Saturday, 13 June 2009

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  A Rave Concerning Good, Evil, and Freedom: Part the Fifteenth

  O Felix Culpa
  

  At the risk of repeating a point to oblivion, Middle Knowledge—or at least a view of Middle Knowledge that assumes incompatiblist or libertarian freedom—does not answer the challenge that evil presents. One could embrace a robust view of human freedom and argue it is impossible for God or anyone else to know beyond a certain degree of probability what a free creature might do and so God created aiming for the best, but we are responsible for any outcome. I have voiced objections to this view in the past. I should only wish now to point out that first that however appealing divine risk-taking may be to a people who relish the entrepreneur spirit, it provides little guidance on how to judge such risk-taking behavior. Would God be a conservative investor or a speculator? Just how much good would God have been aiming for compared to what God got? Since God would seem to be stuck with the cosmos forever and so always open to reversals,¹ could God ever know that he made a good bet? Moreover, on such a view, we are the ones taking these risks on God's behalf. One might well ask why God just doesn't fold and start all over. It isn't as if we would notice if God cut his losses and started again. If God throws the cosmic dice enough times we would all freely do what is right.
  

  Alternatively, one could take a modified Molinist position and hold that there just aren't any possible worlds that meet with the principle of plenitude and contain no evil. Just as Libertarian view would seem to trade off omniscience, this view by holding that there are definite limits on essences would set a sort of limit on omnipotence. I should hasten to point out that on the one hand, limiting knowledge itself effectively limits power (if God doesn't know the future, it is not in God's power to bring about a given future) and that stating that essences have limited possibilities simply follows from their inherit finitude.² Still, there may have been some things that each of us really could have done but chose not to. In that case, it is fair to say that God also choice that we would freely do what we have in fact done. If so, then there must be something necessary about this present evil state to secure a far better state that could not have come about otherwise.
  

  It may simply be that a generic notion of God or at least a generic notion of God and God's relation to creation is just not up to the task. Such a generic notion leaves it up to the imagination just what it is that a deity may intend and just what real limits there are in the relation between the deity and the deity's creation. I should like to look at some responses drawn from Western Christianity (which would cover Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Protestant denominations). I don't know enough about Eastern Orthodoxy and would certainly not presume know what resources Judaism or Islam have to bring to bear. Mind you, what follows is a survey of theories Christians have used to deal with the problem of evil. Such a survey would either be circular because it would simply be an amplification of the generic idea that we've already seen to be insufficient or ad hoc because it would a doctrine that was imported to support a shaky position. Rather I wish to look doctrines and practices that have developed quite apart from this question that might in turn shed some light on the subject.
  

  One thought, recently exploited afresh by Alvin Plantinga³, goes back to the Exultet of the Easter Vigil "O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer."⁴ The general notion here is that the Incarnation and the subsequent Atonement and redemption of humanity are inherently good things, but these good things require a fallen creation. No Fall, no Atonement, and a great good is then lost. Note that felix culpa is a preexisting liturgical practice designed to show the believer the extravagant vastness of God grace, not as a sort of explanation. It is, however, something that we would not have known, experienced, or felt in the core of our being save that we first fell from grace. Something very important about our relationship with God would have been missing. What is also interesting is that it allows Plantinga to back track a bit on his Free Will Defense. Felix Culpa does not require transworld depravity. There could be some worlds where everyone freely does what is right, but none of these would as good as this one that includes the Atonement. Note also that while felix cupla doesn't help with issues of libertarian freedom, it make either the modified Molinst or Scotian positions a bit stronger. On the one hand, freed from transworld depravity, a modified Molinist can not admit that there are possible worlds where you are I could have always done the right thing, but that God providentially ordered events so that would happen. The Scotian position is strengthened because now we are given some sort of reason why God might have willed that we would fall.
  

  There are important ambiguities in the above presentation. However, they will have to wait.

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  1On the other hand, if cosmos is not going be to around forever, it is a pretty safe bet that it will at the very least become less interesting and less good.

  2This is an obvious tautology, so let me put it this way. God is the only infinite being, therefore there are only a finite number of things any actualized essence can express, therefore any world that God would create presents itself with only finite (or at least not an actual infinite) possibilities.

  3Plantinga, Alvin “Supralapsarianism, or 'O felix culpa'” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, edited by Peter van Inwagen, W. B Eerdman's, Grand Rapids, 2004, p. 1-25.

  4 O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem

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