In the following post I left a comment reacting to William Lane Craig's thoughts on the problem of evil: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/03/react-william-lane-craig-on-problem-of.html
An RF admin left the following response:
We can grant per hypothesis that there can be no morally sufficient reasons for God to actualize the conditions in your thought experiment (max suffering, max sufferers, max duration). That merely shows that God would not actualize such conditions. And, according to both Christianity and everyday experience, the actual world does not have such conditions. There could have been greater degrees of suffering in the world. There could have been more sufferers in the world. And there could have been a longer duration of suffering in the world.
In your last paragraph, you abandon the thought experiment by limiting the scope to max suffering. But then it's unclear whether God could have a morally sufficient reason for actualizing a max duration of max suffering of fewer than the max number of people, or a limited duration of max suffering of fewer than the max number of people. Perhaps there is a moral infraction so great that it merits such suffering, say, disobeying God himself or intentionally drawing others away from him.
You claim that the greatest good that could come from max suffering would be deliverance from or prevention of max suffering. However, this is readily answered by a free will defense. For those who freely disobey God and reject his forgiveness, max suffering just is the good of divine justice. God cannot make people freely choose things because that's a logically incoherent state of affairs. This also entails that the greatest possible good is not outside our ken, even though we can reject it and bring on ourselves max suffering. So, if God decides to create free creatures, then the evil choices of those creatures plausibly entail that they are responsible for their own max suffering, not God. So long as this is even logically possible, then max suffering and the existence of God are not logically incompatible. - RF Admin
I left the following reply (with slight changes to formatting, and added comments in brackets):
I do not "abandon" my thought experiment, but I identify the relevant feature of the nightmare world that proves the God of the nightmare world unloving to be maximal suffering. The number of sufferers and the duration of suffering is irrelevant, because if the suffering of the sufferers is low enough, and if the low-enough suffering appropriately grounds greater goods (in magnitude or order), then the suffering can be justified. It's the max suffering that's causing the problem, because max suffering cannot possibly ground a good greater in magnitude or order. (We can think of orders of goods and evils in terms of "salience", and we can think of salience in terms of the most relevant moral interest of a creature. More on that below.)
"For those who freely disobey God and reject his forgiveness, max suffering just is the good of divine justice."
I think this is the hopeless corner the theist is backed into. They have to say that justice is more important than people. I hope that the Christian, ever sensitive to the importance of love, immediately recognizes that it's people who are more important than justice.
Josh Rasmussen has given the following thought experiment (I don't have a citation; it's in a YouTube interview): Would I allow my children to play in the front yard if I knew there was some chance they would fall into a bottomless pit forever? No, I would not. That would be profoundly unloving.
So too would a loving God never give us freedom if that meant running the chance of our freedom leading to our maximal suffering. Our freedom is not as valuable to us as our freedom from maximal suffering. This makes perfect sense. What possibly could be our greatest moral interest if not for freedom from maximal conscious suffering? [Or: What could possibly be of greater moral urgency than freedom from maximal conscious suffering?]
Josh Rasmussen and his wife Rachel wrote the book When Heaven Invades Hell. There they defend the view that justice serves people; people do not serve justice. And isn't this the spirit of what Jesus was saying when Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath?
And so to say that goodness ultimately finds its foundation in justice is to say something deeply false. We must ground goodness in persons -- in conscious experience. If I'm not mistaken, Craig says goodness is basic and cannot be analyzed. I think that's mistaken. We can analyze goodness in terms of direct conscious awareness. I'm currently reading a book that roughly defends my views: The Feeling of Value by Sharon Rawlette.
If we grant this analysis of goodness (and I admit that this is a big thing to grant; it's a theory that must be defended like any other), then it does logically follow that the most salient goods, the goods of greatest moral interest and urgency for conscious beings, are conscious goods. And God's justice is not a conscious good. So it's not logically possible, in my view, for God and max suffering to be compatible. [I could have said: therefore, it's not possible for the good of justice to be as salient as the good of deliverance from maximal suffering.]
[I could also have asked the following question to promote intuitions: God's justice is good. Good for whom? Good in what way?]
Elsewhere, I argue that free will is not possible either. But that's a massive debate in its own right. For our purposes here, all we need to say is that free will, whatever it is, cannot possibly be more valuable than freedom from maximal conscious suffering. Simply ask yourself: Would I rather be free with a chance of being tortured constantly for eternity, or determined and safe from such a bad fate?
Christians seem to think the worst possible thing that could happen to a person is to lack free will (which I find funny because, on my analysis, we must and do lack free will anyway, and there are no good reasons to fear the idea that we lack free will, and in fact free will skepticism leads to a more beautiful, and more accurate, picture of the world. Bruce Waller defends this idea in his book Against Moral Responsibility). But we can easily imagine a fate worse than lacking free will: falling into a bottomless pit. And falling, and falling, and falling, with no chance of ever getting out.