Friday, March 14, 2025

React: William Lane Craig on the problem of evil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuBXmn7AO7s

I left the following comment on this video:

I argue there are cases where it is not possible for God to have morally sufficient reasons to allow certain kinds of evil. Take for instance the following thought experiment: God tortures an infinite number of people for an infinite amount of time. So you have max suffering, max sufferers, and max duration of suffering. I know Craig doesn't like actual infinities, so posit potential infinities instead. Still, you have max suffering, max sufferers, and max duration of suffering.

In this nightmare world, it is not possible for God to have morally sufficient reasons to allow for these evils, because the greatest possible good for a member of the nightmare world is to be saved from the nightmare world. No other good comes close. So it's impossible for a person to both be a member of the nightmare world and to enjoy some good greater than the good of being delivered from the nightmare world.

I argue that this generalizes across cases of max suffering. God can never allow max suffering, because God only allows those evils for which there are grounded and greater goods (greater either in magnitude or in kind or order, as there are lower and higher order goods and evils). But the greatest possible good (in magnitude or kind) grounded in max suffering is the deliverance from or prevention of max suffering. And just as max suffering is within our ken, so too is its deliverance within our ken. It's impossible for the greatest possible good in the case of max suffering to be outside our ken.

So all we need to ask is: Is there max suffering in the actual world? If there is, then this proves that there is no perfect God. Max suffering is suffering so bad that it makes death preferable to life for the sufferer. Clearly, there is max suffering in this world. But a perfect God is incompatible with this particular kind of suffering, even if a perfect God is compatible with, as I myself would argue, many other kinds of suffering.

No comments:

Post a Comment