with human free will. If there are indeed true CCFs, then, given their envisaged role in guiding God’s choices, the true CCFs must be supposed to be metaphysically and (for God) epistemically prior to God’s actual providential decisions, if God exists. From now on let us take this supposition to be included in the meaning of ‘CCF’. (Some writers, however, use the expression to apply to just about any counterfactual whose consequent speciﬁes free choices or actions by rational creatures, even when its truth value is obviously not prior to God’s actual past providential decisions—for example, If the telephone rang, you would answer it.) Molinists can be seen as arguing that there are true CCFs, along the following lines (where the assumption that God exists is present but not explicitly stated as a premiss): ¹⁸ The words ‘all and only’ in the antecedent help simplify the exposition a good deal. This is because God strongly actualizes A and If God were to strongly actualize A then he would thereby weakly actualize B do not together entail B obtains. For God strongly actualizes A is consistent with God strongly actualizes both A and C, and If God were to strongly actualize A then he would thereby weakly actualize B is consistent with If God were to strongly actualize both A and C then B would not obtain.

22

God, the Best, and Evil

(1) There occur free creaturely choices and actions. [Premiss] (2) Free choices and actions are incompatible with Theological Determinism. [Premiss] (3) Theological Determinism is false. [From 1, 2] (4) Comprehensive Knowledge is true. [Premiss] (5) Comprehensive Providence is true. [Premiss] (6) In the actual world, and also in many other worlds, God acts indirectly, by employing means. [Premiss] (7) God’s decision about whether he will weakly actualize a world and, if so, which world he will weakly actualize is formed on the basis of a comparative evaluation of alternative global options for action. [Premiss] (8) Comparatively evaluating options with respect to indirect action involves God’s comparing what would result, or would probably result, from his acting directly in such-and-such ways. [Premiss] (9) If God acts indirectly, there must be truths specifying what would result, or what would probably result, from God’s acting directly in such-and-such ways. [From 8] (10) There are truths specifying what would result, or what would probably result, from God’s acting directly in such-and-such ways. [From 6, 9] (11) God’s comparative evaluation of alternative global options for action involves there being, amongst the truths envisaged in 10, ones that are metaphysically and (for God) epistemically prior to all contingent states of affairs that obtain as a result of God’s acting. [From 3, 4, 7, 8, 10] (12) Some of them concern free choices and actions by rational creatures. [From 1, 10] (13) There are true CCFs. [From 10, 11, 12] Molinists have a second argument for there being true CCFs. In broad outline, it goes like this: (1) God has everlastingly past, infallible, complete foreknowledge of future free choices and actions of rational creatures. (2) Such knowledge is possible if and only if it arises from God’s infallible, complete knowledge of what states of affairs he intends to strongly actualize together with his infallible, complete knowledge of true, suitable CCFs. (3) Therefore there are true CCFs.

Introduction

23

1.5.2 Is it Necessary that there are Enough True, Suitable CCFs? All Molinists hold that it is only contingently true that God has brought anything into existence, and that what he has brought into existence includes free rational agents. Should they maintain that it is necessary that if God brings free rational agents into existence then there are true CCFs? Should they also maintain that it is contingent that there are true CCFs? Molinists emphasize that necessarily if a CCF is true then it is contingently true, but this does not settle either question. Its being necessary that there are true CCFs is consistent with its being merely contingent that there are enough true CCFs to enable God both to bring into existence many rational creatures each possessing extensive scope for free action, and yet to have the degree of knowledge and providential control over them speciﬁed by the doctrines Comprehensive Knowledge and Comprehensive Providence. In the absence of independent strong arguments for supposing that either of these two doctrines is necessarily true, the premisses of the two arguments (1)–(13) and (1)–(3) above obviously do not imply that it is necessary that there are any true CCFs, let alone a very large array of them. Does the law of conditional excluded middle provide the basis for a good argument that necessarily there are enough true CCFs to make Comprehensive Providence compossible with the occurrence of a great many undetermined creaturely choices and actions? The so-called law can be expressed as the schema necessarily, for all states of affairs x and y, either if x were to obtain then y would obtain, or else if x were to obtain then non-y would obtain.¹⁹ (The two disjuncts are not negations of each other. Let us say that they are opposites of each other.) Our linguistic and metaphysical intuitions are unreliable guides as to whether the law is ¹⁹ Thus the law of conditional excluded middle is stronger than the proposition that necessarily either if x were to obtain then y would obtain, or else if x were to obtain then it is not the case that y would obtain. This weaker proposition, while less controversial than the Law of Conditional Excluded Middle, provides no basis for holding that necessarily either the proposition If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1. . .Sn then he would thereby weakly actualize Bj is true or else the proposition If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only S1. . .Sn then he would not weakly actualize Bj is true. (Maybe God might or might not thereby actualize Bj: if so it is not the case that he would and not the case that he wouldn’t.) Moreover the second italicized proposition, whether or not it is true, is not a CCF.

24

God, the Best, and Evil

true. Various technical theories of the semantics of counterfactuals claim to resolve the matter, but it is far from clear which if any of the current theories is correct. So appeal to the law is of little help in establishing whether it is necessary that there are true CCFs, and enough of them to satisfy the needs of Molinism. Freddoso ﬁnds the law plausible, and reports that Molina assumed it to be true. Nevertheless Freddoso, and also Flint, think it safer to dispense with the unrestricted law, and commit Molinism only to the assumption that a restricted version of the law is true of CCFs. They do not argue in favour of the restricted version.²⁰ Even were we to accept that the law is true, and therefore that necessarily there is an inﬁnite number of true CCFs, this would not settle whether necessarily there is a sufﬁciently rich array of them to enable it to be necessarily true that God had the option of weakly actualizing a world which contained a great many rich creaturely lives suffused by free actions. Obviously such a world must contain a great many positive actions—for example, getting out of bed, having breakfast. Yet it is surely logically possible that God exist and be faced with a large array of true CCFs all or almost all of which have stiﬂing or barren consequents, such as . . . then the agent would freely stay in bed all day. If God were as a matter of contingent fact in such a situation, then he could not bring it about that there were a great many libertarian-free positive actions, over which he exercised tight control, and which contributed to an overall state of human life which constituted a serious option for him. Flint discusses whether all true CCFs have negative consequents, and says that he ‘suspects’ that this is impossible. But he offers no argument to support his suspicion.²¹ Anyway, the negative consequents are only some of the stiﬂing or barren consequents. Consider the free-will defence developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Alvin Plantinga, who did not at the time realize that he was preparing the way for a signiﬁcant American revival of Molinism. Plantinga’s strategy relies on the premiss that it is logically possible that there is nothing that God could do such that if he were to do it then all rational agents would always freely choose rightly. That is, whatever CCFs are ²⁰ A. F. Freddoso, Introd. to Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Cornell University Press, 1988), 50; Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Cornell University Press, 1998), 49. ²¹ Flint, Divine Providence, pp. 48–50. All that Flint provides is an account of the concept creaturely world type which is crafted to accommodate the supposition that he is mistaken.

Introduction

25

in fact true, God might have been faced with a body of true CCFs such that he could not bring free creatures into existence and guarantee that they would perform many actions all of which were morally permissible. Molinists who assent to the free-will defence will ﬁnd it difﬁcult to resist the idea that it is logically possible that the true CCFs be such that God cannot do anything to guarantee that many people freely care for children, or engage in agriculture, or be members of stable communities, and accordingly such that God cannot exercise tight control, or have infallible, complete foreknowledge in any world in which there are free human beings in rich and complex communities. If there had been no suitable CCFs, but God had wanted to bring such communities into existence and to exercise tight control over them, then he would have had to juggle with probabilities (if there were probabilities to juggle), and keep on intervening as events happened. Assume, as Molinists do, that in fact God was faced with a set of true CCFs providing a wide range of options each involving his weakly actualizing a great many positive, undetermined actions. God could have nevertheless decided to exercise a much looser providential supervision of human activity. He could, for example, have refrained from weakly actualizing any choices or actions, but have adopted important general goals and guaranteed their fulﬁlment by strongly actualizing the desired non-universal patterns of free action. Theological Determinists who think that it is logically impossible that God exercises merely loose control over the universe typically hold the principle of sufﬁcient reason, or some similar philosophical doctrine. It would be difﬁcult for a Molinist to afﬁrm the principle of sufﬁcient reason: what is the sufﬁcient reason for the truth of the true CCFs? This explains why Flint conﬁnes himself to theological arguments which could establish, at most, that if God exists then Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge are contingently true. Finally, it is worth considering whether, even if they were assured of the truth of a rich array of true CCFs, Molinists will also need a rich array of true PPCs. For presumably God, when deciding whether to bring into existence a universe containing free creatures, would want to consider providential options involving his exercising only loose control over free rational creatures, along with options involving his bringing into existence a universe which lacks free creatures but is nevertheless indeterministic. In order to do so, he would need to consider what would probably happen if he were to do this or that.

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1 . 6 O PE N T H E I S M Open Theists believe that God exists and that human beings make many free choices and perform many free actions. They also believe that free will is incompatible with Theological Determinism. They differ from Molinists in that they deny Comprehensive Providence and Comprehensive Knowledge, and deny that there are true CCFs. Contemporary open theists include Richard Swinburne and William Hasker. How, according to Open Theists, is God to reach a decision on whether to bring free people into existence, and if so what physical and cognitive powers, and what emotional repertoire, to give them? Maybe God possesses some reason which delivers an answer which is independent of what might or might not subsequently happen. But in the absence of some good argument for saying that he has such a reason, it is more plausible to suppose that he takes outcomes into consideration. How? God can have exhaustive knowledge of outcomes of his strongly actualizing any speciﬁc set of deterministic laws of nature and initial conditions. (This supposition is consistent with God’s being in time and free to change his plans, and free to intervene in the course of events to bring about events that are not determined by earlier states of the universe. For the phrase ‘initial conditions’ is being used to cover both states of the universe at the (perhaps fuzzy) time of creation and also states occurring at some later time but strongly actualized directly by God.) Open Theists deny the existence of true CCFs; so they deny that God can use them to obtain knowledge of events that he does not directly or indirectly strongly actualize. Section 1.4 introduced the concept of a PPC, and explained that if there are suitable true PPCs then God might be able to use them, together with very elaborate propositions concerning initial conditions, to predict many free actions with a high degree of reliability (falling short of infallibility). God could thereby assess his options concerning indeterministic worlds containing free agents. Furthermore, whether or not there are true, suitable PPCs, God could combine an indeterministic policy with respect to particular free actions with a policy of strongly actualizing general but non-universal patterns of free action, thereby obtaining infallible coarse-grained knowledge. While Theological Determinists and Molinists hold that God in fact exercises very tight control over the universe, many of them hold that

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God could have opted for looser control. Those who take this view typically offer theological arguments rather than philosophical ones for saying that Open Theism is false—that is, they appeal, explicitly or implicitly, to some premisses derived from some special revelation. 1 . 7 C R E AT I O N A N D C R E ATA B I L I T Y The English word ‘create’ can be used when a person brings a thing such as a statue into existence, and also when a person brings about a situation or state of affairs—for example, ‘he created a disturbance’. So philosophers, in addition to speaking of God’s creating human beings, the stars, and so on, have had no qualms about speaking of God as creating a possible world. When he does so, an all-inclusive possible state of affairs becomes actual. From now on let us consider it to be built in to the meaning of ‘create’ that if a world is created then some person creates it; and let us simplify the exposition by treating God as the only candidate creator. Exactly what divine causal contribution to a world’s becoming actual should be counted as constituting God’s creating the world? An obvious suggestion is that God creates a speciﬁc world if and only if he strongly or weakly actualizes it. But is there some sense of ‘create a world’ apt for use by Open Theists and by people who think that although God did not in fact opt for loose providential control, he could have? Suppose that in world Z God forms some very general long-term goals and then adopts a ﬂexible approach, responding to what is happening with a succession of new short-term aims and actions. Accordingly, he strongly actualizes all states of affairs that are not dependent on free actions, and he inclines, but does not strongly or weakly actualize, particular free creatures to perform particular actions that are likely to help fulﬁl his aims. Suppose also that in Z all or almost all God’s long-term large-scale goals, and short-term aims concerning particular free actions by particular people, are fulﬁlled. Might we sensibly say that Z contains the state of affairs God creates Z ? Perhaps. But let us not adopt this way of speaking, instead seeking economy of expression by conﬁning the scope of create to strongly or weakly actualize. For world Z is either a ‘freak’ world in which God has an amazing run of luck, or else it is a world in which his control is not very loose. Even if we broadened the meaning of ‘create’ to cover the Z example, Open Theists would still deny that God has created the actual

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world. For they believe that in the actual world God’s short-term aims with respect to particular free people are very often not fulﬁlled. This is why William Hasker describes God as ‘taking risks’, and as experiencing ‘aversion, anger or disappointment over the actual course of events’.²² Of course, in worlds in which God exercises loose providential control it can still be true that God creates the universe, in the sense of bringing into existence the objects and structures within which events unfold. Given that God creates a world if and only if he either strongly actualizes it or weakly actualizes it, what account should be given of God can create world W and World W is creatable? It might be thought that Theological Determinists will treat God can create W as equivalent to It is logically possible that God create W. But many Theological Determinists will say that there are, or can be, contingent limitations on what God can do by way of world creation—limitations set by contingent properties God possesses prior to his deciding what world to create. For example, if God has a preexisting, contingent disposition to love rational creatures, then he cannot strongly or weakly actualize a world in which he never has that disposition. Molinists will say that God’s options concerning world creation depend partly on what CCFs are true, which is a contingent matter. There is a rough-and-ready distinction between an agent’s intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities, on the one hand, and what the agent can in the current circumstances do, on the other hand. A similar distinction is familiar from non-personal contexts. For example, in an obvious sense, the power to dissolve zinc is intrinsic to hydrochloric acid: it is not dependent on the actual existence of any zinc; yet, in another obvious sense, whether or not a particular sample of hydrochloric acid can now dissolve a particular piece of zinc depends on circumstances that are extrinsic to the acid, such as whether the acid and the zinc are currently separated by a glass barrier. Let us say that God can, relative to world V, create world W if and only if in V God exists and has the intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities needed to create W, and has the opportunity to create W, and it is logically possible that God create W.²³ ‘God can create W’ is to ²² Hasker, Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (Routledge, 2004), 133, 158, 160. ²³ It is not some lack in God’s intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities that is responsible for the fact that he cannot create a married bachelor. Similarly, if world W contains the state of affairs W’s being not actualized by God, then even though God has all the intrinsic powers and capacities required to actualize W, he cannot do so.

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be understood as short for ‘God can, relative to the actual world, create W’.²⁴ A world is creatable if and only if God can create it. If God has contingent character traits and desires which are prior to his decision whether to create a world, and which world to create, then at the point when a decision is made God does not have the opportunity to create a world in which he lacks those character traits and desires: it is ‘too late’. So the foregoing deﬁnition has the consequence that as a matter of contingent fact all creatable worlds contain God’s having those character traits and desires. 1 . 8 O M N I P OT E N C E This section deals mainly with some implications of God’s omnipotence for what he can do by way of world creation.

1.8.1 Are there Contingent Limitations on what God can do? For reasons apparent from earlier sections, to count as omnipotent with respect to world creation God need not be able to create a world in which he strongly or weakly actualizes any state of affairs whose obtaining is incompatible with some property that God himself contingently possesses prior to his own actions. It might be objected that if moral goodness is not essential to God then omnipotence with respect to world creation requires that God be able to create a world which is on balance very evil, even though doing so is incompatible with perfect goodness, which he possesses prior to all his creative actions. The objection fails, broadly speaking for reasons supplied by T. V. Morris, who argued that necessarily if God is contingently omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good at any time then he does not act in a morally defective way at any subsequent time.²⁵ ²⁴ Can God act in a morally wrong manner? Some philosophers will say ‘Yes: he has the causal powers and ample opportunities to do so but freely chooses not to do so’. Others will say ‘No: he has the causal powers and the opportunity to act wrongly but it is necessary that he does not choose to do so’. Others will say ‘No: because it is necessary that God does not choose to act wrongly, he does not have the causal power to do so; for example, though God at all times has the power to utter the words ‘‘Alfred is bald’’, he does not have the-power-to-utter-those-words-in-circumstances-where-to-do-so-would-be-to assert-a-falsehood-and-thereby-deceive-his-audience’. ²⁵ T. Morris, ‘Properties, Modalities and God’, Philosophical Review, 93 (1984), 35–56.

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Some people hold that the passing of time limits what God can do. Here is a time-honoured example. Suppose that at past time t some person Alice lost her virginity, and that she survived the event. Before time t God could have ensured that Alice remained a virgin for the whole of her life, but after t he has not been able to do so: it is too late. This is a contingent limitation, because it is contingent that Alice lost her virginity at t. Our present concern, however, is with what omnipotence should be understood to imply about worlds God can create, relative to his position before he does anything. The salient truth is that, relative to such a position, God could have created some world in which Alice remained a virgin for the whole of her life, though he could not have created a world in which both she lost her virginity at t and she remained a virgin for the whole of her life. As I pointed out in Section 1.7, whether Theological Determinists say that there are contingent limitations on what God can do by way of world creation should depend on whether they think that God has contingent properties prior to his deliberating about what world to create. Molinists hold that the true CCFs impose contingent constraints on what worlds God can create. Consider a speciﬁc true CCF. If it had been false, then God would have been able to create a world of a kind that he in fact cannot create; namely, a world in which there are free creaturely choices and in which God strongly actualizes all and only the states of affairs mentioned in the antecedent but does not thereby weakly actualize the truth of the consequent. Furthermore, even if the true CCFs in fact constitute a rich array with positive consequents, Molinists seem unable to rule out its being logically possible that all or almost all true CCFs had stiﬂing or barren consequents. Molinists must say that if this possibility had obtained, then God would not have been able to create a world of a kind which he can create; namely, a world in which there are a great many free, wise choices. A similar point applies concerning the logical possibility that all or almost all true CCFs were of the kind If God were to directly strongly actualize all and only the states of affairs S1 . . . Sn, then the agent would perform such-and-such a seriously evil action. Hence Molinism implies that it is contingent that God can create a world in which there is an acceptable overall outcome concerning the histories of ﬂourishing communities of free creatures. How wide a range of options God has concerning such a goal depends on the array of true CCFs.

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1.8.2 Flint and Freddoso’s Account of Omnipotence Is such variation in what worlds God can create consistent with his being omnipotent with respect to world creation? Flint and Freddoso offer a libertarian treatment of the general concept of omnipotence which is relevant to this question.²⁶ What they say is obviously intended to be suitable for adoption by Molinists, though their paper does not work with the fully-ﬂedged concept of a CCF. They begin by arguing as follows. Let ‘C’ denote the circumstances in which Jones ﬁnds himself at time t, including the fact that what Jones does at t is not determined by prior states of affairs. Consider (λ) If Jones were in C at t, then he would freely decide at t to refrain from writing a letter to his wife. Since (λ) is either true or false, and since no one other than Jones can determine how Jones would freely act, not even an omnipotent being can decide by himself to make (λ) true or false. Hence if (λ) is true then not even an omnipotent being can strongly or weakly actualize its being the case that Jones is in C at t and Jones freely decides to write a letter to his wife. And if (λ) is false then not even an omnipotent being can strongly or weakly actualize its being the case that Jones is in C at t and Jones freely decides to refrain from writing a letter to his wife. Therefore at least one of the contingent states of affairs cannot be strongly or weakly actualized by God: Jones’s being in C at t and freely deciding at t to write a letter to his wife and Jones’s being in C at t and freely deciding at t to refrain from writing a letter to his wife. Since this fact follows solely from the logically necessary truth that one being cannot causally determine how another will freely act, it should not be regarded as a kind of inability which disqualiﬁes an agent from counting as omnipotent. Flint and Freddoso now proceed to offer a formal analysis of omnipotence. Let a counterfactual of freedom (sic) be a counterfactual whose consequent speciﬁes at least one free choice or action. Let a world type for person S be a set which is such that for any counterfactual of freedom over which S has no control, either that counterfactual or its opposite ²⁶ ‘Maximal Power’, in A. F. Freddoso (ed.), The Existence and Nature of God (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 94–5.

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is a member of the set.²⁷ For any free agent there will be some world type. Then: Person S is omnipotent at t in W if and only if for any state of affairs p and any world-type-for-S Ls such that p is not a member of Ls, if there is a world W∗ such that (i) Ls is true in both W and W∗ , and (ii) W∗ shares the same history with W at t, and (iii) at t in W∗ someone actualizes p, then S has the power at t in W to actualize p. Here Flint and Freddoso are using ‘S has the power at t in W to actualize p’ interchangeably with ‘in W, S can, at t, actualize p’. I assume that they are using ‘actualize’ to mean ‘strongly actualize or weakly actualize’. Let p be Jones freely writes a letter a letter to his wife, and suppose that in W∗ but not in W Jones actualizes p by freely actualizing a letter to his wife. For ease of exposition, suppose that W is the actual world. In W∗ there was something that Jones had the power to do at t, namely freely write a letter to his wife, such that if Jones did it then p would be actual. But in the actual world is there something that God has the power to do at t, such that, given the history of the actual world up to t, if God did that thing at t then p would be actual? I can see no reason to suppose so. There are lots of things that God could do at t to encourage Jones to freely write a letter to his wife, indeed to make it highly probable that Jones would freely write a letter to his wife, but perhaps nevertheless God could do nothing at t to weakly actualize Jones’s freely writing a letter to his wife. Maybe in neither world are there true counterfactuals which give God the opportunity. If so, then Flint and Freddoso’s analysis counts God as non-omnipotent in the actual world. Let us step back from the details of their account and consider the big picture. I agree with them that, given such assumptions as the truth of libertarianism, the fact that there are contingent states of affairs which God cannot actualize should not prevent God from counting as omnipotent with respect to world creation. But Molinism still needs to deal with a puzzle. ²⁷ Flint and Freddoso use the word ‘negation’. But obviously they mean ‘opposite’. (This term was introduced in Section 1.5.2.)

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The cases in which God faces an inﬁnite array of true CCFs seem to divide into three logically possible sub-cases: Scenario 1: The true CCFs are collectively favourable to God’s weakly actualizing a broad range of signiﬁcantly different worlds each containing an acceptable overall outcome for the histories of ﬂourishing communities of free creatures. Scenario 2: The true CCFs are collectively favourable to God’s weakly actualizing a quite narrow range of signiﬁcantly different worlds each containing an acceptable overall outcome for the histories of ﬂourishing communities of free creatures. Scenario 3: The true CCFs are collectively unfavourable to God’s weakly actualizing any signiﬁcantly different worlds each containing an acceptable overall outcome for the histories of ﬂourishing communities of free creatures.²⁸ In these scenarios ‘signiﬁcantly different’ means ‘signiﬁcantly different with respect to the kinds and mixes of values instantiated in the worlds’. (Even if there are inﬁnitely many different shades of red, of orange, and so on, the range of signiﬁcantly different colour shades between red and green is broader than the range of shades of blue.) In Scenario 1 God has a much wider range of signiﬁcantly different options than he has in Scenarios 2 and 3, and in Scenario 2 he has a much wider range than he has in Scenario 3. This generates a sense in which God can do a lot more in Scenario 1 than in Scenarios 2 and 3, and a lot more in Scenario 2 than in Scenario 3. Should these differences between what God can do be taken to imply that, in Scenarios 2 and 3 at least, God is not omnipotent?

1.8.3 A better account for Theological Determinists and Molinists Here we should employ the distinction drawn in Section 1.7 between an agent’s intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities, on the one hand, and what the agent can do, on the other, and we should explain omnipotence primarily in terms of the former. For while what God can ²⁸ Notice that even Scenario 3 is consistent with Flint’s ‘suspicion’ that it is impossible that all true CCFs have negative consequents.

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do differs from one scenario to another, his intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities can plausibly be supposed to be the same. What God can do depends partly on what opportunities he has, and the range of the true CCFs is partially constitutive of the range of God’s opportunities. If the true CCFs provide no opportunity for God to weakly actualize a certain human’s freely performing some speciﬁc action, then there is no logically possible being who, faced with those same CCFs, could weakly actualize the human’s freely performing that action. Both Molinists and Theological Determinists are free to make use of the account of creatability offered at the end of the preceding section, and to say: God is omnipotent with respect to world creation in world W if and only if God exists in W and for any world W∗ in which God exists either God can, in W, create W∗ or else he cannot, but his doing so is not precluded by any defect or limitation in the intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities he has in W.²⁹ From a Molinist standpoint an important advantage of this account is that it explains why God can be omnipotent with respect to world creation despite the fact that how much he can do varies depending on what CCFs are true. Another advantage is that the account explains why God can be omnipotent with respect to world creation despite the fact that he cannot create any world in which he breaks his promises. If God is essentially perfectly good, he cannot create any such world, because his doing so is logically impossible and the logical impossibility does not derive from any falling short in God. If God is contingently perfectly good, he cannot do so because he is perfectly good prior to creation and so prior to making any promises, and, as Morris has shown, it is necessary that if God is contingently omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good at any time then he does not act in a morally defective way at any subsequent time; once again, the inability does not result from any defect or limitation in God’s intrinsic causal powers or cognitive capacities. ²⁹ This analysis of omnipotence with respect to world creation bears similarities to the general account of omnipotence offered by Erik J. Wielenberg, ‘Omnipotence Again’, Faith and Philosophy, 17 (2000), 26–42. My analysis possesses the advantage of employing the concept of intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities.

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1.8.4 Open Theism and Omnipotence Open Theists deny that God can either strongly or weakly actualize any worlds containing free people. While they believe that God brought into existence the universe and its parts, they believe that God is not in the process of creating the actual world. Nevertheless they typically claim that their position is logically compatible with God’s being omnipotent. William Hasker says: According to the open view of God, God is strictly omnipotent, in the sense that he is able to do everything which is logically possible and consistent with God’s morally perfect nature. It is worth stressing that God as so conceived is in no way deﬁcient in power as compared with God as viewed by Calvinism [i.e. Theological Determinism].³⁰

There is a tangle here that needs to be unravelled. Hasker thinks that God must take risks if he brings into existence creatures possessing libertarian freedom. Hasker would agree that God’s taking signiﬁcant risks requires more than the logical possibility of his intentions being frustrated: there must in each case at the very least be, for him, an epistemic possibility of failure, and there must in many cases be considerable uncertainty about the outcome. Now epistemic ‘cannots’ generate ‘cannots’ that apply to actions. There is a minuscule probability that you might spin the dial of a combination lock at random and thereby succeed, by sheer ﬂuke, in opening the lock. Nevertheless there is a sense of the can/cannot pair—call it the epistemo-practical sense —in which people cannot open a bank vault if it is locked and they do not know the combination of its lock. Given that infallible foreknowledge of free human actions is impossible if there are no true CCFs, and given (as Hasker thinks) that true CCFs are logically impossible, and given that someone possessing libertarian freedom is likely to reset the combination of the lock on a particular vault several times over the next few days, God cannot, in the epistemo-practical sense, reliably tell someone now what the combination of the lock will be this time next week. Here is an important feature of the epistemo-practical sense. Open Theists hold that (1) It is logically impossible that God infallibly foreknow an undetermined truth. ³⁰ Hasker, Providence, p. 101.

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Let us suppose that (2) As a matter of contingent fact, it is now undetermined what the combination of the lock will be next week. It would be fallacious to infer, from the conjunction of (1) and (2), that (3) It is logically impossible that God now infallibly give correct information to someone specifying the combination of the lock. But it is not fallacious to infer from (1) and (2) that (4) God cannot (in the epistemo-practical sense) now infallibly give correct information to someone specifying what the combination of the lock will be next week. The truth of (2) places God in a position where (4) is true. Hence Hasker should admit that, contrary to the foregoing quotation from his most recent book, there is a relevant sense of ‘cannot’ in which God cannot do everything which it is logically possible for God to do and which is consistent with God’s morally perfect nature. Consider two worlds V and W. In both worlds the overall state of the physical universe at time t1 determines the state of any physical object O at any later time tn, unless either God’s or some creature’s libertarian-free action, occurring between t1 and tn, causally affects the state of O at tn. In V there are few free creatures, and their personal capacities and level of technology make them physically capable of affecting only a small part of the universe. In W there are many free creatures, who are capable of affecting a very large part of the universe. It follows, given the truth of key Open Theist assumptions such as the impossibility of true CCFs, that in V God can plan and direct the history of the universe in much greater detail that he can in W. There are several promising strategies for philosophers seeking to maintain that Open Theism is compatible with divine omnipotence. One involves generalizing the account of omnipotence with respect to world creation that I formulated above. Open theists can agree with the main idea underlying that account, that while what God can do varies greatly between different worlds, his underlying, intrinsic causal powers and cognitive capacities do not. It is plain that, given such an account of omnipotence, the doctrine Comprehensive Providence does not entail that God is omnipotent. It is also plain that Open Theists, together with those Molinists who think

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that there might not have been true CCFs apt for God’s exercising tight control of the universe, and those Theological Determinists who think that God might have opted for loose control, should declare that divine omnipotence does not entail comprehensive providence. 1.9 OMNISCIENCE Theological Determinists and Molinists hold that God is omniscient. Theological Compatibilists who hold that God is in time typically think that by adapting arguments in favour of the compatibility of determinism and human freedom they can reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge of free, determined human choices and actions. Molinists who believe that God is in time maintain that they can achieve such a reconciliation by saying that God’s foreknowledge of undetermined choices and actions is generated jointly by his knowledge of what initial conditions (including the laws of nature) he has decided to strongly actualize, together with his knowledge of the true CCFs he took into account when reaching his decisions. (Whether this is the case, even granted that there are the true CCFs Molinists envisage, is an important question which need not be discussed here.) Most Molinists will accept physicists’ testimony that as a matter of contingent fact there occur physically undetermined events other than free creaturely choices and actions. How can God have everlastingly past, infallible foreknowledge of these events? Perhaps he himself strongly actualizes them directly. Perhaps there are counterfactuals similar to CCFs except that their consequents specify, or are made true by, the occurrence of these events rather than by choices and actions. What should Open Theists say about divine omniscience? Hasker declares that according to Open Theism God is ‘omniscient, in that he knows everything that logically can be known’. He adds that ‘it is logically impossible for God to have foreknowledge of creaturely actions that are truly free’.³¹ While God could have brought into existence a universe in which he had full foreknowledge of every detail, by himself determining all that occurred, he chose to bring into existence a universe containing free rational creatures, and so his foreknowledge is incomplete. I agree with Hasker’s view that the extent and degree of completeness of what God knows can vary across possible worlds while the fact that he ³¹ Hasker, Providence, p. 101.

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is omniscient remains constant. But nevertheless Hasker’s own defence of the idea is unsuccessful. Let us agree, for the sake of argument, that if a choosing is free then that particular event-token is essentially free and therefore essentially undetermined. Let us also agree that essentially undetermined events are essentially incapable of being infallibly foreknown. Divine omniscience needs to be understood, however, in terms of knowledge of truths as well as knowledge of events³²—for example, God’s omniscience involves not only his remembering my last birthday party: he also remembers that it lasted for three hours. Hasker holds that God’s knowing everything that logically can be known is compatible with his not knowing that such-and-such people will perform such-and-such free actions because it is logically impossible that God has foreknowledge of any free action. But the assumptions (1) It is logically impossible that both John Howard will freely eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015 and God now infallibly foreknows that Howard will do so. and (2) As a matter of contingent fact, John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015 and will freely do so. do not jointly entail (3) It is logically impossible that God now infallibly foreknows that John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015. Given (1) and (2) are true, God does not foreknow that John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015. Yet it is logically possible that both John Howard eats exactly one apple on 1 January 2015 and God foreknows this truth, because it is only contingently the case that when John Howard eats the apple he will eat freely. Hence given that (2) is true, Hasker will have to admit that God does not infallibly foreknow every truth that logically can be infallibly foreknown. Swinburne crafts a deﬁnition of ‘omniscience’ which is designed both to deal with philosophical difﬁculties concerning God’s knowledge of the truth or falsity of human assertions containing indexicals such as ³² Various medieval philosophers denied this; but it is impracticable to pause to deal with every line of dissent from my exposition.

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‘you’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ and also to reﬂect the view that God cannot have foreknowledge of future free actions (human or his own). Swinburne says: [God’s omniscience should be deﬁned as knowledge, at each period of time,] of all propositions that it is logically possible that he entertain then and that, if entertained by God then, are true, and that it is logically possible for God to know then without the possibility of error.³³

This deﬁnition, however, is unsuccessful for the same reason that Hasker’s was. Suppose that John Howard will eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015, and will freely do so. Suppose that not only will the relevant act-token be undetermined; it is also the case that nothing will determine that Howard eat exactly one apple on 1 January 2015.³⁴ According to Swinburne, God does not know now that John Howard will eat an apple on 1 January 2015. But this proposition is one for which it is logically possible both that God entertains it now and also that if he does entertain it now it is true; moreover the proposition is one which it is logically possible for God to know now. So Swinburne’s deﬁnition yields the result, which he intended to avoid, that God is not omniscient now. Theological Determinists, Molinists, and Open Theists should be able to agree on the following working deﬁnition of ‘omniscient’: God is omniscient in world W if and only if God exists in W and for any proposition p which is true in W, in W it is the case that either God knows that p, or else he does not but his knowing that p is not precluded by any defect or limitation in his intrinsic cognitive capacities. The key idea is that incompleteness of God’s knowledge does not entail limitation in God’s intrinsic cognitive capacities. The deﬁnition enables Theological Determinists and Molinists to say that God would still have been omniscient even if he had voluntarily decided to exercise only loose control over human choices and actions. Given the foregoing deﬁnition, the doctrine Comprehensive Knowledge does not entail that God is omniscient, and the doctrine that God is omniscient does not entail Comprehensive Providence. It is also plain that Open Theists, together with those Molinists who think that there ³³ Swinburne, The Christian God (Clarendon, 1994), 133. ³⁴ The ‘not only. . .but also’ speciﬁcation is inserted with Frankfurt’s examples in mind.

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might not have been suitable true CCFs enabling God to exercise tight control of the universe, and those Theological Determinists who think that God might have opted for loose control, should declare that divine omniscience does not entail Comprehensive Knowledge. 1 . 1 0 P O S S I B L E WO R L D S A N D M O R A L N E C E S S I T Y This is a good place to say a little more about possible worlds, and the relevant concepts of possibility and necessity. A world should be regarded as a whole whose parts are states of affairs, rather than as a set whose members are states of affairs. For any proposition p there is a state of affairs which we can refer to by the expression ‘Its being the case that p’, but sometimes distinct propositions p and q are such that ‘Its being the case that p’ and ‘Its being the case that q’ refer to the same state of affairs. Just as the actual world is a whole comprising all and only the actual states of affairs, including both logically necessary and logically contingent states of affairs, so non-actual worlds are wholes such that every part of the whole is a logically possible state of affairs, and every part is logically compatible with every other part, and there is no state of affairs which is logically compatible with every part and which is not itself a part. I will remain silent on the question of whether we should be realists about non-actual states of affairs, and non-actual worlds (as opposed to identifying them with linguistic entities, or regarding talk of them as useful ﬁction). Logical possibility and logical necessity can be deﬁned in terms of each other: It is logically possible that p if and only if it is not logically necessary that not-p. Obviously I have been using the expression ‘logically necessary’ to cover not only tautologies but also truths of mathematics and propositions like All bachelors are unmarried and If A is north of B then B is south of A and Nothing is both red and green all over at the same time. More controversial examples include Water is H2 O and Saul Kripke is not a crocodile. (Some philosophers say that these ﬁve examples are all ‘metaphysically necessary’.) Cognitivists about the right and the good can easily regard the foregoing sense of ‘logically necessary’ as already including some propositions in which words like ‘right’ and ‘good’ occur—for example If an action is good in some respect then it is not also bad in the same respect, and If A is better than B then B is inferior to A. Such propositions are neutral between

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coherent rival schemes of evaluation, because they must be respected by all such schemes—by western utilitarians, by Muslim fundamentalists, by Plato, by Lenin, by Gandhi . . . Any acceptable conjunction of evaluative propositions must respect constraints corresponding to such propositions. A great many non-cognitivists about the right and the good also will be prepared to extend the meaning of ‘logically necessary’ to cover the italicized sentences, regarded now not as propositions but, say, as constraints on coherent prescription. God, the Best, and Evil extends the application of ‘logically necessary’ in an additional way. Although some moral propositions and ascriptions of value are true partly in virtue of relevant contingent facts, there is a strong case for saying that others are in some sense necessarily true. Consider, for example, If Alice is perfectly good then she does not torture people for the fun of it. The truth of this proposition does not seem to depend on contingent circumstances Alice happens to ﬁnd herself in, or on contingent truths about human nature, or on contingent truths about torture. It would be true of any logically possible person, whatever their community and whatever their biological species, that if they were perfectly good then they would not torture any other person, whatever the latter’s community and whatever their biological species, for the fun of it. Similarly with Other things being equal, a person’s being wise is good for its own sake. Kit Fine would agree that these propositions about torture and wisdom should be classiﬁed as necessary, but he maintains that the sense or kind of necessity they involve cannot be subsumed under, or deﬁned or understood by reference to, the sense or kind of necessity involved in the ﬁve examples given three paragraphs ago.³⁵ Nevertheless in this book I will be treating If Alice is perfectly good then she does not torture people for the fun of it and Other things being equal, a person’s being wise is good for its own sake as logically necessary propositions. If you think that Fine is correct, then you can charitably regard my expression ‘logically necessary’ as short for ‘logically or morally or axiologically necessary’. Accordingly, I will be assuming that there is no possible world in which God is perfectly good and performs a morally impermissible action, or in which God is perfectly good and performs an action which is less rational than some relevant alternative action that he can perform. ³⁵ Kit Fine, Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (Clarendon, 2005).

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1 . 1 1 T H E C O N C E P T O F EV I L Most recent philosophical books and journal articles on the problem of evil do not provide any serious explanation of the concept of evil. What frequently happens is that some examples are listed, and then the concept assumed to be available as a basis for a distinction between two broad kinds: moral evil and natural evil.³⁶ The most impressive recent scholarly account of changing concepts of evil (and approaches to ‘the’ problem of evil) over the last few centuries has been provided by Susan Neiman, but her work has so far had little inﬂuence in philosophy of religion journals.³⁷ Aquinas said: Evil is simply a privation of something which a subject is entitled by its origin to possess and which it ought to have, as we have said. Such is the meaning of the word ‘evil’ among all men.³⁸

It is not clear to me whether in speaking of ‘the meaning of the word’ Aquinas intended to claim synonymy, or something weaker such as logical equivalence. For it is obvious that ‘evil’ is not synonymous with the expression ‘a privation of something which . . .’. Many philosophers would classify all the following as clear-cut examples of evil: • • • • • •

war schizophrenia quadriplegia pain, and the emotional distress caused by pain intended violations of important moral duties malice

These examples cannot, however, be taken for granted. The conceptual boundaries of evil are understood very differently by different ³⁶ Moral evil, it is said, consists of morally wrong actions and morally bad states of mind together with any resulting pain, illness, deprivation, etc., while natural evil consists of pain, illness, deprivation, etc. which (leaving aside any role played by God) result entirely from impersonal causes such as earthquakes. Although the distinction is useful, Chapters 6–8 do not use it. ³⁷ Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2002). ³⁸ For this and similar quotations see H. J. McCloskey, God and Evil (Nijhoff, 1974), 25 ff.

Introduction

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thinkers. For instance, A. A. Long tells us that the Stoics conﬁned the word ‘evil’ (kakon) to moral character and action, and did not apply it to pain, disease, and so on.³⁹ Leibniz works with a threefold classiﬁcation of evils: metaphysical/physical/moral. Physical evil consists of suffering, sorrow, and misery. Moral evil consists of sin. Metaphysical evil consists of imperfection. In a sense, ﬁnitude can be seen as imperfection; but in that case not all imperfection counts as metaphysical evil. Rather, what Leibniz has in mind are monstrosities and other disorders in nature such as earthquakes and ﬂoods, even ones which preceded the arrival of human beings in the relevant regions of the universe.⁴⁰ Many people would regard Leibniz’s concept of evil as too broad: earthquakes and ﬂoods which have no adverse effects on human beings or their interests should not count as evil. Other people would regard Leibniz’s account as too narrow: they might say, for example, that the destruction of a great work of art is evil even though it causes no suffering, sorrow, or misery, involves no sin, and does not constitute a disorder in nature. John Kekes, in his article ‘Evil’ in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, says: ‘Evil must involve harm, and it must be serious enough to damage its victims’ capacity to function normally. Furthermore, the harm must be unjustiﬁed, since not even serious harm is itself necessarily evil, as it may be just punishment for crimes committed, or the only means of preventing yet greater harm’ (3: 463). The context invites us to take Kekes as here charting the scope and limits of the concept of evil. But many people use the word ‘evil’ in a much broader sense. They would, for instance, count the intention to kill someone to facilitate a bank robbery as evil, even if the intention was not carried out, and so there was no victim whose capacity to function normally was damaged. People holding hedonist theories of value are likely to agree, against the Stoics on the one hand and Kekes on the other, that war, schizophrenia, and so on are genuine examples of evil. But they are likely to insist on a distinction between primary and secondary meanings of the word. ‘Evil’ is in the ﬁrst place applied to suffering and unhappiness, and has secondary application to other states, in virtue of their including ³⁹ A. A. Long, ‘The Stoic Concept of Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly, 18 (1968), 329–43. ⁴⁰ Theodicy, sects. 241, 244–5. Charles Journet, The Meaning of Evil, trans. Michael Barry (Kenedy, 1963), 42–3 ascribes to Leibniz the view that beings are metaphysically evil merely in virtue of their ﬁnitude. This seems to me a misinterpretation.

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suffering and unhappiness, or their being causes or signs of suffering and unhappiness. Just as the word ‘healthy’ is used in its conceptually fundamental meaning to describe plants and animals (including humans), and in derivative senses to describe foods and pathology results, so the primary use of ‘evil’ generates derivative uses to describe natural disasters, diseases, traits of character, and also the news of these. Are the differences of opinion noted above conceptual in nature, or do they come down to substantial differences in value judgements? We need not pursue this question here. (Maybe it has no determinate answer.) The relevant point for our purposes is that there is disagreement not merely about what are recognized as borderline cases: what some people regard as clear-cut evils, other people regard as clear-cut non-evils. Fortunately, a full, rich account of the concept of evil, or a theoretically well-founded taxonomy of evils, is not required for the arguments of this book. For now, the salient question is: What minimal, partial understanding of evil, and identiﬁcation of examples of evil, is necessary and sufﬁcient for generating the most serious arguments from evil against the existence of God? War provides the basis for an objection to the existence of God because, a priori, we would expect there to be no war if God existed. Why? Because typically wars include a great deal of death, suffering, deprivation, enmity, and morally wrong conduct; and if God existed he would have very strong reasons, derived from the nature of these states of affairs, for ensuring that war did not occur. Maybe those reasons could be overridden by other considerations; maybe not. But the ﬁrst ﬁrm reference point we can use when identifying concepts of evil suitable for use in this enquiry is this: (1) Evil is such that God, if he exists, has (at the very least) strong prima facie reasons for ensuring that there is little or no evil. There are a number of other features of evil that help to ﬁx the meaning of the word as it occurs in recent philosophical discussion of evil as an objection to the existence of God: (2) The evils in this universe include at least some kinds of morally wrong human intention and action, at least some kinds of morally bad motives and states of character, as well as at least some kinds of human suffering, ill-health, impairment, and deprivation. (3) A particular state of affairs can be evil even though its effects include great goods which more than compensate for bad effects. A rape is

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evil even if a child is born as a result and that child’s life is a great good to the child itself and to the mother. The torture of one person is an evil even if it somehow leads to the prevention of several other cases of torture. (4) An evil state of affairs, considered in abstraction from any goods of which it is a part, goods which are a part of it, or good effects which it produces (or of which it is a necessary condition), is worthy of aversion, and of being disvalued and opposed. (5) Some cases of an agent’s wronging someone are cases of evil, but not all. If I take your car without your consent and without other legally valid authorization, I am wronging you. But in some such cases I am acting innocently, because I placed reasonable trust in someone else’s statement that they owned the car and wanted me to take it. My wronging you is not a case of evil. (6) Some cases of the deterioration or destruction of the good are evil, but not all—for example, the fading of a beautiful sunset. (7) Evil states of affairs are not merely trivially bad. Some writers classify as evils even minor violations of moral duty. They are justiﬁed in doing so only if they hold that minor violations of moral duty are axiologically important. Unpleasant experiences that give rise to no signiﬁcant distress are not evil. Most philosophers writing about God and evil do not discuss whether talk of evil, including the preceding seven statements, is to be understood in cognitivist or non-cognitivist terms. This omission is not surprising, because the objections to the existence of God based on evil are neither strengthened nor eliminated nor weakened by the stance taken on the cognitivism/non-cognitivism issue.⁴¹ To illustrate the point, let us take a simple ‘Hurrah!/Boo!’ account of goodness and badness. Even the conceptually thinnest emotivist theory must recognize some place for rational argument concerning goodness and badness. For example, it must somehow provide for the validity of the following reasoning: If Mary enslaves children then Boo!Mary. Mary enslaves children. Therefore Boo!Mary. ⁴¹ Here I ﬁnd myself in agreement with the general drift of Michael Tooley’s remarks in his paper ‘The Argument from Evil’, (Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), 89–134), pp. 99 ff.

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Some account of validity extending beyond truth-preservation will be required. Perhaps, for example, in discussions of moral inference the Hurrah!/Boo! theorist will try to replace ‘true’ and ‘false’ by ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’. Given all this, the Hurrah!/Boo! account can recognize objections to the existence of God based on evil. For example: If God exists then Hurrah!God. If Hurrah!God then there exists little or no suffering. There is a lot of suffering. Therefore God does not exist. More elaborate arguments concerning God and evil may be difﬁcult or impossible to formulate given the impoverished resources of the ‘Boo!/Hurrah!’ account. The same will be true of arguments concerning Mary. But sophisticated non-cognitive theories may be able to do better. An axiologically and morally penetrating account of the nature of evil would explain what was evil about, say, war in terms which were more profound and more illuminating than saying merely that wars involve a lot of death, suffering, deprivation, enmity, and morally wrong conduct. This book does not offer a deep and sensitive treatment of these matters. Its working assumption is that such a treatment is not necessary for making substantial progress with the question whether evil provides a strong objection to the truth of classical theism, or of theism. I intend no disrespect to victims of great evils when I stick to the narrowly conceived task I have assigned myself. Like the concept of evil, the concept of goodness-for-its-own-sake, or ends-in-themselves, is contested. While some philosophers think that defenders of theism have little chance of success as long as they conﬁne themselves to a religion-neutral value theory, in this book I will attempt to do so.⁴² Indeed, I will work with a minimal, partial understanding of goodness-for-its-own-sake, constituted by such platitudes as: Goodness-for-its-own-sake is such that if God brings a universe into existence then he has (at the very least) strong prima facie reasons for ensuring that it contains a lot of goodness-for-its-own-sake. ⁴² Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999), 11–12.

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The states of affairs that are good-for-their-own-sakes include at least some kinds of morally good motives and states of character, as well as at least some kinds of human pleasure and achievement. States of affairs which are good for their own sakes, considered in abstraction from any evils to which they are linked, are worthy of being pursued, welcomed, and valued.

2 God and Worlds than which there are None Better Let us say that a world is maximal if and only if there is no world better than it. Sections 2.1–2.3 of this chapter investigate whether there is at least one maximal world. Sections 2.4 and 2.5 jointly establish, given some plausible (but contestable) assumptions, that we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists and there is at least one maximal world then the actual world is maximal. In Sections 2.1–2.3 the word ‘value’ sometimes means the quantity of net goodness of some state of affairs, and sometimes means the number which measures the quantity.

2 . 1 A R E T H E R E WO R L D S H AV I N G I N F I N I T E VA LU E ? Perhaps the questions Are there worlds having inﬁnite value? and Are there maximal worlds? are epistemically independent of each other. But, surely, even if this turns out to be so, it is not obvious at the outset, so it is worth enquiring into the ﬁrst question before tackling the one which mainly concerns me, the second. This section argues that it is not known whether there are worlds having inﬁnite value. Everyone agrees that whether one world is better than another depends on what good and bad states of affairs each world contains, and on how good and bad they are. Some accounts of the value of a world are mathematically aggregative (from now on ‘aggregative’ for short) in the following sense. They start by identifying certain individual basic value states, and assign positive or negative numbers as measures of their value. Some aggregative theorists would be happy to identify the value of the state with the net amount of goodness (positive or negative) in the state, but they do not need to speak this way. Simple aggregative

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theories then declare that the value of a world is measurable by some speciﬁed mathematical function of the values of the basic value states it contains.¹ That is, these values—the numbers—are all the information we need to calculate the value of the world. Complex aggregative theories require that more information be used. For example, a theory might keep track of which individual people various basic value states concern, and when in these people’s lives they obtain. Obviously there are aggregative theories which imply that there are worlds of inﬁnite value. Might there be non-aggregative theories, serious candidates for truth, which use cardinal measures of how good a world is, and assign some worlds inﬁnite value?

2.1.1 Can Non-Aggregative Theories Recognize Inﬁnite Value? Marking students’ essays involves taking into account various features of the essay, but typically the mark is based on a holistic judgement of how good the essay is, rather than an aggregation of marks assigned to the relevant features. Marking scales differ widely. In my own department an essay mark is a natural number between 0 and 100, but we could devise various scales that had no upper limit. On one of these scales, let us suppose, if a superb ﬁrst-year essay would receive 100, then a superb fourth-year honours essay would receive 300, and a typical article published in the Journal of Philosophy would receive 900. It is hard to see, however, that the explanation of the marking scale so far given assigns any meaning to the mark Inﬁnity. We might wonder whether Inﬁnity tells us that the piece of work that receives it is inﬁnitely better than the ﬁrst-year essay, the postgraduate essay, or the journal article, and is therefore better than any philosophical work for which some natural number would be a justiﬁed mark. But surely it is doubtful that the expression ‘inﬁnitely better’ itself has a clear meaning that can be applied to pairs of essays, and used to confer meaning on the mark Inﬁnity. Maybe Inﬁnity could be stipulated to be the mark appropriate to an essay than which none better can be conceived. But is such an ¹ One reason we need basic value states is to avoid double counting. For example, if Alice’s being courageous early this morning and Alice’s being temperate early this morning both basic count positively towards the value of the world, we need some way to avoid counting, as well, the compound states of affairs consisting respectively of their disjunction and their conjunction.

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essay logically possible? Even if it is, the mark Inﬁnity, so deﬁned, would not be a quantitative measure. A non-aggregative theory could understand the sentence ‘There are worlds having inﬁnite value’ to be saying simply that there are worlds than which none better can be conceived. Now there are well-known reasons for supposing that what we human beings can, psychologically speaking, conceive (or imagine, or entertain) does not coincide with what is logically possible. So from now the conceivable will be reinterpreted as coinciding with the logically possible. So the proposed way of understanding the sentence ‘There are worlds having inﬁnite value’ amounts to treating it as logically equivalent to ‘There are maximal worlds’. In that case, of course, the claim that there are worlds having inﬁnite value could not count either for or against the claim that there are maximal worlds. Non-aggregative theories typically ignore the essay-marking model, and deny there is such a thing as the (quantitative) value of a world. Some of them say that there is never such a thing as the value of the states in a world. Others are open to there being amounts of net goodnessfor-its-own-sake in some states of affairs within worlds, but nevertheless reject all quantitative statements about how good a world is—even statements saying merely that the world’s value is indeterminate but at least such-and-such a quantity. Maybe they ought to relent a little over a few very simple, sparse worlds. I know of no non-aggregative theory of goodness that afﬁrms that a world can be inﬁnitely good in a quantitative sense. We should therefore turn again to aggregative theories of the goodness of worlds. They all seem hopeless, for reasons given by Michael Stocker and others.² But it is worth spending a little time investigating whether, if we are open in principle to the idea that some aggregative theory is true, it is likely that we will be strongly attracted to the view that there are inﬁnitely good worlds, in a quantitative sense of ‘inﬁnite’.

2.1.2 Can Aggregative Theories Rule out Assigning Finite Values for All Worlds? Let us consider two different approaches to the problem. Firstly, there are aggregative hedonist theories that identify the basic value states in ² Michael Stocker, Plural and Conﬂicting Values (Oxford University Press, 1990).

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any world as all consisting in a person’s feelings of pleasure or displeasure during a short unit interval of time, measure the value of each state simply by the intensity of the feelings, and declare that the value of a world is some speciﬁed mathematical function of the value of the states. If we choose summation as the mathematical function, then worlds will have inﬁnite value if they contain ﬁnitely many people all of whom have a positive net amount of pleasure throughout inﬁnitely long lives, or if they contain an inﬁnite number of people who all have a positive net amount of pleasure throughout their lives whatever their length. But even if we accept the foregoing simple hedonist account of the values of the basic value states, and accept that the value of a world is determined by aggregation, we ought not to accept summation as the method of aggregation. For one thing, doing so would commit us to what Derek Parﬁt called the Repugnant Conclusion, that For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.³

A hedonist who wants to avoid the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’ has moved away from the idea that the only thing that matters is the quantity of pleasure in a world, and is attaching independent signiﬁcance to its distribution. What remains doubtful is that any aggregative hedonist proposals currently on offer succeed in avoiding unacceptable comparative judgements of the kind illustrated by the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’. The second aggregative approach to the question whether there are worlds of inﬁnite value arises from the reﬂection that aggregative theorists, whether theists or not, should accept that there are worlds in which God exists. So consider what aggregative theorists should make of the following argument: (1) There are worlds in which God exists and has inﬁnite positive value—that is, the state of affairs God’s existing has inﬁnite positive value. (2) In no world in which God exists and has inﬁnite positive value are there states of affairs that individually or collectively have inﬁnite disvalue. (3) Therefore there are worlds that have inﬁnite positive value. ³ Derek Parﬁt, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), 388.

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The inference from (1) and (2) to (3) is not entirely unproblematic, but let us, along with many though perhaps not all aggregative theorists, acquiesce in this inference and consider whether we should assent to (1). Although (1) is more plausible than, say, There are worlds in which a cat exists and has inﬁnite value, its truth is far from obvious. Let us suppose that the basic value states in our preferred theory all consist in some individual’s possessing some good-making property, and the theory assigns to each such state a measure of value which is proportional to the degree to which the individual possesses the property—for example, intelligence. Obviously, if argument (1)–(3) above is to be at all interesting, if the inputs to the aggregation function are all ﬁnite numbers, then its output must also be a ﬁnite number. But if some or all of the inputs are inﬁnite numbers, might the aggregation function produce a ﬁnite number as output? It might be argued: If in every world in which God exists he has only ﬁnite value then we can conceive of a being who in some or all worlds in which this being exists has greater ﬁnite value than God has in any world, contrary to the Anselmian idea that God is a being than whom none better is possible. Is this argument strong? Let us grant the strong, Anselmian premiss (4) If there is some world in which God exists and has value N then there is no world in which any other being exists and has a value equal to or greater than N. (4) does not yield (1). After all, (4) is consistent with (5) There is a ﬁnite number M such that there is no world in which some being has a value greater than M. If (5) is true, then although we can in some sense imagine a being of value greater than the ﬁnite number M, this is a bit like our imagining that there is a greatest prime number, or a class of all classes that are not members of themselves: what we imagine is ‘inconceivable’—that is, a logical impossibility. Maybe the number N mentioned in (4) is identical with the number M envisaged in (5). Would having ‘only’ a ﬁnite value constitute a lack or defect in God which, even if it is a necessary lack or defect, renders him less than entirely worthy of worship? No. Consider the fact that God cannot reduce the temperature of an object below −273 degrees Celsius. (Treat the expression ‘−273 degrees Celsius’ as rigidly designating absolute zero. It is irrelevant that ice could have melted at a higher temperature.)

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Here we have a ﬁnite number, −273, measuring a necessary limit to God’s power. But being able to reduce the temperature ‘only’ to this ﬁnite level does not constitute a shortcoming in his power. The source of the limit is not God’s nature but the essential properties of temperature and heat. Similarly, if there is a ﬁnite limit to the value of God’s existence then its source is not his nature but the essential properties of goodness. It might be objected that if there is some world in which God has a ﬁnite value N then surely there will be worlds in which there are k non-divine beings each of whose life has a ﬁnite positive value j such that kj > N; and surely there being a possible collection of beings who are collectively of greater value than God is, is contrary to the spirit of the Anselmian way of thinking about God. But granted that there are indeed worlds in which there are k non-divine beings each having a ﬁnite positive value j such that kj > N, are there worlds in which the collective value of these beings is at least N? The objector can hardly rely on the premiss that the collective value of x beings each of value y is always equal to x multiplied by y, since accepting that premiss will saddle us with the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’. Given that God is a being than which none greater can be conceived, and given that we have an aggregation function which assigns God’s existing the ﬁnite value N, the conclusion to draw is that the aggregation function is non-linear, and will, as k and j increase, assign to the successive states of affairs There existing k non-divine beings each of whom has ﬁnite value j values that converge on N but do not reach it. A similar point holds concerning a series of worlds containing some single being B, such that in each successive world B receives a ﬁnite increase in one or more of B’s good-making properties. The aggregation function will surely assign ﬁnite increases to the values of B’s existing. Although one can imagine an aggregation function which assigned an inﬁnite difference in value to B in two successive members of the series, such a function seems deviant. Why would anyone want to adopt it? Given that (1) and (2) jointly entail (3), there is a big theoretical advantage, from the viewpoint of aggregative theorists, in being able to say that in some or all worlds in which God exists the value of God’s existing is ﬁnite. Although two sets can both have an inﬁnite number of members and yet one have a greater cardinal number of members than the other, there is no reason to suppose that two states of affairs might both have inﬁnite value and yet one have a higher cardinal value than the other. Therefore supposing that the value of God’s existing is ﬁnite avoids the need for appeal to an ad hoc hypothesis in order to say

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that worlds in which God exists can not only be ranked ordinally by the better-than relation: they can be assigned different cardinal values. Of course if (1) and (2) do not jointly entail (3), then it will be true anyway that worlds in which God exists can be assigned different cardinal values. Aggregative theorists, even if they are atheists, will be unhappy with a theory of quantitative value that cannot assign different values to different worlds in which God exists. Why? If all such worlds had inﬁnite value, couldn’t aggregative theorists still do most of the jobs for which they need values by assigning them to the different created portions of the worlds?⁴ Unfortunately this may not be possible. For in many cases, at least, God’s actions in a world are inextricably involved in the ‘created portions’; moreover in worlds in which God exists a large part of the value of many states of affairs involving creatures is conferred on those states of affairs by God’s involvement.⁵ We should conclude that we lack good reasons for supposing that a plausible aggregative theory, if there is one, will assign inﬁnite values to some worlds. Are there good reasons against the supposition?

2.1.3 Are there Good Arguments against Some Inﬁnitely Valuable Worlds? My colleagues Allen Hazen and Greg Restall, in personal communications, have raised an interesting issue bearing on the foregoing question. Restall writes: It seems that any proponent of inﬁnite quantitative value must explain how their position differs from a straightforward variant of their position which restricts all quantitative value to being ﬁnite. For any function f that the proponent of IQV (inﬁnite quantitative value) might suggest as the measure of value (f is a function from states of affairs to numbers: for simplicity’s sake, let’s make them the positive real numbers, plus a special number, ‘inﬁnity’, though the case will work just as well for more ⁴ This is suggested by David Basinger, ‘Divine Omniscience and the Best of All Possible Worlds’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 16 (1982), 146. ⁵ Sections 3.3 and 3.4 employ the proposition that in some possible worlds the whole consisting of states of affairs involving created entities, considered in abstraction from their relations to God, is disappointing, or alternatively non-disappointing, relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. But this proposition is much less problematic than the view that an aggregative theorist can specify some viable way of assigning different values to worlds in which God exists by assigning different values to states of affairs involving created entities, considered in abstraction from their relations to God.

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complicated measures), proponents of FQV (only ﬁnite quantitative value) can offer a function g which has a maximum ﬁnite value N that it never goes beyond. It’s straightforward to deﬁne this from f: let g(x) = ﬁx(f(x)) where ‘ﬁx’ is a function from [0, inﬁnity] to [0, N]: ﬁx(a) = Na/(a + 1) ﬁx(inﬁnity) = N Fiddling with it shows that ﬁx(0) = 0, ﬁx(1) = N/2, ﬁx(2) = 2N/3, etc., but ﬁx(x) = N only when x is inﬁnity. So g deﬁned by setting g(x) = ﬁx(f(x) ) is a function with a maximum, and furthermore it’s order preserving. g(x) > g(y) if and only if f(x) > f(y), so measuring ‘better than’ with f or with g makes no difference. Now, all of this is purely mathematical ﬁddling. But it raises an issue for the proponent of IQV. If for any measure of value with an inﬁnite quantitative value we can construct what looks like a measure of value which doesn’t have one, exactly what rules out this so-called ‘measure’? What can one say which shows how a measure like f is better than a measure like g?

I have two answers to Restall’s question. The ﬁrst of these addresses Restall’s speciﬁc illustration of the general point. Consider the problem of measuring the combined length of two rods laid end on end. If the lengths of the rods are x and y, then we can specify the combined length as follows: f(x, y) = x + y. And treating f as admitting varying numbers of arguments, we can say that f(x, y, z, . . .) = x + y + z + . . . This leads to inﬁnite combined lengths. Suppose that we now deﬁne the function g in Restall’s way. There are decisive reasons for preferring f to g. For one thing, f gives the same results independently of our choice of units of measurement, whereas g does not. If we describe the two rods as respectively 1 metre and 2 metres long, the use of g yields the following reasoning about the rods’ combined length: g(x, y) = ﬁx(x + y) = ﬁx(3) = 3N/4 m = 300N/4 cm; and if we describe the rods as respectively 100 centimetres and 200 centimetres in length, the use of g gives us a combined length of ﬁx(300) = 300N/301 cm = 3N/3.01 m. The same holds for weights, temperatures, etc. The discrepancy indicates that the use of g is absurd. The foregoing point, however, concerns only one suggestion about how we might deﬁne a function which has a ﬁnite maximum value for worlds. What about the general idea that here will always be such a function available, one whose use we have no way of excluding? The main problem with the idea is this: Someone might offer a similar argument,

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from the availability of some relevant mathematical function to the conclusion that even a galaxy containing an inﬁnite number of stars could not properly, non-arbitrarily be said to have inﬁnite mass or inﬁnite size, and that even a galaxy that has existed forever could not properly, nonarbitrarily be said to have existed for an inﬁnite period of time—where a galaxy exists forever if and only if for every ﬁnite period E throughout which the galaxy has existed there is some earlier, equal period F through which it has existed, such that E and F do not overlap. Surely we would regard such an argument as too-powerful-to-be-sound. In the absence of some strong positive reasons for adopting a function which has a ﬁnite maximum to the value of worlds, the mere conceivability that there exists an appropriate function constitutes at most a reason for being less than certain that there are worlds having inﬁnite value. Think of Leibniz, whose ‘worlds’ were big things rather than big states of affairs, and were such that God was located outside them rather than inside them. He held that the value of a world depends on the variety of phenomena and simplicity of the laws in that world, and there comes a point at which any increase in the one must be at the expense of a decrease in the other; so the aggregative function can be represented by a curve that has a highest point. Well, our possible worlds are not Leibniz’s. If God’s value is essential to him, then either in all worlds in which he exists he has ﬁnite value, or else some worlds have inﬁnite value, or an acceptable aggregative function assigns some worlds a ﬁnite value even though they contain at least some states of affairs, such as God’s existing, which have inﬁnite value. 2 . 2 I N F I N I T E VA LU E A N D M A X I M A L WO R L D S Let us now consider how inﬁnite value bears on the main topic of this chapter; namely, whether there is at least one maximal world. If there is a best world, it will be maximal, but there might be several maximal worlds in the absence of a best one. Suppose for the sake of argument that there are many worlds having denumerably inﬁnite value, and no worlds having non-denumerably inﬁnite value. Then all of the worlds having inﬁnite value have the same cardinal value. Even so, some such worlds may be better than others. Here is why. Surely there are two worlds A and B in which exactly the same people exist, an inﬁnite number of them, such that each person leads a very

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good life, taken as a completed whole, and no person’s life is better or worse than anyone else’s, and there are no important moral differences between A and B concerning the processes by which outcomes are obtained. The main difference between the two worlds is that everyone leads a better life in A than in B. Surely if we hold that A and B have inﬁnite value, we ought to add that nevertheless A is better than B.⁶ The foregoing argument—and various other arguments in this chapter—assumes that all basic value states are states of persons. If you think that there are also independent basic value states involving dolphins, forests, and deserts, then it will be easy enough to reformulate the arguments accordingly. If we accept the foregoing argument, then we may hold an aggregative theory of the value of worlds, but we have rejected the universal applicability of an aggregative approach to ranking worlds. For we now hold that for worlds of inﬁnite value the relative position of a world is a matter not only of its value but how it compares to other worlds having the same value, and this is not determined by any mathematical function—not unless we trivialize the concept of a mathematical function by broadening it to include almost any way of reasoning to a conclusion. The ranking of worlds might still be determined by some relation between the respective basic value states, but this does not sufﬁce to make the theory aggregative.

2 . 3 M A X I M A L WO R L D S I N T H E A B S E N C E O F QUA N T I TAT I V E VA LU E Can it be shown that whether or not there are worlds of inﬁnite value, indeed whether or not worlds possess value at all (in the quantitative sense of ‘value’), for any world there is a better one—that is, there are no maximal worlds? Call the following the ‘Same People, Better and Better Lives’ argument: Surely for any world V containing people there is some other world W in which exactly the same people exist as in V, each person’s life in W ⁶ Closely related arguments have been endorsed in many recent papers, including Mark Nelson, ‘Utilitarian Eschatology’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 28 (1991), 339–47, and Peter Vallentyne and Shelly Kagan, ‘Inﬁnite Value and Finitely Additive Value Theory’, Journal of Philosophy, 94 (1997), 5–26; it was when reading Vallentyne and Kagan that I acquired the idea of an aggregative theory of value.

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is better, overall, than their life in V, the distribution of goods in W is not less fair than it is in V, and the differences between V and W are not due to morally bad actions or unfair processes in W. Surely W is better than V. This reasoning can be repeated without limit. Therefore for any world there is a better one. The foregoing argument is unsatisfactory. My reasoning has six stages: (1) Improvements in a person’s life have to be in principle recognizable by the cognitive capacities of ﬁnite beings such as us.⁷ (2) If the series of worlds generated from V in the way described is endless, then there will be an endless series of discernible improvements to the lives of the people who exist in V. (3) Even if we hold that worlds do not have values, we can still sensibly speak of one world’s being much better than another, just as in the absence of any way of assigning a cardinal measure of how funny a comedian is, we can still sensibly say that some comedians are much funnier than others. (4) Consider worlds located a large but ﬁnite number of steps along the series of worlds envisaged in (2)–(say) 1020 steps along. The inhabitants will be beings who lead lives vastly better than our own. (There have been fewer than 1020 seconds since the Big Bang.) The qualitative difference between their lives and ours would strike us as more dramatic than the qualitative difference between our lives and those of, say, a mosquito or even an earthworm. (5) But what will be the situation when we get to the position in the series numbered 10 to the power one billion? Can we make any sense at all of the idea that there is a world containing beings whose lives are that much better than our own? It is not clear that there is such a world. (Can we make any sense of the statement that there is a world containing a mosquito the size of the Milky Way? The laws of nature would have to be so different that we lose our grip on the idea that it is a mosquito.)⁸ (6) Therefore ‘Same People, Better and Better Lives’ fails to show that there are no maximal worlds. ⁷ Talk of improvements in this context should be understood to involve comparisons between states of affairs in different worlds, rather than at different times within the same world. ⁸ There is a potential threat here to the concept of God. But there is no space for a detour to explore the issue.

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Call the following the ‘Extra-People’ argument for the claim that there are no maximal worlds: Surely for any world V containing people there is some other world W such that (1) everyone who exists in V exists in W, while there are a ﬁnite number of people who exist in W but not in V; (2) in each world, every inhabitant leads a life which is worth living, and is neither better nor worse than any other inhabitant’s; (3) everyone who exists in both worlds leads a life in each which is neither better nor worse than his or her life in the other; (4) the distribution of goods in W is not less fair than it is in V, and the differences between V and W are not due to morally bad actions or unfair processes in W. In that case, W is better overall than V. This reasoning can be repeated without limit. Therefore for any world there is a better one. The argument contains no assumptions or conclusions about quantitative value. Furthermore, advancing it does not commit one to the doctrine that if one world is related to another via what Parﬁt calls ‘mere addition’ then the larger world must be better. There is ‘mere addition’ when, in one of two outcomes, there are extra people who have lives worth living, who affect no one else, and whose existence does not involve social injustice. Parﬁt showed that the doctrine in question encounters major difﬁculties. In evaluating the argument, let us assume that we can exclude the use of quantitative principles from which ordinal rankings might be derived. Do the speciﬁed conditions entail that W is better than V? Perhaps the view that they do is sustained by the following line of thought: Each extra person in W is making no less a contribution than the people in V to the lives of family, friends, and fellow citizens, and is no less worthy of being treasured and loved for his or her own sake. Therefore the presence of these extra people makes W better than V. But it is not plain that the ﬁrst sentence entails the second. In general, there is a close connection between what goes on in a world and how good the world is, but the nature of the connection is not well understood.

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The argument assumes that all basic value states are states of persons, or at least of individual beings. This assumption might be denied. Leibniz thought that what needed to be taken into account was the variety of phenomena in the world, and the economy of the laws which generate the phenomena—other things being equal, the fewer and simpler the laws, the better. He believed that there would be an optimal trade-off between these two considerations. Here is a non-Leibnizian illustration of why the supporting thought suggested above does not sufﬁce to sustain the view that the listed conditions jointly entail that W is better than V. Suppose that we are invited to rank two novels A and B, which differ in that B contains another chapter, inserted at the point where A ends. The additional chapter is at least as well written as any chapter in A. Nevertheless we cannot be conﬁdent that B is a better novel than A. Maybe the additional chapter introduces some incoherence in the plot. Thus the addition of an additional well-written chapter, holding the rest of the novel’s text constant, does not guarantee the preservation of all the virtues of A. Maybe, alternatively, B is not inferior to A, but nevertheless the additional chapter does not add to or intensify any of the good-making properties of the novel—for example, it does not make B thematically richer, or make it end on a better note. Hence while ‘Extra People’ is superior to ‘Same People, Better and Better Lives’, it should nevertheless be viewed with considerable caution. 2 . 4 W H AT G O D C A N D O : C O M PAT I B I L I S T A N A LY S I S Sections 2.4 and 2.5 together argue we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists and there is at least one maximal world then the actual world is maximal. Although at various points the argument employs a local supposition that there is at least one maximal world, the overall strategy does not depend on the supposition. The contribution of this section to the joint task is to consider whether if Theological Compatibilism is true and there is at least one maximal world, then God creates a maximal world. Both sections assume that every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures, and no morally wrong ones. This proposition is unproved, but nevertheless plausible. Its chief opponents seem to be those, such as Leibniz, who hold on

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a priori grounds that the actual world is maximal. Of course many theologians have believed that the actual world, containing as it does Adam’s sin and Christ’s redemptive activity, is much better than the world that would have been actual had Adam resisted temptation. And greater-goods theodicists often assert that we are better off with various moral evils and the greater goods for which they are logically necessary than we would have been with neither the moral evils nor the goods. But each of these statements is consistent with the assumption. Let us subdivide the discussion, considering in turn the situation relative to two alternative theses: (a) God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness jointly entail that if God can create a maximal world then he does. (b) Possibly, God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world, but he does not. Suppose that (a) is true. Now we are also assuming (i) Necessarily, every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures (including free choices to do what is morally obligatory), and no morally wrong ones. Now (a) and (i) jointly entail (ii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then the actual world contains creaturely choices and actions, and no creaturely choices and actions are morally wrong. Compatibilism tells us that Necessarily, if initial conditions C held millions of years ago and universal laws of nature L are true then person A performs action X and Initial conditions C held millions of years ago and universal laws of nature L are true are together consistent with Person A does X freely. After all, an action’s being determined is consistent with its being the case that the person would have acted differently if the person had adopted different aims or values, or had discussed the options further with friends, and so on. Indeed an action’s being determined is consistent with its being, in a sense, an ‘accident’ that you acted as you did: perhaps, for example, if you hadn’t glanced to your left at that precise moment then you would not have seen your friends, and so you would not have spoken to them. But whether or not God exists and is perfectly good is no accident. And (ii), in the present context, should be understood in such a way

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that it assures us that, necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and can create a maximal world then he systematically arranges initial conditions (including the laws of nature) with the overriding intention of strongly actualizing there not being anyone who performs a morally wrong action. Thus No person ever performs a morally wrong action differs vitally from No person ever reads aloud the second 1000 digits in the decimal expansion of pi. There are maximal worlds, let us suppose, in which both are true, and both are determined to be true. In many of those worlds, however, the latter is only accidentally true, and lots of people are free to read aloud the digits. Given (ii), in none of those worlds are people free to act wrongly, for, however complicated the causal chains immediately preceding a person’s decision, the non-occurrence of morally wrong choices and actions is entrenched in the universe at least as deeply as the laws of nature. We need not take a stance on whether in all worlds which God strongly actualizes everything that occurs is intended by him. It remains the case that even if God intends that some individual does not read aloud the second 1000 digits of pi, he might have lacked this intention, whereas according to (ii) he could not have lacked the intention that the individual not perform a morally wrong action. Even if it is determined that S not do A, a human being S may still be free to do A. Nevertheless if doing A is logically inconsistent with conjunction of the laws of nature and There is carbon or There are planets then S is not free to do A. And if doing A is logically inconsistent with the existence of God then S is not free to do A. Now S performs a morally wrong action is inconsistent with the conjunction of (ii) and God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and If God exists he can strongly actualize a maximal world, a conjunction which during this stage we are supposing to be true. The ﬁrst three conjuncts, if true, are necessarily true.⁹ Therefore S performs a morally wrong action is logically inconsistent with God exists. Therefore S is not free to perform a morally wrong action. Some compatibilists will reject this reasoning, on the basis of one or another analysis of free action. For example, it might be insisted that an agent S is free to do A if and only if it is true that if S were to decide to do A then S would do A, and that S is free in deciding to do A if and only if S’s decision-making processes are not being manipulated by other people and S is not suffering from any of a number of speciﬁed mental ⁹ Admittedly, even if compatibilism is true, the maximal worlds might all contain undetermined events which God cannot actualize, but surely if this is so then it is necessarily so.

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deﬁciencies or afﬂictions, such as delusion. It will be said: Despite the cited differences between performing a morally wrong act and reciting the second 1000 digits of pi, the relevant conditions for freedom are fulﬁlled. But this needs to be shown in detail. Suppose that your performing a speciﬁc action were indeed inconsistent with the conjunction of the laws of nature and There is carbon. Then surely either it would be false that if you were to decide to perform the action then you would do so, or else your deciding to perform the action would be inconsistent with the conjunction of the laws of nature and There is carbon. In the former case my claim that you would not be free must be conceded. In the latter case the account of freedom in deciding comes under pressure. Although various speciﬁc versions of compatibilism employ analyses of free will which, if plausible, would undermine my claims about freedom to perform a morally wrong action, compatibilism itself, the generic position, does not. Hence it is consistent with compatibilism for me to say that the relevant difference between performing a morally wrong act and reading aloud the second 1000 digits of pi is that in the former case, but not the latter, the very structure of the creation rules out its being the case that both if S were to attempt to do A then S would do A, and S attempts to do A. Compatibilists ought to acknowledge that in such a situation S is not free to do A. Hence compatibilists should agree that from (ii) we can infer (iii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then no rational creature is ever free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. But (a) and (i) also jointly entail (iv) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then rational creatures are sometimes free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. From the conjunction of (iii) and (iv) we can infer (v) Necessarily, it is not the case that both God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and God can create a maximal world. Since we are assuming that God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, we can conclude that (vi) God cannot create a maximal world.

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Since either (a) or (b) is true, we can draw the following conclusion from Section 2.4: If compatibilism is true then either God cannot create a maximal world or he can do so but his perfect goodness does not entail that he does. In either case it is obvious that if compatibilism is true then we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists then the actual world is a maximal one. 2 . 5 W H AT G O D C A N D O : L I B E RTA R I A N A N A LY S E S Let us now suppose that libertarianism is true. Assume also, as in Section 2.4, that there are maximal worlds and necessarily every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures (including free choices to do what is morally obligatory), and no morally wrong ones. It follows immediately that God cannot strongly actualize any maximal world. The question remains, can he weakly actualize one, and thereby create it? Let us look at the issue ﬁrst from the standpoint of Open Theism. If Open Theism is true, then although God can bring into existence a universe within which there are free human choices, he cannot create any world containing free human choices, and therefore he cannot create any maximal world. So if Open Theism is true, the following disjunction is true, in virtue of the truth of the ﬁrst disjunct: either God cannot actualize a maximal world, or he can but his omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness do not entail that he does. We should now consider matters from a Molinist standpoint. If the views expressed in Section 1.5.2 are correct, Molinists should say that whether God can create a maximal world is a contingent matter, depending on what CCFs are true. As Molinists see it, there are two alternatives: ﬁrstly, that according to the true CCFs there is a possible set of circumstances which God can strongly actualize and given which free creatures would always choose and act rightly; and, secondly, that according to the true CCFs there is no such set. In the latter case the following disjunction is true, in virtue of the truth of the ﬁrst disjunct: either God cannot create a maximal world, or he can but his perfect goodness does not entail that he does. Suppose, however, that the ﬁrst alternative holds: that according to the true CCFs there is a possible set of circumstances in which free creatures would always choose and act rightly. Does it follow that God

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can, by strongly actualizing the speciﬁed circumstances, weakly actualize its being true that free creatures always choose and act rightly? As in Section 2.4, let us consider in turn the situation relative to the two rival theses (a) God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness entail that if God can create a maximal world then he does. (b) Possibly, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world, but he does not. Suppose that (a) is true. Then we encounter an argument which is in many ways strikingly similar to one employed in Section 2.4, in connection with compatibilism. We are assuming (i) Necessarily, every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures (including free choices to do what is morally obligatory), and no morally wrong ones. Now (a) and (i) jointly entail (ii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then the actual world contains creaturely choices and actions, and no creaturely choices and actions are morally wrong. And (ii), in the present context, assures us that necessarily if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and can create a maximal world then, even if God does not cause and determine any creaturely actions, he systematically arranges laws and initial conditions with the overriding intention that no person perform a morally wrong action. If so, then no one is free to act wrongly, for the non-occurrence of morally wrong choices and actions is entrenched in the universe at least as much as if it were a law of nature. The structure of creation is not up to rational creatures. It might be objected: People are free to act wrongly, since they have the power to act in such a way that, if they were so to act, then God could not create a maximal world. Look at it this way. Suppose that people are actually in circumstances C and act rightly; then according to Molinism the subjunctive conditional If people were in C then they would act rightly is true. Now if they had acted wrongly in C then a different subjunctive conditional would have been true, namely If people were in C then they would act wrongly. If God had seen that this conditional was

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true, then despite the truth of (a) and (i) he might well still have placed people in C, since it may well have been true that he could not create a maximal world.¹⁰ This objection fails. Whether or not God can create a maximal world depends, according to Molinism, on what CCFs are true. Nevertheless whether or not God can create a maximal world is not up to rational creatures. I have no decisive proof of this last claim, but it seems highly plausible for the following reasons. Suppose that it is up to you whether in your present actual circumstances you freely recite the second 1000 digits of pi, and so it is up to you whether the conditional If you were in these circumstances you would recite those digits is true. It does not follow that it is up to you whether there are any possible circumstances which God can strongly actualize and given which you would freely recite the second 1000 digits of pi. Indeed this surely is not up to you—that is, is not under your control. Your powers over your own motivational structure do not extend so far. (You can clench your teeth and think to yourself, ‘No matter what happens, I will not recite those digits!’ but doing so will not sufﬁce.) Similarly, suppose that it was up to the rational creatures who in fact existed whether in the circumstances C1 in which God in fact placed them they always freely acted rightly. Nevertheless it was surely not up to them whether there were any possible circumstances which God could strongly actualize and which were such that in those circumstances some rational creatures or other always freely acted rightly; nor was it up to them whether, if there were such possible circumstances, some of them were included in maximal worlds. Hence even though, according to Molinism, it had become in circumstances C1 up to the rational creatures who in fact existed whether God in fact created a maximal world, it was not up to these or any other creatures whether God could have created a maximal world.¹¹ The foregoing claims are not certain; but they are credible. (It is not certain that there is at least one world at least as good as the actual world ¹⁰ This objection is intended to avoid the idea that people who acted wrongly in C would thereby have strongly or weakly actualized the truth of some corresponding CCF. I will not discuss whether the intention is fulﬁlled. ¹¹ Suppose that there is exactly one maximal world, and that it is up to the rational creatures who in fact exist whether in the circumstances in which God has in fact placed them they always freely act rightly. Then it is up to them whether God can actualize a maximal world. But, pace Leibniz, it is plausible to suppose that if there is any maximal world then there are many of them.

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and which contains unicorns; but I think that it is true, and it would require a strong and surprising argument to remove my belief.) We should conclude that the objection fails to undermine the claim that (ii) assures us that, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and can create a maximal world then the non-occurrence of morally wrong choices and actions is built into the structure of the creation at least as much as if it were a law of nature. Suppose that there is a prison governor who is able to predict accurately, ﬁve minutes in advance, when a prisoner will form the intention to try to leave. Given that the prisoners possess libertarian free will, her predictions are fallible; but they are very reliable. She normally leaves all the doors of the prison unlocked, but when she predicts an attempt to leave she initiates a process which, four minutes later, locks all the doors. Plainly, if the doors are unlocked at a given time, then there is a sense in which a prisoner can, during the next four minutes, leave the prison: if he tries to leave, then (we can suppose that) there is nothing the governor can do to stop him.¹² Nevertheless there is an obvious sense in which no prisoner is free to leave. After all, the prisoners have all been conﬁned against their will for years. They all want to leave, but they are as securely held as if they were chained to the walls. The upshot: There are many very different ways in which you can be deprived of your freedom. From a libertarian viewpoint, one of these ways is by having it built into the nature of the system, unalterable by you, that you will never perform a certain type of act. This is our position if (a) and (i) are true. A prisoner might be able to defeat the governor’s predictive powers by resolving ‘I will set up an indeterministic process which has a probability of about 1/2 of issuing in a certain outcome O, and I will try to leave, 30 seconds after observing what happens, if and only if what happens is O.’ I stipulate that in the case in question no prisoner is clever enough to devise this expedient; but if there had been one, the governor ¹² If the governor never fails to predict, ﬁve minutes in advance, the formation of an intention to try to escape, then if a prisoner tries to escape at some speciﬁc time, the governor will have taken steps to stop him. What if the governor occasionally gets distracted? What if the door-locking mechanism occasionally malfunctions? The prisoners cannot properly be said to be free to escape: they have a low degree of freedom to leave. ( The concept degree of freedom is discussed in Section 7.6.2.) I said early in Section 2.4 that Sections 2.4 and 2.5 would employ the assumption that every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures, and no morally wrong ones. Let me now clarify this by saying that by ‘free’ I meant having a high degree of freedom.

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would have detected this fact, and taken additional steps to prevent this unusual prisoner from escaping. People are often unable to do things that other individuals can do, because of limitations in their knowledge and ingenuity. Hence from (ii) we can infer (iii) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then no rational creature is ever free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. But (a) and (i) also jointly entail (iv) Necessarily, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and he can create a maximal world then rational creatures are sometimes free to choose or act in a morally wrong way. From the conjunction of (iii) and (iv) we can infer (v) Necessarily, it is not the case that both God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and God can create a maximal world. Since we are assuming that God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, we can infer that (vi) God cannot create a maximal world. If you think that (a) is true, then you will draw the conclusion that even if the true CCFs tell us that there is a possible set of circumstances in which free creatures would always choose and act rightly, it does not follow that God can, by actualizing the speciﬁed circumstances, weakly actualize its being true that free creatures always choose and act rightly. We are not yet in a position to decide whether (a) is true. We know, however, that either (a) or (b) is true. So what we can say, on the basis of the discussion so far, is that if Molinism is true then, whether or not there are true CCFs which tell us that there is a possible set of circumstances in which free creatures would always choose and act rightly, either God cannot create a maximal world or he can but his omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness do not entail that he does so. Hence we conclude from this section that if either Open Theism or Molinism is true, then we have no a priori guarantee that if God exists then the actual world is a maximal one. This result complements that reached at the end of Section 2.4 concerning compatibilism.

3 Divine Choice from Inﬁnite Hierarchies of Creatable Worlds 3.1 CONTEXT AND AIMS Sections 1.4–1.9 provided an introduction to three leading theories of the extent and method of divine providence: Theological Determinism, Molinism, and Open Theism. They explained that Theological Determinists and Molinists agree that God exists, and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. They also agree that God creates the actual world—that is, strongly or weakly actualizes every contingent state of affairs in it (with a few exceptions such as God’s existing, if this is contingent)—and that God knows infallibly everything that occurs. The third leading theory of divine providence, Open Theism, denies both tight providential control, and infallible and complete divine knowledge. Open Theism is a libertarian theory which denies that there are, or even could be, the true CCFs that seem required to reconcile libertarianism with tight providential control and infallible, complete divine knowledge. Sections 1.8 and 1.9 explained that there is a sense in which Open Theists can afﬁrm God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Although God, the Best, and Evil is intended to be neutral between the three theories just sketched, this chapter will employ the temporary working assumption that either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, and that therefore God creates the actual world. While some people hold that God can create any world it is logically possible for him to create, others think that there are contingent limitations on what he can create. Molinists, for example, think that the range of creatable worlds depends partly on what CCFs are true. Section 1.7 discussed how we should understand the expression ‘can create’.

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The following stipulative deﬁnitions will prove useful: Two or more worlds are commensurable with each other if and only if each is either better than, inferior to, or ranked equally with, the other. A creatable hierarchy is a set S of worlds such that each member of S is commensurable with each other member and God can create any member of S, and there is no world outside S which is both commensurable with each member of S and which God can create. A world W is a prime member of a creatable hierarchy H if and only if W is a member of H and there is no better member. A world is prime if and only if it is a prime member of some creatable hierarchy. In investigating what kind of world God will create if he creates some world or other, there are three (epistemic) possibilities to consider: (1) there are one or more creatable hierarchies and none of them has a prime member; (2) there are one or more creatable hierarchies and each of them has at least one prime member; (3) there are at least two creatable hierarchies and at least one of them has prime members while at least one does not. The task of this chapter is to consider the ﬁrst of these three alternatives. It argues against what I will call the Entailment Thesis, advanced by William L. Rowe in his recent book Can God Be Free? The proposition For every creatable world there is another one that is better than it entails the proposition There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being.¹

Rowe should be interpreted as using the word ‘create’ as God, the Best, and Evil does, in such a way that God creates a world if and only if he strongly or weakly actualizes (nearly) every contingent state of affairs in it. Throughout his book Rowe simply ignores the view, endorsed by Open Theists, that God’s actions sometimes fail to achieve God’s aims. Accordingly, the Entailment Thesis is to be taken as equivalent to: ¹ William L. Rowe, Can God Be Free? (Oxford University Press, 2004), 92. Rowe uses ‘world’ to mean ‘possible world’, and on pp. 40–1 he proposes that a world be thought of not as a whole consisting of created objects such as trees, rivers, and minds, but instead as ‘a maximal state of affairs W such that for any state of affairs either it or its negation is included in W’. I concur.

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The proposition There are no prime worlds entails the proposition There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being. There have been various other philosophers writing in the last ﬁfteen or twenty years along more or less similar lines to Rowe, but Rowe’s arguments for the Entailment Thesis are at least as strong as anyone else’s, so I will discuss his views at length, and attend to the best of the other presentations in Section 3.6.

3 . 2 ROW E ’ S P O S I T I V E A RG U M E N TS F O R T H E E N TA I L M E N T T H E S I S Rowe’s main argument is that the thesis follows from the following proposition, ‘Principle B’, which he declares to be a necessary truth: If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world it could create, then it would be possible for there to be a being morally better than it.² Obviously Principle B entails the Entailment Thesis only if the proposition If an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being exists then this being creates some world is necessarily true. So Rowe is committed to the necessary truth of this proposition.³ Open Theists will point out that in neglecting their position without any argument Rowe leaves his case for the entailment principle seriously incomplete. Rowe needs to rule out the possibility that there are worlds better than any creatable worlds, and that God can and should try to foster the becoming actual of one of these worlds. Rowe acknowledges that ‘we are far from proving’ Principle B,⁴ but offers two arguments in prima facie support of it. Here is the ﬁrst: For if an omniscient being creates a world when it could have created a better world, then that being has done something less good than it could do (create a better world). But any being that knowingly does something (all things considered) less good than it could do falls short of being the best possible being.⁵ ² ibid. 97. ³ Rowe says: ‘Given that it is better to create a world than not to create at all, God is doing the right thing in choosing to create a world rather than not to create at all’ (p. 111). ⁴ Ibid. 121. ⁵ Ibid. 89, 120f.

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Consider the proposition that even if for every creatable world there is one that surpasses it in goodness, an omnipotent, omniscient agent’s failure to create an unsurpassed creatable world constitutes a fault that shows that the agent himself is not unsurpassably good. Rowe is not asserting this proposition. Instead, he is saying that an omniscient agent’s creating a world when there is a better one that it could create shows that the agent is not unsurpassably good.⁶ There is an important ambiguity in Rowe’s expression ‘done something less good than it could do’. Rowe’s ﬁrst premiss in the foregoing argument can be understood in either of the following ways: (1a) If an omniscient being creates a world when it could have created a better world, then that being has thereby performed an action which is less good—that is, less morally good, less rational, or less a manifestation of excellence in acting—than an alternative action that the being could have performed. (1b) If an omniscient being creates a world when it could have created a better world, then that being has thereby performed an action whose total causal consequences are less good than those of some alternative action that the being could have performed. (1b) is plausible; but to just about everyone except maximizing actconsequentialists (1a) will surely seem no less doubtful than Principle B itself, and so cannot contribute to a strong argument for the principle. For example, deontologists and rule-consequentialists will be able to envisage cases in which one imperfect but omniscient being is to choose which of two worlds another imperfect being is to create, and the ﬁrst being has a moral duty to choose the inferior world rather than the better one.⁷ Rowe’s second premiss can be understood in either of the following ways: (2a) Any being that knowingly performs an action which is less good— that is, less morally good, less rational, or less a manifestation of ⁶ William L. Rowe, 104 ff. ⁷ In Section 1.7 I said that God creates a world if and only if he strongly or weakly actualizes it; the terms ‘strongly actualize’ and ‘weakly actualize’ had been deﬁned in Sections 1.4.1 and 1.5.1 respectively. This explanation of ‘create a world’ can easily be given a natural extension to cover a situation in which there are two imperfect beings and one of them is the creator.

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excellence in acting—than an alternative action that the being could perform falls short of being the best possible being. (2b) Any being that knowingly performs an action whose total causal consequences are less good than those of some alternative action that the being could perform falls short of being the best possible being. Here (2a) is plausible.⁸ But unless we are already maximizing actconsequentialists why should we regard (2b) as more secure than Principle B itself, and so a good starting point for a persuasive argument for Principle B? As for maximizing act-consequentialism, Section 3.5 will explain why it is far from clear that this doctrine can be used as a premiss supporting (2b)—or (3a) or (3b), stated below—and thereby supporting Principle B. To sum up: (1b) and (2a) look initially plausible, but they do not jointly entail Principle B. It is plain that if we interpret Rowe’s argument in such a way that it is free from equivocation with respect to the expression ‘do something less good than one could do’, and its premisses jointly entail Principle B, then either (1a) or (2b) requires a great deal to be said in its favour before most philosophers will be impressed by Rowe’s argument for Principle B, and by the argument based on Principle B for the Entailment Thesis. Rowe’s discussion of the recent literature contains a second positive argument in direct support of the Entailment Thesis; it also constitutes an argument for Principle B. Here is the major premiss: (3a) When the agent’s motive in acting is to bring about a good state of affairs, the goodness of an action—measured in terms of the quality of its result—is expressive of the agent’s goodness.⁹ The context makes it clear that the goodness of an action and of an agent are to be understood as their moral goodness. But, so understood, the principle is obviously false. An agent may be motivated by a desire to bring about a good state of affairs, and this desire may be fulﬁlled, ⁸ Construed uncharitably (2a) implies that if there is a best possible being then each of his actions—including trivial ones like brushing one’s teeth (or whatever is the equivalent for such an exalted being)—manifests excellence in acting as much as each other action. I assume that a more charitable interpretation can be devised. Similarly with respect to (2b). ⁹ Ibid. 100. I am not quoting Rowe; rather, the proposition sums up what he says over several sentences.

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but the moral goodness of the action and of the agent may diverge far from the quality of the result. For example, the quality of the result can vary with luck and with the interference of other people, without there being any variation of the moral goodness of either the action or the agent. Perhaps Rowe overlooks the foregoing points because he is thinking of an omnipotent and omniscient creator, who does not ﬁnd the outcomes of his providential activity affected by luck or by the interference of other people. But it is hard to see how Rowe can obtain a good argument for the entailment thesis by somehow restating (3a) so as to get a premiss with a more restricted scope. Consider, for instance: (3b) If an omnipotent and omniscient agent’s motive in creating a world is to bring about a good state of affairs, then the degree of goodness of the world measures the degree to which the agent is morally good. Suppose that there exists a being M who is omnipotent, omniscient, and moderately good, and consider two worlds V and W such that W is better than V but if M were to create W then M would violate an important moral duty recognized by deontologists and rule-utilitarians, while if M were to create V then M would not violate any moral duty. It is true that even deontologists and rule-utilitarians admit that at least some moral duties are defeasible by considerations of utility. But why should they think that, given that M, V, and W are as described, they should conclude—as (3b) requires them to conclude—that M’s creating W would indicate M’s possession of a higher degree of moral goodness than would be indicated by M’s creating V? Other things being equal, in intentionally bringing about the better state of affairs one acts in the better way, all-things-considered. Section 3.3 will argue that this truth does not provide the basis for a good argument for the Entailment Thesis. 3 . 3 A N A RG U M E N T I N FAVO U R O F S AT I S F I C I N G If there are no prime worlds, and an omniscient being creates a world, then he creates a world when he could have created a better one. Rowe thinks that in this case the omniscient being performs an action which is less good than a relevant alternative action that he can perform, and therefore falls short of being the best possible being.

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I deny Rowe’s claim. It is logically necessary that an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being cannot act in a morally better way, or in a way which is better all-things-considered, or more rationally, than he in fact acts. If there are no prime worlds, then what follows is that in every creatable hierarchy there are inﬁnitely many pairs of worlds V and W such that both W is better than V and an omnipotent and omniscient being can create W, but his creating W need not be a morally better action, or better all-things-considered, or more rational, than his creating V. Other things being equal, in intentionally bringing about the better state of affairs one acts in the better way, all-things-considered. Nevertheless there are certain situations in which the inference from The agent could have selected a better world to be created to The agent could have acted in a better way is defeated.¹⁰ One defeater consists of the conjunction of the following three conditions: (1) For every world that could have been selected there is a better one that could have been selected. (2) The world that was in fact selected is good enough relative to the foregoing circumstances. (3) Failure to select any world would have led to an outcome that was far inferior to each of the worlds which is good enough. Alongside issues concerning God’s choices if there are no prime worlds, there is a puzzle concerning rational, self-interested choice. Suppose that a superior being offers to prolong your life for a ﬁnite number of good days, with the number of days to be chosen by you, without restriction on how many days you may pick. Rational decision theory can reasonably be required to advise you about what you should do in the foregoing situation. It is tempting to argue: For any number of days, N, that you might obtain, you would be better off if you obtained N + 1 instead.¹¹ So for any N you have better reason to select N + 1 instead. So you would be ¹⁰ In addition to the defeater proposed in the next sentence of the main text, others are discussed in Chapter 4: for instance, the creator may have agent-relative reasons, deriving from his own contingent desires and personality traits, for selecting the world that is inferior, as judged from an agent-neutral standpoint. ¹¹ You may be eighty years old at the time you receive the offer, and you may have decided that your aims in life are largely complete, and that death would not be unwelcome. But the superior being’s offer surely calls for reconsideration of this attitude, in the light of new opportunities which have unexpectedly been opened up. What is at

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acting more rationally if you selected N + 1 than if you selected N. So you should not select N. This conclusion, however, is inconsistent with the obvious truth that you should select some number, rather than walk away from the offer. You should satisﬁce—that is, choose a number that will secure an outcome which is good enough.¹² Indeed, you are rationally required to do so. Satisﬁcing will lead to a better outcome for you than failing to satisﬁce. Nevertheless satisﬁcing involves choosing an outcome despite the fact that there is an alternative available outcome given which you would be better off. It might be objected: When a policy is rationally required, and there are various rationally permissible ways of implementing it, some of these ways can be more rational than others. Even though it is more rational to satisﬁce than to fail to satisﬁce, and therefore there are some numbers that it is rationally permissible for you to choose, for each such number N it remains more rational for you to satisﬁce by choosing N + 1 than to satisﬁce by choosing N. Decision theory provides demands (including prohibitions), recommendations, and assessments (including comparisons) of rationality. These must ﬁt together harmoniously. Speciﬁcally, our decision theory (C1) should not both recommend, of each of several candidate actions, that it be not performed, and also recommend that there be one of these actions which is performed; and (C2) should recommend that an action be not performed if the theory identiﬁes some rival action (or refraining from action) as more rational; and (C3) should recommend (and, indeed, demand) that an action be performed if the theory identiﬁes the action as rationally required. The objectors violate at least one of these conditions of theoretical coherence. Their theory evidently identiﬁes, for each available choice of the number of days, at least one rival choice as more rational. According to condition (C2), their theory should therefore recommend, for each available choice of number, that you not make it. But their theory admits that satisﬁcing—making one of the available choices—is stake is not merely more days, but new goods, currently only partially understood, whose attainment more days would make possible. ¹² ‘Satisﬁce’ is a technical term from decision theory and economics.

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rationally required, and so according to (C3) it should recommend that you make one of them. But these two recommendations jointly violate (C1). You are rationally required to select some ﬁnite number of days. Our decision theory should afﬁrm this. It follows, via (C3), that our decision theory should recommend that you select some ﬁnite number of days. No doubt it will add some supplementary recommendations—for example, that the number selected should be greater than any number of days you have a reasonable expectation of living even if you decline the superior being’s offer. Let us call any number that fulﬁls this and similar clauses ‘admissible’. According to (C1), if our theory should recommend that you select some admissible number of days, then it should not recommend of each admissible number that you not select that number; in which case, we can infer, via (C2), that our theory should not, for every admissible number, identify at least one other number (for example, the number’s successor) as one which it would have been more rational to select. We should conclude that there is at least one admissible number N such that N it is not more rational to select N + 1 instead, even though you will be better off if you select N + 1 than if you select N. Notice that I stipulated that you will be better off if you select N + 1 days than if you select N. I was able to do so because what did the work in the story employing the word ‘you’ is the underlying thesis that it is logically possible that there be some good and some agent such that marginal value of the good for the agent is always positive. It might be claimed that necessarily beyond some point the value of, or the value brought by, an extra day of life would always be zero or negative. Rather than get into a debate on this issue, important as it is elsewhere in the philosophy of religion, I would simply change the example. For instance, suppose that ‘you’ attach great value to the number of your descendants. What the superior being offers is to ensure that you have whatever ﬁnite number of descendants you choose, and to ensure that each descendant has a good life. The foregoing problem has an ethical variant. Suppose that you are a child’s guardian, and have a moral obligation to act in that child’s interests. A superior being offers to prolong the child’s life for a ﬁnite number of good days, with the number of days to be chosen by you. What should you do? An argument similar to the one above leads to the conclusion that, morally speaking, you should satisﬁce for the sake of the child.

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We should not respond to the problem of how an omnipotent and omniscient being should choose when there are no prime worlds by concluding that There are no prime worlds entails There is no omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being. Drawing that conclusion would provide no way out of the underlying ethical problem, which is raised equally by agents who are limited in knowledge and power, and who may or may not be morally perfect, but are faced with an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better states of affairs that they can decide will be brought about. What moral demands and recommendations does our well-developed moral theory issue to such agents? What should it say about when their selecting a better state of affairs would be acting in a morally better way than their selecting a less good state of affairs? It should recommend that they satisﬁce—that is, that they select some good state of affairs even though they could select a better one. Therefore it should not also recommend, of each available good state of affairs, that they not select that one. Therefore it should not declare that, whichever state of affairs they select, there is at least one alternative member of the hierarchy such that selecting it would be a morally better action. I claimed earlier that when an agent is choosing a world to be created from an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better available worlds, the inference to the conclusion that whatever he does he could have acted in a better way is defeated. An objection was stated: that however good the world chosen, the agent would always have chosen better by choosing a better candidate. We are now in a position to identify where the objection goes wrong. We should resist the inference from If the agent had chosen W instead of V then he would have chosen a better world to If the agent had chosen W instead of V then he would have chosen better.¹³ 3 . 4 WO R L D S T H AT A R E G O O D E N O U G H In Can God Be Free? Rowe responds to an earlier version of the line of reasoning advanced in Section 3.3.¹⁴ He focuses on my original ¹³ The arguments in this section yield a response to two points made by Klaas J. Kraay (‘William Rowe’s A Priori Argument for Atheism’, Faith and Philosophy, 22 (2005), 211–34) about shortfalls in some arguments in my paper ‘God and the Best’ (Faith and Philosophy, 13 (1996), 311–28). Incidentally, I accept Kraay’s premiss P1, but reject the proposition obtained from P1 by omitting the words ceteris paribus; it is this latter proposition, rather than P1, whose conjunction with Kraay’s (7) entails his (8). ¹⁴ The earlier version was contained in ‘God and the Best’. Rowe’s discussion of my article is on pp.121–7 of his book.

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claim, modiﬁed above, that in the scenario in which there are no prime worlds the conclusion that God could have acted in a morally better way is defeated by the fact that some worlds are good enough. He applies pressure to the idea that some worlds are good enough.¹⁵ Rowe observes that in my view whether or not a particular world is good enough for God to create is not an intrinsic feature of the world, but is relative to the range of options God faces. He complains that I seem, wrongly, to think that it is obvious just what worlds are acceptable for actualization, relative to the choice situation in which for every world that could have been selected there is a better one. So I should now say more about this non-obvious matter. That there is more that can be said is plain from the longevity example. Plainly if you were to choose the number 1 you would be choosing irrationally. You should satisﬁce by picking a number which is high enough. But when is a number high enough, relative to this choice situation? There must be some guidelines for choosers, even if they are very sketchy, since in their absence wise choice would be impossible in the situation supposed—a consequence which our decision theory must avoid. What counts as a world which is good enough, relative to the task of a person who is to decide which world will be created out of an inﬁnite range of better and better worlds? As I have already pointed out, we need not assume that the chooser is perfectly good. The issue concerns what our moral theory tells him about which of the available worlds are such that he would be choosing in a morally better way if he selected one of the others, and which of the available worlds are not. If there are worlds in the latter group, then they are the ones that are said, in the present context, to be good enough. What answer our moral theory gives will depend on its assumptions about value. Suppose, for instance, that it identiﬁes the basic value states in any world as all consisting in a person’s feelings of pleasure or displeasure during a short unit interval of time, measures their value simply by the intensity of the feelings, and declares that the value of a world is the sum of the values of the states. In that case there seems to be no principled way of identifying, amongst the worlds that have positive net value, some that are good enough. But a theory of the foregoing kind is very implausible. ¹⁵ Rowe, Can God Be Free?, pp.124–6.

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So suppose instead that our moral theory embodies the assumption that worlds are to be ranked chieﬂy by the extent to which they include many large communities of people characterized by justice, a rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose lives embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together, and do not also include communities which are seriously malfunctioning. A theory of this kind is likely to support the judgement that there are worlds such that, whether or not there are even better worlds, they are not ﬂawed, deﬁcient, or disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of worlds. (From now on, for brevity’s sake, I’ll just say ‘(non-) disappointing’; the other adjectives should be regarded as tacitly present.) Such judgements ﬁt in with a much wider array of judgements of quality—for example, we can regard a meal cooked by a friend as very good, without enquiring into what a ﬁve-star restaurant chef would have succeeded in doing with similar raw meat and vegetables; we can rate the ﬁrst performance of a new piano sonata as wonderful, without listening to other performances of it by pianists of higher repute. At this point a complication needs to be recognized and dealt with. Many theists hold that if God had not brought anything into existence at all, then the actual world, containing only necessary states of affairs and contingent ones involving him, would have been good enough. Presumably then they will say that whatever creative actions God took, if they did not involve bringing about bad states of affairs, then the resulting world would be good enough—for example, God might have merely brought into existence, ex nihilo, a few stars, which shone until they burned out. Rowe would reject these claims. In order to circumvent this dispute I propose, for the sake of argument, to suppose that if God exists and there are no prime worlds then he will create some world such that it contains states of affairs involving created entities, these states of affairs (considered in abstraction from their relations to God) are collectively very good, and the whole consisting of these states of affairs is not disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. Then I will adopt a convention, for the rest of this chapter, licensing talk of a world as good enough when what is under discussion is whether it contains states of affairs which involve created entities and which fulﬁll the three conditions stated in the preceding sentence.¹⁶ ¹⁶ Cf. Section 2.1.3, n. 5

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How good does a world have to be to be good enough, relative to the choice situation speciﬁed? Here is a sufﬁcient condition: when an agent is selecting a world to be created from an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better candidates, a world is good enough if it is non-disappointing in the light of the values that underlie the ranking of worlds, and moreover is abundantly better than those worlds that only just barely escape the accusation that they are disappointing.¹⁷ Can God Be Free? yields grounds for thinking that Rowe would object to the last few paragraphs, along the following lines.¹⁸ Let us compare two hypothetical agents Alice and Beryl, each of whom, in different possible worlds, is faced with the task of selecting a world to be created from an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better candidates, and each of whom adopts the following policy: I will satisﬁce, and moreover I will choose in a great-hearted manner, and so select a world which is abundantly better than any world which is just barely non-disappointing. The difference between Beryl and Alice is that Beryl rules out of further consideration worlds that Alice is quite prepared to regard as living options, because Beryl has a much higher standard than Alice ¹⁷ At p.125 Rowe considers a being who creates a world W100 from an inﬁnite series of increasingly better worlds. Such a being, Rowe says, could instead have created a world a billion times better than W100. Surely there might be a being whose goodness simply would not let him create W100 when there was this superior alternative option. If so, then the being who creates W100 is not absolutely perfect. The last few paragraphs form the basis for a reply to Rowe. Furthermore, it is at best very risky to assume that if a creator faces an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better creatable worlds then in selecting one of them he declines worlds a billion times better than the one he chooses. If there is an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better worlds, it may nevertheless be that these worlds cannot sensibly be regarded as themselves possessing quantitative values, even fuzzy ones, and if the worlds do possess quantitative values, these values may converge on some ﬁnite limit. (Rowe ignores these epistemic possibilities when he says on his p. 135: ‘In the [inﬁnite] series of increasingly better worlds . . . each world logically could be better than a world below it by the same degree or amount’.) In the former case, no world will be a billion times better than any other; in the latter case, if the value of the selected world is close to the limit then it may be that no world is a billion times better than it. (Of course even if most or all worlds lack quantitative values some worlds may be a billion places above V in the ranking, and it might be appropriate to say that these worlds are very much better than V.) ¹⁸ Cf. Rowe’s response to Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder’s views on his pp.92–8, and his principle III∗ and assumption A3, which he states on his pp. 115 and 119 respectively and employs in his discussion of W. J. Wainwright’s paper ‘Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe and the Necessity of Creation’. (Rowe’s and Wainwright’s pieces are both to be found in Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), Faith, Freedom and Rationality (Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1996).)

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of what is required by great-heartedness, and of what should count as being abundantly better than the minimally and near minimally non-disappointing. Surely, the objector declares in support of Rowe, our moral theory should deliver the verdict that in virtue of Beryl’s higher standards and the accompanying choice-disposition Beryl has a better moral character than Alice; and furthermore, given that Alice’s choice of a world is classiﬁed as morally inferior by what we ourselves describe as the higher moral standards of Beryl, we should regard Alice’s choice of a world as morally inferior to various alternative choices. The example can be reiterated, since for every possible agent there will be another who has much higher standards pertaining to great-heartedness, and to what should count as being abundantly better than barely non-disappointing. Hence for every possible agent faced with the task of selecting a world to be created from an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better candidates, there is another possible agent who faced with a similar task makes a morally better choice and who has a better moral character. Hence the account given in Section 3.3 is mistaken. Here is some parallel reasoning concerning self-interested choice in the longevity example. Suppose that you have chosen a number of days. Someone now alleges that your standards of what counts as a good enough life, and the dispositions which have led you to hold those standards, have led to a less rational choice of a number of days than alternative standards and dispositions that you might have possessed, and reﬂect a less rational practical intellect. Indeed, it is alleged, not only has this in fact happened; it had to happen, because whatever speciﬁc standards you might have held, there would have been others which it would have been more rational to hold. Hence, even if relative to those standards you actually hold your choice of number of days was at least as rational as any other, your choice was not, all-thing-considered, as rational as a choice of this or that larger number would have been. It is plain that there is an error somewhere here. As Section 3.3 argued, the view that for every number there is another number which it is more rational for you to choose should be recognized (in the light of plausible general principles of decision theory) to be inconsistent with the manifest truth that, having received the superior being’s offer, practical reason requires you to choose some number. Hence the last sentence of the preceding paragraph, and so the reasoning that led up to it, should be rejected,

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But where, speciﬁcally, does the reasoning go wrong? Well, for one thing, it is far from clear that there is indeed an inﬁnite series of standards of a good enough life that it is more and more rational for you to hold, as the objector in the longevity example assumes. (The mere fact that one person chooses a higher number than another does not show that they have different standards—that is, different underlying values and criteria for applying those values.) Similarly, in the case of choice between worlds it is far from clear that there is an inﬁnite series of standards of a minimally good enough world that are not only higher and higher in the sense of more and more demanding but are also such that, other things being equal, a person who holds a higher standard has a morally better character than a person who adopts a lower standard. Instead of developing this point further, let us move straight on to the question: Relative to the premiss that there is indeed such an inﬁnite series of standards, what recommendations do our decision theory and value theory jointly deliver about which standards you should hold? They should at least recommend that choosers adopt (or reafﬁrm) some standards of what counts as a non-disappointing life and of what counts as a good enough world, and cultivate some relevant dispositions, rather than, say, choosing at random or in accordance with whatever dispositions the choosers happen to ﬁnd themselves with. If the objectors were to suggest the contrary, then they would not be entitled also to make their various moral claims about Alice, Beryl, and other agents. (C1) and (C2), in Section 3.3, make it plain that our decision theory and value theory should not recommend of each available standard that you not hold it, and of each available disposition that you not cultivate it. Hence, given they should not, for every available standard say that there is at least one alternative which it would be more rational, or better-all-things-considered, to hold. I can now safely reafﬁrm my own conclusions about satisﬁcing by divine and non-divine choosers. 3 . 5 F I N I T E A N D I N F I N I T E C R E ATA B L E H I E R A RC H I E S : I M P L I C AT I O N S F O R ROW E Although my main criticisms of the Entailment Thesis are now complete, it is worth drawing attention to one other consideration that Rowe should ﬁnd awkward. It becomes apparent in the context of the supposition, which Rowe would ﬁnd it hard to rule out, that God is

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faced with some creatable hierarchies containing prime members, and some creatable hierarchies without them. Let V be a prime member of some creatable hierarchy, and let W be a good member of some hierarchy that lacks prime worlds. Surely, other things being equal, God will be indifferent between creating V and creating W. After all, V is incommensurable with W. It might be objected that if God creates W then he acts in such a way that he has better reason for creating some other world instead, whereas if he creates V then this is not the case. Now it is true that in general if some world W∗ is better than W then this constitutes a reason for actualizing W∗ instead of W. But in the context of God’s speciﬁc overall choice situation, W ∗ is better than W does not entail God has better reasons, all-things-considered, for actualizing W ∗ : that the former does not entail the latter follows from the truth, for which Section 3.3 argued, that in this context W ∗ is better than W does not entail It would be more rational, all-things-considered, to create W. Hence the ﬁrst premiss of the objection is erroneous. God should indeed be indifferent between actualizing V and actualizing W. An especially interesting point emerges from the previous paragraph. Rowe is committed to saying that God’s being morally perfect is compatible with God’s creating V but is incompatible with God’s creating W. Hence Rowe is committed to the view that God should rank creating V higher amongst his options than creating W, even though V and W themselves are incommensurable in value. Plainly, this view is incompatible with maximizing act-consequentialism. Hence given the assumption that some creatable hierarchies contain prime members and some do not, Rowe cannot invoke the truth of maximizing act-consequentialism in any argument he might appeal to in direct support of Principle B, or in support of (2b) or (3a).¹⁹ Moreover the view that an agent may rank one candidate action higher than another even though their respective total causal consequences are incommensurable is incompatible with both Rowe’s (3a), which ¹⁹ I do not assert that Principle B entails act-consequentialism. Nor do I assert that Rowe himself is a maximizing act-consequentialist. After all, he recognizes the existence of supererogatory acts (Can God be Free?, p. 82). Of course it might be argued that my longevity example provides a strong objection to all varieties of consequentialism that rank one action as better than another if and only if its causal consequences are better overall. I need not press this suggestion here, but rest with the point that Rowe will have to work hard before he is in a position to use any such variety of consequentialism to lend plausibility to Principle B.

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constitutes the major premiss of Rowe’s second argument in direct support of the entailment thesis, and also Principle B. It is hard to see how Rowe can rule out its being true that some creatable hierarchies contain prime members and some do not.

3 . 6 OT H E R R E C E N T S U P P O RT E R S O F T H E E N TA I L M E N T T H E S I S

3.6.1 Erik Van Wielenberg Conclusions similar to Rowe’s, supported by fairly similar reasoning, have been advanced in several other recent publications.²⁰ Amongst the best of these presentations is Erik Van Wielenberg’s. I will not summarize the whole of his paper, but will conﬁne myself to his case for his crucial premiss (P ), which says: (P ) Necessarily, if x is essentially omnipotent and omniscient and creates some world or other, and x is a morally unsurpassable agent in every world in which he exists, then x creates some world W such that W is not surpassable for x.²¹ He points out that (P ) and the proposition For each world which God can create there is a better world he can create jointly entail There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, morally unsurpassable being.²² Since (P ) is necessarily true if it is true at all, a successful argument in favour of (P ) will establish that For each world which God can create there is a better world he can create entails There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, morally unsurpassable being, which is very close in content to Rowe’s Entailment Principle. Van Wielenberg offers us two arguments for (P ). To facilitate evaluation of these arguments I should introduce two items of his technical terminology. A non-Hurka virtue is (in contrast to typical ²⁰ For example, Steven Grover, ‘Why Only the Best Is Good Enough’, Analysis, 48 (1988), 224; Jeff Jordan, ‘The Problem of Divine Exclusivity’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 33 (1993), 92f; Steven Grover, ‘Rival Creator Arguments and the Best of All Possible Worlds’, Sophia, 43/1 (2004), 101–14; and Erik Van Wielenberg, ‘A Morally Unsurpassable God Must Create the Best’, Religious Studies, 40 (2004), 43–62. ²¹ Van Wielenberg, ‘God Must Create the Best’, p. 44. The version of (P) I have given is a close paraphrase of Van Wielenberg’s own words. ²² Ibid. 58.

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virtues) one which does not involve a disposition to pursue intrinsic value states in proportion to their degree of intrinsic value. Agent x faces a Hurka-conﬂict in situation S if and only if there is some non-Hurka virtue V such that if x acts in accordance with V in S, then x pursues intrinsically valuable states less proportionally than x could otherwise. Both arguments for (P ) share the following premiss: x is a morally unsurpassable agent in world W if and only if it is not the case that there is some world W∗ and some agent y such that y in W∗ is more disposed to pursue intrinsically valuable states proportionally when not facing a Hurka-conﬂict than x is in W.²³ I can explain why Van Wielenberg’s ﬁrst argument for (P ) should be rejected by stating the following key piece of reasoning: Consider worlds W and W∗ such that in W there exists an essentially omnipotent and omniscient being A who chooses to create W, and in world W∗ there exists a similar being B who chooses to create W∗ , where W is better than V. Suppose that A and B are choosing from amongst the very same worlds as each other. It follows that B is (in W∗ ) more disposed to pursue intrinsically valuable states proportionally than is A (in W).²⁴ Therefore, unless either A or B faces a Hurka-conﬂict, A is not a morally unsurpassable agent in every world in which A exists.²⁵ The supposition that A and B are choosing from amongst the very same worlds as each other is, however, inadmissible. It is logically possible for A to create a speciﬁc world only if it contains A’s creating it, while it is logically possible for B to create a speciﬁc world only if it contains B’s creating it. Given that there is no world which contains Both A and B’s creating it, it follows that A cannot create any worlds which B can create, and vice versa.²⁶ I will not pause to consider whether Van Wielenberg’s argument can be repaired, since it is likely that the ²³ van Wielenberg, 48; y can, but need not, be identical with x. ²⁴ If V and W do not have quantitative values, then ‘proportionally’ will not have its usual mathematical meaning. Presumably Van Wielenberg would say that in such cases agents can be said to choose proportionally if and only if given a choice between two outcomes one of which is better than the other, they always choose the better outcome. ²⁵ This is a close paraphrase of sentences occurring on Van Wielenberg’s pp. 48–9. ²⁶ In Section 3.4 I considered two hypothetical agents Alice and Beryl each of whom, in different possible worlds, is faced with the task of selecting a world to be created from an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better candidates. Their task description did not imply that any of the worlds constituting options for Alice were options for Beryl, or vice versa.

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criticisms I will make of Van Wielenberg’s second argument for (P ) would apply also to any repaired version of the ﬁrst argument. The second argument for (P ) proceeds as follows: Consider a single candidate creator A, who is essentially omnipotent and omniscient. Suppose that A selects for creation some world W such that W is surpassable for A. This implies that there is a better world W∗ which A can create and in which A is otherwise disposed exactly as he is in W. In W∗ A creates W∗ . It follows that A is more disposed to pursue intrinsically valuable states proportionally in W∗ than A is in W. Hence unless A faces a Hurka-conﬂict in selecting which world to create, A is not a morally unsurpassable agent in W. Now necessarily, if x is an essentially omnipotent and omniscient creator, and is a morally unsurpassable agent in every world in which x exists, then x does not face a Hurka-conﬂict in deciding which world to create. Therefore A is not a morally unsurpassable agent in W.²⁷ In my view the foregoing reasoning fails because it does not include qualiﬁcations required to accommodate the epistemic possibility that there is an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better worlds available for choice. Van Wielenberg, however, accepts the unqualiﬁed reasoning and says that if whichever world A chooses there will be some better world A could have chosen, then whichever world A chooses A could have been more disposed to pursue intrinsic value states proportionally than A is, and is therefore not morally unsurpassable. For reasons explained in Sections 3.3 and 3.4, our moral theory should declare that if there is an inﬁnite hierarchy of better and better worlds available for choice, then choosers such as Van Wielenberg’s A should satisﬁce. It should say that choosers should hold some standards of what counts as a good enough world, and cultivate some relevant choicedispositions, rather than, say, choosing at random or in accordance with whatever dispositions the choosers happen to ﬁnd themselves with. Therefore our moral theory should not recommend of each available standard that the chooser not hold it, and of each available choicedisposition that the chooser not cultivate it. Hence it should not say, for every available choice-disposition, that it is morally inferior to some other. ²⁷ This is a close paraphrase of sentences occurring on Van Wielenberg’s p.49.

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3.6.2 J. H. Sobel The arguments presented in Section 3.3 sufﬁce to dispose of J. H. Sobel’s recent treatment of the Entailment Thesis.²⁸ In relation speciﬁcally to the argument on his p. 473, two comments are worth explicitly making. The ﬁrst concerns Sobel’s premiss (xiii): For any choosing beings X and Y, if S , the set of exactly the items X can choose, is a subset of S, the set of exactly the items Y can choose, and X and Y agree in their preferences for items in S , then if the object of a rational choice by Y from S is in S , it is identical with the object of rational choice by X in S . This principle is correct if rational choice means rationally required choice, but not if it means rationally permitted choice or rationally non-inferior choice.²⁹ In supposing that the particular world which happens to be the actual world was the object of a rational choice by God, Sobel must surely have the latter in mind—for he did not even attempt to exclude there being worlds that tied with this world. Here is a counter-example to Sobel’s premiss (xiii), so understood. X and Y are altruists, choosing on behalf of some child of whom they are joint guardians. A superior being has offered to prolong the child’s life by a ﬁnite number of good days, with the number of days to be chosen by X and Y. Y may choose any natural number, while X may choose only even numbers. They are to deliberate separately, and give their choices separately to the being, who will average the numbers chosen, rounding upwards, if necessary, to the nearest whole number. Here the set of items that X can choose is a subset of items that Y can choose, and X and Y rank the numbers in the same order of preference. Let us suppose that X chooses an even number, as required, and that Y also happens to choose an even number, but a different one. Section 3.3 argued, in effect, that X and Y are both acting in a rationally permissible and non-inferior manner if they satisﬁce. It is not at all surprising, or an indication of some ﬂaw in their ways of choosing, that X and Y should choose different even numbers. Hence we should reject (xiii). ²⁸ J. H. Sobel, Logic and Theism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 470–3. ²⁹ My agreement even under the ﬁrst interpretation is subject to the remedying of an elementary defect. X and Y may surely choose different items that are ranked equally or are members of different, incommensurable hierarchies of options. Hence the antecedent of (xiii) should include the clause If for each pair of items of objects of rational choice, either a is preferred to b or b is preferred to a . . .

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Of course the foregoing is not a knock-down argument against Sobel. He might reply: ‘Your argument in favour of satisﬁcing was based on your three conditions (C1), (C2), (C3). I am a lot more conﬁdent that my premiss (xiii) is true than I am that your (C1), (C2), and (C3) are all true. So I am freed to regard your counter-example as spurious’. This dispute does not come down simply to different people having different intuitions or gut feelings. The issue is whether (C1), (C2), and (C3) are all more deeply entrenched in, less dispensable to, rational decision theory, than (xiii) is. Here is my second comment on Sobel’s argument on p. 473. Let ‘Alpha’ rigidly designate the particular world which is in fact actual. The ‘somewhat perfect being’ could not have created Alpha. For even though the somewhat perfect being could have existed in some world, which therefore would have been actual, it is essential to Alpha that it contains the state of affair Alpha’s being created by the perfect being rather than by the somewhat perfect being. Similarly, if it is true in world Beta that the somewhat perfect being creates Beta, then God could not have. Therefore the worlds which the somewhat perfect being could have chosen to be actual are not a subset of those that the perfect being could have chosen to be actual—contrary to the antecedent of Sobel’s premiss (xiii). So even if premiss (xiii) were true, the argument would still fail. I conclude that we should reject the view that There are no prime worlds and If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being then he creates some world jointly entail There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being.

4 World Creation when there are Prime Worlds 4 . 1 P R I M E AC T UA L LY A N D B E T T E R O U TC O M E / AC T I O N Section 3.1 pointed out that in studying what kind of world God will create if he creates some world or other, there are three epistemic possibilities to consider: (1) There are one or more creatable hierarchies and none of them has a prime member. (2) There are one or more creatable hierarchies and each of them has at least one prime member. (3) There are at least two creatable hierarchies and at least one of them has prime members while at least one does not. The preceding chapter dealt with the ﬁrst of these possibilities. Sections 4.2–4.8 address a sub-case of the second, in which there is exactly one prime creatable hierarchy and it has a prime member. Section 4.9 tackles the third possibility. Section 4.10 deals with another sub-case of the second possibility, in which there are several creatable hierarchies and all of them have at least one prime member. Section 4.11 draws some important additional conclusions from the discussion in Chapters 2–4. Sections 4.2–4.8 support the following claim—call it Prime Actually: It is logically necessary that if God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, and there is exactly one creatable hierarchy and it has at least one prime member and God creates a world, then God creates a prime world.¹ ¹ In this chapter, as usual, the description ‘omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good’ should be regarded as tacitly present when God is discussed. Sections 1.8 and 1.9 dealt with the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience.

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Here are two lines of thought in its favour: The appeal to God’s rationality. If God is perfectly good then he creates no world such that he has better reasons all-things-considered for creating some other world instead; and if a creatable hierarchy has both prime and non-prime members then God always has better reasons all-things-considered for creating a prime rather than a nonprime member and would be acting more rationally if he created a prime member. The appeal to God’s moral unsurpassability. God’s perfect goodness involves more than his doing nothing morally wrong and having no defects of character. It must also be the case that there is no world in which there is a being x (God himself, or some other being) such that x is a morally better agent in that world than God is in the actual world. Now if all creatable hierarchies contain at least one prime member and God creates a non-prime world, then God does not act in the best way that he can, morally speaking, and therefore does not act in the best way that he can all-things-considered, and so it is possible that there is an agent who is better than God is in the actual world; namely, an agent who creates a prime world. So if all creatable hierarchies contain at least one prime member and God is perfectly good and God creates a world then God creates a prime world.² The trouble with these two lines of thought is that they are mere argument sketches. Let me develop the point by concentrating on the appeal to moral unsurpassability. Consider a human agent, Emily, who brings about a state of affairs x, thereby passing over the option of bringing about a better state of affairs y. Utilitarians and other maximizing act-consequentialists will say that Emily would have acted in a morally better way if she had brought about y. They might well hesitate about inferring that she would have been a morally better person. The complexities of utilitarian accounts of moral virtue leave room for there being special situations in which the less virtuous of two people will be the one more likely to perform the right action. Rule-consequentialists and ² A similar argument is advanced by Philip L. Quinn, ‘God, Moral Perfection and Possible Worlds’, in F. Sontag and M. D. Bryant (eds.), God: The Contemporary Discussion (Rose of Sharon, 1982), 212f. It is endorsed by William Rowe, ‘The Problem of Divine Perfection and Freedom’, in Eleonore Stump (ed.), Reasoned Faith (Cornell University Press, 1993), 228f, and by Jeff Jordan, ‘The Problem of Divine Exclusivity’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 33 (1993), 93.

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non-consequentialists will be even more doubtful. They will list many possible reasons why Emily may have done the morally better deed, acted more virtuously, and done what she had the best reasons for doing, in bringing about x. Now there are many apparently relevant differences between Emily and God. So it may well turn out that God always has better reasons for creating a prime member of a creatable hierarchy than for creating any of its other members. It may well turn out that if God creates a prime member then he acts in a morally better way, and is himself morally better, than he would be if he created a non-prime world. These claims, however, need argument. That argument is not supplied in the appeals to God’s rationality and moral unsurpassability as set forth above. An illuminating argument for Prime Actually can be constructed using the following principle—call it Better Outcome/Action: Other things being equal, in bringing about the better overall outcome one acts in the better way. In a speciﬁc case the conclusion that one acted in the better way can be defeated by various circumstances. (At least, this is what philosophers who reject maximizing act-consequentialism will say.) The existence of defeaters for Better Outcome/Action implies that in some cases the inferior action has better consequences than the better action. I will argue that if all creatable hierarchies have prime members, and God is choosing between a prime and a non-prime world, it is implausible that any of the defeating circumstances obtains. Better Outcome/Action is distinct from: Other things being equal, one has a moral duty to bring about the best overall state of affairs that one can. Our question concerns not the scope of God’s moral duties but the implications of his perfect goodness. Let us examine the defeaters that are most often involved with Better Outcome/Action, and see whether any of them apply to God’s choosing between a prime and a non-prime member of some creatable hierarchy. Since Prime Actually is either necessarily true or necessarily false, counter-examples to it need be only logically possible cases.

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4 . 2 R I S K O F S E R I O U S LO S S We can quickly dismiss the ﬁrst candidate defeater, that an action which in fact succeeded in bringing about the better state of affairs may have involved an unacceptable risk of a net overall result which is very bad, or at least signiﬁcantly inferior to a state of affairs which would have been secured by aiming slightly lower. We are supposing that God will create some world or other, and is therefore choosing between creatable worlds. Now all creatable worlds are worlds in which God exercises tight providential control. (Proof: Consider any world W that does not include God’s exercising tight providential control in W. Since W is all-inclusive, it follows via the law of excluded middle that W includes God’s not exercising tight control in W. Hence God creates W entails God does not exercise tight control in W. Hence God creates W entails God creates W and God does not create W. Since the states of affairs that are included in a world are necessarily included in it, it follows that it is logically impossible that God create W. Hence God cannot create W.³) Since all creatable worlds are worlds in which God exercises tight providential control, whichever world God creates he takes no risks.

4 . 3 OV E R R I D I N G M O R A L D U T I E S Agents sometimes have a moral duty to bring about the inferior state of affairs, or (for some other reason) a moral duty not to bring about the better state of affairs.⁴ What about God? This section argues that necessarily ³ Here is as good a place as any to point out that while God can create a world W only if W includes God’s creating W, if W includes God’s creating W then this fact establishes merely that it is logically possible that God create W. Even so, if there are contingent limits on God’s power, then God may be unable to create W. ⁴ T. Morris, ‘Duty and Divine Goodness’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 21 (1984), believes that since God is essentially good and so could not violate his moral duties if he had any, he has none. But Morris believes that God necessarily ‘acts in accordance with those principles which express duties for a moral agent in his relevant circumstances’. Would a proposed action’s inconsistency with such a principle constitute a defeater for God’s bringing about a state of affairs in accordance with Better Outcome/Action? The arguments of Section 4.3 can easily be adapted to show that

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if a creatable hierarchy contains some good world V that God can create without violating any moral duty, then it will contain no world, better than V, which God can create only if he violates a moral duty. If God creates a world W then W itself contains the state of affairs God’s creating W. If God has a moral duty not to create some state of affairs included in W, and if God’s creating W is included in W, then the state of affairs God’s violating a moral duty, along with more speciﬁc states of affairs such as God’s telling a lie or God’s unjustly punishing someone, are also included in W. Now if God is essentially morally good, these constituent states of affairs are logically impossible, and therefore W is not a possible world after all; so there is no world W such that God creates W only if he violates a moral duty. And if, instead, God is contingently morally good, then W is possible but God is not perfectly good in W. Surely God’s being less than perfectly good, and telling a lie (or whatever), must involve such a gigantic loss of value that W cannot be as good as a good world which includes God’s creating the world and which God has no moral duty not to create. (Call this last consideration the loss-of-value argument.) Some value theorists will reject the loss-of-value argument—hedonists, for example. But philosophers who take theism seriously should ﬁnd it persuasive. Contrast God with Jim in Bernard Williams’s well-known example.⁵ Jim is offered a choice about the fate of twenty innocent Indians captured by some South American soldiers: either Jim kills one Indian and the other nineteen go free, or else Jim refuses to kill and all twenty Indians are killed by the soldiers. Although most deontologists will say that Jim ought not to shoot an Indian, they can all agree that the state of affairs in which Jim shoots one and the other nineteen go free is better than the state of affairs in which he refuses and the soldiers shoot all twenty—after all, Williams constructed the example as part of an objection to utilitarianism. Deontologists think that the prohibition against murder operates as a side constraint on Jim’s actions. Now Jim is a human being, and no doubt already a sinner; if he commits an additional injustice, the heavens will not fall. But God is different. God’s perfect goodness is to be understood in such a way as to imply that in the actual world God has greater goodness-for-his-own sake than any acting in accordance with the relevant principles would never lead God to refrain from creating a prime world. ⁵ J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973), 98f.

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other possible being or possible collection of beings. And a vital part of his perfect goodness is his ﬂawless moral goodness. Accordingly, an omnipotent, omniscient being who was morally ﬂawed might be very admirable, but would not be worthy of religious worship, and would have far less goodness-for-his-own-sake than God has in the actual world. Hence it is hard to see how the additional good to be gained by God’s violating a moral duty could ever outweigh the good that would thereby be lost. Accordingly, the loss-of-value argument is vindicated. For any world in which God violates a moral duty, there is a better world in which he does not do so. Therefore no prime world could be such that God had a moral duty not to strongly or weakly actualize some state of affairs included in it, and so not to create the world itself. 4.4 THE LESS GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH It might be suggested: God can remain morally perfect and completely rational in creating a non-prime world V rather than a prime member W of the same creatable hierarchy, because the wholly satisfactory nature of V defeats the inference from W is better than V to Creating W is a better action than creating V. Even maximizers can agree that there are circumstances in which moderation in the pursuit of the good is rational and consistent with virtue, while dissatisfaction with what is entirely satisfactory—with what would be entirely satisfying if it were not for the option of taking the better—is less than admirable. For example, conducting a prolonged hunt for the best birthday card to send to a friend, when you have already found one which is entirely adequate given the nature of the friendship, is not typically something you have good reasons all-things-considered to do. Mozart must have ﬁnished work on some of his pieces to be performed while knowing that they were not up to the standard of his ﬁnest work, and this is a good thing: a refusal to do so would perhaps have been a sign of hubris, and of a lack of wisdom in setting his goals. But here, maximizers will hasten to add, ﬁnding and buying the best birthday card you can obtain, and ensuring that this sonata-inprogress turns out to be the very best ﬁnished work of which you are capable, do not involve bringing about the best overall state of affairs, all-things-considered, that you can. You stop looking at more birthday cards because you have good reason to stop: you have better things to do with your time, and you do not want to become a perfectionist about

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matters concerning which the quest for perfection is silly. Your seeking and obtaining the better birthday card, the better holiday, or the better school for your child need not have the better overall outcome, taking into account all the causal and non-causal consequences of your actions. In contrast, it is logically necessary that creating the better world has a better overall outcome than creating the inferior world. Later sections will deal with cases in which you avoid what will maximize the good, in order to remain loyal to some friend, or to indulge some taste, and you partly defend your doing so by saying that the overall outcome will be good enough. Right now the issue is whether even if you know that outcome y would be better than outcome x, and you have no other good reasons (such as reasons based on loyalties or personal tastes) for preferring to bring about x, you might nevertheless classify x as ‘good enough’ and bring it about, without thereby acting defectively with respect to rationality or moral goodness. We need not be consequentialists to answer ‘No’. Surely, given that • • • • • • •

y is better than x and y is better than x is at least a prima facie reason for preferring to bring about y rather than x and x is good enough is, ex hypothesi, not a prima facie reason for preferring to bring about x rather than y and you have no other good reasons for preferring to bring about x and y and x are not members of an inﬁnite set of better and better candidate outcomes and other things are equal and you know the foregoing

we should conclude that you would be more rational to bring about y than to bring about x, and that your bringing about y is a better action, all-things-considered, than your bringing about x. It may seem odd to declare that if a creatable hierarchy H lacks prime members then the inference from V and W are members of H and W is a better world than V. to God’s creating W would be a better action than his creating V. is defeated by the premiss V is good enough, though if H has prime members then the inference is not so defeated, whether or not W is itself prime.

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Indeed, it would be odd. But the declaration is not one that I myself am committed to making. Consistently with what I say about satisﬁcing in Section 3.3, what I maintain, instead, is that the inference from V and W are members of creatable hierarchy H and W is a better world than V. to God’s creating W would be a better action than his creating V. is defeated by the premiss There is one creatable hierarchy, and it lacks prime members, and V is good enough, and failure to create any world would have led to an outcome which is far inferior to God’s creating some world which is good enough. even though the same inference is not defeated by the premiss There is one creatable hierarchy, and it has at least one prime member, and V is good enough.⁶ In many circumstances moderation in the pursuit of the good is a virtue, and dissatisfaction with what would be entirely satisfying if it were not for the option of taking the better is less than admirable. But if God is choosing between a non-prime world V and a prime world W, he does not ﬁnd himself in such a situation. The loss-of-value argument (advanced in Section 4.3) suggests that there is no prime world in which God’s attitudes and choices are less than admirable. 4 . 5 C O N T I N G E N T D E S I R E S A N D U N D E R LY I N G PE R S O N A L I T Y T R A I TS Leibniz held that although it is contingent that God chooses the best, God is pleased by things in direct proportion to their ‘prior’ goodness—that is, goodness they possess as possible beings, prior to his ⁶ Section 4.10 enables this point to be extended. The inference from V and W are members of H and W is a better world than V to God’s creating W would be a better action than his creating V is defeated by the premiss All creatable hierarchies lack prime members and V is good enough and failure to create any world would have led to an outcome which is far inferior to his creating some world which is good enough even though the same inference is not defeated by the premiss All creatable hierarchies have at least one prime member and V is good enough.

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being pleased by them.⁷ Some philosophers would object that this view erodes God’s standing as a genuinely personal agent, making him sound like an intelligent robot whose function or raison d’être is to discover what constitutes the best all-things-considered, independently of what he himself prefers, and bring it about. We should instead suppose, they would insist, that God has his own contingent character traits superimposed on the comparatively abstract attribute perfect goodness, and his own contingent unmotivated desires: we should suppose God possesses at least some of them prior to making his providential decisions, and that these contingent features play a role in generating his decisions.⁸ This view is controversial. It conﬂicts, for example, with the widespread doctrine that all God’s real properties are ones that he has necessarily, and that although the predicate ‘loving Jacob rather than Esau’ is contingently true of God, God does not possess the real property loving Jacob rather than Esau—in which case God’s loving Jacob rather than Esau can hardly possess metaphysical, causal, or explanatory priority to God’s timeless or everlastingly past providential decisions. Awkward questions arise concerning whether God has strongly actualized, weakly actualized, or neither strongly nor weakly actualized these contingent states of himself. If we suppose that God lacks contingent character traits and desires, then we do not need to consider whether they give rise to a defeater for Better Outcome/Action in God’s choice situation. So let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that God does have contingent character traits and desires. This assumption is consistent with Prime Actually. To see this, consider which state of affairs would be better: your now having a cup of tea, or your now skipping tea? Suppose that having a cup of tea will not damage your health, prevent your fulﬁlling a duty, or inconvenience anyone else. Then which state of affairs would be better depends mainly on what you would like to do, and on what you would enjoy more. Furthermore, we sometimes ﬁnd ourselves in situations in which we are faced with a choice between bringing about A and bringing about B, where A is neither superior nor inferior to B, and we choose to bring ⁷ G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy (1710), ed. A. Farrer (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 183. William Hasker agrees: ‘God will not have a non-rational attachment to some one value in preference to other, objectively greater values’ (Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (Routledge, 2004), 180). ⁸ The concept of an unmotivated desire is explained by Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton University Press, 1970), 29.

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about A because doing so better expresses our freely chosen lifestyle, better reﬂects our love for some mode of culture, or for some landscape, or perhaps advances a big project to which we have already devoted a lot of time and emotional energy. But in these situations our better expressing our lifestyle, etc. is itself a non-causal consequence of our choice. In choosing to bring about A we bring about more than A, and this fact must be taken into account when we decide what to do. Given our working assumption that God has contingent character traits and desires, for many pairs of states of affairs, x and y, whether x is better than y surely depends partly or entirely on them. So perhaps God’s acting on his own tastes and what he ﬁnds interesting, and so bringing about x rather than y, never involves his departing from bringing about the better state of affairs. Hence Prime Actually may be true, while whether a world is prime may depend partly on God’s contingent tastes and desires. Although the points made in the last three paragraphs are important, they do not resolve the main issue, whether Prime Actually is true. Let us assume that, for some V and W, its being the case that W is prime and V non-prime depends on God’s personal preferences in V and W. The question remains whether God’s choice between the two worlds is settled by the fact that W is better than V and God can create W. Many philosophers believe that there exists what Samuel Schefﬂer calls an ‘agent-centred prerogative’ according to which it is often morally permissible for agents to depart from the course of action that will produce the best available overall outcome, as judged from an ‘agentneutral’ standpoint, in order to indulge their own tastes, pursue their own projects, and act in harmony with their own desired lifestyles.⁹ Notice that even if agent-centred rankings of outcomes need to be taken into account as well as agent-neutral ones when observers assess the moral status of actions, the resulting judgement is itself made from an agent-neutral standpoint. To see this, consider cases in which outcome A is better than outcome B, taking into account all relevant considerations including the agent’s tastes and preferences, but it is the agent’s moral duty (arising from a prior promise, say) to bring about B rather than A. The agent who brings about B out of respect for his or her duty is acting on an agent-centred reason. This is consistent with ⁹ Samuel Schefﬂer, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Clarendon, 1982).

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impartial spectators’ recognizing that the agent is acting rightly, and performing the morally best action, in bringing about B. We need, however, to distinguish two different claims about the force of agent-centred prerogatives: The weaker claim: Agent-centred prerogatives sometimes make it morally and rationally permissible to perform an action which will have inferior total consequences, as judged in agent-neutral terms. The stronger claim: Agent-centred prerogatives sometimes make doing what will have inferior total consequences at least as morally good and as rational an action as doing what will have the better total consequences. Schefﬂer himself advanced only the weaker claim.¹⁰ The candidate defeater for Better Outcome/Action, however, rests on the stronger claim. I am not aware of any good arguments in favour of the stronger claim. It is not logically possible that there is a pair of creatable worlds, V and W, such that given God’s relevant agent-centred reasons God’s creating V is a morally better action, or one that it is more rational for God to perform, than God’s creating W, even though W remains the better world, as judged from an agent-neutral standpoint. For if there were such a pair, then W would contain the state of affairs God’s creating W even though it was true in W that creating V would have been the morally better, or more rational, action for God to perform. But, necessarily, a perfectly good being never performs an action when he knows that it would be morally better or more rational for him to perform some contrary action instead. So in W God would not be perfectly good. But if God is essentially perfectly good, there can be no such world, and if he is contingently perfectly good then the loss-of-value argument renders it doubtful that W can really be better than V. Perhaps, it might be thought, God has opposing prima facie reasons which wholly cancel each other out. In favour of creating a prime world W is the fact that W is the better world; in favour of creating a non-prime world V is that God’s creating V ﬁts in better with agent-relative considerations bound up with tastes, desires, and so on which God possesses before reaching his decisions.¹¹ If so then God’s ¹⁰ Samuel Schefﬂer, 14, 17 ff. ¹¹ The second reason might be expanded to include the fact that V contains at least an ‘acceptable’ level of net goodness.

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tastes and desires are taken into account in two quite different ways: they contribute to settling which is the better world, and they have a further role in helping to settle whether God has better reasons allthings-considered to create one world rather than the other, and if so which one. The result is either that all-things-considered the reasons for creating V are exactly as strong as the reasons for creating W, and so God’s creating W is as morally good and rational good an action as God’s creating V. If so then we have a counter-example to Prime Actually, since plainly in the circumstances described there would be no guarantee that God would create the prime world rather than the non-prime world. Since Prime Actually is either necessarily true or necessarily false, counter-examples need be merely logically possible cases. Let P be the proposition: It is logically possible that there be a creatable hierarchy containing a pair of creatable worlds, V and W, such that V is non-prime and W is prime and, in virtue of God’s contingent desires and underlying personality traits, God’s reasons in favour of creating V are not inferior to his reasons for creating W. Is there some kind of general presumption in favour of P? Anyone who thinks so needs to explain why there is not also some kind of general presumption in favour of the following proposition (Q): It is logically necessary that if there is a creatable hierarchy containing a pair of creatable worlds, V and W, such that V is non-prime and W is prime and, in virtue of God’s contingent desires and underlying personality traits, God’s reasons in favour of creating V are just as good as his reasons for creating W, then that hierarchy also contains another prime world U which ﬁts in better than V (though not better than W) does with God’s contingent preferences and underlying personality traits and which God accordingly has better reasons to create than he has for creating V. If Q is true then P does not defeat the presumption identiﬁed by Better Outcome/Action, in favour of creating a prime world. In fact P and Q are both very unsafe premisses for use in discussion of Better Outcome/Action and Prime Actually. Molinists might offer the following argument in favour of P—call it the limiting-counterfactuals argument. If Molinism is true, surely it is logically possible that God is stuck with an array of true CCFs that generate and limit his options in such a way as to make true the state of affairs whose logical possibility P afﬁrms. After all, many Molinists hold that it is logically possible that the true CCFs did not give God an opportunity to create a world in which everyone always freely acted rightly.

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Molinism will work as a theory of providence only if it involves, in addition to the doctrine that God has taken advantage of suitable CCFs and created the actual world, the doctrine that God had a wide range of options concerning which worlds to create. Molinism will work only if it afﬁrms that God is secure against the existence of many erratic gaps—even random gaps—in the array of true CCFs, creating disturbing and erratic restrictions on his options. The most promising way of supporting these two commitments is to link them together by the thesis that although each CCF is contingently true, it is necessarily the case that the array of true CCFs is sufﬁciently wide, rich, and orderly to give God a great many attractive options concerning the creation of worlds involving free rational creatures. P, however, requires that it be logically possible that the true CCFs drastically limit God’s options in ways that Molinists should ﬁnd unacceptable. For example, suppose that the logical possibility set forth in P is actual, and suppose that in both V and W (related in the way set forth above) God has a friend and a certain situation arises in which the friend needs help; in V God helps the friend while in W he refrains from doing so. Are there no creatable worlds at all in which God has the same friend but prevents the situation of need from arising? And if there are such worlds, are they all inferior to W? Are there no creatable worlds in which God refrains from helping the friend in the relevant situation, but amply compensates the friend afterwards, with the result that the friendship is thereby enriched? And if there are such worlds, are they all inferior to W? How unfortunate for God, to have so few ways forward open to him with regard to this friend! If Molinists concede that these things are logically possible, then they seem to have no way of ruling out its actually being the case that God found himself in just such a situation, and therefore they have hamstrung their overall theory of providence. And if Molinists deny that such things are logically possible, then they thereby have strong reasons for rejecting P. Since Theological Determinists—at least, the compatibilists amongst them—usually hold that God can do more than Molinists think that he can, they have even stronger reasons for rejecting P. The foregoing considerations do not amount to a proof that roles played by God’s contingent personality traits and desires do not yield a counter-example to Prime Actually, but they do amount to a good prima facie case against that conjecture.

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4 . 6 D I V I N E G R AC E A N D B E N E F I C E N C E Robert Merrihew Adams deﬁnes grace as ‘a disposition to love which is not dependent on the merit of the person loved’.¹² He argues that a perfectly good God would or might be gracious, and so might well choose to create and love less excellent creatures than he could have chosen. He infers that such a God might not create the very best world that he could. Now if the inference is to be valid, Adams must by ‘creatures’ mean not only rational creatures such as human beings, but anything that God creates, and he must by ‘world’ mean the totality of created beings —from subatomic particles to galaxy clusters. God could have chosen to bring into existence, and love, beings who collectively constitute a less excellent whole than he could have chosen. So understood, what Adams says seems right. But of course I have throughout this book been using the expression ‘world’ to refer not to possible wholes whose parts are beings but to possible all-inclusive states of affairs. They include not only states of affairs involving rivers, echidnas, and planets but also states of affairs involving God. The truth that God’s perfect goodness is consistent with his bringing into existence, and loving, beings who are individually less excellent, and add up to a less excellent whole, than alternative beings he could have brought into existence does not entail that God’s perfect goodness is consistent with his strongly or weakly actualizing a non-prime all-inclusive state of affairs when he could have strongly or weakly actualized a better, prime one instead. We might try revising Adams’s deﬁnition of grace, and say that God is gracious to people only if God sometimes beneﬁts them on occasions when it would be better, all-things-considered, if he did not do so. It might then be argued as follows: Acting graciously is compatible with perfect goodness. Therefore God’s sometimes beneﬁting people on occasions when it would be better, all-things-considered, if he did not do so is compatible with his perfect goodness. Therefore God’s ¹² Robert Merrihew Adams, ‘Must God Create the Best?’, Philosophical Review, 81 (1972), 317–32; the quotation is from p. 324. Cf. William Wainwright’s assertion that the value of gratuitous love is not a function of the object loved, in his paper ‘Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe and the Necessity of Creation’, in Jeff Jorden and Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), Faith, Freedom, and Rationality (Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1996).

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creating a non-prime member of a creatable hierarchy that also has prime members is compatible with his perfect goodness. The foregoing argument is unsatisfactory. For one thing, why should we adopt the revised deﬁnition of grace, rather than retain Adams’s account? It might be answered that a gracious action is performed for the sake of the person to whom grace is extended, whereas if the agent beneﬁts the person only when it is best, all things considered, to do so then the agent acts rather for the sake of maximizing total goodness. This claim, however, is doubtful. Think about what utilitarian agents will say to the accusation that they cannot rationally act from love. Here, for example, is J. S. Mill: utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in afﬁrming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action¹³

Furthermore, if we do adopt the revised deﬁnition of grace, saying that an agent is gracious towards someone only if the agent is prepared to beneﬁt the person even when doing so would not be best all-things-considered, why should we then accept the premiss that acting graciously in the revised sense is compatible with perfect goodness? Appeal might be made to revelation, but if we look at the great, paradigmatic stories of what the biblical writers regard as divine gracious action (past or promised for the future) it is not at all clear that any of the stories implies that God beneﬁts someone when it would have been better, all-things-considered, if he had not done so. The word ‘grace’ is often applied to the action of welcoming or beneﬁting someone when doing so is motivated by kind-heartedness and goes well beyond the call of duty. Of course the mere fact that in various cases the welcoming and beneﬁting go beyond the call of duty is consistent with their being, in those cases, a necessary condition of perfect goodness. T. J. Mawson rejects Prime Actually in the light of a consideration which concerns beneﬁcence but not grace. According to Mawson, what perfect goodness requires is that God perfectly fulﬁl the demands of love towards his creatures. Hence if God brings into existence a set of creatures then they will live in the best or joint best of all possible worlds ¹³ J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 2; cf. Smart, in Smart and Williams, Utilitarianism, pp. 44–5.

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for this set of creatures, considered as a totality (if there is such a world).¹⁴ I propose for the sake of argument to assume that Mawson’s principle is correct, and to examine whether it constitutes a serious difﬁculty for Prime Actually. Let us simplify the discussion by considering all pairs of worlds such that V and W contain the same creatures, each of the non-human creatures in V is equally well off in W, and each human being in V is better off than he or she is in W. Is there some such pair such that W is prime and V is non-prime? It might be replied: Yes, for amongst the worlds ﬁtting into the ‘W’ slot there will be some with a better distribution of goods amongst the human beings and amongst the other creatures, and also more goods which are not good for any creatures at all, such that these facts more than compensate for the fact that in V each human is better off. It is far from clear that the reply is correct, but let us suppose that it is. Consider then all pairs such that V and W* contain the same creatures, each of the non-human creatures in V is equally well off in W*, each human being in V is better off in V than in W*, and W* has a better distribution than V of goods amongst the human beings and amongst the other creatures, and also has more goods which are not good for any creatures at all. Surely for each such pair there will be some world U such that U and W* contain the same sentient creatures, each of the non-human sentient beings in U is equally well off in W*, and each human being in U is better off than in W*, and U is not inferior to W* with respect to the distribution of goods amongst the human beings and amongst the other creatures, or with respect to goods which are not good for any creatures. I have no proof of this conjecture, but it is prima facie plausible that the description of U is free from contradiction and other sources of logical impossibility. If the conjecture is true then surely U is better than W*, and so W* is not prime. Yet U fulﬁls Mawson’s principle as well as W* does. Hence there will be no possible cases in which there are prime worlds yet God, in order to perfectly fulﬁl the demands of love towards his creatures, must create a non-prime world. Thus Mawson’s account of what God’s goodness requires is compatible with Prime Actually. ¹⁴ T. J. Mawson, Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Clarendon, 2005), 200–5.

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4 . 7 LOY A LT I E S A N D C O M M I T M E N TS Another defeater frequently involved with Better Outcome/Action is bound up with reasons generated by love, friendship, and other bases of loyalty in morally admirable human lives. As I pointed out in Section 1.4.1, if God creates a world, and if God timelessly or omnitemporally possesses comprehensive knowledge, then God’s choice of which world to create is not made in stages, as actual events unfold. His decisions about what will happen do not take into account what has actually happened up to the time of decision. Since his choice of which world to create must take place ‘before’ he has brought anything at all into existence, and thus ‘before’ he has entered into any relationships with people, there is a straightforward sense in which the choice cannot be motivated by loyalty.¹⁵ He cannot take into account reasons for action that are generated by creature-related loyalties and commitments that precede his choice of which world to create, for there are none. God might, however, be motivated by an unmotivated desire to have a friend of such-and-such a kind; and he might take into account the idea that if he acquires a friend of the kind in question, then he should act loyally towards the friend. Issues raised by this idea were discussed in Section 4.5.

4 . 8 S E L F - S AC R I F I C E The presumption that in bringing about the better overall state of affairs one acts in the better way is sometimes defeated in cases of self-sacriﬁcial action. Perhaps from an impartial standpoint it is better that you should survive than that some stranger should survive, but sometimes your sacriﬁcing your own life to save a stranger’s is at least as morally good an action, and at least as rational an action, as not doing so. Leaving aside complications arising from the Christian doctrine of the incarnation ¹⁵ The inverted commas around the word ‘before’ are a reminder of the point, made in Section 1.4, that if God is timeless then expressions usually indicating temporal order are in this context used to indicate some logical or epistemological or metaphysical order.

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and the death of Jesus, it is obvious that God cannot die, or damage himself. But perhaps he can forgo the fulﬁlment of important desires in order to beneﬁt other people, when from an impartial standpoint it would be better if his desires were fulﬁlled and the people left unbeneﬁted. Do we have, in some such situation, a counter-example to Prime Actually? The issues involved in answering this question are similar to those canvassed in Sections 4.5. The moral and rational non-inferiority of forgoing the fulﬁlment of one’s desires can be seen as due to a special kind of agent-relative prerogative. Section 4.5 distinguished between a stronger and a weaker claim concerning the existence of agent-centred prerogatives, and pointed out that the alleged counter-examples rest on the stronger claim, for which there seem to be no good arguments. Even if the stronger claim is true, both Molinists and Theological Determinists have good prima facie reasons for rejecting the logical possibility of its being the case that there are prime worlds but God cannot create a prime world in which God has no reason for selfsacriﬁcial action. And it is implausible to suppose that God could have an unmotivated desire, one not based on reasons, for acting self-sacriﬁcially. 4 . 9 D I V I N E C H O I C E G I V E N C R E ATA B L E H I E R A RC H I E S O F B OT H K I N D S The time has now come to consider the second of the three epistemic possibilities listed in Section 4.1, that there are at least two creatable hierarchies and at least one of them has prime members while at least one does not. Chapters 3 and 4 have afﬁrmed the principle Better Outcome/Action: Other things being equal, in intentionally bringing about the better state of affairs one acts in the better way, all-things-considered. The ‘other things being equal’ clause reﬂects the idea that whether one action is more rational or morally better than another is not always ﬁxed merely by which action has better consequences. Section 3.3 assumed, as Rowe did, that there is exactly one creatable hierarchy and that it lacks prime worlds, and considered whether it is possible that God exists and creates one of the worlds. For each candidate world there is a better world that he could create. Nevertheless, I argued,

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in this situation the inference from God could create a better world to God could act in a better way is defeated by the conjunction of the following three conditions: (1) For every world that God could create there is a better one that he could create. (2) The world that he in fact creates is good enough relative to the foregoing circumstances. (3) Failure to create any world from the creatable hierarchy that lacks prime worlds would lead to an outcome that was far inferior to creating one of the worlds in that hierarchy which is good enough. If, however, there are several creatable hierarchies and some of them have prime members while others do not, the third of these conditions is not fulﬁlled: by selecting a prime world, the agent could avoid creating a world from one of the hierarchies that lacks prime worlds, without thereby ending up with an inferior outcome. Let H be a creatable hierarchy that lacks prime members, and let W* and W be members of H. W* is better than W and H is the sole creatable hierarchy does not entail God would act in a better way if he created W*. The inference from W* is better than W and in addition to H there is exactly one creatable hierarchy J with prime members to God would act in a better way if he created W* is not defeated by the three conditions listed above, since the third condition does not obtain. I will assume that there is an inﬁnite subset of better and better members of H such that the inference is not defeated by any other circumstances either; this assumption receives indirect support from other sections in this chapter. Given that there are both H and J, whichever speciﬁc member of H God were to create he would act in a better way if he created some other world instead—some world which is better than the created world. On the other hand, if God were to create some prime member of J, then he will not have better reasons for creating some non-prime world instead. Therefore God acts in a better way, all-things-considered, if he creates a prime member of J than if he creates some member of H. Therefore his perfect goodness guarantees that if God creates a world then he will create some prime member of J.

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4 . 1 0 D I V I N E C H O I C E G I V E N S EV E R A L C R E ATA B L E H I E R A RC H I E S , A L L C O N TA I N I N G PRIME MEMBERS Now let us turn to the case in which there are several creatable hierarchies, and all of them have prime members. Suppose that V is a non-prime member of some creatable hierarchy H while W is a prime member of some creatable hierarchy H*. Bringing together considerations advanced in various preceding sections of this chapter, we can see that if God creates V then he has better reasons for creating some other world instead—a better member of H—whereas if God creates W then he does not have better reasons for creating some other world instead. Therefore, despite the fact that V and W themselves are incommensurable, God acts in a better way if he creates W than if he creates V.¹⁶ Therefore God’s perfect goodness guarantees that if God creates a world then he will create some prime world.

4 . 1 1 C O RO L L A R I E S O F F O R E G O I N G C O N C LU S I O N S The last couple of sections yielded two results. Firstly, that if God exists and there are several creatable hierarchies and some of them have prime members while others do not and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. Secondly, that if there are several creatable hierarchies and all of them have prime members and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. The conjunction of these two propositions with Prime Actually entails the following proposition: Prime Actually Strengthened: It is logically necessary that if God exists and there are prime worlds and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. At the beginning of Chapter 2 a maximal world was deﬁned as a world such that there is no world better than it. Obviously it is logically necessary that if there is at least one creatable world which is maximal ¹⁶ Therefore maximizing act-consequentialists must either deny that there are prime worlds, or deny that some worlds are incommensurable with others.

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then a world is prime if and only if it is maximal and God can create it. Therefore Prime Actually Strengthened entails a proposition that I will call Maximal Actually: It is logically necessary that if God exists and there are maximal worlds which God can create and God creates a world then God creates a maximal world. Sections 2.4 and 2.5 entitle us to conclude that either God cannot create a maximal world, or he can but even given that he creates a world his omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness do not jointly entail that he creates a maximal world. The conjunction of this conclusion with Maximal Actually entails: God cannot create a maximal world. If God cannot create a maximal world then, given the assumption (shared by Theological Determinists and Molinists but not by Open Theists) that God exists and creates the actual world, it follows that if God exists then the actual world is not maximal. This result should not be surprising. Recall that the argument for saying that God cannot create a maximal world depended on the premiss that necessarily every maximal world contains many free, morally right choices and actions by rational creatures and no morally wrong ones.¹⁷ Since everyday observation reveals that the actual world contains many morally wrong choices and actions by rational creatures, the assumption commits theists to saying that the actual world is not maximal. ¹⁷ The assumption constituted premiss (i) in Sections 2.4 and 2.5.

5 Empirical Objections to Theism, not based on Evil 5 . 1 A D I L E M M A F O R T H E O LO G I C A L D E T E R M I N I S TS A N D M O L I N I S TS Sections 5.1–5.3 consider an objection to both Theological Determinism and Molinism, while Section 5.4 considers a related objection to Open Theism. Although neither objection is based on evil, they both start from conclusions reached in Chapters 3 and 4, together with the idea that if there has been someone supervising the universe, whoever it is has not been doing as well as an omnipotent and omniscient being could count on being able to do. The two objections jointly constitute what at ﬁrst sight appears to be a strong objection to the existence of God.¹ The name ‘Alpha’ will be used to rigidly designate the actual world—that is, this one. Sections 4.2–4.11 argued in favour of the principle Prime Actually Strengthened, according to which it is logically necessary that if God exists and there are prime worlds and God creates a world then God creates a prime world.² Theological Determinists and Molinists who hold that God exists and has (as a matter of contingent fact) created Alpha, are committed by Prime Actually Strengthened to saying that (as a matter of contingent fact) if there is at least one prime world then Alpha is prime. It might be thought: Surely it is plain on empirical grounds that if God exists then Alpha is non-prime. Even if we leave evil aside, we can ¹ As usual, the description ‘omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good’ will be tacitly present when God is discussed. Section 1.9 explained that there is a sense in which Open Theists can assert that God is omniscient even though they hold that there is much that God does not know about the future. ² The term ‘prime world’ was introduced in Section 3.1.

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envisage many improvements to human history, to the broader natural history of our planet, and to the lives of presently living human beings and non-human animals—better states of affairs which God could have strongly or weakly actualized. Therefore Theological Determinists and Molinists should say that there are no prime worlds. The arguments advanced in Section 3.3 suggest that if there are no prime worlds then God will satisﬁce. The inference from God can bring about a better state of affairs to God can act in a better way is defeated by the fact that for every world which God can create, God can create a better world than it, and such-and-such a speciﬁc world is good enough given this choice situation, and failure to select any world would have led to an outcome that was far inferior to each world which is good enough. But surely, it might be thought, everyday observation and reﬂection massively support the view that Alpha is not good enough relative to God’s supposed choice situation. Suppose, as Section 3.4 did, that worlds are ranked in value chieﬂy by the extent to which they include large communities of people characterized by justice, a rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose lives embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together, and do not also include communities that are seriously malfunctioning. Surely, relative to these desiderata, and also relative to the world-creation opportunities which Theological Determinists and Molinists believe that God had, Alpha is deﬁcient and disappointing, and hence not good enough. Moreover this is plain even if we leave evil out of consideration. If God exists then he has not satisﬁced. The upshoft is that whatever view Theological Determinists and Molinists have about the existence of prime worlds, they face an objection, based on empirical evidence other than evidence concerning evil. Their dilemma can be set out in the form of a pair of arguments. Here is the ﬁrst member of the pair: (i) There are prime worlds. [Assumption] (ii) Prime Actually Strengthened: It is logically necessary that if God exists and there are prime worlds and God creates a world then God creates a prime world. [Premiss] (iii) If God exists and creates a world then he has created Alpha. [Premiss] (iv) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. [From i, ii, iii] (v) If God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha. [Premiss]

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(vi) Either God does not exist or he does not create a world. [From iv, v] (vii) Theological Determinism and Molinism are both false. [From vi] Here is the second argument: (viii) There are no prime worlds. [Assumption] (ix) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, then if there are no prime worlds and God has the opportunity to create a world which is good enough, then he creates some world which is good enough. [Premiss] (x) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God exists and he created Alpha. [Premiss] (xi) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God had the opportunity to create a world which is good enough. [Premiss] (xii) Alpha is good enough. [From viii–xi] (xiii) Alpha is not good enough. [Premiss] (xiv) Neither Theological Determinism nor Molinism is true. Section 5.2 examines the ﬁrst argument, and Section 5.3 the second.

5 . 2 T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M T H E R E B E I N G P R I M E WO R L D S

5.2.1 Structural Analysis: the Need to Bypass (1c) Whether (v) is true is knowable by human beings only a posteriori. Since ‘Alpha’ rigidly designates a world whose complete description includes Alpha’s containing the state of affairs Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar, the proposition In Alpha, Brutus stabs Caesar is necessarily true, but of course we do not know a priori that Brutus stabbed Caesar, or even that in Alpha Brutus stabbed Caesar. If we know that (v) is true, then we do so by knowing what happens in Alpha, and we know this only empirically. If (v) should be classiﬁed as obviously true, this will not be because it is self-evident, or demonstrable by pure reason. It will be because it is the conclsuion of some strong argument containing obviously true empirical premisses. This argument may also contain a priori premisses, but in what follows I will consider enthymematic formulations in which the a priori premisses are suppressed.

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Below is a restatement of the ﬁrst horn of the dilemma. The auxiliary argument for (v) has been incorporated into the main argument. To save space, (i)–(iii) are taken for granted, and acccordingly (iv) is treated as secure; and since the step from (vi) to (vii) is trivial, the abbreviated formulation stops with (vi). For expository convenience, various propositions already stated are renumbered. Call the following schema Argument (I): (1a) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. (1b) [speciﬁc empirical information about Alpha directly relevant to its improvability.] (1c) Therefore Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha. [From 1b] (1d) Therefore either God does not exist or he does not create a world.³ [From 1a, 1c] The immediate task is to assess the strength of Argument (I) relative to the assumption that (1a) is true. Various formulations ﬁlling the slot marked ‘(1b)’ will be considered below; but a fair amount of progress will be made before reaching this stage. Alongside Argument (I) consider Arguments (II) and (III). Is (I) weak, like (II), or strong, like (III)? (2a) If Cathy died while the jury was deliberating then Cathy was not convicted. (2b) Five witnesses testiﬁed under oath that they saw Cathy commit the crime; and Cathy’s own story was ripped to shreds under cross-examination. (2c) Cathy was convicted. [From 2b] (2d) Therefore Cathy did not die while the jury was deliberating. [From 2a, 2c] (3a) If Cathy died while the jury was deliberating then Cathy was not convicted. [Premiss] (3b) Today’s newspaper reports that Cathy was convicted. [Premiss] (3c) Cathy was convicted. [from 3b] ³ How could God exist but not create a world? By proceeding as Open Theists think he does: by strongly actualizing some states of affairs and causally contributing to the obtaining of, but neither strongly nor weakly actualizing, other states of affairs.

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(3d) Therefore Cathy did not die while the jury was deliberating. [from 3a, 3c] From now on the expression ‘the a-premiss’ will sometimes be used to cover (1a), (2a), and so on, according to the context. All three arguments are enthymematic. Their strength as stated is evaluated in the light of additional empirical information—for example, about the reliability of newspaper reports of trials. Consider Argument II from the standpoint of visitors who left the courtroom during the lawyers’ closing submissions. They believe the apremiss, along with some other background information about Cathy’s good health. They have heard the witnesses, including Cathy herself, and so accept (2b), and on the basis of (2b) they accept (2c). But in doing so, they were surely already taking it for granted that (2d) is true. The visitors might well feel justiﬁed in doing so: there is no evidence against (2d), and moreover it is well known that defendants rarely die while the jury is deliberating. But if the inference from (2b) to (2c) depends on the visitors’ already taking it for granted that (2d) is true, the two-stage argument from (2b) to (2c) and then from the conjunction of (2c) and the a-premiss to (2d) is circular. Consider some visitors who, as the lawyers are making their closing submissions, possess a strong prima facie reason for suspending judgement about (2d)—e.g. they have just been informed that ﬁve minutes ago Cathy swallowed poison, that she will soon fall unconscious, and that it is uncertain whether she will survive. What conclusion do they come to about (2d)? Well, suppose that someone now tells the visitors that since they accept the a-premiss and (2c) they are committed to accepting (2d). They would be correct to reply: We are re-evaluating our position. Whether we should continue to accept (2c) depends on how likely it is, relative to the conjunction of the a-premiss and our other relevant information, that Cathy will die while the jury is deliberating. If the principal question to be decided is whether (2d) is true then plainly we ought not to infer (2c) from (2b) and then infer (2d) from the conjunction of (2c) and the a-premiss. Instead, we should suspend judgement on (2c), and try to determine whether (2d) or its negation is more likely, taking into account our background evidence and the new information about the poisoning. Similar points apply in connection with Argument (I). People who already believe (1d) are justiﬁed in inferrring (1c) from (1b) But, given

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that (1b) does not entail (1c), they would be reasoning fallaciously if they used this inference as part of an argument to reinforce their belief that (1d) is true. Given that (1b) does not entail (1c), people who currently suspend judgement on (1d) would be reasoning fallaciously if they accepted (1c) on the basis of (1b) and then accepted (1d) on the basis of (1c) and the a-premiss. Hence the a-premiss and (1b) together provide strong argument for (1d) if and only if there is some convincing line of thought in favour of (1d), employing the a-premiss and (1b) but bypassing (1c)—that is, dispensing with (1c) as an intermediate step.

5.2.2 Is (1b) Surprising? One way of arguing from (1a) and (1b) while avoiding (1c) is to consider a hypothetical group consisting of Theological Determinists and Molinists who believe the a-premiss, and also know that the earth has rational and other sentient inhabitants, but know nothing more about the history and present state of our planet. Would such people conﬁdently expect the negation of (1b), and be surprised and disconcerted to ﬁnd that (1b) was true? Similar questions arising in relation to the weak Argument (II) and the strong argument (III) have the answers No and Yes respectively. The foregoing structural analysis has been able to proceed in abstraction from the speciﬁc content of (1b). However, the time has now come to consider some alternative propositions ﬁlling this slot. Such propositions are, of course, chosen with an eye on corresponding candidate improvements upon Alpha. Often it is hard to be sure that a proposed change would constitute an improvement. We ask ourselves, ‘Would a world whose only relevant difference from Alpha is such-and-such be a better world than Alpha?’. The larger the scale of the change involved in such-and-such, the more likely it is that this change entails others which are relevant to value comparisons, and the harder it is to be conﬁdent that all things considered the other world is indeed better than Alpha. So it may be worth trying a strategy of considering small-scale candidate improvements upon Alpha. Here is an attempt at executing such a strategy. It is couched in the form of an argument, (IV), which can be regarded as a speciﬁc version of the schematic argument (I).

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(4a) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. [Premiss] (4b) The degree of pleasure felt by the dog Rover while eating its evening meal yesterday was less than the maximum degree of pleasure that in general it is psychologically possible for Rover to feel. [Premiss] (4c) Therefore Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha—for example, a world that differs from Alpha only in that Rover feels slightly more pleasure when eating his evening meal yesterday (and in entailed and supervenient respects). [From 4b] (4d) Therefore either God does not exist or he does not create a world. Argument (IV) does not concern evil. Even if theists could show that the existence of evil, or the existence of great evils such as we actually ﬁnd around us, did not constitute a strong objection to the existence of God, there would remain the challenge based on God’s apparent ability to create a world better than Alpha. The Rover example has been chosen to highlight this fact. Are the a-premiss and (4b) jointly a strong reason for (4d)? To establish that they are, one must develop a convincing line of thought employing the a-premiss and (4b) but bypassing (4c). Suppose that there were a group of Theological Determinists and Molinists who believed the a-premiss, and also knew that the earth has canine inhabitants, but knew nothing more about the history and present state of our planet. Would such people conﬁdently expect the negation of (4b), and be surprised to ﬁnd that (4b) was true? I cannot see good grounds for thinking that they would. Consider the possible worlds in which every dog on every, or almost every, occasion feels the maximum degree of pleasure that in general it is psychologically possible for it to feel. Each of these worlds differs from Alpha in many ways. But surely in all of them canine life is seriously defective with respect to important goods other than pleasure. It is implausible to suppose that any of these worlds is prime. In a prime world, if there are dogs then many of them on many occasions will feel less than the maximum degree of pleasure. Is there some special fact about Rover and his evening meal yesterday in virtue of which, if the a-premiss were true and God were to exist, then (4b) would be not true? No such fact has been speciﬁed. We have no grounds to assert this last conditional proposition. Hence the argument for (4d) fails.

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Let us try another version of the basic argument for (1d), one which envisions improvements on a much larger scale. Surely, other things being equal, things would have been better if, in general, human physical and mental capacities had been greater than they are? And surely God could have created a world in which this was so? Theists who hold the a-premiss are committed to denying (5c) Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha—for example, some world in which human physical and mental capacities are in general greater than they are in Alpha. How can the theist deny (5c) without grotesque ad hoccery? My answer should by now be plain. There must be some argument for (5c). Here is a candidate explicit, empirical premiss for that argument: (5b) Human physical and mental capacities have such-and-such limits—for example, no human being can run a marathon in less than an hour. It is tempting now to argue in two stages: ﬁrstly from (5b) to (1c), and then from (1c) and the a-premiss to (1d). But my discussion of earlier sample arguments shows that this procedure involves a fallacy in inductive logic. Our starting point is constituted by two premisses—the a-premiss and (5b). To establish that these are jointly a strong reason for (1d) one must develop a persuasive line of thought bypassing (5c). It is doubtful that such a convincing line of thought can be developed. Since the existence of koalas, with their distinctive range of abilities, is not bad, we humans do not fall below some universal minimum level of acceptability. It might be claimed that in virtue of being intelligent agents we are endowed with aspirations relative to which we are far too poorly equipped. But the evaluation involved in the words ‘far too poorly’ needs support. Any intelligent agents of any species whose abilities were ﬁnite would be able to identify good levels of ability which were beyond their reach. Such a situation is not itself bad. Is there some other reason why an omnipotent being should not, morally speaking, bring such agents into existence? Is there some reason why he should not, morally speaking, endow them with the speciﬁc ﬁnite levels of capacity that are characteristic of humanity? None is evident. The objection to the existence of God based on the a-premiss and (5b) seems at best inconclusive.

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It is obvious that, even leaving aside evil and its effects, human communities could have richer cultures than they in fact typically have, and individual humans could often be happier than they are. But this truth does not entail that God, if he exists, can create a better world than Alpha. For suppose that the entailment did hold. Then surely it would be necessarily true that if God cannot create a better world than Alpha then it is not the case that most people avoid involvement in poetry, painting, and drama and instead watch gridiron and netball. Now we are currently examining the ﬁrst horn of the dilemma for theological determinism and Molinism, and accordingly assuming that there are prime worlds and that Prime Actually Strengthened is true. If Prime Actually Strengthened is true then it is necessarily true, and if there are prime worlds then this fact is a major structural feature of how things are, on a par with There is helium and There are stars. It follows that relative to the human population of the universe it is inevitable that it is not the case that most people avoid involvement in music, poetry, etc. and instead watch gridiron and netball. Given this, not only Molinists but also Theological Determinists (for reasons that will be explained in Chapter 7) should agree that individuals have only a low degree of freedom in behaving in the speciﬁed ways. But this is a respect in which the overall outcome would be inferior to the situation in Alpha, where typically even poor people have a high degree of freedom in this area. Surely it would be rash to claim that necessarily individuals’ lives would go better all-things-considered if they were happier and went better with respect to literary and artistic values but were inferior with respect to freedom. Nevertheless it might be maintained that the fact that human communities could have richer cultures than they in fact typically have and individual humans could often be happier than they are creates a presumption that God, if he exists, can create a better world than Alpha. Yes, but presumptions can be defeated. At this point we need to recall the place in the overall argument of this discussion of greater happiness and richer cultures. The argument to be evaluated goes like this: (6a) If God exists and creates a world then he cannot create a world better than Alpha. [Premiss] (6b) Human cultures, and individual human lives, have such-and-such desirable qualities and not others. [Premiss] (6c) Therefore Alpha is such that if God exists and creates a world then he can create a world better than Alpha—for example, a world

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that differs from Alpha in that individuals are happier and cultures are richer. [From 6b] (6d) Therefore either God does not exist or he does not create a world. [From 6a, 6c] For reasons explained previously, (6a) and (6b) together provide a strong argument for (6d) if and only if there is some convincing line of thought employing the a-premiss and (6b) but bypassing (6c). Leaving aside evils and their effects, are actual levels of human cultural achievement and individual happiness less than we would expect them to be if (1a) were true and God created some world? Well, it is plain that if Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God could have strongly or weakly actualized higher levels of these goods than he has in fact done. A world in which he did so would in that respect be better than Alpha. But it is very far from being plain that all worlds, or even any worlds, in which he did so would all-things-considered be better than Alpha. Suppose that there is a ranking of worlds with respect to human cultural achievement and individual happiness (CAIH). Let a TopCAIH world be a world such that God cannot create any world which is higher in the ranking. Either there is at least one TopCAIH world or there is not. Philosophers who hold that the only good states that are goodfor-their-own-sakes are cultural achievement and human happiness will say that if there are TopCAIH worlds then they are all prime. But a great many philosophers will dissent from this theory of value. It is a very insecure basis on which to found a strong objection to theism. Yet apart from the foregoing theory of value, there does not seem to be any reason to suppose that if there are TopCAIH worlds, they are all prime. After all, many TopCAIH worlds might be poorly endowed with other goods. Given that God will choose one of the prime worlds, there seems to be no reason to believe that if amongst the prime worlds there are some TopCAIH worlds, then he will discriminate in favour of the TopCAIH prime worlds. Cultural achievement and human happiness have already been fully taken into account in classifying these worlds as prime. What if there are no TopCAIH worlds? For each world, God can create a world which is higher in the supposed ranking. But ex hypothesi there are prime worlds, and if God exists he will create a prime world. So the mere fact that there is an inﬁnite number of worlds ranked higher than some particular world W with respect to human cultural

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achievement and individual happiness does not entail, or even create a presumption, that W is not prime. Perhaps the best strategy for opponents of Theological Determinism and of Molinism is to appeal to evident great evils that the world contains. Surely things would have been a lot better if all, or at least a large amount, of the evil in it had not existed? And surely God, if he exists, could have strongly actualized there being much less evil than in Alpha, without thereby precluding the existence of at least as much good? Many philosophers have argued that if theism were true then there would be a lot less suffering, injustice, selﬁshness, bigotry, illness, etc. than Alpha is known to contain. Their arguments have been such that if they succeed then they will also establish that if both the a-premiss and theism were true then there would be a lot less suffering, and so on, than Alpha is known to contain. On the other hand, other philosophers have offered theodicies whose upshot is that even if God were to exist and to create a world, it might well still be the case that there was as much suffering as Alpha is known to contain. Maybe some theodicies explicitly or implicitly rely on the negation of the a-premiss.⁴ But most theodicies do not. It is plausible to suppose that if it is successfully argued that if God were to exist and to create a world, it might well contain as much suffering as Alpha contains, then it can also be successfully argued that if the a-premiss were true and God were to exist and to create a world, then there might well be as much suffering as Alpha contains.⁵ If so, then accepting the a-premiss will not make the task of defending Theological Determinism or Molinism much harder than it otherwise would be. Obviously the results of Chapters 6–8 bear directly on this matter, even though they do not try to show that if God were to exist and to create a world, it might well contain as much suffering as Alpha contains. What is clear is that the ﬁrst horn of the dilemma does not constitute a threat to Theological Determinism and Molinism, independent of considerations concerning evil. ⁴ Cf. George N. Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-time Religion (Clarendon, 1988), ch. 2. ⁵ Michael Tooley, in a paper in which he advances an objection to the existence of God, based on evil, argues that if the existence of evil is logically compatible with the existence of God, and if evil can be logically necessary for a greater good that outweighs it, then ‘the idea of worlds that are larger and larger, either in space or in time, suggests that one cannot place an upper limit on the quantity of evil that might be found in a world created by God’ (‘The Argument from Evil,’ Philosophical Perspectives, 5 (1991), 89–134; the quotation is from p. 92.).

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5 . 3 T H E A RG U M E N T F RO M T H E R E B E I N G N O P R I M E WO R L D S Let us now consider the second horn of the dilemma, presented in Section 5.1 in the form of the argument: (viii) There are no prime worlds. [Assumption] (ix) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true, then if there are no prime worlds and God has the opportunity to create a world which is good enough, then he creates some world which is good enough. [Premiss] (x) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God exists and he created Alpha. [Premiss] (xi) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God has the opportunity to create a world which is good enough. [Premiss] (xii) Alpha is good enough. [From viii–xi] (xiii) Alpha is not good enough. [Premiss] (xiv) Neither Theological Determinism nor Molinism is true. The argument is deductively valid. The ﬁrst premiss, (viii), is secure because it is an assumption on which turns the second horn of a dilemma. For reasons that should be clear from Chapter 3, Theological Determinists and Molinists should accept (ix). Premiss (x) is obviously true. Therefore Theological Determinists and Molinists must reject either (xi) or (xiii). Neither (xi) nor (xiii) is evident to the senses, or delivered by empirical science, or self-evident. The truth of (xi) might be thought obvious: after all, Theological Determinists and Molinists typically hold that God might have refrained from bringing anything into existence at all, in which case the resulting actual world, limited to necessary states of affairs and contingent ones involving him alone, would have been good enough. Such a world would not have been deﬁcient or disappointing, because God himself is very good. If so, then the only way that Alpha could fail to be good enough would be if the contingent states of affairs not involving God were on the whole very bad. Whether or not they are will be addressed in Chapters 6–8. Right now, however, the main concern is whether (viii) and (ix) generate a good objection to Theological Determinism and Molinism which is independent of considerations about evil.

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Saying that Alpha is not good enough amounts to saying that in Alpha the whole consisting of states of affairs involving created entities (considered in abstraction from their relations to God) is disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. Now it can hardly be maintained that God could acceptably refrain from bringing anything into existence, but could not acceptably bring into existence merely one atom of hydrogen. So what counts must in some way be relativized to kinds of wholes consisting of states of affairs involving created entities. Rather than develop a fully-ﬂedged theory of the evaluation of such wholes, I will simply assume, for the sake of convenience, that what counts is the quality of rational creatures’ individual and communal lives. With this understanding, (xi) should read: (xi ) If either Theological Determinism or Molinism is true then God has the opportunity to create a world which contains rational creatures and is such that the whole consisting of states of affairs involving these people (considered in abstraction from their relations to God) is not disappointing relative to the values that underlie the ranking of such wholes. It is doubtful that (xi ) should be afﬁrmed either by Molinists or by people who prior to encountering (viii)–(xiv) have been suspending judgement about whether Molinism is true. Maybe, for example, all non-disappointing worlds of the kind described in (xi ) contain many good free (and therefore undetermined) choices and actions by rational creatures, and comparatively few bad ones, and the true CCFs are unfavourable to God’s creating such a world. Maybe in consequence God cannot bring into existence large communities of free people, all of which are characterized by justice, a rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose life embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together. Maybe, alternatively, the true CCFs enable him to do so but they do not enable him to do so while giving human beings much greater intelligence and a much longer typical natural lifespan. It might be objected that these hypotheses are nothing more than ad hoc, fanciful speculation. But the immediate issue is whether Molinists, and also people who have hitherto suspended judgement about Molinism, can conﬁdently dismiss these hypotheses and thereby enable themselves to afﬁrm (xi ). If it is not evident that they can, then (viii)–(xiv) is not a danger to Molinism.

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Here is a proposition, not involving evil, on the basis of which some philosophers will ﬁnd the conjunction of (xi ) and (xiii) plausible: (S) In Alpha the good for human beings is limited to levels far below non-extravagant human aspirations. We do not ﬁnd around us, except (at best) in a very sporadic fashion, large communities of people characterized by a justice, rich culture, and fellowship between individuals each of whose lives embodies a wide range of goods functioning well together. Quite apart from disruptions involving evil, this truth is no accident. Important long-lasting features of human nature and the natural environment are not well set up to promote and sustain the existence of such communities. Surely God could have strongly actualized improvements. For example, he could have adjusted the weather so that it is more favourable to bountiful harvests. He could induce small variations in human fertility that would ensure that in all geographical areas the human population is well adjusted to the available natural resources. He could give human beings greater intelligence and creativity, and a greater natural lifespan, than they in fact typically have. It is tempting now to argue in two stages: ﬁrstly from claim (S) to (xi ) and (xii ), and then from (xi ) and (xiii), together with (viii), (ix), and (x), to (xiv). But in Section 5.2 I argued that this procedure is unsafe. To show that (viii) and (S) jointly provides a strong argument against Theological Determinism and Molinism it