I've gotten the sense that the problem of evil is the primary motivation for many who subscribe to what's commonly called open theism, i.e. the view that God does not know the future, takes risks, and changes his mind due to learning new information.
Some open theists take God to have voluntarily given up the right to have knowledge of the future for the sake of human freedom. The assumption is that divine foreknowledge and human freedom are incompatible. Other open theists take God's ignorance of the future to be a necessary fact about the nature of time, since there's no future to be known. This view assumes what I call a growing block theory of time. Some think it follows from presentism, i.e. the view that the present exists but the future and past don't, but if presentism is going to justify the view that there are no truths about the future, then it must also justify the view that there are no truths about the past. So it assumes a growing block view, according to which past and present exist but no future, since those truths aren't somehow sense "fixed".
I share neither of these assumptions, so I have little sympathy for open theism, but my concern here isn't to deal with those elements. I'm interested in a different motivation for open theism, the motivation that God's ignorance of the future can explain the kinds and amount of evil in the universe in a much more satisfying way than any other view. I just don't think that's true.
This post at Rebecca Writes has the beginning elements of the kind of argument I want to make here. She argues that the amount of evil explained by God's ignorance of the future isn't sufficient. Even if open theists are correct and God doesn't know what free human beings are going to do in the future, far too many cases of really bad evil could so easily have been prevented. I'd like to explore a couple cases.
Consider the Holocaust. It's true the Htler, his key leaders, and the average solider in the Nazi regime had the freedom to make the choices they made. According to a traditional free will + foreknowledge response to the problem of evil, God mostly allows people to go their way. Open theists motivated by the problem of evil don't see that as good enough, since they find it morally offensive that God might know people to be about to do something so wretched but still not prevent it, so they think God must not know it's about to happen. Yet look at how things went in the Holocaust. There was a steady period of building when the ideas became more and more accepted. People who anyone omniscient about the present could detect were willing to do what they were saying were saying all sorts of awful things about what should be done. These people made it into power. Then they started implementing those decisions, progressively getting worse. For open theism to add anything to the traditional free will response to the problem of evil, at least when it comes to the Holocaust, God must have been hoping for the best while realizing that things were pointing in worse and worse directions the whole time. At each juncture when Jews were being tortured, God would have been sitting back hoping that the people ordered to do things would refuse, even though he knew their psychological makeup and knew that almost everyone who had been put into those situations before had been doing it.
So I question the idea that not being sure of how things will go in any absolute sense gives any reason to absolve God of moral blame for allowing things to go the way they seem likely to go, assuming as they do that it's wrong for God to allow any evil that's foreseen. At this point, it seems that there's no way still to absolve God of some of the things open theism was supposed to absolve God of. Even in situations where someone still has to make a choice, and God can sti and hope the choice will go a way other than the last 50 or 500 times, it seems equally bad (if it's bad to allow a fully foreseen action) to allow an action that seems just pretty likely. If it's bad but not really, really bad then I can see giving room to let people make mistakes, but people who press the problem of evil see the Holocaust as one of the worst things God has to answer for. If the motivation of open theists is to answer that charge, I'm not sure how God's ignorance of the future would do the necessarily explaining. God would have had a fair idea of how likely it would be to keep going. After all, Churchill and Roosevelt did. Presumably God would be a better predictor of the future than they were, even if it's not the real foreknowledge of traditional theism.
Consider also American slavery. Such widespread mistreatment of people was going on that a God who is morally required to stop all evil that can be foreseen as much as possible would have to stop a lot more of it than actually happened, even if God didn't know for sure which locations and people would be doing it and to what degree. Open theism just doesn't have the resources to dodge the hardcore objections pressed by people like William Rowe. If Rowe is right, then even what God would consider likely should be headed off. I don't think Rowe's assumptions are right, and open theists might say the same thing, but then I don't think there's any motivation for open theism anymore. The motivation was to explain the kinds and extent of evil that other explanations didn't cover. If you question Rowe's assumptions then there's no more need for that, since his assumptions are the only thing driving the problem of the extent and amount of evil. I intend a followup post to explain the other explanations of evil traditional theists have offered along with the responses to William Rowe's argument that so motivates open theists. I will argue why those are both necessary even for open theism to respond to Rowe but as good without open theism as they are with it, which seriously undermines open theism's claim to have a better response to the problem of evil.
Somehow I am going along a sort of parallel universe in my own blog....
I see the problem of the open theists ( only having familiarity with their ideas through blogs like yours) as soon arriving at a concept of an unnecessary God/god. I have to wonder whether this sort of idea of God/god isn't similar to Deists thinking that there may be a God but it doesn't really matter.
They don't say that, but it reduces to that. The simplest view of all this is that all are variations on the theme that man is his own best god. Basic Garden of Eden stuff.
I do have the suspicion that it is very difficult for us to face up to the problem of evil because it says terrible things about us, but also because we don't want the truth near as much as we say we do.
It is painful to understand. But being primarily a pragmatic sort of person, I feel that we don't have any say in whether the world should be without evil even at the cost of freedom. We were handed existance in the world as it is. And the Bible seems to stress that we would be far better off trying to understand the nature of good.
Something we seem equally in the dark about, in general, as humans.
Do we have any explanations for good? Why is there good? Why do we need it and long for it so? Why can't we be happy with the evil estate of things?
I don't think anyone much asks those questions.
Here's one: What if... if... all the evil that there is, is simply freedom emptied of God and His likeness?
Open theists don't need to believe God is a contingent being. A necessary being could fail to have other traditional attributes of God, such as foreknowledge. Also, deists don't simply leave it at "there might be a god". Deists believe in God. They just don't think God has set up any particular religion through revealed revelation or has extremely specific purposes as history unfolds.
Actually, the issue of why there's morality is a very old question. Plato dealt with something like it when he wondered whether the gods just decide what's right or whether it's right independent of them entirely. Christians have a third option. Check the archives on this blog for more on that. We've discussed it at length. Some people think the existence of evil (and therefore good) is actually an argument for the existence of God rather than against, simply because they don't see how morality could make sense without God. If I'm reading you correctly, that's what you're saying, but it's not as if no one discusses that. It's a common discussion in philosophy of religion and in meta-ethics.
I came to similar conclusions Jeremy, after reading Plantinga's approach to the problem of evil. Even if it disables the big problem of evil, it doesn't seem to do much to explain many particular evils ranging from earthquakes to genetic illnesses up to freely chosen acts that seem preventable. But if you only are able to answer one formulation of the problem but the problem as such remains, what is the point? You really haven't achieved anything. Further using this as reasons to adopt a particular position (open theism, process theology) seems difficult to accept.
The free will defense is only designed to address the logical problem of evil, and almost all of his critics have acknowledged that he did so successfully. The problem, as you said, is that you still have other things that need other theodicies. Plantinga, of course, realized this. Open theists, in my experience, tend not to think such answers are adequate and deny God's foreknowledge as a result. What I'm saying is that doing so doesn't help much, whereas traditional foreknowledge + those other theodicies will do more.
Yes, I recognize that the problem of evil is primarily a problem as an interesting logical conundrum for why there must be *any* evil rather than evil as such. As such it is of interest to philosophers simply as an interesting question, much like a mathematician ponders odd questions independent of any application. So in that context I really enjoy Plantinga. I also always find refreshing that he cautions against drawing too much practical theological implication from it. (Say in that nice little book God, Freedom, and Evil which I often recommend to non-philosopher friends)
The problem I have with Open Theism and perhaps the main strains of Process Thought is that by rejecting foreknowledge they end up causing more problems than they need. That's not to say that the responsibility arguments aren't strong. They frequently are. However a lot of the other arguments made, in terms of evil and other such theological problems, don't seem particularly strong. Indeed often when I encounter them it seems like the Open Theists are brushing a lot under the rug by merely focusing in on the "classic philosophical" versions of problems rather than more practical theological forms.
(i.e. for people rather than philosophers, the raging theological problem is why I experience these evils and not some abstract logical problem)
I think people are in trouble when they try to prove the existance of God. I don't think it can be done in an objective way. The questions on good and evil, when God is being discussed, seem to revolve around the nature of God's character, and/or trying to reconcile ones view of God with the problem of evil.
The problem of outlining morality is dependent on a standard. The argument pivots on who/what defines the standard.
Morality can make sense on the basis that we need it, without needing to insert the "proof" of God. The further questions are what create the problems in the arguments. That's where leaving out the idea of God causes theories on morality to fall apart.
Because the standard has to be higher than any one of us, and it is not supported by the idea of what's best for the group. Further, evil is not defined exactly the same by all groups.
I will look over past entries, but I didn't mean that I don't think those questions were ever discussed. Everything is discussed at some time or another:) It just isn't the emphasis in most of the discussions I run across on this subject.
Are 'open theists' a sort of Deist, then? Or do they maintain something of Christianity?
-just bringing the discussion down on the level of the layman here....
I guess my stance is that problems of pain and evil are the very essence of our reality. The answers we have on those problems will be applicable to how we live out our lives. Which is why Christianity gives hope and modern philosophies end in despair.
But it ends up in a different arena than philosophical discussions. I agree with Francis Schaeffer ( without whom I could not see this clearly) that whether you speak of open theism ( he used terms including modern theologies) or nihilism, or existentialism, you are speaking of everything on one side of the line that leads to a materialist view which ends in despair and the disintegration of what makes man, man.
Everything is the machine. I submit that open theism, as defined here, leaves man as a cog in the machine of the universe. Isn't that why the Greeks had to dispense with their gods? Their gods became too small to address the expansion of mans knowledge.
Perhaps I am missing the whole point. I am not used to this venue and many of the terms. I am used to the discussions on the more common level, people who struggle with ideas of God and why there is so much suffering.
I am not sure that anyone can fully explain all the different sorts of evils, or the reasons for them. There are only basic things that can be discussed.
One way or another, I think it will always end up at the "mystery" answer. Perhaps a long way down the road, but it will have to end there. This is the frustration for men of faith who sincerely try to explain these things thoroughly, I believe.
We might understand why there is a devil, and that God has things planned that "neither eye hath seen nor ear heard", but can we explain those things? We might even understand much of suffering ( which I do not), but apart from saying that the Bible gives a cohesive and workable outline on this, I don't think we can say that it is fully explained to us.
And then we are left with conjectures which is what I believe you are looking at in open theism.
You said in the article " God could have eliminated...","God could have reduced even the kinds of evil..." I don't know what you would base that on except conjecture... and we get into the same problems as open theists when we do that.
I have taken up too much of your space here... I think I will chew on some things and try to post the enzymatic result on my blog.
Thanks for the stimulus to thought. That is what I most appreciate about your blogs.
Open theism has one thing in common with deism. Both want to restrict God's activity to something less than what I consider the traditional Christian view does. They do it for very different reasons, though. Deists restrict God's activity because they don't think God will bother with certain things. Open theists want to say that it's because God does care, but it's sort of a roundabout argument why it leads to open theism. It's basically because they don't think traditional explanations of evil are adequate. God must care more about all the evil than the traditional view allows for. They wouldn't expect God to allow as much evil as happens if God could do something about it, so they conclude that God must not be able to predict what will happen. So it's coming from a very different mindset from deism.
I don't see any connection with materialism. Open theism is consistent with both materialism and dualism. The cog-in-the-wheel sort of image is usually the ones open theists use against those whose views are closer to determinism. Open theism is the opposite side, since things are absolutely not predetermined in advance. That's why God doesn't know what will happen.
What I was saying in my post is that we can't know very well what God could or couldn't have done. Your quotes that suggest the opposite were out of context.
"What I was saying in my post is that we can't know very well what God could or couldn't have done. Your quotes that suggest the opposite were out of context."
I disagree, but not vehemently.
We, who take the Bible as our source of information, can know _certain_ things about what God could or couldn't have done.
The quotes seemed to be your view, and I'm sorry for misconstruing the meaning.I reviewed the text...was still unclear, it seems those are the questions that *could* be brought up.
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Deism says God doesn't intervene and open theism says the same, but for different reasons. Christianity, proper, says that there is meaning in the suffering, but it remains that the existance of evil is not well explained. Evil seems to have pre-existed the creation of man, so there is a hint that man was part of the plan to eradicate evil. Christianity does hold that it will be eradicated.
This still does not explain why it exists in the first place.
My own thought is that it relates to freedom. That freedom is of a high enough good that the possibility it holds of corrupting to evil, as the opposite choice of good, was acceptable. I don't believe that evil is necessary to know good... otherwise why would the fruit from that tree have been forbidden?
Open theism leaves one with a small god, much like the pagan types. Not sufficient. Deism leaves one with an irrelevant one, if we were truly on our own, now. Materialism collapses the whole idea of a spiritual world down...so if open theism is truly "consistent with both materialism and dualism", where is the duality? Where is the spiritual part if the material is the defining factor?
In modern terms, even if you would give the point that there is a physical and an intellectual part to man... materialism explains it all as physically based. There is no real duality there.
So the Theo part of theism becomes a god word, I believe. As long as it is believed that we have the capacity to measure how much evil is "necessary", we are god. We are the final measure of all things, and then there is no duality. It is all collapsed down.
That is how I would relate open theism to materialism.
At some place Christianity must stand apart and say that we can definitely know some things about God, because He has revealed those things; about Himself, the way He does things and what He plans to do.
We know some things, but certain things are mysteries. In that word mystery is the implication that we will know those things, but not automatically. This leaves us in a weak place if we try to explain evil, and in a strong place if we submit that we have the remedy for the problem of it.
There has to be a good reason for this, but I can't seem to follow it any further. It is somehow rounding back to the place I found myself with proving the existance of God: there is a demand on God's part for faith. We will be relegated to that in this problem of why He allows evil. It is a humbling thing if that is where it must stay.
But preferable to having to diminish God in order to uphold ones own idea of good. We have no proof that God can or should be so diminished, it is only an indication of our own finite abilities.
I figure I better explain myself on one point:
|We, who take the Bible as our source of information, can know _certain_ things about what God could or couldn't have done.
|...God could have reduced even the kinds of evil..." I don't know what you would base that on except conjecture... and we get into the same problems as open theists when we do that.
We can't conjecture on what God would've or could've in a specific sense, but God does says He will act in certain ways under certain conditions. For instance, we know that some things are judgment responses to evil, we think of them as evil, but they are to contain the proliferation of evil: ie destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
I hate to interrupt, but as an Open Theist I have to interject. I am not an Open Theist because of the inadequacies of traditional theodicies. I think that Lewis' The Problem of Pain still answers any questions I have about the compatibility of God's goodness and evil.
The reason that I am an Open theist is that i am a firm believer in Libertarian Free Will. My decisions are not causally determined by my circumstances. And simply stated, if God knows reality exhaustively then he knows that my LFW decision tomorrow is not settled as a "will" or "will not" fact; it is a "might and might not" fact.
Open Theists DO NOT DENY OMNISCIENCE.
My 2 cents, Ross
Ross, I didn't say that open theists always base their view on the problem of evil. I said it's the main argument for a number of prominent open theists. There are others who do so because they don't understand how divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. I didn't get into that issue here, because I was dealing with the problem of evil. Do a search of the site for keywords of foreknowledge and freedom, and you'll find a couple really good discussions of those problems.
I know full well that open theists consider God to be omniscient about the facts they consider settled. Since I don't think those are the only facts that are settled, I don't think that counts as omniscience about all facts, but I know open theists consider it to be omniscience and affirm the statement 'God is omniscient'. That subject didn't come up here at all, though, so I'm not sure why you're shouting about it.
Jeremy,
Sorry about that Jeremy. I'm gonna do a search for the previous threads that discuss the subject of divine foreknowledge and human freedom.
Ross
good
∫(x/∞)dx = reality
evil
where x is all that exists (finite) and infinity represents God
You may ask, what has this to do with open theism and the problem of evil. To that I reply, with God in the denominator, all possibilities from good to evil fail to impact the nature of "The Infinite". All unknowns that man is aware of concerning the nature of God ultimately boils down to a fundamental separation between finite and infinite. If man has any hope it remains in the hands of the Infinite to bridge that gap.
Therefore the debate should focus on why someone with everything would create anything at all? The purest and highest love that cannot be imagined is the answer...no the Blessed Union of Souls did not get it right, but God's Son, Jesus Christ did Amen! So I guess we both need to go do something productive