A theodicy even better than the Grand Story Theodicy? The All Possible Persons theodicy

I had thought that the Grand Story theodicy was the best theodicy available. But maybe something along the following lines is even better:

• God is obligated to prevent worst possible depriving evils.
• So God is obligated to create all possible persons and to give them all fundamentally good lives. (Lives that are totally consciousness-affirming, meaning that every person loves being alive to the point of strongly preferring being alive to not, this preference is fixed and never wavers, and they always get what they want, namely, to live.)
• It would be such a shame to miss out on living a fundamentally good life. In fact, it would be a worst possible depriving evil. God knows this about you, and me, and about every possible person. So God has no choice but to create every possible person and give them a best possible life, which really is any life in which the person wants to live and gets to live. (Thus, a person on this view is minimally something that has the ability to prefer living to not living.)
• Here's the problem. The only possible way for certain persons to be created is through really complex, messy systems like our universe. In fact, all possible universes must be created across all possible levels of complexity, so that the entire range of all possible persons, from the most to the least complex, will eventually be created.
• This requires an infinite amount of time, and there will never be a time such that an infinite amount of time has passed, so there will never be a time at which all possible persons have been created, and so God has no choice but to create a potentially infinite number of persons in an unfolding manner requiring space and time. (Maybe some possible persons do not require space and time to exist.)
• But you couldn't exist without evolution being exactly the way it is, and without all the evils of the world being exactly the way they are.
• We are but one of a potentially infinite number of universes carving out person-space out of the infinite ocean of possible persons. Think of a child scooping up a cup of seawater. Our universe's job is to be that cup and scoop up its share of possible persons.
  
• So evils, even horrendous evils, are necessary to create all possible persons. Then, either all at once at some later time in a mass resurrection, or immediately after death, each person's fundamentally good life starts. God explains to that person that the reason why all the evils they faced (and/or witnessed other people face) were necessary to create them and others.
• You could even have a temporary hell where some individuals don't have their fundamentally good life starting immediately upon resurrection, but only after they've been through a rehabilitation process (or, in the case that we have free will, retributive punishment).
• For any evil whatsoever, the answer to "Why did God allow that?" is "Because if God didn't, a possible person wouldn't have been born, and that possible person would have been deprived of eventually getting to live a fundamentally good life."

This combines the "metaphysical necessity" theodicy with the "heaven" theodicy. In short, God is obligated to prevent all worst possible depriving evils, which means preventing any possible person from being deprived of the best possible good of living a fundamentally good life. But creating all possible persons requires allowing, temporarily, even horrendous evils, as you can only exist if certain physical events happen to generate the complex neurobiological system that gives rise to your exact subjective consciousness. So God is forced (by obligation) to force us a trade: experience horrendous evils in a temporary life so that we can be created (and so that other possible persons can be created), so that you can then eventually live a fundamentally good life. Being deprived of the fundamentally good life is infinitely worse than suffering finite horrendous evils. So, it's a good trade.

A few problems:

1) Usually theists want to say that before creation, reality is already perfect and maximally good, because God is maximally good. So to say that God is obligated to create to maximize value would seem to imply that God alone is not maximally good.

My response to this is that it seems self-evident that a world with more happiness is a better world than a world with less, and that a world with my happiness in it (or your happiness in it) is a world with greater happiness than a world without my happiness (or without yours), ceteris paribus. So basically, I don't understand why people say a world with only God is maximally good; that just seems self-evidently false. 

However, God himself is maximally good in the sense that God himself is the greatest possible extrinsic good, because God gives rise to all fundamentally good lives.

This is a bit tricky because I also want to say that a fundamentally good life is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to an individual.

We might distinguish between degrees of extrinsicality. A best possible extrinsic good (degree 1) is a fundamentally good life, and God is a best possible extrinsic good (degree 2). Being "deprived of God" doesn't exactly make sense, but being deprived of a fundamentally good life does. We might also say that degrees are tied to individuals versus groups. A degree 1 best possible extrinsic good is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to an individual. A degree 2 best possible good is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to a group of people.

We might think of it this way: When we ask what is the best possible thing that could happen to a person, it would be strange to say, "The best possible thing that could happen to you is God," because that demands an immediate question, why is God the best possible thing that could happen to you? The obvious answer: because God will give you a fundamentally good life. So while technically God is the ultimate greatest possible extrinsic good, that's only because of how value is ultimately cashed out, which is through maximizing intrinsically positive states (both in quality and quantity). And so we can trace God's value, just as we can trace our own value (or the value of anything), to the phenomenal value that that thing produces.

In fact, due to considerations of eudaimonia, what counts as a fundamentally good life for an individual might not allow for the best possible life for a group of people. So we might say that there are further and further degrees of best possible goods as we zoom out to cover larger and larger groups of individuals. This brings us to problem 2 below:

2) There are possible individuals for whom living a fundamentally good life (you always prefer to live and you always do) entails living a profoundly evil (or mediocre) life. It stands to reason that God would not want to sustain these lives despite the fact that they are fundamentally good. Consider a person who lives all by themselves, and their psychology is such that they are happy to live alone and do nothing but watch obscene images and videos (fill in the blank). No one else exists in this world but them, so it's not like they are hurting anyone. But it seems clear that this is a massively impoverished life, and one with no virtue. It's hardly a good life despite this individual strongly preferring to live over not living and getting to live forever. In fact, the fact that their disturbing existence goes on forever seems to just add to the problem. So it cannot be the case that consciousness-affirmation is the only meaningful consideration.

Here's a potential solution to this problem: There is a distinction to be made between someone's subjectivity and the quality of their consciousness. The example I like to give is the math genius who sustains a brain injury and loses their math skills. They remain the same person after the injury; they have the same first-person subjective experience. But the quality of that experience, what it is like to be them, has changed. So when we go to heaven, we retain our subjectivity, and thus our personhood, but the quality of that subjectivity is significantly enhanced.

This might require a stint in hell or purgatory for rehabilitation purposes. The renewal of one's mind needn't be an instantaneous, pain-free experience. In fact, the increasing of the quality of one's consciousness could take place over an infinite amount of time; we are always improving the quality of our consciousness.

What matters is not only what we affirm, but what we would affirm were our consciousness to be of high quality. The man who is happy to live alone doing nothing but watching obscene material would not be happy for long. Once his mind had been renewed to an extent, he would be profoundly unhappy with his existence, in which case God would again be obligated to move him to a better world. (And so God would perhaps move him to heaven from the beginning, anticipating this change of heart and mind. Or we might say that these bad worlds that include solitary disturbed individuals (or whatever disturbing features) are the exact hells and purgatories people exist in until their minds have been renewed to the point that they can now fit in heaven.)

This also provides an important resource when it comes to disability theology. It seems cruel of God to keep someone's severe mental disability forever in heaven. And yet, at the same time, it seems cruel to just annihilate these persons out of existence. The solution is to keep their souls, but improve them over time (or all at once; or to improve them to a degree all at once (an initial boost) and then improve them thereafter slowly over time).

So we must modify our understanding of a fundamentally good life. Consciousness-affirmation alone is not enough; it's something more like: consciousness-affirmation when the quality of your consciousness is high (or ever-improving). This makes sense, because if happiness is how value is cashed out, then the quality of that happiness matters greatly. Greater quality of happiness is a greater degree of happiness. So God could never settle for creatures living lives of diminished quality of happiness, as that would fail to maximize happiness.

So if someone could experience eternal consciousness-affirmation without living a fundamentally good life, does this imply that someone could experience eternal consciousness-denial without living a fundamentally bad life?

I don't think so, and here's why. In the former case, you need higher degrees of consciousness in order to maximize happiness. God is disturbed by the happy evil individual (which, incidentally, makes God unable to maximize his own happiness) because God knows how this person would feel about their own choices were the quality of their consciousness leveled up. God knows that this person would be horrified and ashamed, exactly because a deeper understanding of things comes with a recognition of what is good and what is bad. Only a fully recognition of what is good and bad can result in a full appreciation of good and bad, right and wrong, and thus a full instantiation of phenomenal value.

This does suggest that the feeling of ought-to-be-ness that comes with phenomenal value is highly misleading; we might never know whether our happiness is the kind of happiness we would approve of were our consciousness of a higher quality (unless God tells us).

But in the case of living a fundamentally bad life, quality of consciousness doesn't seem relevant. Someone could experience unbearable suffering for a time, as long as it's required for this person to eventually live a fundamentally good life (either due to necessity or rehabilitation). But no one could ever experience consciousness-denial forever without that person's existence being unjustified. So while living a fundamentally good life requires high (or ever-increasing) quality of consciousness, living a fundamentally bad life remains a worst possible evil regardless of the quality of your consciousness. 

This is a categorical worst possible evil; we can imagine God increasing one's capacity for pain, thus causing their torture to be ever-increasing. This high-fidelity fundamentally bad life would be far worse than a low-fidelity fundamentally bad life. So we might be tempted to say it's really the high (or ever-increasing) fidelity bad life that is the worst possible extrinsic evil, but any fundamentally bad life is a categorically worst possible extrinsic evil.

An analogy would be this: Imagine being overdrafted is a worst possible evil. In that case, it makes no difference if someone overdrafts by a dollar or by a thousand dollars; either way, a worst possible evil has occurred, and the fact that one is a greater degree doesn't make a relevant difference to the permissibility of the lesser degree worst possible evil. (It does sound strange to speak of degrees of worst possible evils. But again, if we allow 'worst possible evil' to be categorical, then degrees shouldn't be problematic.)

If consciousness-denial is what makes life not worth living, then maximal consciousness-denial is what makes life maximally not worth living. Not-worth-living-ness is thus the measure of badness that can befall an individual. Once that measure has crossed a threshold where life is officially not worth living for the individual, then it's not relevant (as far as justification is concerned) to what degree beyond that threshold that life is not worth living.

If maximizing phenomenal value depends on quality of consciousness, then the maximizing of phenomenal disvalue depends on the quality of consciousness. But when it comes to whether evils are justifiable or not, there is an asymmetry between living a fundamentally good life, which requires consciousness-affirmation of a high or ever-increasing degree, and living a fundamentally bad life, which requires eternal unbearable suffering regardless of the quality of that suffering.

So perhaps more simply we could just say that a life not worth living in the long run is a categorical worst possible evil (regardless of the details of its not-worth-living-ness), which generates a categorical best possible saving good with respect to that evil, and so God cannot allow for anyone to live a life not worth living in the long run, as that would be to allow an unjustifiable evil (an evil which cannot possibly generate outweighing good). The best possible good grounded by such an evil would be to be fully saved from that evil, either by annihilation, by being sent to a fundamentally good life, or by being sent to a fundamentally neutral life.

But because God is obligated to give us fundamentally good lives anyway, it follows that God could not allow worst possible evils anyway.

3) Another problem is a matter of power. Why would God be limited to creating us only by specific physical inputs? Why couldn't God create us wholecloth out of nothing? The question of how God could create a person at all, or how a person could possibly exist in the first place, is one of the deepest questions in philosophy. It may be that God does in fact create all possible persons he can ex-nihilo or de novo. Presumably, in Christianity the angels are like this. But if God is obligated to create all possible persons, then again it's hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact that this involves God creating trillions upon trillions upon trillions (really, approaching infinity) of persons. It's all possible persons, after all. This would involve any coherent account of person-generation, and that just so happens to include persons that are created through a DNA, RNA, evolution, biological process brought about by the laws of chemistry and physics we observe in our universe. Maybe there are countless persons God can create that don't require all these things, but that doesn't change the fact that we require these things to exist, and God must create us lest we are deprived of a best possible good, which would indict God on charges of allowing worst possible depriving evils.

Theodicy #13 - Grand Story / O Felix Culpa

I have saved the best for last. The Grand Story theodicy is featured in Josh Rasmussen’s book How Reason Can Lead to God, though I am adapting it to make the strongest theodicy I can.

#13a - Locally Gratuitous Evils

For the Christian theist there is a big problem on the horizon. Let’s say there are no gratuitous evils; all evils produce more goodness than badness, and it’s not the case that any evil could have been replaced by a good for a greater net good; every evil is a net good and every net good is the best possible net good. But net goods are a kind of good. So evil is a kind of good. But if evil is good, then it doesn’t make sense why God should be opposed to evils, or why God shouldn’t be the author of evil. If evils are net goods, then why not have evils in heaven? Why punish sinners, or consider sin something that needs to be atoned for? Having evils be a kind of good has the advantage of making sense of why God allows evils. But if evils are so good, then why can’t we say God is pro-evil? Why does God express his wrath toward evil?

So we need something that resolves the paradox of the permissibility and impermissibility of evils. If evil is too permissible, then God is pro-evil. But if evil isn’t permissible enough, then God and evil are incompatible.

Here is where locally gratuitous evils (LGEs) come into play. Let’s say your 3 year-old son gets lost in the woods during a camping trip. After desperate searching you finally find him and thankfully he’s okay. So you experience an evil at time t (toddler gets lost), then at time t + 10 you experience a good (toddler gets found). Let’s stipulate that the goodness of finding your toddler outweighs the badness (higher-order goods include: not taking your child for granted, a bonding moment, a display of parental love and care, participating in a dramatic story with a good ending, and so on). So from t until t + 10 we had the badness of the evil without the goodness that outweighs it. So the evil was in fact gratuitous for that duration.

So for any evil with a delay between when its badness obtains and when its justifying goodness obtains, there is a duration when the badness of that evil outweighs the goodness it has yet to produce, and thus a duration when the evil is gratuitous. So broadly justified evils (BJEs) are always locally gratuitous (unless there is an evil whose goodness is cashed out instantly).

I can imagine an evil producing goods for one person such that the evil is justified with respect to that person, but overall the evil produces more badness than goodness for everyone else. So you can have a broadly gratuitous evil that is locally justified.

If we set deontic worries aside and allow for someone’s suffering to be broadly justified by the goodness it produces for others, then with respect to the sufferer the evil is gratuitous. (I’m thinking here the goodness of being useful to others is not as good as being free from horrendous suffering.) The principal sufferer in these cases does not benefit, all things considered, from the outweighing goodness their suffering produces. This would mean some BJEs are gratuitous with respect to the principal sufferer, and this local gratuitousness lasts forever. Therefore, locally gratuitous evil can be temporary or permanent.

This calls into question whether a loving God could allow even broadly justified evils given their local gratuitousness. But let’s set that aside for now. Christians should accept the existence of LGEs for two reasons: one, their existence is undeniable, and two, because it’s their best shot at solving the paradox of the permissibility and impermissibility of evil.

LGEs and the B theory of time

You might say the B theory of time is true, in which case the past, present, and future all have equal ontological status. So when an evil occurs, in a sense the goodness the evil produces does obtain at the same instant as the evil. Both the evil and justifying good are real, there is simply a temporal distance between them.

The B theory will not prevent the existence of LGEs. First, you still have the permanent LGEs that are gratuitous with respect to those sufferers who never benefit, all things considered, from the justifying goods their suffering produces.

Second, you still have shorter and longer distances between evils and their justifying goods. The intuition remains that shorter distances are better. The longer the distance between an evil and its justifying good, the more likely you will end up relying on a butterfly effect theodicy or end up running into deontic worries. When we come up with plausibly justified evils, like the kid falling off the bike, the distance between the good and the evil is always relatively short. (And if it turns out that long distance LGEs always rely on a bad theodicy, then only short distance LGEs will have a chance at being justified.) 

Third, humans cannot see the future. So epistemically speaking, for all we know the future justifying goods will never come. Since we see how God is incompatible with gratuitous evils, this makes apparently gratuitous evils a threat to our belief in God. So this does nothing to solve the problem of apparently gratuitous evils. God, knowing this, would act accordingly if he wanted us to believe in him in a justified way.

#13b - The Grand Story / O Felix Culpa

The Grand Story theodicy combines aspects of the necessity of evil, usefulness, soul-making, heaven, and O Felix Culpa. O Felix Culpa is a theodicy defended by Alvin Plantinga[*6] which says that the greatest possible story is the Christian story; God incarnates as a human to show solidarity with humanity. God demonstrates his perfect love by dying for our sins, and demonstrates his perfect justice by ensuring the debt of our sin is paid. Death and evil are defeated by the resurrection of Jesus, who is the Son of Man and the Son of God, the bridge between God and humanity, the perfect lamb whose infinite perfection absorbs our infinite sin (i.e., our sin against an infinite God; or, whose infinite perfection absorbs our finite sin). To obtain such a story, the evils of pain and death are necessary.

We start with the story I gave in theodicy #8. God, a being of perfect love, must create beings to share his love with. But creation necessarily will be unlike him. An imperfect world gives rise to imperfect experiences, to evils. If those evils are gratuitous then God cannot create anything. But if God can bring about an overwhelming good through the imperfection, then God can redeem evil and justify creating an imperfect world. The only way God can redeem that evil is through story and meaning. If God can create the best possible story, then the goodness of that story can override the badness of evil.

However, for a story to come to fruition, it must have a beginning, middle, and end. Once that ending has come and the story is complete, God is then out of theodical resources that he can use to turn LGEs into justified evils. So from then on God has no choice but to stop all evils, which is why heaven is free from evil.

The Gospel is the grand story. God incarnates as a human in solidarity with humanity, validating the human body and the human experience. When Jesus dies, resurrects, and ascends into heaven, he is not subsumed back into the Father. Rather, Jesus keeps his human identity for the rest of eternity, fully and absolutely validating the human being.

Because of the imperfection of humanity and nature, these things are separated from God who is perfect. This is why God is hidden. God, being personal, loving, and relational, does not want this separation to continue forever. So God incarnates as Jesus, a human with God’s soul filtered through a human brain, body, and environment, to die for our sins that we may become perfected so God no longer has to be separated from us.

God demonstrates his love for us by the fact God in incarnate form sacrifices himself to generate a degree of moral goodness so great that it surpasses all of the moral depravity of humankind. The goodness of Jesus’ love as expressed through his sacrifice is so great that it covers the badness of humanity’s sins and even the badness of natural evils.

The end of the story is the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgment, and the New Heaven and New Earth. Jesus is glorified, Satan and his demons are defeated, perfect justice is meted out, and God reigns over his people who delight in God and in God’s new creation for forever thereafter.

Locally gratuitous evils are as vilified as they are throughout the Bible because of their injustice and because the only way for God to permit them is through the great good of the story of humanity, the incarnation, the atonement, and of God defeating sin and death. But for the goodness of the Grand Story to obtain, the story must complete and end. A never ending story never cashes out its goodness. But once the greatest possible story ends, God no longer has access to that which prevents evils from being gratuitous, which is why from then on he must “wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4). A good story needs a good ending, and God defeating evil forever is an ending worthy of the greatest possible story.

Because evils are locally gratuitous, God opposes them absolutely, and sin is as serious as the Bible makes it out to be. When we commit sin, we are in fact bringing gratuitous evil into the world and placing a burden on God to ensure that our sin does not remain gratuitous forever. Evil is a net good, but it’s a net good because justice will ultimately prevail, because God will defeat sin and death and fairly judge humanity. So we cannot commit sin knowing it’s a net good, because the only reason why it’s a net good is because of the goodness of the story, and that story will involve our judgment and, as the case may be, our punishment.

So to summarize:

(1) Evils are appropriately reviled because they are locally gratuitous.

(2) Evils are permissible because they are redeemed by meaning. The best possible world contains the best possible story, and the best possible story involves love, sacrifice, death, suffering, meaningful choices, and the triumph of good over evil.[*7]

(3) The goodness of the infinite love of God as expressed through Jesus’ atoning death outweighs the finite badness of all evils. The goodness of the Grand Story, which includes the infinite good of eternal paradise for those who are saved, outweighs the finite badness of all evils.

(4) Deontic worries are abated: the suffering we experience is meaningfully connected to the Grand Story. Without a world with suffering and death, we would not get the ultimate expression of love through the suffering and death of Jesus. All sufferers benefit from the great good of participating in a grand story.

(5) Our sins are a net good, but this does not give us permission to sin. Our sins are only a net good because of the goodness of the Grand Story, which may involve punishment for our sins.

(6) Despite the permissibility of evil, heaven is evil-free because evil is only permissible through the Grand Story, which requires heaven, an evil-free world, as its good ending. Additionally, heaven must be evil-free because once the best possible story ends (and it must end for the goodness of the story to be realized), then there are no more theodical goods with which to convert locally gratuitous evils into broadly justified evils.

Recall the conditions for an evil to not be gratuitous:

Condition 1: The good G that an evil E produces must be of greater magnitude than the badness of E.

Condition 2: Even if G + E is a net good, God allowing G + E cannot entail treating any person in an unloving way, such as by treating them as a means to an end.   

Condition 3: Even if G + E is a net good and does not require treating any individuals in an unloving way, the net good of G + E must not be outweighed by the net good of an alternative God could have actualized.

(1), (2), (5), and (6) show how the paradox of the permissibility and impermissibility of evil is resolved.

(2) also shows why this world is the best possible world; God could not have achieved a greater net good elsewhere, satisfying Condition 3. 

(3) shows how evils satisfy Condition 1.

(4) shows how evils satisfy Condition 2.

This theodicy solves two new problems: the problem of locally gratuitous evils and the paradox of the permissibility and impermissibility of evils. It comports with my intuitions that evil can be justified as long as it’s meaningful, gives rise to higher-order goods that depend on it, is a necessary part of the best possible world, doesn’t require God to be unloving, and makes life overall more worth living for all inhabitants. However, despite my best efforts, this theodicy, like all the others, faces serious objections.

#13c - Objections

Objection 1: Evil is not necessary

Heaven has no evil in it. How is this possible? Wasn’t it the case that creation must be unlike God, and thus imperfect?

A solution to this is to concede the objection and modify the story about the necessity of evil: Evil is not necessary at all. Rather, God wants to create the best possible world, and it happens that such a world must contain the best possible story, and it happens that such a story includes a story of divine love, sacrifice, atonement, death, suffering, the redemption of evil, the triumph of good over evil, and a perfect afterlife. God could create a perfect world that is evil-free from the beginning, but such a world would be missing the best possible story, and thus would not be the best possible world.

Objection 2: Dependency on Christianity

This theodicy depends on Christianity being true. There are many challenges to Christian belief, such as the failure of prayer, meager moral fruits, the Bible containing contradictions, falsehoods, and morally problematic verses, the lack of coherence of doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement, and commitment to costly beliefs in Satan, angels, demons, and divine realms. Naturalism does not face any of these challenges.

Objection 3: Worries over locally gratuitous evils

Short vs Long LGEs

In theodicy #5 we looked at an example of a plausibly justified evil: a kid falling off his bike, hurting his knee, and getting patched up by his mom. If we take all the goods that arise from the kid getting patched up by his mom as the justifying goods, then there is a short window between when the kid hurt his knee and when the justifying goods take place. Technically, during that window, the badness of the hurt knee is locally gratuitous. But the distance between the LGE and the justifying good is very short. Contrast that with an LGE that doesn’t produce its goods until years or decades later. What could those goods possibly be?

If those goods are for the sake of the original sufferer, then you have this long gap where the individual has suffered an apparently gratuitous evil. Arguably, allowing such a long gap is unacceptable for deontic reasons: it treats the person as if it’s okay to subject them to a gratuitous evil for decades. Also, if there is no appropriate causal connection between the evil and the justifying goods, then you run into problems of relying on a butterfly effect theodicy, which is unacceptable (God could obtain the justifying goods without the evil).

If the goods are for the sake of others besides the original sufferer, then again you run into the butterfly effect problem, and the deontic problem of permanent LGEs is even worse: it treats the person as if it’s okay to subject them to a gratuitous evil for forever.

Both of these worries suggest that in order for God to be compatible with LGEs, the justifying goods that convert LGEs into BJEs must be obtained for the person who suffers and must be obtained relatively soon after the badness has obtained, or else you run into worries of aiming for goods that could have been obtained without the evil and/or of treating individuals as a means to an end rather than an end unto themselves.

Objection 4: Deontic worries are not abated.

Not only are locally gratuitous evils suspect for deontic reasons as Objection 3 points out, but the Grand Story itself suffers from deontic worries. How does the suffering we experience in this life meaningfully cause the Grand Story? And how does the grand story benefit the sufferer?

There may be a satisficing component here where our evil does not specifically connect to the Grand Story, but that we suffered is connected to the grand story.

However, 1) the evils that we experience can be so humiliating that it’s hard to see how God could both love us and allow us to suffer them. If God truly loved us, he wouldn’t have us suffer as much as we do, in the ways we do, in the first place. And 2) it looks like we are being treated by God as pawns in a game of value chess where we are used as tools to generate the suffering necessary to create the Grand Story. God shouldn’t be looking at the world like it’s one number against another, the tally of total goodness vs total suffering, and as long as the goodness tally is higher then everyone is okay. God should see us as the individuals we are who think and feel and hurt.

A counter is that the Grand Story does hold our best interest at heart; we are glorified through Jesus, and this glory dwarfs the humiliation we experience. Again, God demonstrates his love for us by dying for us; it’s not merely about tallies at all.

But how exactly is our suffering supposed to cause the glory of Jesus? By giving God the opportunity to demonstrate his love? But God could demonstrate his love for us by preventing our suffering in the first place. God could be glorified by creating a world that was perfect from the start, and this would be a greater glory than having us first trudge through Earth.

Furthermore, the grand story does not benefit everyone. It only benefits those who are on the right side of salvation. Everyone else gets screwed over. You might say that it’s good to participate in ultimate justice, but it’s certainly not good to experience everlasting punishment. The Grand Story then seems dependent on some version of universalism. (Or more accurately, a God of love entails some version of universalism.)

Objection 5: The Grand Story is not grand at all.

The Christian story has been called the best possible story.[*8] But maybe the idea of a “best possible story” is incoherent. Regardless, the Christian story is arguably quite ugly:

5a - God is a God of covenants

God creates a covenant with Abraham and the Hebrews. Then God makes a new covenant through Jesus. This feels too tribal, even racist of God. Why wouldn’t God make a covenant with tribes around the world?

5b - The awkwardness of God not caring about other cultures

At the end of the world we have this ridiculous picture of people from all over ending up in heaven. Imagine sacrificing humans to Quetzalcoatl as an Aztec only to die and find out everything you believed was false. It would be very confusing. “Where was Yahweh when we were on Earth?”, the Aztecs could say. And this wouldn’t just be true of the Aztecs, it would be true of the vast majority of humans throughout history.

5c - The Grand Story makes the individual feel small

It feels good to be part of something bigger than yourself. The Grand Story is the biggest thing you could be a part of. But it’s not clear what you have to do with anything. If the end of the world involves a final battle at Armageddon, then I suppose you might play a role in that. But for the most part it sounds like the Grand Story is something that happens to you; you don’t have any input or freedom in the matter. But when we think of heaven we think exactly of freedom. In heaven we can explore the galaxy, terraform planets, create communities, create art and explore deeper and greater technologies. We can have a real impact on the world around us. But if we’re forced to be involved in a grand story where we play no meaningful role, then it might feel like we are reduced to a grain of sand or a drop in the ocean.

5d - The ugliness of biblical ethics

The doctrine of original sin, the Binding of Isaac, the story of Job, the Flood, the slaughtering of enemy tribes… there’s a great deal of ugliness in the Old Testament. And yet, it seems like Jesus affirms the Old Testament. Christians have to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of Jesus, which is no easy task. Even in the New Testament you have verses that are arguably misogynistic, homophobic, and tribal. How do we fit all the problems of the Bible into the Grand Story? 

5e - The ugliness of human sacrifice

The atonement itself is ugly. Jesus dies a hideous death for our sins? Why couldn’t Jesus express his love for us in a non-violent way? Why couldn’t God forgive our sins without violence?

5f - Animal suffering

Billions of years of evolution was required to get to where we are today. Countless horrific events of predation, starvation, and mutation occurred so that we eventually could participate in the Grand Story. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between the suffering of animals and the Grand Story. They don’t meaningfully participate in it at all. Deontic worries are multiplied by many orders of magnitude when we consider how animals are treated by God as a means to an end.

5g - Bad stories

There are a countless number of bad stories that have taken place on Earth, both human and non-human. No matter how long heaven lasts, there will always be a tainted history filled with these stories. If the Grand Story depends on these countless bad stories taking place, then plausibly the Grand Story isn’t worth it. If good stories are so important, then why wouldn’t God create good stories from the beginning? Why not create an evil-free world?

Objection 6: Divine hiddenness

I mentioned, as part of the theodicy, that God must be separated from us because our sinfulness repels a perfect God. But either God can interact with humanity or not. If not, then how did God interact with Noah, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and so on? How did God send Jesus? How did Jesus live among humans and heal them? But if God can interact with humanity, then why not send more prophets or heal more people?

Objection 7: The silver lining problem

There is the same worry as brought up in theodicy #6. Imagine a pharmacist visits a city. He has just invented the cure for the common cold. But this city has never had a problem with the common cold. So the pharmacist is disappointed that his work is a waste; it’s useless. He wants the city to appreciate his cure, so he introduces the virus into the city and spreads the common cold. He doesn’t sell his cure. He just wants his invention to be appreciated as a very good thing. He gives it away freely to the city, who mass produce the cure and give it to everyone who needs it. The pharmacist is hailed as a hero.

The pharmacist is not in it for money or even for glory; he’s in it because he wants to capture the goodness of his cure. Even still, it’s clearly wrong for him to spread the common cold despite him holding the cure for it. The world where there is no cure and no disease is better than the world where there is the cure and disease. The cure does not give us any goodness beyond the elimination of the disease, so there is no profit in introducing both the disease and cure.

Likewise, there is no goodness of the Grand Story beyond the redemption of all the gratuitous evils that took place. (Assuming the grand story even manages to achieve that magnitude of goodness, which it arguably does not.) So the goodness of the Grand Story is limited to canceling out the badness of gratuitous evils. Just as it is unjustified for the pharmacist to cause the common cold to obtain the goodness of his cure, it’s unjustified for God to allow the gratuitous evils of Earth to obtain the goodness of the Grand Story.

Objection 8 - An evil-free world leads to a better story

As usual, I save the best for last. If God wants good stories, he should maximize good local stories, which he could do without apparently gratuitous evils. On the Grand Story, if we zoom out, we see a series of bad stories leading up to a grand story and then countless local good stories after that. On an evil-free world, we would see a consistent series of local good stories. This second “meta story” is arguably better than the first. The best possible story perhaps is one of eternal flourishing from the beginning. God could demonstrate his love for us by giving us an evil-free life. If our greatest moral interest is being free from horrendous suffering, then there is no better way to love a human than ensure that they will not experience horrendous suffering. An evil-free world better shows God’s opposition to evil, better shows God’s love, better shows God’s perfection and glory, and so on. We can compare (1)-(6) above to:

(1) Evils are appropriately reviled because they are prevented entirely. At least, apparently gratuitous evils are prevented.

(2) Apparently gratuitous evils are not permissible because of all the problems they cause, as we have seen. The world is better without them.

(3) The goodness of the infinite love of God is expressed through the prevention of apparently gratuitous evils.

(4) Deontic worries are actually abated.

(5) There is no worry over whether our sins are a net good or not. There are no sins.

(6) There is no worry over how heaven can be evil-free and yet Earth isn’t.

A world without apparently gratuitous evils leads to a better story overall.

 

Note on free will

You may notice that my grand story does not mention free will. I mentioned punishment for sins, but we might think of that as rehabilitation, undergoing a process of becoming the kind of person fit for heaven, which is more of a universal reconciliation account of punishment.

Usually free will is front and center for theodicies – not so for mine. I’m not sure free will is a coherent notion, or that it’s metaphysically possible, or that we need it to make sense of praise, blame, justice, and meaning. I’m not sure free will is valuable, as briefly discussed in theodicy #10. So if I am to make the Grand Story theodicy as good as possible, then I want it to be open to both pro-free will and anti-free will views.

I don’t think God earned being God. So we can’t praise God in the sense that he earned something. Rather, we praise God because God is good. I think we can cash out all praise and blame in this way; to praise is to acknowledge the goodness of something (not to give credit) and to blame is to acknowledge the badness of something (not to accuse). Just like God, no one earned the goodness or badness of themselves; they simply happen to be good or bad in the ways they are due to circumstances beyond their control.

No one deserves anything in the sense of just deserts. We can think of deserve in consequentialist terms: a hard worker deserves a reward because we want to encourage hard work. If people looked around and observed that hard work was never rewarded, they would be less inclined to work hard. Likewise, evildoers deserve to be punished to cause people to be less likely to engage in evil. Rewards also play an acknowledging role; they acknowledge the goodness of a behavior. Punishments acknowledge the badness of a behavior. If someone does evil and gets away with it, then the badness of the evil is never acknowledged, which violates our desire to see the truth affirmed.

On my view we have freedom, which is the ability to identify various courses of action we can take. We have the power to choose from among those options and we see that our choices are coming from ourselves. With freedom and the power to choose, we undergo a deliberation process when confronted with a choice, and then we make a choice. That deliberation process is determined by our intelligence, our access to information, how much time we have to make a choice, by what we happen to be convinced is true at the time, by what we find important, good, or valuable (things we are taught by our parents, friends, culture), and so on. None of these things are up to us. So the outcome of our deliberation process is not up to us. So our choices are not up to us. Our choices can certainly be good or bad and reflect poorly on our character. Maybe our intelligence is not high enough to calculate our options well enough, or we have false beliefs about the importance of things. But whose fault is it that we have the intelligence we do or the beliefs we have?

We are certainly causally blameworthy for the badness of our actions, just as mosquitos are causally blameworthy for the spread of malaria. But mosquitos don’t have to worry about failing to recognize reasons for acting. Humans can fail to recognize, understand, or adequately appreciate the reasons for acting. So with non-rational agents you have the badness of the consequences of their actions and the danger the agent presents to others, but with rational agents you have the badness of the consequences of their actions, the danger the agent presents to others, and the failure to recognize, understand, or adequately appreciate the reasons for acting. This failure can be cashed out as a matter of violated expectation. We don’t expect mosquitos to ever understand why they shouldn’t spread malaria. But we do expect humans to understand why they shouldn’t make the world a worse place in the many ways they do. This failure to respond to reasons could also be cashed out as a failure to live up to a human ideal. An ideal mosquito can’t reason properly, but an ideal human can.

People say that if we don’t have free will then we are like robots or fictional characters in a book. This is true in the sense that we are programmed and our fates are sealed; we are souls along for the ride, bearing witness to how the dominoes fall. But robots and fictional characters aren’t persons; they don’t feel things and they don’t have conscious experience. But we are persons. We do feel and have experiences. We can suffer and flourish. So we are not robots.

You might point out how my view that there is no moral responsibility is in stark contrast with the entirety of the Bible, which depicts us as being overwhelmingly responsible for our sin. In light of this, the Christian is free to reject my view of free will and adapt my Grand Story theodicy to better fit their interpretation of the Bible. However, given how many problematic verses there are, Christians are arguably already committed to something like Providential Errantism (See Randal Rauser’s book, Jesus Loves Canaanites). Perhaps the view that we have moral responsibility is one of the many errors of the Bible that God allowed in his providence. While many Christians believe in hell, and while the Bible seems to teach eternal conscious torment, there has been a growing movement away from hell.[*9] If the Bible has caused confusion surrounding hell, then that confusion may be part of God’s providence for some reason. Likewise, if the Bible causes confusion around moral responsibility, then that confusion may be part of God’s providence too. If it turns out that the Grand Story theodicy doesn’t work on a no free will view, then it won’t be compatible with my beliefs. But then again, I don’t think the Grand Story theodicy works anyway.

Grand Story and God’s foreknowledge

I will have to reflect more on this, but my first impression is that my version of the Grand Story theodicy is compatible on both open theism as well as on models where God knows the future. If God knows the future, then God knows that all evils now are broadly justified. If the future is open to God, then God can still envision the future much like we do when we plan things out. Given that God is God, this vision will be highly detailed and highly likely, if not guaranteed, to succeed. Either way, God, at least in a sense, can see the future and can see how evils will end up broadly justified.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that this theodicy fails. Even though it performs far better than all other theodicies, it still suffers from too many worries. The greatest worry is the most direct: the Grand Story is not all that grand. It’s pretty awful. A better story is one with heaven from the beginning. An evil-free world suffers from none of the many worries we have been canvassing across these theodicies.

The only worry that an evil-free world might suffer, that I can see, is (1) lack of free will / meaningful choices and (2) a lack of story and meaning in life given the lack of problems to solve. (1) is not a problem for me at all; without free will our choices are still meaningful because our experiences are meaningful, and our choices are part of our experience. And (2) is not a problem for me at all either; there could be ways to generate meaning without problems, or our problems could look very differently in heaven; they would be always be minor, manageable, and part of that which enables life to always be deeply enjoyable and life-affirming; they would never rise to the level of despair they do for us on Earth. 

Anti-theodicy #9

God wants good stories, but God allows countless horrible stories to take place on Earth. EJ’s story is a tragedy; it’s a very bad story. If God wants good stories then he should prevent EJ’s dementia, or answer our prayers and miraculously cure EJ. Plausibly, local stories matter far more for humans than grand stories. Plausibly, a much better story is the local story in which EJ is always dignified and always flourishing, or in which EJ is miraculously healed. Plausibly, the goodness of the Grand Story requires treating EJ as a means to an end, and the badness of EJ’s suffering requires treating EJ with too great an indignity, and so God cannot allow the G & E of EJ's situation without failing to love her.

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*6 - Alvin Plantinga, "Supralapsarianism, or 'O Felix Culpa'" (2004), in P. van Inwagen (ed.) Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil. Retrieved from: https://andrewmbailey.com/ap/.

*7 - Strictly speaking, I don’t think there could be a best possible world. I agree with the response that you could always make the world better by adding one more flourishing person, and/or by increasing the inhabitants’ capacity for flourishing. However, if heaven allows for the continual addition of flourishing persons, then we could say heaven is the best possible state of affairs, which is where the world is fundamentally good, includes the best possible goods (e.g., the grand story), and keeps improving every day ad infinitum.

*8 - Gavin Ortlund says this at the 3 minute mark: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdoCFbUyfys)

*9 - See:

1. Keith DeRose, “Universalism and the Bible”, https://campuspress.yale.edu/keithderose/1129-2/.
2. John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God’s Final Victory (2011).
3. Christopher Date, Gregory Stump, Joshua Anderson, eds. Rethinking Hell (2014).
4. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (2019).
5. Joshua and Rachel Rasmussen, When Heaven Invades Hell (2020).