The problem of evil – Religion Refuted

If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there such a thing as evil? This is known within philosophy of religion as the problem of evil or the problem of theodicy.[1]⁺

Believers can solve the problem of evil by admitting that God can’t eliminate all evil. In his posthumously published Three Essays on Religion, John Stuart Mill said that acknowledging God’s lack of power makes us foot soldiers of God in the battle against evil, infusing our mortal lives with a grand purpose. The hypothesis that God’s power is limited draws support from 1 Corinthians 1:25: “the weakness of God is stronger than men” (KJV). But a weakling god holds no appeal to the 80 percent of Christians who say “With God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26, KJV).[2] These Christians need to account for evil.

Christians could say God willfully creates evil. The philosopher Robin Collins is notable among philosophers for taking this view.[3] Collins is also notable for sounding like Kermit the Frog.

Jehovah, notable for sounding like James Earl Jones, bellowed, “I make peace, and create evil” (Isaiah 45:7, KJV).[4]⁺ The Old Testament is chock full of cruelty condoned or committed by Jehovah. Virginia Woolf scribbled in her journal, “I read the Book of Job last night—I don’t think God comes well out of it.”[5] As discussed in chapter 7, even “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,”[6] Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6), endorsed Nazi-style atrocities.

But most Christians hold God blameless, insisting that God does nothing evil. So, we must again ask, where does evil come from?

Some believers look you straight in the eyes and tell you that the universe contains no evil. Our perspective is too restrictive, they say; if we could see the whole picture, we’d understand that all is good. Advocates of this baffling Panglossianism tell us that even death appears evil to us only because we have limited comprehension.

I’m not buying it. If the word evil means anything, death is evil, child abuse is evil, and parasitic infestation is evil. I even think it’s evil when I pour a bowl of cereal and then discover that somebody drank all the goddamn milk.

Even if evil is defined merely by our emotional reactions (as Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells us, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”[7]), that still leaves room for the reality of evil as a psychological state. Evil doesn’t vanish just by being given a subjective definition.

If one is willing to concede that everything we think is evil is really good, then where does this sort of concessionary thinking end? Maybe everything we think is hot is really cold. Maybe what we think is five is really seven and a half. Maybe what we think is courage is really a potato. If our judgment about the identity and nature of things is fundamentally unreliable, then we have no hope of arriving at any valid conceptions of God or anything else. Everything becomes a big, black, hairy, pungent mystery. Or a rotisserie chicken.

The notion that all is good is, to my astonishment, promulgated by some brilliant thinkers. It’s attributed, fairly or not (probably not), to the pantheistic Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The same position was allegedly taken much earlier by the ancient Roman Stoics, most notably Emperor Marcus Aurelius.[8]⁺

Given that ancient Rome wasn’t a wholly cheery place, the emperor may have promoted temperamental optimism to mollify the populace and thereby maintain political stability. But the principle that all is good, if taken seriously, wreaks havoc in ethics. If everything is good, it is futile to attempt to distinguish good behavior from bad behavior. We should never correct our children or interrupt a crime. All prisons and hospitals can be shut down.

Of course, to the impartial truth-seeker, this moral objection to Stoicism is beside the point. The consequences of a belief don’t determine whether the belief is true, a point we emphasized in our earlier discussion of Pascal’s wager (chapter 9). The question is whether Stoicism makes sense.

It doesn’t. If we mistakenly perceive something as bad, that mistake counts as a bad thing. Therefore, the universe isn’t all good. If some modern-day Stoic wants to argue that being wrong isn’t bad, which I presume he must do since he thinks everything is good, then by his own logic, wrongly rejecting Stoicism is a good thing. Stoicism fails by its logical inconsistency, projecting our conception of good onto the external world while dismissing evil as a mere phantom of the human imagination.

Christians avoid the Stoic mistake. The contest between good and evil (God and Satan) constitutes the major theme of Christian mythology. Precisely for this reason, the Christian is acutely afflicted by questions posed by Epicurus: “Is God willing to stop evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is God able to stop evil, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is God both willing and able to stop evil? Then whence cometh evil? Is God neither able nor willing to stop evil? Then why call him deity?”[9]⁺

Religionists often argue that heaven’s goodness lessens the comparative percentage of evil in the cosmos. The ancient satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote that when Cyniscus queried Zeus about the suffering of the innocent and the prosperity of the wicked, Zeus replied, “Surely you know, Cyniscus, what punishments await the evil-doers after death, and how happy will be the lot of the righteous?”[10] That answer is as unsatisfactory to modern skeptics as it was to Cyniscus.

Proposing that there is a heaven brings no peace of mind to anyone trained in logic or probability theory. Adding supplemental conditions to one’s theodicy, such as stipulating that there’s a heaven, without adding corroborating evidence, can’t increase its probability. To presume otherwise is to commit the conjunctive fallacy.[11]⁺

Logical fallacies aside, adding heaven to offset Earthly suffering portrays God in a bad light. It makes God analogous to the father who tells his child, “Honey, this afternoon I am going to let a mean man rape you, shatter your teeth, twist your arm until it pops out of joint, and do other horrible things that I don’t even want to describe. It will last several hours and leave you permanently damaged, both physically and psychologically. But to compensate you for your hardship, I am going to give you a lifetime membership to Disneyland. Because I love you.”

Awarding a prize at the end of a rigged game doesn’t solve the problem of evil. We wouldn’t expect a loving god to compensate us for our suffering. We would expect him to prevent our suffering.

Hell contains an infinite amount of suffering that God either cannot or will not stop. An infinitely compelling theodicy would therefore still leave us in a state of equilibrium with no residual evidence for belief in even a slightly good god. Indeed, philosopher David Lewis pointed out that any god who imposes or permits infinite punishment for finite sin is infinitely worse than Hitler. Do the math.[12]⁺

By far the most common theistic response to the problem of evil is to invoke the doctrine of free will. Christian apologists insist that their sub-logi-omnipotent god logically cannot prevent free agents from doing bad things. He has to let us do as we will.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that we can’t do as we will. We can’t will ourselves to be ten feet tall. We can’t will ourselves to be red pileated woodpeckers. Our ability to do as we will is severely restricted. Preventing us from brutally slaughtering one another seems like a reasonable restriction. I would gladly give up the ability to rape and murder in exchange for, say, the ability to fly and bore a hole in a poplar tree with my pecker.

God allegedly gifted humans with enough free will to launch a raft of misery. It’s like a B movie plot in which the main character’s well-intentioned but imprudent decision predictably leads to an action-packed unfolding of events as humans run amok and things get so out of hand that God sweats blood and impales himself on wooden crossbeams.

The free will argument, as presented by religious traffickers like Peter Kreeft, explains only moral evil, specifically the wrongs perpetrated by humans (not God).[13] It fails to explain natural evil, things like earthquakes, forest fires that incinerate squealing bunnies, and an evolutionary process that is explicitly predicated on suffering.

C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga proposed that natural evil may be the work of Satan, to whom God also gave free will.[14] Satan killed millions with cholera, while God idly waited for some doctor to figure out the remedy. God could have saved these lives by twiddling a few neurons in a single primate brain. But apologists object that this would have abridged Satan’s free will by denying him the consequences of his actions. What about the free will of the millions who died? Apologists shrug that such is the price of original sin.

The free will argument, though doctored by Plantinga, suffers numerous debilitating congenital defects. First, there’s inadequate evidence that any god exists. Second, there are strong arguments that the Christian god does not exist. Third, the free will argument assumes that God designed us with free will, whereas there’s evidence that humans evolved rather than being designed. Fourth, science and philosophy discredit the hypothesis that we humans have libertarian free will as presumed by the argument. Fifth, God’s own evil acts cast doubt on his willingness to stop Satan’s evil acts. Sixth, our free will is apparently not important to God since it is restricted by all kinds of human limitations and by original sin. Seventh, free will, whether exercised by humans or Satan, is inadequate to account for evil, given that free agents commit evil acts in joint proportion to their moral character and environmental conditions.

Let me flesh out this last objection. God could have made us morally pure enough to always make the virtuous choice of our own volition. If he didn’t want to make us morally pure from birth, he could minimize temptations during our formative years, while we are under his moral tutelage. That much we’d expect of a loving, fatherly god. No loving and responsible father grants liberty to his children before they are mature enough to handle it, especially if the potential consequences include eternal agony. Too hastily granting liberty to morally flawed people also constitutes reckless endangerment of third parties, who would have solid legal grounds for a lawsuit.

While I was proofreading the manuscript for Religion Refuted, my familiarity with the text lulled me into overlooking some gaps in my explanations, poor word choices, grammatical blunders, typos, and other miss steaks. Authors have learned tricks to help catch such problems. One trick is to print the manuscript, rather than reading it on a screen. Another trick is to switch the venue for the editing process. Go sit in your car or in a diner.

Similarly, the free will defense is so familiar to us that its faulty logic can easily pass unnoticed. The faulty logic is rendered more conspicuous by applying it in an unfamiliar context. Let’s apply the logic of the free will argument to heaven. There’s no sin in heaven, so I have been told. Angels aren’t going around cussing and fighting, sexting incubi and succubi, or doing improper things to one another, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Angels always act virtuously.

There’s one exception. Christian mythology portrays Satan as an angel who, quite mysteriously and spontaneously, went bad and led a rebellious party of angels against God. But Satan and his toadies all got kicked out, so heaven ought to be sinless again.

Theoretically, there could be some more bad angels lurking in heaven, maybe squatting behind a large harp or standing behind Jerry Falwell, but the point I am making remains valid with respect to the good angels. I am assuming there are at least some good angels in heaven. If not, then to hell with heaven; let me speak of hypothetical good angels. As for these good angels, either they have enough virtue to resist whatever temptations, if any, are present in heaven, or else they have no free will. In a sin-free context, angels are either good enough or they’re automata.

Those same two options are available on Earth as well. It’s not necessary that there be sin on Earth, or even a prospect of sin. Sin is a third option available to the Creator, but sin isn’t an inherent risk in a world populated by creatures possessing free will.

I have heard all my life that mankind’s ability to do evil is a necessary consequence of his having free will. If this were true, then we could maintain the same position with respect to God. His ability to do evil is a necessary consequence of his having free will.[15]⁺ In other words, it’s within the scope of God’s moral character to commit evil. If you counter that God, owing to his moral nature, has no ability to choose evil, then you are admitting he lacks free will. You may say he has free will combined with enough virtue to prevent him from committing evil. Say that, however, and you grant my point that free will and virtue combined eliminates the necessity of moral evil.

The apostle Paul conceded this point by saying that God “will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13, NIV). Paul was wrong. We don’t have enough virtue and sufficiently benign circumstances to always resist sin. But he at least deserves credit for recognizing this state as a logical possibility.[16]⁺

My claim that God could have endowed us with enough virtue to enable us to abstain from sin could be met with the following objection:

If God tailored the world so that a given person freely chose the good, then the world might be such that another person chose evil. It may be impossible for God to create a world where all the billions of free people living on Earth always choose the good.

If humans were endowed with enough virtue, they would do the best thing possible under whatever circumstances they faced. That eliminates all moral evil, period. The problem described above arises only if humans have reduced virtue. That’s why this apologetic fails.

It also fails because it presumes that the moral state of our world is the best that an all-powerful, all-wise god could create, given that humans have free will. This isn’t a theodicy or defense. It’s blasphemy (a victimless crime). If we live in the best world God could create, then prayer is pointless nagging.

The free will defense suffers another defect. It maintains that God can retain absolute power, yet not control human conduct. That’s a logical contradiction.

A fast-talking Christian hayseed, trying to do-si-do his way around this contradiction, drew a homey analogy between God and a babysitter. Brother Hayseed said the babysitter hugs a bowl of popcorn, props her feet on the arm of the sofa, and more or less supervises the children in her charge rather than directly controlling every aspect of their behavior. God, likewise, is ever watchful, yet he might let people commit acts contrary to his wishes.[17]⁺

This babysitter analogy initially sounded reasonable to me owing to the dope-lure effect, not to be confused with the Doppler effect. The dope-lure effect is what happens when the speed at which an idea comes at you exceeds your ability to scrutinize it, thereby making it sound reasonable.

On closer examination, I realized that the vast differences between the faculties of God and those of a babysitter render the analogy implausible. If God is omniscient, if he sees into the future and knows precisely what will happen—not merely what might happen but what will happen—then the future must already be mapped out. Otherwise, he would not know it. A preset future leaves no room for free will. Omniscience implies predetermination.[18]⁺

I am using the traditional Christian definition of libertarian free will, which holds that human behavior is uncaused, a definition of free will plagued by philosophical and scientific objections that I won’t explore here.[19]⁺ The compatibilist definition of free will held by most modern academic philosophers, in contrast, says that free will is doing as we choose, but it leaves open the possibility that what we choose is strictly determined by our glands, neuroanatomy, and so forth.[20] In the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”[21] The compatibilist view of free will is compatible with God’s directing every event in the cosmos, but, unlike the traditional Christian definition of free will, doesn’t let God off the hook for creating evil.

A murder suspect cannot plead innocence by saying that the bullet killed the victim and his pulling of the trigger was incidental. If a voluntary act has a reasonably predictable outcome, then the agent who performs the act is accountable for that outcome. God, as an all-knowing and all-powerful being, has no excuse.

A theologian might try to rescue God’s virtue by claiming that God did not create man’s capacity for evil. But if God didn’t do it, some independent creative power in the universe did, which means God is not all-powerful. Any power possessed by a non-God entity is not God’s power, which entails that God is less than all-powerful. This principle holds regardless of whether the non-God entity is a human, some other kind of free agent such as Satan, or a mindless force such as gravity.

A Christian apologist might object as follows:

The very definition of free will entails that God has relinquished to mankind the ability to make and carry out decisions. The skeptic who quibbles over whether relinquishing this power diminishes God’s power forgets that God has infinite power, and infinity minus X is still infinity.

The apologetic response above erroneously treats this as an arithmetic problem, when it’s really a problem within the domain of set theory. Analogously, a god who knows the full set of counting numbers but not the full set of real numbers possesses infinite knowledge but not all knowledge. A being cannot possess all power and simultaneously not possess some power. If God possesses all power, we possess none. To be all-powerful does not mean having the capacity to overpower everyone else. It means having all power. If any being or force other than God has any power whatsoever, God is not all-powerful.

Christians try to sidestep the problem of evil by suggesting that God might have reasons for committing or tolerating evil actions that we mere mortals can’t grasp. Their argument is that we’re too ignorant about God and his circumstances to know whether he had adequate justifications for allowing the evil we witness in the world.

This argument, known to philosophers as skeptical theism, is as bad as it is common. Imagine a hypothetical world in which only God exists. Since God is perfect and there’s nothing else in this hypothetical world, this hypothetical world is perfect. It can’t get any better.

It also can’t get any worse. There is no logical pathway from such a perfect world to a less-than-perfect world. A perfect god would never corrupt or lessen the perfection of the world by creating anything imperfect. According to Matthew 7:18, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (NIV). This passage concerns physical probabilities. My argument, similar to that expressed by Graham Oppy, is much stronger because it’s about logical possibility, not mere physical probability. Potential excuses for evil are irrelevant. There is no potential good or benefit that can accrue from creating an imperfect world that is sufficient to make that imperfect world preferable to the perfection of the original God-only world.

Envision the biblical god, a frustrated being, unable to accomplish his goals without creating an imperfect world—not just a garden with an evil snake in it, but a world plagued by the horrendous suffering we see in our present world, things like totalitarianism, Ebola, and writers who don’t finish their senten. Only in behalf of such a stunted god can we offer excuses, pleading that there must have been mitigating circumstances, that he meant well, but that he had no option but to impose or permit suffering.

As Kevin Scharp, a philosopher at the University of St Andrews, observes, “The discussion invariably descends into speculations about divine psychology (what God would do under certain circumstances), and this is as fact-free and utterly hopeless an endeavor as debating with a child about his or her imaginary friend.”[22]

The theist chides us not to presume to grasp why God does what he does. The theist thus engages in a spineless parlor game, in which every cancer and every train derailment evokes the familiar refrain that “God works in mysterious ways!”[23]⁺ The theist insists that, because God operates in circumstances beyond our awareness and because God uses methods exceeding our comprehension, we are in no position to judge his actions or motives.

By disqualifying us from plumbing God’s mind, theists unwittingly undermine the entire bulwark of natural theology, since plumbing God’s mind is precisely what theists purport to do when they argue that God decided to be the first cause, or that God wishes to perform miracles, or that the universe reflects God’s intentional design. The champions of religion must either abandon the cosmological, teleological, and miracle arguments or else they must quit playing their “mysterious god” parlor game.

Theists who, by their own admission, can’t appraise God’s actions and motives, also can’t know whether God is good or evil. It’s equally as unwarranted to presume the goodness of a mysterious god as it is to presume the goodness of a mysterious man in the alley. God is either mysterious or he is not. If he is mysterious, then they can’t say God is all good. If he is not mysterious, then they can’t say God is all good.

By the way, this predicament in which we can’t appraise God’s moral character also arises from the alleged divine attribute of omnipotence. If God can do anything, he can make people believe he is good no matter how evil he might be.

The Christians’ next evasive maneuver is to say we can’t understand God’s standards of good and evil. What we see as evil—the Holocaust that Hitler and his fellow Catholics imposed on Jewish “Christ-killers,” the forced assimilation (and occasional murders) of indigenous students by Catholic schools throughout North America, and the rape of tens of thousands of children worldwide by Catholic priests—might be good from God’s perspective. This apologetic shrug has disastrous implications. If God’s concept of good differs in unknowable ways from our human concept of good, then we humans can’t intelligibly describe God as good.

Some Christians—the theologian John Hick, for instance—have proposed a “soul-building” defense. They say that evil in the form of temptation is required for us to develop the capacity to resist temptation, a virtue we might call moral impulse control. The claim being made is that God could not reduce the level of temptation without reducing the amount of virtue in the world. This implies that God’s power is limited. A god thus limited is sub-logi-omnipotent.

Why view temptation as a good thing? The argument seems to be that temptation is like a weight, which we can repeatedly resist to build our moral strength. But moral strength is beneficial only in a world featuring unnecessary temptations, much as the ability to breathe pure neon gas is beneficial only on a planet with a neon gas atmosphere. Why force a creature to function in an environment for which it is naturally unsuited, especially when that creature or its environment could be readily altered?

That point aside, people often suffer excessively from their poor moral choices. The lazy Iraqi schoolboy who takes a shortcut across his neighbor’s property and consequently steps on a decades-old land mine made a poor decision, but the penalty seems too severe to reconcile with the notion of a loving and wise god.

And how can we morally justify a temptation that results in harm to the innocent? Is it good when a child falls under the control of a pederast priest because that gives the priest an opportunity to restrain himself? So far, that system hasn’t worked well for the little victims.

Do you know how to spot the fellow who thinks temptation is a good thing because it fosters the development of virtue? It’s easy. Just look for the fellow who, rather than maintaining a secure bank account, keeps his stockpiles of cash unguarded in public places. It’s amazing how often people introduce arguments in behalf of religion that they manifestly do not believe.

It might be countered that temptation is good only when it occurs in small enough doses that we can resist it with firm effort. By this standard, God, like a quack pharmacist, has chronically administered overdoses of temptation. Apparently, theological dispensationalism regulates the dispensing of truths and moral rules, but not the dispensing of temptation.

Some Christians say suffering, whether experienced firsthand or witnessed in someone we love, is a good thing because it strengthens us spiritually and draws us toward God. This argument is so terrible that I feel sad for those who express it. Humanity is perhaps two hundred thousand years old, whereas Christianity is only two thousand years old. So, for 99 percent of human history, suffering was pointless. Human suffering is nothing compared to the eons of pointless suffering by animals. If all gratuitous suffering were represented by a line stretching from horizon to horizon as far as the eye can see, then the small point on that line that could be explained away through this pathetic theodicy would be invisible to the naked eye.

Even if we grant that the suffering of a fatally injured child might contribute to the prayerfulness of the parents, that hardly seems like a just trade-off. The idea that an innocent person should suffer for the enhancement or improvement of another violates our basic concepts of justice, accountability, and autonomy.

If the child suffered at all without the knowledge of the parents, which seems inevitable, then even this questionable rationale would not apply. And if the parents are already devout, they may wonder why the fatal injury befell their child, rather than befalling the healthy and happy child of the atheist next door.

Suppose that you honestly believed that God, a being with endless means to solve problems, chose to torment someone to improve their character or to reform some third party. Or suppose that you witnessed God using a lit cigarette to burn the neighbor’s pet iguana to change its habits. Would such behavior prompt you to surrender your heart to God?

The whole notion that suffering contributes to virtue is suspect. Precisely what virtue does one get from a cleft palate? Sitting comfortably in your chair and reading this text, you may be able to search your mind and postulate some virtue that such a hardship might help foster. I don’t doubt your cleverness. But out in the real world, where people lament their deformities and shed warm, salty tears, would you—if it were your choice—dare be so cruel as to inflict a cleft palate on a child for the sake of some hypothetical benefit?

Emotionally healthy humans grieve over the suffering of others. Picture in your mind the little girl with a cleft palate. Does her sense of isolation and anguish fill your heart with sorrow? Or does it edify you with the prospect that she might potentially profit from her affliction? Does the surgeon who alleviates her suffering thereby increase vice and deserve our condemnation? Or would you agree that everyone who has a practical opportunity to reduce suffering ought to have the common moral decency to do so? If your answer to the preceding question is yes, then where does that leave God?

[1] Space is too limited for me to explore the philosophical distinctions between a theodicy (plausibility of God despite evil) and a defense (possibility of God despite evil), the evidential versus the logical problem of evil, or the long history of debates on this topic. I hope this discussion whets your appetite for independent research.

[2] “Most American Christians Do Not Believe that Satan or the Holy Spirit Exist,” Barna Group, April 13, 2009, https://www.barna.com/research/most-american-christians-do-not-believe-that-satan-or-the-holy-spirit-exist/.

[3] “Does Evil Refute God’s Existence? (Robin Collins),” Closer to Truth, September 1, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nZ7cGv_38c (video no longer available).

[4] The King James Version uses the word evil in this passage. Other versions use words like disaster, calamity, and woe. Any of these alternative terms work fine in the context of this discussion.

[5] Quoted in: William Safire, “Where Was God?” New York Times, January 10, 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/10/opinion/where-was-god.html.

[6] This is the first line of the poem titled Gentle Jesus by Charles Wesley (1707–1788), an English leader of the Methodist movement. He is said to have written an average of 10 lines of poetry per day for half a century.

[7] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.249–250.

[8] Marcus Aurelius wrote about Stoicism in his Meditations. My focus here is not on addressing misconceptions about Stoicism, but rather debunking philosophical problems in the caricatured version of Stoicism.

[9] This is often called Epicurus’s trilemma. There is some dispute as to whether Epicurus originated it. The particular phrasing that I quoted is from David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1779).

[10] H. W. and F. G. Fowler, trans., “Zeus Cross-Examined,” The Works of Lucian of Samosata (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1905).

See also:

Michael Tooley,“Does God Disprove Evil?” Closer to Truth, https://www.closertotruth.com/series/does-evil-disprove-god.

[15] The philosopher Wes Morriston calls this state, in which God cannot do evil because his nature is too virtuous, “perfect” freedom, as opposed to “moral” freedom, which is freedom without flawless virtue. I find Morriston’s terminology to be unhelpful in the extreme. The term perfect freedom sounds to me like complete freedom, not the restrictive effect that moral perfection has on free choice. And the term moral freedom sounds like the freedom to act according to one’s moral values, not the freedom afforded by the imperfections in one’s moral state. Morriston’s confusing terminology tempts me to take out a contract on him.

[16] Paul unfortunately contradicts himself in Romans 11:32: “God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (ESV). I’m no psychiatrist, but this sounds like Munchausen by proxy. Paul’s concept of mercy is confused. Mercy consists of imposing punishments less severe than deserved, whereas someone consigned by God to commit sin (i.e., someone given too little virtue or too much temptation) might seem to bear no responsibility for his actions and thus not be subject to mercy.

[17] Richard Swinburne similarly compared God to a mother who vacates the nursery to see how the children behave when unsupervised.

“Arguments for Atheism? (Richard Swinburne),” August 30, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CeJJeA0FA0 (video no longer available).

[18] One of the professional philosophers I called upon to vet parts of this book cautioned that I cannot say that God’s foreknowledge confers de re necessity—meaning that God’s foreknowledge is itself causal. I embrace that caveat. God’s knowing something doesn’t make it so. Nonetheless, if God knows something will happen, it will happen.

But I’ll go further than that. Omniscience implies predetermination (OIP). Omniscience thus contradicts the notion of libertarian free will.

Peter van Inwagen proposes that we solve the OIP problem by demoting omniscience to something less than full knowledge of the future. This solution is adopted by theologians who, like Richard Swinburne and Greg Boyd, subscribe to what’s called open theism.

Alvin Plantinga says that God knows what you will do in every possible world, including the actual world, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t do otherwise. I don’t see how Plantinga solves the OIP problem. We can’t, after all, voluntarily leap between possible worlds.

Some religious philosophers, including Thomas Flint and William Lane Craig, suggest that God has “middle knowledge.” This claim traces back to the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina and is thus called Molinism. You might think of it this way: Imagine a stack of three blocks. The bottom block is dumb nature, doing what it does automatically without direction from any conscious being. The top block is stuff that happens as a direct product of God’s will. The middle block is human actions resulting from our choices. God knows what we’d freely choose if placed in any circumstance. That’s middle knowledge. Molinists say that we choose our actions, but God knows how we’d choose in every circumstance; therefore, he knows our choices before we do. And God chose to create us, knowing what all our choices would be. Hence, he’s in control of everything, yet we’re still choosing. This clever sophistry doesn’t reconcile libertarian free will with an all-knowing god. At best, it’s compatibilism.

William Lane Craig also tries to reconcile God’s foreknowledge with libertarian free will by postulating that our choices retroactively (through something like backward causation) establish God’s prior knowledge. Some physicists have speculated about the potential for backward causation, as in Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory and Yakir Aharonov’s two-state vector formalism. But, so far at least, the evidence for backward causation is negligible to nil, whereas evidence for forward causation is pervasive. Moreover, Craig’s backward-causation solution portrays God as subject to causation, thus God lacks full omnipotence.

Some apologists, seeking to reconcile libertarian free will with God’s foreknowledge, complain that OIP commits a modal transfer fallacy. One commits a modal transfer fallacy if one says that God’s knowledge that proposition p (a statement of fact about the future) is true logically entails that p is metaphysically necessary. This kind of mistake is precisely what the professional philosopher warned me against. But OIP does not commit this mistake. OIP asserts no logical entailment. OIP merely says there are empirical reasons to believe, given that God knows p well in advance of p’s physical actualization, that p is inevitable. In other words, epistemic predetermination provides a sound basis for belief in physical predetermination. When humans epistemically determine future events (to the extent that we can), we rely on our (limited) understanding of the regular operations of the physical world. Perhaps God knows the future in the same way we do, through his grasp of the physical world, except that his knowledge is comprehensive and infallible. Perhaps God knows the future through means unlike human means. For instance, God may know the future through his awareness of his divine plan. In either of these two scenarios, the truth of p is physically predetermined.

Let’s suppose that the future truth-value of p is not fixed by any principle or mechanism; p is instead ontologically indeterminate (purely random). In this case, it seems that p is inherently unknowable. Proposition p is epistemically indeterminate because it is causally indeterminate. Yet an all-knowing god would know the future truth-value of p even if the future is inherently unknowable. After all, “With God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26, KJV). In contrast, if God’s omniscience is restricted, such that he knows only what is knowable, the future must be knowable. By what means? We humans depend on the future’s being physically fixed. To the extent that the future is not fixed, or to the extent to which we fail to grasp how nature operates, any true belief we happen to hold about the future is subject to the Gettier problem: it does not qualify as knowledge; it’s just a lucky guess. God, in contrast, doesn’t make lucky guesses. He knows. God’s infallible method of knowing could be his imposition of physical fixity via his plan or via natural laws. Given that the fixity of nature is the likely (perhaps the only intelligible) means by which future knowledge is acquired, we have powerful evidence against libertarian free will.

These considerations, taken together, warrant our concluding that God’s foreknowledge implies that we lack libertarian free will. Furthermore, God’s omniscience implies that God himself lacks libertarian free will. In short, and to recap, OIP. QED.

[19] But I do want to mention in passing that libertarian free will, the notion that we can act contra-causally or acausally, contradicts the PSR (the principle of sufficient reason, discussed in chapter 1, which is crucial to every version of the cosmological argument that I have ever encountered). Apologists must give up libertarian free will or the PSR—or, better yet, both.

[20] Bourget and Chalmers, “The 2009 PhilPapers Survey.”

[21] Quoted in: Pavel Vasilevich Simonov, The Motivated Brain: A Neurophysiological Analysis of Human Behavior (1991), 198.

[22] The Veritas Forum, “Is There Evidence for God? | William Lane Craig & Kevin Scharp at Ohio State University,” March 31, 2016, YouTube video, 1:17:48, https://youtu.be/8KMd_eS2J7o.

[23] The Bible does not directly say that the ways of God are mysterious, but it hints at it in passages such as Romans 11:33: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (NIV). A hymn by William Cowper (1731–1800) first expressed the idea that God is mysterious in its opening sentence: “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.”

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