Theodicy #8 - Evil is necessary

This theodicy says God allows evils because he is forced to by metaphysical limitations. The story could go like this: God, in his creativity and beauty, must create a beautiful universe. And God, in his love, naturally wants to share his joy with others, and to relate to others in a personal way, and thus must populate the universe with creatures who can receive God’s love and delight in God’s creation. But God cannot create another perfect being, as a perfect being must exist a se and not depend on anything for its existence. So God must create an imperfect world with imperfect creatures, and that imperfection results in badness. Nature’s distance from perfection results in natural evils and the distance of persons from perfection results in moral evil.

Problems with this theodicy:

#8a - The Bible makes it sound like heaven is evil-free and yet God is able to create it. So evil is not necessary.

#8b - If God can ensoul himself into a human body like in the case of Jesus, then why not ensoul himself every time so that all humans are morally perfect? Jesus is, after all, fully human, and not identical to the Father. So there shouldn’t be any worries about having “clones” or a lack of diversity of persons. Plus there is no worry about free will unless we accept that Jesus lacks free will.

#8c - This brings up the ontological problem of evil. How could a perfect God produce imperfection? We might expect a perfect being to only be able to beget further perfection. For badness to be necessary, it can seem like it would have to be built into the foundations of things. But that would mean God would have to include badness in his essence, which is unacceptable.

#8d - Either the imperfections of the world are gratuitous or justified. If they are gratuitous, then God is forced to not create anything at all. But if they are justified, then we wonder how they are justified; that is the very question we are exploring. If you say imperfections are justified because God is forced to create by metaphysical limitations, then that’s false. As just stated, God could be forced to not create.

The above story can help us understand why God creates something rather than nothing, but it does nothing to explain how evils are justified. This theodicy fails to address the problem of evil and only restates the problem.