Theodicies About Free Will, Predictable Laws, and Souls Don't Work
Theists Need Better Theodicies
Given their theological insistence on holding that the world would be worse if small children didn’t naturally get cancer, theists have to come up with a variety of bizarre theodicies to explain evil. I’ve already debunked the skeptical theist argument and provided general arguments that defeat the others. In this post, I shall continue my project of arguing against theodicies.
1 Free Will
Theists say we need to have free will for value and then say that evil comes from free will. Several issues.
1 This doesn’t explain natural evil—malaria is not a human invention
2 This doesn’t explain animal suffering.
3 God could create us always wanting to do good just like in heaven. God has free will but never does evil.
4 God could make us have much better lives without usurping our free will.
5 One can have free will without being able to do particular things like brutally torture other people. Free will doesn’t entail being able to do lots of terrible things.
6 This doesn’t explain evils that go against free will like death (Which usurps free will), dementia, and insanity which causes people to do evil things without intending it.
7 It’s not clear why free will is of value and certainly unclear why it’s of infinite value.
Theists will say that natural evils came from the fall. However, this doesn’t explain why God made eating from a tree produce all of the worlds evils or any of the above thing. This is no more of an explanation for evil than a terrorist who rigged explosives to blow up a city would have, if the person who detonated the explosives was their clueless 4 year old child.
Theists will blame thing on demons using free will. This doesn’t explain demons having the ability to cause lots of evil.
This also can’t explain why we don’t have greater ability to will the world to be much better. Why doesn’t God give us the ability to easily solve disease.
This, like the other theodicies, is totally unable to explain my minimal facts.
2 Soul Building
Theists will often say that evils build our souls. This is not a good explanation for a bunch of reasons.
It can’t explain evils that hamper soul building like dementia, cancer, and brain death.
If this were true it would be good to make the world actively worse—to let more people build there souls. Why cure cancer if God uses it to build our souls.
An omnipotent God could build souls in either ways.
It can’t explain gratuitous misery—people being slowly tortured to death doesn’t build their souls.
It’s not clear why suffering builds souls or why that soul building is good. This would seem to rule out God having a robust soul and heaven building our souls.
This can’t explain evil’s spatiotemporal contingency. Do people in poor countries need more soul building than people in rich ones?
It can’t explain animal suffering that has been going on for billions of years. There are certainly some animals like fish that can suffer but lack souls. If one thinks that animals have souls and often suffer horrifically, then it seems unjust if they have no afterlife. But if they have an afterlife there are only two possibilities. Either they will remain roughly the same in terms of intellect and understanding in the afterlife, or they will become far more intellectually robust. If they remain the same, then they’re clearly missing out. However, if they’re different, then their time on earth as a grasshopper won’t have built our souls. If fish are scholars in the afterlife, then being an angler won’t build their souls.
This also can’t explain teleological evil, that follows from entities operating the way they were designed.
3
A final theodicy claims that God uses predictable laws, which is why there’s so much suffering. After all, if laws weren’t predictable then we couldn’t be confident in any of our judgements. As a result of making consistent, predictable laws, suffering emerges by accident. This theodicy fails for a bunch of reasons.
God could obviously have predictable laws without suffering. An omniscient and omnipotent being could make a world that didn’t kill lots of small children with malaria. One cannot hold that God is logistically constrained. There’s nothing impossible about having predictable laws that don’t cause the quick death of most sentient beings.
Presumably heaven has predictable laws. If so, then it’s possible to create a utopia with predictable laws
This can’t explain God failing to intervene to prevent things like Covid, the black plague, and many others.
God knew in advance what his predictable laws would do. Given that predictable natural laws result in a deterministic universe (excluding the actions of agents), God could make a universe with deterministic laws that result in better things and less suffering.
Theists hold that our minds are not purely physical and supervene. Thus, this can’t explain suffering as a feature of our mental life, or any other features of our subjective experience, because they’re not governed by predictable natural laws.
Evils depend on the initial conditions of the universe. This thus can’t explain why the initial conditions allowed so much suffering.