CS Lewis propounds a theodicy very similar to this one in his science fiction trilogy. There, be suggests that there are many angels (eldila), but each world has a governing archangel (Oyarsa). Most of the Oyarsa are very good, but ours is Satan, and he corrupted earth pretty badly. Eventually, God will redeem earth (through Christ), but in the meantime a lot of suffering and evil happens because our angels are evil.
Theologian Greg Boyd does a great job expanding on a theodicy similar to this in his book “Satan and the Problem of Evil” (as well as the previous title “God at War”). Some of the philosophical verbiage he uses goes over my head but I think you’d enjoy it.
While I did laugh reading the blow-by against bounded aggregation, it actually seems to me that bounded aggregation could help this theodicy! Not only because, as you suggest with reply 1, the goods in heaven are plausibly good enough to not be the kinds with low bounds (like eating a chocolate bar), but actually because it seems plausible that goods in heaven might even be *lexically superior* to a whole lot of earthly goods and bads. Bounded aggregation is a friend :)
Also — potential worry: do you think the good of connections are dependent on the *actual* amount of good someone does for me? Or just my *belief* in the amount of good someone does for me? Like, if I believe you save my life, and so do you, but it turns out in fact all along someone else would’ve intervened if you failed, or if all along I actually wasn’t at danger because the laws of nature were about to change, or we’re in some skeptical scenario, etc., does this make my connection to you any less great? I mean, suppose I never find out you didn’t *actually* save my life. Seems I’d be equally grateful to you and our connection would be equally strong.
Hmm…then if God can keep us sufficiently fooled, and thus prevent a whole lot of evil, at the cost of only “half” the goods of connections, seems maybe He should? Maybe the infinity stuff saves here
Forgive me if I’m being dense or anti-intellectual… but theodicies just seem like philosophically wrapped coping mechanisms.
“Why does evil exist if a perfectly good and all powerful god exists?”
“Well if you assume that a bunch of severely undersupported facts (that amount to a nice, cozy, and warm story) are true, then that’s why!”
… this kind of argument seems primarily designed to assuage tension in the minds of believers, not to convince proponents of the problem of evil of anything.
Well, ideally a theodicy won't be severely unsupported, but will instead be plausible given theism. If you can come up with a plausible explanation of why a world with God would have lots of evil then that should undercut the force of the problem of evil,.
>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.
I think this depends on the person saving you not having set the building on fire in the first place. If the guy saving you is the arsonist, you probably won’t love him forever for almost burning you alive.
It seems like god could much more easily forge a connection identical to the strongest one humanity currently knows: the connection between a mother and a child. This only depends on a creator’s unconditional love and presence. Incidentally, making soup for your child when they’re sick is a common expression of it.
Similarly, couldn't god make it so building these rewarding connections doesn't require harrowing risks, or couldn't god make it so that the beings forging such connections merely surmise that they're difference makers even if there's secretly a safety net?
Yeah, like every theodicy, extremely unconvincing at best, totally nut at worst. Anyone with a little glimpse of common sense can see that the far better explanation of the data is : There is no perfect being looking over this whole mess.
I'm not sure if this is really an improvement on the other connection-based theodicies, like the preexistence theodicy. I think it still has the same problems and might even make some of them worse. The main problems I have are:
1. It doesn't take God's omnipotence seriously enough. If God is truly omnipotent, he should be able to forge the valuable connections between us and the archons, or between us and other people, without needing to resort to a method that involves allowing for a massive amount of evil to exist.
2. If the archons fail, then we don't forge valuable connections with them, and we would in fact come to resent them for failing us and causing us immense suffering. So the failure of the archons has just as big a negative effect on our infinite future in heaven as the success of the archons would have a positive effect. If there's some way for God to prevent this negative effect, then that just makes point 1 even stronger - God has some way of strengthening our relationships with the archons that doesn't require the possibility of suffering. And evidently, the archons are pretty likely to fail given that the theodicy argues that God made it very difficult and costly for them to succeed, and we know that they failed in the only instance we've observed.
3. The same connections could have been forged by giving the archons a chance to give us an immense good in a world that was devoid of extreme suffering but just not as good as it could be by default (e.g., it's also devoid of extreme, heavenly pleasure). The archons' success would still give us just as much reason to connect with them in heaven due to our gratitude for the immense good they gave us in our earthly lives, but it wouldn't require the possibility of extreme suffering. This would probably also make the heavenly consequences of the archons' failure much less severe - even if they failed to bring us an extreme good, that would weaken our connection much less than if they had allowed extreme suffering.
4. The theodicy requires libertarian free will, which, as a compatibilist, I don't think is metaphysically possible. God could have just made the archons perfect so that they were guaranteed not to fail. It would still be their agency that creates the good world for us and saves us from suffering, so all the connection-building benefits would still be there. And he could still precommit to not intervening in this situation so that the archons would be genuine difference-makers - it's just that he would never need to follow through on that precommitment because the archons would never fail. In addition to still obtaining all the same goods that we would get from from archons that might fail, this one would also strengthen our connection with God, since we would be grateful to him for creating the archons in such a perfect manner that they could never fail us.
5. The failure of the archons not only weakens our connection with them, but with God for creating the conditions that allowed them to fail and resulted in extreme suffering if they failed. Arguably, it would damage our connection with God even if they had succeeded - as another commenter noted, your connection with someone isn't strengthened if they save you from a fire that they started in the first place solely to be able to save you. But even if this is not the case, our connection with God would surely weaken in the case that they fail, because then we had to go through horrible suffering, all on God's watch, because of conditions he created, and it's not compensated by anything, since we don't get to form the relationships with the archons that people in worlds where they succeeded would. For people with deontological sympathies, it might even be immoral for God to create these conditions, since they caused some people great, uncompensated suffering, only to be made up for by other people's greater ability to connect with their archons. I'm a consequentialist, so that doesn't exactly matter to me, but it still seems the connection-forming consequences now weigh even more heavily against what God did: The archons succeeding would help us foster a greater connection with them, but their failure hurts our connection with them and with God.
6. Clearly, Matt Dillahunty's reaction to you coming on his show was of such great disvalue that it outweighs even the infinite value of forming connections with the archons.
1) Each kind of connection is a unique kind of good. Thus, only this world can give us the unique kind of connection of making a difference to whether another undergoes a horrendous fate.
2) But that opens up new avenues for connection through repentance and forgiveness. And while the value of success is infinite, the disvalue of failure isn't.
3) That would make them smaller difference makers. Then they're relevantly like people who offer you a great gift--paying for college--rather than save you from a burning building and then pay for college. If the alternative is worse, the connection is better.
4) I don't know that it requires that. It might be able to work with deterministic agents tempted. You might think there's something screwed up about God directly determining that people are always motivated to act rightly--there must be genuine risk of failure. I also think that conditional on theism you probably have to be a libertarian. Fortunately, libertarianism is true and the only way to account for moral knowledge (if determinism is true the moral facts play no explanatory role in our moral beliefs).
5) I don't think it weakens our connection to God because we recognize that he did it for our sakes and it was good off in expectation. If God set a fire because he knew your life would be saved in a scheme that infinitely would benefit you, then upon having complete wisdom in the afterlife, your relationship wouldn't be damaged.
1) I don't really think there's a distinct kind of connection aside from what God could give you. Maybe there could be on an objective list theory of well-being, but definitely not on a hedonic theory. On a preference theory, I suppose it depends on your individual preferences, but I feel like most people would be fine not having to go through horrendous suffering and just having God do whatever is necessary to forge a psychologically equivalent connection.
2) If the value of success is infinite, I think the disvalue of failure would also have to be infinite. If helping someone forges some sort of positive connection with them for all time, then hurting someone should forge a negative connection for all time. Maybe it can be lessened by factors like forgiveness, but by the same token, we could forge a connection without others helping us through an abundance of love.
3) They would be creating a good much greater than paying for college though. They could make the world so unimaginably good that the difference between that life and a good but not overwhelmingly good life is comparable to the difference between a good life and a life of horrendous suffering.
4) God could have just created all the archons to be resistant to temptation. I don't think there's anything screwed up about it unless you already accept incompatibilism. The archons are still freely choosing to do good.
I don't know what the inference from theism to libertarianism would be - it seems to me like theism actually gels much better with compatibilism since it's predetermined that God will always make the morally best choice. But even if theism implies libertarianism, that just makes the problem even worse, since now it's a problem for any version of theism and not just a specific theodicy. I also don't think libertarianism is required for moral knowledge. I think moral facts can play an explanatory role in our moral knowledge in a similar way that mathematical facts do in our mathematical knowledge, even if it's not a causal role. But even if that doesn't work, something like, "God knows all the moral facts do to his omniscience and then put that knowledge in our heads," would imply an explanatory role for moral facts in our moral knowledge without saying anything about whether free will is compatible with determinism.
5) In the case where it actually does benefit you, it may not weaken your connection to God, but what about the case where the archons fail? In that case, it genuinely didn't benefit you. Even if the you forgave the archons and your connection with them was not infinitely harmed, as you suggested, your connection still hasn't been strengthened, so you were harmed with ultimately no benefit to yourself. And God, being omniscient, knew this would happen.
Isn't this reasoning disharmonious with your anthropic argument for god? If the Archons usually succeed, shouldn't we expect to find ourselves in one of those worlds?
Have you read the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick? The published version of this begins with this passage:
"The beautiful and imperishable comes into existence due to the suffering of individual perishable creatures who themselves are not beautiful, and must be reshaped to form a template from which the beautiful is printed (forged, extracted, converted). This is the terrible law of the universe. This is the basic law; it is a fact… Absolute suffering leads to — is the means to — absolute beauty.”
Dick's theodicy has been summarized as "If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others" and is explored in both his works (Ubik, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, VALIS, and the Divine Invasion most specifically) and his related philosophy.
I wrote a short book called "The Devil's Disbarment: Exploring Christ's Victory In The Divine Council" in which I offer a somewhat similar theodicy. The book is ultimately about atonement, but I note in the final chapter how it also provides a response to the problem of evil. If you find this interesting, you might want to check out the book (its free on Kindle Unlimited).
You said that you consider this the most plausible account for why evil exists. What's your rough estimate for the probability that this explanation is true?
I worry that the connection is unlikely to actually form because a lot of people will not want to forgive the beings that ignored them for their and their ancestors’ entire lives up to that point.
Right the idea is that it builds the connections if the archons succeed. Though if they fail there are new kinds of connections built from us forgiving them.
Why should we expect that the archons failed, or as you even say, "didn't even try"? Shouldn't beings created and tasked by God possess superhuman benevolence and ability? Basically, why would God create such shitty archons?
Well, he had to make it difficult and psychologicall taxing to bring about the best kind of connection building. The best kind comes when you do good even despite temptation. But temptation means risk of failure.
Should we use anthropic reasoning to assume that our observation of failed archons implies that most archons failed? Because observing ourselves to be in a universe where the archons failed to save us would be more likely if the archons failed in more universes.
So our situation would be akin to someone putting a bunch of people in burning buildings, knowing that the vast majority of people sent in to save them will fail. I know you appeal to an infinite afterlife making even extreme sacrifices for slight relationship-building worth it, but you have to admit that on the face of it it doesn't make God look very good. Surely there could have been a better way to build relationships than to put people in universes full of suffering that most of the time they won't be saved from.
No, what? I didn't say most archons fail. I say there's an update in favor of most archons failing. But that doesn't mean likely most archons will fail! I think probably most succeed!
Absent risking serious harm, one can't get access to the kind of connection building where you make a difference to whether one undergoes great harm.
Because there were a series of pre-conditions which God wants to fulfill in and of themselves. One way of looking at this is a stereotypically Panglossian way, but another is that even to the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, structure matters. The Trinity is that all three are God but none are each other, and this is the key insight. Could an omnipotent God make all three each other at the same time? Only through God.
CS Lewis propounds a theodicy very similar to this one in his science fiction trilogy. There, be suggests that there are many angels (eldila), but each world has a governing archangel (Oyarsa). Most of the Oyarsa are very good, but ours is Satan, and he corrupted earth pretty badly. Eventually, God will redeem earth (through Christ), but in the meantime a lot of suffering and evil happens because our angels are evil.
I think that because the evils look like the byproduct of indifference, abandonment is a better bet than deliberate malice or corruption.
I think you are right. The evil of earth, taken by itself, looks more like neglect than malice.
Theologian Greg Boyd does a great job expanding on a theodicy similar to this in his book “Satan and the Problem of Evil” (as well as the previous title “God at War”). Some of the philosophical verbiage he uses goes over my head but I think you’d enjoy it.
I second this recommendation!
While I did laugh reading the blow-by against bounded aggregation, it actually seems to me that bounded aggregation could help this theodicy! Not only because, as you suggest with reply 1, the goods in heaven are plausibly good enough to not be the kinds with low bounds (like eating a chocolate bar), but actually because it seems plausible that goods in heaven might even be *lexically superior* to a whole lot of earthly goods and bads. Bounded aggregation is a friend :)
Also — potential worry: do you think the good of connections are dependent on the *actual* amount of good someone does for me? Or just my *belief* in the amount of good someone does for me? Like, if I believe you save my life, and so do you, but it turns out in fact all along someone else would’ve intervened if you failed, or if all along I actually wasn’t at danger because the laws of nature were about to change, or we’re in some skeptical scenario, etc., does this make my connection to you any less great? I mean, suppose I never find out you didn’t *actually* save my life. Seems I’d be equally grateful to you and our connection would be equally strong.
Probably some combination of how much good they actually do and how much they believed they'd do.
Hmm…then if God can keep us sufficiently fooled, and thus prevent a whole lot of evil, at the cost of only “half” the goods of connections, seems maybe He should? Maybe the infinity stuff saves here
Forgive me if I’m being dense or anti-intellectual… but theodicies just seem like philosophically wrapped coping mechanisms.
“Why does evil exist if a perfectly good and all powerful god exists?”
“Well if you assume that a bunch of severely undersupported facts (that amount to a nice, cozy, and warm story) are true, then that’s why!”
… this kind of argument seems primarily designed to assuage tension in the minds of believers, not to convince proponents of the problem of evil of anything.
Well, ideally a theodicy won't be severely unsupported, but will instead be plausible given theism. If you can come up with a plausible explanation of why a world with God would have lots of evil then that should undercut the force of the problem of evil,.
Plausible (?) given theism but necessary to maintain theism.
Seems a wee bit circular at some level. Maybe that of persuasion.
>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.
I think this depends on the person saving you not having set the building on fire in the first place. If the guy saving you is the arsonist, you probably won’t love him forever for almost burning you alive.
It seems like god could much more easily forge a connection identical to the strongest one humanity currently knows: the connection between a mother and a child. This only depends on a creator’s unconditional love and presence. Incidentally, making soup for your child when they’re sick is a common expression of it.
Similarly, couldn't god make it so building these rewarding connections doesn't require harrowing risks, or couldn't god make it so that the beings forging such connections merely surmise that they're difference makers even if there's secretly a safety net?
Yeah, like every theodicy, extremely unconvincing at best, totally nut at worst. Anyone with a little glimpse of common sense can see that the far better explanation of the data is : There is no perfect being looking over this whole mess.
I don't know how to refute an incredulous stare.
I'm not sure if this is really an improvement on the other connection-based theodicies, like the preexistence theodicy. I think it still has the same problems and might even make some of them worse. The main problems I have are:
1. It doesn't take God's omnipotence seriously enough. If God is truly omnipotent, he should be able to forge the valuable connections between us and the archons, or between us and other people, without needing to resort to a method that involves allowing for a massive amount of evil to exist.
2. If the archons fail, then we don't forge valuable connections with them, and we would in fact come to resent them for failing us and causing us immense suffering. So the failure of the archons has just as big a negative effect on our infinite future in heaven as the success of the archons would have a positive effect. If there's some way for God to prevent this negative effect, then that just makes point 1 even stronger - God has some way of strengthening our relationships with the archons that doesn't require the possibility of suffering. And evidently, the archons are pretty likely to fail given that the theodicy argues that God made it very difficult and costly for them to succeed, and we know that they failed in the only instance we've observed.
3. The same connections could have been forged by giving the archons a chance to give us an immense good in a world that was devoid of extreme suffering but just not as good as it could be by default (e.g., it's also devoid of extreme, heavenly pleasure). The archons' success would still give us just as much reason to connect with them in heaven due to our gratitude for the immense good they gave us in our earthly lives, but it wouldn't require the possibility of extreme suffering. This would probably also make the heavenly consequences of the archons' failure much less severe - even if they failed to bring us an extreme good, that would weaken our connection much less than if they had allowed extreme suffering.
4. The theodicy requires libertarian free will, which, as a compatibilist, I don't think is metaphysically possible. God could have just made the archons perfect so that they were guaranteed not to fail. It would still be their agency that creates the good world for us and saves us from suffering, so all the connection-building benefits would still be there. And he could still precommit to not intervening in this situation so that the archons would be genuine difference-makers - it's just that he would never need to follow through on that precommitment because the archons would never fail. In addition to still obtaining all the same goods that we would get from from archons that might fail, this one would also strengthen our connection with God, since we would be grateful to him for creating the archons in such a perfect manner that they could never fail us.
5. The failure of the archons not only weakens our connection with them, but with God for creating the conditions that allowed them to fail and resulted in extreme suffering if they failed. Arguably, it would damage our connection with God even if they had succeeded - as another commenter noted, your connection with someone isn't strengthened if they save you from a fire that they started in the first place solely to be able to save you. But even if this is not the case, our connection with God would surely weaken in the case that they fail, because then we had to go through horrible suffering, all on God's watch, because of conditions he created, and it's not compensated by anything, since we don't get to form the relationships with the archons that people in worlds where they succeeded would. For people with deontological sympathies, it might even be immoral for God to create these conditions, since they caused some people great, uncompensated suffering, only to be made up for by other people's greater ability to connect with their archons. I'm a consequentialist, so that doesn't exactly matter to me, but it still seems the connection-forming consequences now weigh even more heavily against what God did: The archons succeeding would help us foster a greater connection with them, but their failure hurts our connection with them and with God.
6. Clearly, Matt Dillahunty's reaction to you coming on his show was of such great disvalue that it outweighs even the infinite value of forming connections with the archons.
1) Each kind of connection is a unique kind of good. Thus, only this world can give us the unique kind of connection of making a difference to whether another undergoes a horrendous fate.
2) But that opens up new avenues for connection through repentance and forgiveness. And while the value of success is infinite, the disvalue of failure isn't.
3) That would make them smaller difference makers. Then they're relevantly like people who offer you a great gift--paying for college--rather than save you from a burning building and then pay for college. If the alternative is worse, the connection is better.
4) I don't know that it requires that. It might be able to work with deterministic agents tempted. You might think there's something screwed up about God directly determining that people are always motivated to act rightly--there must be genuine risk of failure. I also think that conditional on theism you probably have to be a libertarian. Fortunately, libertarianism is true and the only way to account for moral knowledge (if determinism is true the moral facts play no explanatory role in our moral beliefs).
5) I don't think it weakens our connection to God because we recognize that he did it for our sakes and it was good off in expectation. If God set a fire because he knew your life would be saved in a scheme that infinitely would benefit you, then upon having complete wisdom in the afterlife, your relationship wouldn't be damaged.
6) LOL!
1) I don't really think there's a distinct kind of connection aside from what God could give you. Maybe there could be on an objective list theory of well-being, but definitely not on a hedonic theory. On a preference theory, I suppose it depends on your individual preferences, but I feel like most people would be fine not having to go through horrendous suffering and just having God do whatever is necessary to forge a psychologically equivalent connection.
2) If the value of success is infinite, I think the disvalue of failure would also have to be infinite. If helping someone forges some sort of positive connection with them for all time, then hurting someone should forge a negative connection for all time. Maybe it can be lessened by factors like forgiveness, but by the same token, we could forge a connection without others helping us through an abundance of love.
3) They would be creating a good much greater than paying for college though. They could make the world so unimaginably good that the difference between that life and a good but not overwhelmingly good life is comparable to the difference between a good life and a life of horrendous suffering.
4) God could have just created all the archons to be resistant to temptation. I don't think there's anything screwed up about it unless you already accept incompatibilism. The archons are still freely choosing to do good.
I don't know what the inference from theism to libertarianism would be - it seems to me like theism actually gels much better with compatibilism since it's predetermined that God will always make the morally best choice. But even if theism implies libertarianism, that just makes the problem even worse, since now it's a problem for any version of theism and not just a specific theodicy. I also don't think libertarianism is required for moral knowledge. I think moral facts can play an explanatory role in our moral knowledge in a similar way that mathematical facts do in our mathematical knowledge, even if it's not a causal role. But even if that doesn't work, something like, "God knows all the moral facts do to his omniscience and then put that knowledge in our heads," would imply an explanatory role for moral facts in our moral knowledge without saying anything about whether free will is compatible with determinism.
5) In the case where it actually does benefit you, it may not weaken your connection to God, but what about the case where the archons fail? In that case, it genuinely didn't benefit you. Even if the you forgave the archons and your connection with them was not infinitely harmed, as you suggested, your connection still hasn't been strengthened, so you were harmed with ultimately no benefit to yourself. And God, being omniscient, knew this would happen.
Isn't this reasoning disharmonious with your anthropic argument for god? If the Archons usually succeed, shouldn't we expect to find ourselves in one of those worlds?
1) If half the archons fail, then there are still way more instances of us finding ourselves in worlds that look indifferent given theism than atheism--see also here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-most-plausible-explanation-of
2) Probably there's no precise percent of time the archons fail as it's infinite in both cases.
3) Even if we take a small hit in probability from most worlds having the archons succeed, it's just so paltry compared to the anthropic update.
A distant, hands-off God who leaves the world in the hands of a bunch of lazy, incompetent deputies... Did you guys just reinvent gnosticism? 😂😂
Have you read the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick? The published version of this begins with this passage:
"The beautiful and imperishable comes into existence due to the suffering of individual perishable creatures who themselves are not beautiful, and must be reshaped to form a template from which the beautiful is printed (forged, extracted, converted). This is the terrible law of the universe. This is the basic law; it is a fact… Absolute suffering leads to — is the means to — absolute beauty.”
Dick's theodicy has been summarized as "If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others" and is explored in both his works (Ubik, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, VALIS, and the Divine Invasion most specifically) and his related philosophy.
I wrote a short book called "The Devil's Disbarment: Exploring Christ's Victory In The Divine Council" in which I offer a somewhat similar theodicy. The book is ultimately about atonement, but I note in the final chapter how it also provides a response to the problem of evil. If you find this interesting, you might want to check out the book (its free on Kindle Unlimited).
You said that you consider this the most plausible account for why evil exists. What's your rough estimate for the probability that this explanation is true?
Idk
I worry that the connection is unlikely to actually form because a lot of people will not want to forgive the beings that ignored them for their and their ancestors’ entire lives up to that point.
Right the idea is that it builds the connections if the archons succeed. Though if they fail there are new kinds of connections built from us forgiving them.
Why should we expect that the archons failed, or as you even say, "didn't even try"? Shouldn't beings created and tasked by God possess superhuman benevolence and ability? Basically, why would God create such shitty archons?
Well, he had to make it difficult and psychologicall taxing to bring about the best kind of connection building. The best kind comes when you do good even despite temptation. But temptation means risk of failure.
Should we use anthropic reasoning to assume that our observation of failed archons implies that most archons failed? Because observing ourselves to be in a universe where the archons failed to save us would be more likely if the archons failed in more universes.
It will update us in favour of most archons failing but not definitively.
So our situation would be akin to someone putting a bunch of people in burning buildings, knowing that the vast majority of people sent in to save them will fail. I know you appeal to an infinite afterlife making even extreme sacrifices for slight relationship-building worth it, but you have to admit that on the face of it it doesn't make God look very good. Surely there could have been a better way to build relationships than to put people in universes full of suffering that most of the time they won't be saved from.
No, what? I didn't say most archons fail. I say there's an update in favor of most archons failing. But that doesn't mean likely most archons will fail! I think probably most succeed!
Absent risking serious harm, one can't get access to the kind of connection building where you make a difference to whether one undergoes great harm.
My mistake, you're right that updating towards x isn't equivalent to saying x is overall the most likely.
Because there were a series of pre-conditions which God wants to fulfill in and of themselves. One way of looking at this is a stereotypically Panglossian way, but another is that even to the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, structure matters. The Trinity is that all three are God but none are each other, and this is the key insight. Could an omnipotent God make all three each other at the same time? Only through God.
I fail to see what this has to do with my question about incompetent archons.
What if we are the Archons?
Different theodicy!
That guy whose show you called into is a huge asshole by the way. Does he talk to people like that all the time?
Yes
Does he let people talk back to him like that?
No
1) Helping others forges connections that are infinitely valuable and last forever.
2) It's good to do good stuff even if there's already infinite good.