A New Preexistence Theodicy

Perhaps my favorite theodicy to date

Theodicies provide explanations of why God allows evil. They attempt to reconcile the existence of a being of limitless goodness with the profound horrors that fill and stain the world. I’ve previously written about my favorite meta-theodicy, which says that God places us in tons and tons of different worlds, and some of them are like this one. In this essay, I’ll present a new theodicy that I find quite powerful.

The theodicy holds that we preexist our earthly existence (note to Christians who find this heresy: we’ll see later, this assumption can be relaxed). God gives us a choice to enter the world, where if we enter the world, we’ll have the opportunity to help each other. Entering the world is a big sacrifice! It requires giving up a great good—chilling in heaven with God—so that we can live a comparatively shitty life on Earth, for the sake of helping other people.

This seems like a recipe for a very great good: connection building. The first line of the song Iris is, “And I'd give up forever to touch you.” Insofar as we quite literally give up decades of heaven—of the best conceivable existence—and come down to Earth to suffer, all so that we can help other people, that will strengthen our relationships with those people. Imagine someone did that for you: they left heaven to help you out. Wouldn’t that strengthen your relationship with them? Of course it would!

And most importantly, these connections last forever. Your relationship with the people you helped isn’t just better tomorrow or the day after, but remains better stretching infinitely far into the future. Thus, the strengthened relationships brought about by our suffering on Earth have infinite value, for the value compounds over the course of an infinitely long future. It’s worth making any finite sacrifice for future infinite reward. Thus, even though being on Earth is much worse than being in heaven, it’s worth it for an infinite reward.

Such a theory actively predicts immense evil that doesn’t seem to serve a greater purpose. Evil raises the cost of existence on Earth, requiring us to endure a greater cost to come down to Earth. While you’d be appreciative if someone left heaven to help you, how much more appreciative would you be if a person left heaven and risked living a short life as a deer, all so that they could help you.

This theodicy also predicts a largely indifferent world (except insofar as a non-indifferent world is needed to produce agents like us). The more the world starts out indifferent, the more we can do to reform it and help each other out. If we are here to help each other, then the world would be one where we have great ability to help each other. But crucially, it would also be one where helping people is difficult—both psychologically and materially. Thus, it actively predicts that acting wrongly would be very tempting, and doing the right thing would be psychologically difficult. Again, if this is so, a greater cost must be paid to help people out. Wouldn’t it help your connection with a person if they didn’t know you but made a great sacrifice to help you out, though making this sacrifice was quite psychologically difficult?

Finally, it predicts a world that’s radically transformable. While helping others would be expected to be costly, according to the theodicy, it predicts it being possible. This is exactly what we observe—the world is filled with transformative possibilities to help other people.

Now, you might object that this theodicy assumes that there are already people on Earth to be helped out, and the rest of us come to help them. But how do the first people get to Earth in the first place? I have a few proposals:

1. Maybe God simply sends a few people to Earth without giving them the choice, so that the rest of us can help them out. This isn’t morally objectionable, because God will give them the best sorts of lives in the world. So long as you think there are some people for whom the problem of evil doesn’t arise much—perhaps posthumans living the best imaginable lives in a post-scarcity world—then the theodicy can hold that it is these people who weren’t given a choice in coming to Earth. Remember additionally that these people get infinite rewards through connection-building, and thus they benefit.

2. Perhaps everyone is given the choice to come to Earth. However, given that everyone expects others to come to Earth, they all make a sacrifice to help out others.

3. Perhaps the first people come down voluntarily. Though they won’t help people out directly, they know that they’ll have connection-building with others through those others helping them out. Additionally, given that they predict others will come down, they’ll still have opportunities to help people out.

How does the presence of greater numbers of people choosing to enter the world help other people out? Well, perhaps God sets up a world that is better for each of the people already there the more people join. Thus, by joining the world, you are in an important sense making a sacrifice for the purpose of helping out the existing people.

Here’s another worry you might have: perhaps this is heresy. I’ve been told by some Christians that some council or another condemned preexistence. Now, I’m not a Christian, so I don’t care about this, but even if you are, I think the theodicy can still get off without a hitch. Crucially, if you deny preexistence, you can hold that we’re sent to Earth only because we will retroactively consent to it. After we return to heaven, we’ll be glad we went down to Earth, and God only sends us down because he knows this.

This seems to have the same connection-building benefits. If a person is willing to leave heaven to help you out, and this causally results in them leaving heaven, though they aren’t asked before-hand, this would dramatically strengthen your connection with them.

Additionally, I think this theodicy fits really well with Christianity. A view on which we voluntarily enter the world to suffer and die for the sake of others, and that this explains evil, fits quite well with a view on which God himself voluntarily enters the world to suffer and die for the sake of others.

A nice side effect of this theodicy is that it vaporizes the deontological problem of evil. Why does God impose great costs on us without our consent? He doesn’t! We’re consulted in the matter beforehand. Either that or we retroactively consent to it, but it seems that if something is infinitely good for you, it’s fine to impose it on you, knowing you’ll retroactively consent. For instance, if you’re unconscious, it’s fine to give you a surgery that will allow you to live a future infinitely good existence. Now, I don’t think the deontological problem of evil is a serious argument—you all know my preferred response—but if you do, this theodicy can help.

I’ve elsewhere argued that the two most puzzling features of evil, for theism, are:

1. The world seems largely indifferent. Many evils are pointless, and seem conducive to no greater goods. The laws are non-axiarchic—the goings-on of the natural world function in a way indifferent to value. Whether a rock falls doesn’t depend on whether it would be good for it to fall.

2. Lots of terrible things happen that could be prevented, but God doesn’t prevent those things. For instance, when a deer burns to death in a forest fire, God doesn’t save them.

The theodicy explains both. The first is explained by the fact that an indifferent world is one where we can help each other to a greater degree, where we can make greater sacrifices for the sake of others. The second is explained by apparently pointless suffering raising the cost of us entering a world, thus being conducive to connection-building. The theodicy also provides a good that’s worth all the worlds ills—infinitely long-lasting strengthened connections.

Another nice upshot of the theodicy is that it avoids the troubling conclusion that every evil is for the best. If you think that everything in the natural world resounds for the best, then that’s very counterintuitive and seems to weaken the case for us doing anything about evil. If malaria is for the best, why should we fight malaria? This theodicy answers:

1. We should do something about malaria in part because it’s good to help people.

2. Malaria is very bad. The reason it’s kept around is so: 1) we must bear the costs of entering a world with very bad stuff to help other people and 2) so that we can help people out. If in, say, 1 billion CE, a witch appeared and destroyed malaria, that would be a good thing, but God has reason not to destroy malaria, because if it was known that he’d do that, it would undermine the value of the connection-building.

I find this theodicy pretty plausible, particularly relative to existing theodicies, which are mostly not very good. As long as we’re objective list theorists, the assumptions aren’t ad hoc, and end up pretty plausible. Though I anticipate commenters having 99 objections, as they always do when I provide a theodicy. So, why am I wrong?