In a
relatively recent William Lane Craig debate, this time with Alexander
Rosenberg, Craig repeated his claim that the “Problem of Evil” is resolved, in
part, because God could not make a better world. (Note that in Hidden Premises, I
addressed another aspect of Craig’s defence against the Problem of Evil, a
defence that is revolves around Craig’s denial of omnipotence on the part of
his god.)
This
second argument is based on the claim that the levels of evil that are manifest
in this world, presumably both man-made and natural evil, are necessary to
produce the maximum number of people who may come to know him.
This
argument, while relatively simple to put into words, is so convoluted on closer
inspection that it is difficult to know where to start dismantling it. Given that this is a theist argument, it
might be most appropriate to work backwards.
I’m
not going to assume a sub-optimal god since there are already arguments to
dismiss such a notion, including one from Craig. So, we start with an optimal god, who has the
features that we are all familiar with: being omnipotent, omniscient and
omnibenevolent.
Craig
argues that while we humans might struggle with such questions, his god is able
to identify the optimal mix of good and evil required to maximise the number of
people who would come to know him (Craig’s allocation of gender appears to be
based on tradition rather than evidence). In other words, Craig’s god has crunched the
numbers and determined that the Holocaust was a necessary event which resulted
in more knowers of god than could have been achieved by allowing a relatively
small number of men to be eliminated (for example those who planned the Final
Solution). He would presumably have
performed similar calculations for:
·
The Black Death
·
Spanish Flu
·
Malaria
·
Tuberculosis
·
World War 2 in general
·
The American Civil War
·
The English Civil War
·
Stalin (or Marx)
·
Mao (or Marx)
·
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge
·
The Rape of Nanking
·
The Boxing Day Tsunami
· The Catholic Church (covering a multitude of
sins)
Any
horrible event that you can think of, according to Craig, has happened because
god has determined that by allowing those evil things to happen optimises the
number of people who will come to know him.
(Note that I use the word “evil” in this article to represent suffering
as well as the more vaguely defined theological evil. If the reader is an atheist, just read the
word as “suffering”.)
This
brings me to my first question, why does god want the optimal number of people
to come to know him? I don’t know
whether Craig has ever made his explanation of this explicit. One could assume that it’s because god is
loving, as Craig indicated in his closing statements in the second debate with
Quentin Smith:
A
loving God would not leave it up to us to figure out by our own ingenuity and
cleverness whether or not he exists. Rather a loving God would seek to reveal
himself to us and draw us to himself. And this is exactly what Christian theism
teaches. Jesus of Nazareth said, "If any man's will is to do God's will,
then he will know whether my teaching is from God, or whether I am speaking on
my own accord" (John 7.17). And Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit of God
would be given by him to convict and draw persons into loving relationships
with himself.
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So
what we have so far is that god is this all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good,
loving being that is seeking to obtain relationships with an optimal number of
humans.
Cynically,
we could say that the “optimal” number of humans who will enter into
relationships with god is an arbitrary number, perhaps 144,000 (to be honest
though, that number is not arbitrary, it’s a number from the Bible). It might not be optimal for god to have a
higher number, so the evil could arguably be there to prevent too many humans
from qualifying for the relationship with god.
This wouldn’t work as an argument, of course, because of the collateral
damage involved. God surely does not
need more than 7 billion people to suffer evil so that he can select 144,000
from them. In his debate with A.C.
Grayling, Craig indicated that this is not his argument anyway. By “optimal” he apparently means “maximal”:
… God
might have good reasons for permitting a lot of this natural evil in a world
with free creatures. And I think, as a Christian, that it’s related to the
Kingdom of God, if God wants to bring the maximum number of people freely into
his Kingdom. And I don’t find it at all implausible to think that natural evil
and, and moral evil could be a part of the circumstances in which he uses to do
this.
Here,
Craig introduces another element, namely that god wants an optimum, i.e.
maximum, number of humans to enter freely into a loving relationship
with him. This links back to another of
his arguments, namely that the evil that exists in the world is a direct
consequence of giving humans free will. This
is a moderately good argument but only for the evil in the world that is
directly related to the action of humans.
It says absolutely nothing about natural evil.
I
can understand, given that god wants a maximal number of us to enter into a
loving relationship with him, that he would want the decision to enter into
such a relationship to be made freely.
Anything else would be some form of divine rape. So, we can take the “freely” as a given.
However,
when we think about the idea that god wants the maximum number of us to enter
into this relationship with him, it becomes a little less clear as to why he is
so hell-bent on killing us. If he’d
prevented the Black Death, and Spanish Flu and the wars (excepting of course
the wars that he specifically commissioned), then there would be a lot more of
us today. If he’d prevented the Dark
Ages, or just made them significantly shorter, then by now we could have been
exploring the galaxy, colonising other planets and humans could number in the
trillions, rather than just the billions.
It begins to look like “optimum” is a more reasonable claim with regard
to god’s intentions than is “maximum”.
By
far the greatest problem that I have with Craig’s argument is that it tries to
wriggle out of answering what his kind tell us is the biggest question of all –
why are we here?
An
atheist, if asked that question, is likely to either say that there is no
inherent meaning in our being here or answer the question in terms of how the
universe and more specifically humans developed. If in a somewhat less serious mood, the
atheist might answer with “because I was born here”, “because I have not died
yet”, “because it’s better than the alternative” or something similarly droll.
A
theist like Craig, on the other hand, seems to answer with “so that we might
enter into a loving relationship with god”. But hold on a second, that’s begging some rather
large questions. Firstly, a question
raised earlier, why would god want to enter into a loving relationship with us?
And secondly, why did god make us in the first place? And thirdly, why did god make us the way he
did rather than making us another way?
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The
second question is an enormous problem for theists, even if they don’t
recognise it themselves:
·
Did god make us specifically in order to
allow a maximum number of us to freely enter into a loving relationship with
him?
·
Or did he make us for some other, poorly
defined reason and only subsequently decided to enter into this relationship
with us?
·
Or is there another option?
Neither
of the first two options is particularly satisfying.
If
god made all of us with the intention of forming this relationship with as many
of us as possible, but not all, then the rest of us – the ones who are not
destined to enter into this relationship – are chaff and due to his
omniscience, god would have known, and would still know that this is the
case. Does Craig actually think that some
proportion of humanity, the extent of which is currently unclear, is deliberately
and knowingly made dispensable in his god’s great plan - and that the rest of
us are just here to make up the numbers?
As
an alternative, it could be argued that we were just the bi-product of another
plan and the divine relationship that we have all been offered was tacked on as
an afterthought. This, to be frank,
seems rather more feasible. The numerous
imperfections of creation would make a lot more sense if god initially only thought
of humanity as a disposable element of a grander plan, and that we either demonstrated
sufficient worth to justify a qualified opportunity for salvation or god
introduced some sort of recycling measure.
The
problem here, of course, is that such an idea diverges widely from standard
theology in which the human is very much a central component in god’s plan.
Is
there a third option? Joseph Smith, the
founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, came up with what might sound
like another option – a graduated relationship.
It’s conceivable that, if there is a god, that god would have different
levels of relationship with humans much as we have different levels of
relationship with other humans. At one
extreme there would be the atheists and false believers who have a one way
relationship with god knowing them and at the other extreme, the true believers
who are in line for a deep and intimate relationship with god.
In
this option, none of us are chaff, we are just destined for a different sort of
relationship. It’s even possible that,
for some reason, god wanted this variation across relationships. It would at least explain why some people are
inordinately blessed with success and happiness while others are trapped in an
endless cycle of failure and disappointment.
However,
even in this option, there is still no satisfying explanation as to how it came
about that god created humanity in the first place. (And again, it’s not standard Christian
theology.)
I
suspect that, if pushed and prodded enough, Craig will fall back on a variation
of the anthropic principle – there must have been a good reason for god to have
made us, since we are here.
For Craig,
however, this argument fails because he repeatedly rejects the anthropic
principle in order to make space for his god.
It’s intellectually dishonest to later resurrect the anthropic principle
as an explanation for bizarre behaviour on the part of that god. For atheists, it also fails because it is the
standard anthropic principle with the unnecessary addition of a god, and a
universe created by a god requires a lot more explanation than a universe that
arises without one.
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Finally,
why did god make us the way he did and not another way?
This
question is predicated on god’s supposed omnipotence and omniscience, it is not
sufficient to say “I don’t know how god could achieve his ends without causing
as much evil as he does”, with the option of saying “God could not achieve his
ends without causing as much evil as he does”.
It might be the case that in a universe like ours, the evils that plague
us might drive us closer to god, but an omnipotent and omniscient god is not
obliged to make a universe like ours.
Surely
for an omnipotent god, the maximum number of beings that can enter into a
relationship with that god is every single being he creates.
In
Craig’s conception of god, the maximally great being sits outside of space and
time, so there’s no clear reason why he could not have created a mini-universe
for each human that he wanted to enter into a relationship with and run that
mini-universe for as long as it took to get that relationship to manifest. If I, as a puny human, can imagine such a
regime, then there’s no excuse for god not thinking of it.
A
slightly less wasteful version would be to populate a universe with real humans
who are destined to enter into a relationship with god and a vast number of
simulacrums whose only function is to assist the saved to achieve their
destiny. The real humans would be
trapped in a cycle of reincarnation, able only to escape once they achieve an
acceptable standard of performance.
This
brings us to another option, perhaps Craig’s god has done precisely that –
created a universe specifically for the saved, in which they can thrive find
their way to a perfect relationship with their god. (Note that Craig in this scenario would be a
Buddha-like character, soon to leave the cycle of reincarnation but calling out
to other saved to embrace their “Craig” nature.)
If
this is god had created a universe like this, then the unsaved would not be real
in the same way as, say, Craig would be real.
We’d
not have souls, we’d not have Free Will and we’d not perceive god.
And
this would make us … well, atheists.
