The Archon Abandonment Theodicy

My (current) favorite theodicy from Cutter and Swenson

If there’s a God, why do so many horrible things happen? Why has the last nearly billion years of history been filled with animals suffering and dying—through predation, starvation, and disease—rarely in ways that seem to achieve any greater goods? Why would a God of limitless power never have intervened throughout the course of this horrendous process?

In my view, the most promising explanation comes from my friends Brian Cutter and Philip Swenson. This theodicy is a work in progress, and no doubt there are more details to be figured out. But in my view, it is the most plausible account of why God would allow such horrendous things to go on for so long.

The short idea: there are archons (angel or demonlike creatures) tasked with making this world very good. In order to do so, they’d need to work together and carry out a difficult task. However, the archons have failed—most likely they didn’t even try to make the world very good.

Why does the world look so callous and indifferent to our welfare? Because the creatures tasked with making it not indifferent to our welfare failed. The seeming indifference of the world is, on this picture, no more mysterious than an abandoned house looking run-down.

Now you might wonder: why the heck would God set up such a scheme? Why would he make it so that if the archons abandon us, the world has such horrendous evil? Cutter and Swenson answer: connection-building.

Suppose that you rescue someone from a burning building. You do it at great personal difficulty and risk to yourself. You seriously might have failed. Ultimately, this heroic act will forge a kind of connection between you and the person that you saved. They’ll see you as a hero, and your relationship with them will be stronger than it ever could have been otherwise.

But now suppose that the archons do something similar. They undergo a heroic effort, at great personal cost, to rid the world of evils. They transform the world, so that rather than being like ours—full of horrendous evil—it more closely resembles heaven. Similarly, that would build a very valuable connection with the archons. Most importantly, assuming we spend forever with the archons in the afterlife, that valuable connection lasts forever. Because it lasts forever, the value of the connection is infinite—thus enough to fully outweigh the harms of every kind of earthly evil.

However, this great good depends on the archons really being the difference makers. If rather than saving someone from a house, you make soup for a sick person, while that’s still a nice thing to do, it’s nowhere near as valuable as saving someone from a burning building. Nice acts give rise to more valuable connections if they make a major difference—you’ll be more grateful to the person who saves your life than the person who makes you soup.

Analogously, for the archons to be important difference makers, it must be that if they don’t intervene, things go really badly. Otherwise, their intervention is relevantly like making soup for a sick person, rather than pulling someone out of a burning building—still good, but nowhere near as valuable. But if the archons’ intervention is needed to prevent things from going really badly, then there’s some chance that they won’t intervene successfully—that they won’t pay the major cost needed to help us out. Our world is one where the archons failed. The good news is that if you accept that God would make a giant multiverse—which you should—there are a lot of other worlds where the archons succeed.

Now you might wonder: why doesn’t God intervene in the case where the archons fail? If he could help us out, why doesn’t he? Well, if God has a policy of intervening whenever the archons fail, then the archons are no longer the difference makers. Whether the world goes well or poorly no longer depends on how the archons act. The archons become once again like the person who makes soup for a sick person—good, but not genuinely gaining access to the connection building of preventing a horrible thing at immense personal cost.

Here’s another objection you might have: why doesn’t God peer into the future, see if the archons will fail, and then establish a policy of intervening only in the case of the archons who might fail? This has two problems:

1. It assumes Molinism, that God can know what we’d do under different conditions. But Molinism is hugely controversial.

2. It makes the archons no longer genuine difference makers. If someone would save from the burning building anyone who wouldn’t normally be saved, then the guy pulling people out of burning buildings is no longer the difference maker.

A third potential worry: is it really worth it? Sure, maybe the archons helping us out would be sort of nice, but is it worth risking famine, malaria, parasites, torture, and worse? Here, however, I think we need to keep two things in mind:

1. Heaven will be infinitely amazing! The kinds of relationships that we’ll have in heaven will be of infinite value—love on a level we cannot imagine, joys beyond our wildest dreams. Thus, even slightly sweetening the goodness of heaven will be worth pretty much any degree of earthly suffering. If a moment of heaven makes the worst forms of torture look as paltry as the tiniest pinpricks, then making heaven more valuable is worth risking all the world’s evils.

2. The afterlife will last forever. Therefore, if risking the suffering of this world makes it even .00000001% better, it ends up having enough benefit to outweigh all earthly evil. Now you may object: this assumes a controversial aggregationist principle, that lots of small goods can add up to outweigh a great evil. In response I’d say: 1) see my first reply, where I claim that the goods won’t be minor; 2) this aggregationist principle is just obviously right, being supported by hugely powerful arguments (sorry Ibrahim); and 3) even if you’re not sure of the principle, for the argument from evil to be a strong argument, it must rely on obvious axiological judgments—if it requires holding some surprising and controversial judgment, then it’s not effective at massively lowering the odds of theism.

A last objection: isn’t this immoral? Sure, maybe this explains how God allowing a scenario that potentially gives rise to great evils leads to greater goods, but you can’t just go around doing horrific things because they might lead to greater goods. Even if chopping off someone’s leg might lead to a greater good, you can’t just go around chopping off people’s legs. In response to this, I’d note three points:

1. We generally recognize that it’s permissible to impose a cost on someone without their consent if it’s for their own benefit. For instance, if a person comes into a hospital unconscious, and thus unable to consent, generally it’s recognized that performing a surgery would be permissible. Thus, even if we didn’t consent to live in this world, it would be permissible for God to place us in this world for the sake of providing us with infinitely great benefits.

2. If consent is needed, perhaps we did consent! Perhaps God asked us before placing us in this world.

3. Even if we didn’t actually consent, it seems permissible to impose costs on people if they’ll later agree to them (see, for instance, the surgery case). But in this case, if the expected benefit is infinite, we’ll later be glad that they happened.

With this theodicy in place, we can explain basically everything as well as atheism. Why is God hidden? Well, the people tasked with making his revelation clear and obvious failed. Why is the world empty and barren? Because the people tasked with populating it failed! Why does the world have so many horrendous evils? Those tasked with eliminating those evils failed. Why does religious confusion abound? Because those tasked with eliminating confusion failed—likely they didn’t even try.

Overall, I don’t know if this is the right explanation of why God allows evil. Theology is, by its nature, speculative. Perhaps this is part of the story. But at the very least, I think this is a plausible story of why God might allow evil. With this theodicy in place, theism explains everything as well as atheism—in contrast, the atheist is left struggling to explain psychophysical harmony, fine-tuning, the anthropic data, the falsity of skepticism, moral/mathematical/modal/inductive knowledge, and much more. While the theist can explain all the best atheist evidence in one fell swoop, the atheist has no similar way of explaining all the theistic evidence. Thus, the most reasonable conclusion: theism is true. God exists! Hallelujah!

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(Unrelated: I recently called into a show called “the line” run by Matt Dillahunty and friends, where they argue with callers about the existence of God. I called in to discuss the anthropic argument—it went about as well as you’d expect, and was quite hilarious. I’m the caller at 57:43). Though perhaps it is related, because Dillahunty and friends’ confusion about epistemology is an evil so gargantuan that it cries out for explanation :). I also, apparently, committed many fallacies, including the fallacy of believing in a trivial consequence of Bayes’ theorem:

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