Evil, Freedom, and the Heaven Dilemma *

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1 Evil, Freedom, and the Heaven Dilemma * Introduction Why would an all-powerful, all-good God allow evil to befall his creatures? This puzzle, widely known as the problem of evil, has been around at least since Epicurus. Many have seen the problem as insoluble, and as therefore the basis for an argument from evil to the conclusion that a God who is both all-powerful and all-good cannot exist. Such arguments come in many forms, but the strongest, and the one I discuss here, is a deductive argument, one whose atheistic conclusion is logically guaranteed by its premises. In this paper I shall follow other recent commentators by referring to it as the logical argument from evil (LAFE). Against LAFE, theists (that is, people who, like most Christians, Muslims and Jews, believe in a personal God) have been spurred to produce what the great German philosopher Leibniz dubbed theodicies, which are attempts to justify God s permitting evil by showing how a world with evil in it is actually compatible God s omnipotence and goodness. One of the most widely endorsed theodicies does this by arguing that evil must result from the possession by some of God s creatures of free will, which is a gift so great it is worth the cost. This theodicy has been criticized, notably by J.L. Mackie, but has also formed the basis of prominent Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga s defense against LAFE. Plantinga s defense has convinced many atheists: Allen Stairs and Christopher Bernard report that: Plantinga s Freewill (sic) Defense is widely regarded as successfully undermining the logical argument from evil. For example, philosopher Paul Draper, who is a defender of atheism, agrees with most philosophers of religion that theists face no serious logical problem of evil. 1 I believe that such atheists have given up too easily, and I argue below that, once one includes amongst theistic claims under attack by the LAFE cherished claims about the afterlife, one finds that the free will defense is caught on the horns of what I call the heaven dilemma. I then go on to consider what I take to be the most plausible responses to this dilemma and find them all wanting. In conclusion, the existence of evil logically undermines most widely-held versions of theism. The Problem of Evil as an Argument for Atheism The following claims are endorsed by most theists: T1. God is omnipotent (all-powerful). T2. God is omniscient (all-knowing). T3. God is eternal. T4. God is omnibenevolent (all-loving). The problem of evil consists in the apparent clash between the foregoing properties (in particular, omnipotence and omnibenevolence) with the following: T5. There is evil in the world. * An early version of this paper was first presented at the conference Immortality, Physicalism, and Death of God, held at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, June Stairs and Bernard, A Thinker s Guide to the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), p

2 Evil has typically been understood broadly as bad stuff, not just wickedness. For now, at least, think of it as a catch-all term that refers mostly to suffering, often divided into natural evil, such as disease, famine, earthquakes and the like (or rather, their bad effects on those who suffer), and moral evil, the evil that we attribute to free beings and the suffering that such evil causes. An omnibenevolent God would presumably want there to be no evil, and an all-powerful God would presumably be able to prevent all evil, and thus a God who was both those and more should ensure that there be no evil. Yet, plainly, there is evil in this world and in great abundance, and hence the Problem. And here is the logical argument from evil to the conclusion that a God having features T1-T4 cannot exist: If there was a God (with the requisite features) then there would be no evil There is evil There is no God as so described. This presentation of LAFE is clearly deductively valid (it is an example of a modus tollens), so if a theist is to claim that the conclusion is false, it must be because either or both of the premises is false (and thus the argument, while valid, is unsound). Some theists have taken the implausible, Panglossian tack of denying the second premise. On the face of it, such a denial is just absurd. The amount of suffering in the world is depressingly obvious to anyone not hermetically sealed in a sensory deprivation tank. Any theist who seriously defends this tactic almost certainly has in mind the claim that what appears evil to us is not in fact evil (because it s part of God s great plan, or some such). This claim has at least three implausible implications. First, that all suffering everywhere, including the suffering of children born with horrific birth defects who have no chance of life, and of the parents who have to watch them die, contributes to a greater good. Second, that an omnipotent God is constrained by these restrictions and cannot achieve his goals by any other route than through this evil. Most seriously, though, this claim attempts to subverts our ordinary language in a manner reminiscent of Orwellian Newspeak. While you or I might disagree over what exactly the limits of evil are, we can surely agree that a person who tortures a small child slowly to death for his own amusement is doing something evil. Whether or not this occurrence achieves some higher goal unknown to, and unintended by the torturer is neither here nor there. And when we talk about the problem of evil, we mean that evil. In some kind of cosmic sense it might not be a bad thing if the entire human race ceased to exist. But our words did not develop in a cosmic context; they are our words and mean what we think they do. And if God has an idea of evil that is so different from our own that murder and torture and the attendant miseries that are in such depressingly plentiful supply in this world do not qualify, then that would appear to run counter to the teachings of the three most prominent theistic religions, all of which assert that God handed down explicit instructions forbidding just such kinds of behavior. So I shall say no more about theisms that deny the second premise, because they are surely minority views. 2

3 The Free Will Defense The majority of theists, then, attack the first premise of LAFE. Among contemporary theists in Anglo-American philosophy perhaps the most influential critic of LAFE has been Alvin Plantinga, who has pointed out that the first premise requires that there be a formal inconsistency among statements 1-5 and argued that no such inconsistency has been shown to exist. He concedes that none of the traditional theodicies is particularly plausible, but claims that the theist does not need to provide a theodicy to undermine LAFE. The theist doesn t even have to show that there is reasonable doubt about a premise in the opponent s argument. All the theist has to do is show that it is logically possible that the premise is false. To do so is to provide a defense against the argument from evil. 2 And, Plantinga has claimed, the most widely accepted of the traditional theodicies the claim that evil is the inevitable concomitant of the possession by created beings of free will can be conscripted to perform this task. This, then, is the Free Will Defense (FWD) against the logical argument from evil. Let us lay out the core claims of the theodicy that FWD presents as logically possible. The basic idea is that the evil in this world can be explained as the result of the free will possessed by all humans (and possibly some other beings) that inhabit it, and that a benevolent God was right to give us this freedom despite the evil that it inevitably brings in its wake because the only way a world could exist free of all evil would be if it contained no free beings. Faced with a choice between a messy but free world like ours and a world of well-behaved automatons, an omnibenevolent God was right to choose the former. (What about natural evil, you might ask? It is obvious how torture and humancaused mayhem can be blamed on the free choice of humans, but what about floods, fires, famines and pestilence? One suggestion 3 is that these could be the work of other free beings, neither God nor human, such as demons. Remember, this account doesn t have to be plausible in a defense, just not necessarily false.) Thus God s benevolence is consistent with the existence of evil, which is an unavoidable side-effect of the precious-beyond-price freedom. The two key elements, then, are the link between freedom and evil and that between freedom and value, as follows: T6. The Inevitability of Evil given Freedom (FWD1): There cannot be a state of existence containing beings with free will wherein evil will not eventually occur. 4 T7. The Inestimable Worth of Freedom (FWD 2): A state of existence with both free will and the resulting evil is better than one without either (no matter how pleasant that world might be). 5 2 Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), p Ibid., pp What this line of thought would require, of course, is that God values respecting the freedom of Satan and his minions over ensuring the safety of mortals, to the extent that He will not intervene to save us from the havoc wrought by non-human free agents. A sobering thought, and perhaps an incentive to practice devil-worship. 4 Obviously one would want to know what eventually means here. I include that word because my previous formulation of the principle ( there cannot be a state of existence containing beings with free will without evil ) is so obviously false, as one can easily imagine a universe containing a single free being existing for so short of a time that she has no time even to contemplate evil. I believe this improved version is false too, but perhaps not so immediately obviously false. Eventually allows that evil requires some time. How much time is an interesting question that I will not address directly here. 3

4 Again, these statements do not have to be proved true to constitute a successful defense against LAFE: they (taken as a pair) just have not to be necessarily false. This lowering of the bar for the theist from theodicy to defense seems, if Stairs and Bernard are to be believed, to have won over the skeptics, and thrown LAFE into disrepute. I argue, however, that the plausibility of the defense rests on a particularly narrow focus and that if the implications of the two core claims for other views near and dear to most theists hearts are exposed, the theists will not be quick to embrace the defense. Of particular concern are common theistic beliefs about the afterlife. The Heaven Dilemma Heaven for theists is very like communism for Marxists: it s crucially important that it be coming, but very little is actually said about it. However, it is the rare theist (certainly outside of academia) who, even if she would be hesitant to commit to more substantive descriptive claims about Heavenly existence (such as what one will look like, if anything, and how one would pass the time), does not hold that T8 T10 are either now true or will come to pass: T8. At least some humans (or beings who were humans while on Earth) have entered Heaven. 6 T9. There cannot be evil in Heaven. T10. Heaven is the best possible state of existence. I maintain that once these claims about Heaven are made explicit and added to the set of theistic claims then Plantinga can no longer deny the logical inconsistency assumed by LAFE. Specifically, I believe that the following dilemma (the Heaven Dilemma) confronts the proponent of the FWD against LAFE; one of the following must be true: T11. At least some humans who have entered Heaven have free will. T11* No humans who have entered Heaven have free will. Because they are logical contradictories, one of them has to be true and one of them has to be false. 7 They cannot both be true. It follows that any set of statements that implies both of them is a set of statements that is jointly contradictory. And that is exactly the case with the set of theistic beliefs T1-T10. Specifically, consider the combination of T6 and T9: 5 Here better is obviously critically vague, and unlike eventually above, it is qualitatively as well as quantitatively vague. Consider it a placeholder for later discussion. 6 There are views that assert the existence of a Heaven that is as yet empty of (ex-)humans. Christians who believe this can cite John 3:13: No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven. However, such views typically assert that eventually the dead who deserve it will enter Heaven, and so for such views claims T8-T11 and T11* can be re-parsed into the future tense. 7 The atheist believes T11 to be false because the truth of this statement would imply that there are humans in Heaven, but there aren t (because there isn t a Heaven) and T11* to be true, but only because any statement about an empty set is true. 4

5 T6. There cannot be a state of existence containing beings with free will wherein evil will not eventually occur. (FWD 1) Τ9. There cannot be evil in Heaven. Taken together, those two imply T11*: Τ11 No humans who have entered Heaven have free will. But then consider the combination of statements T7 and T10: Τ7. A state of existence with both free will and the resulting evil is better than one without either. (FWD 2) T10. Heaven is the best possible state of existence. Taken together (assuming that humans on Earth are free), these two imply T11: Τ11. At least some humans who have entered Heaven have free will. What s happening here is that the addition of T6 and T7 (the two core claims of the FWD) to the stock of theistic claims in an attempt to demonstrate that no contradiction exists among statements T1 through T5 has had the unintended consequence of producing a contradiction in the set of statements T6 through T10. Or, to put it another way, either people in Heaven are free, in which case it is false that freedom necessitates evil, and the first core claim of the FWD is false; or people in Heaven are not free, in which case it is false that freedom is required for a world to be optimal and the second core claim of the FWD is false. It is thus impossible for both claims of the Free Will Defense to be true at the same time if claims T8 through T10 are true. In summary: it seems clear to me that, first, one cannot consistently assert claims T1 through T10 together; second, if pressed to abandon one of them most theists would find it least painful to reject one or other of T6 or T7 (most likely T6); and that third, that being the case, the Free Will Defense fails, and the problem of evil is still the foundation of a potential anti-theistic argument. In what follows I will consider possible responses to the challenge of the Heaven Dilemma that attempt to preserve the truth of at least statements T1 through T8. These will be, in order: 1. Evil could happen in Heaven, but in fact never does or ever would. 2. Evil can and does happen in Heaven (T9 is false). 3. Actions or thoughts that would be evil on Earth can occur in Heaven, but in Heaven they re not evil. Response 1: Evil in Heaven possible but never actual Perhaps the obvious response to my suggestion is that while of course people in Heaven are free to do evil, they just won t do it (as it is often claimed that God can sin has that power but simply will not). Bolstering this assertion is a further theistic claim: 5

6 Τ12. The Desert-Based Afterlife: one is admitted into Heaven if one does good (or what one should) on Earth, but Hell if not. While this view of the entrance requirements to the afterlife (and, indeed, the existence of a Hell as an alternative to Heaven) is perhaps less universally accepted by theists than the earlier views about God, it is still very widely accepted. It suggests that those in Heaven are likely to be those who just find being good easy and natural and wouldn t really consider doing evil. You know, the Ned Flanderses of this world. However, this response to the heaven dilemma plays right into the hands of the atheist because it amounts to a refutation of T6, and with it the FWD, as I will now show. Let us call the kind of freedom that people in Heaven have on this view saintly freedom. Saintly freedom (so named because it is presumably the freedom exercised by moral saints) is genuine freedom that in fact never results in evil. But if there can be a state of existence with truly free beings but no evil, then an omnipotent God could have given us all that saintly freedom here on Earth, thereby both giving us freedom and preventing evil, and a God who was both omnipotent and omnibenevolent would have done so. Prominent anti-theist J.L. Mackie made just this point with his characteristic verve: If there is no logical impossibility in a man s freely choosing the good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong; there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Clearly his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and wholly good. 8 Can T6 be saved from this threat of saintly freedom? One interesting suggestion, from Alvin Plantinga, is that in fact, while there are possible worlds that contain beings with saintly freedom, it is possible that it is not in God s power to actualize such worlds. His argument is technical, and in my view ultimately unconvincing (and also unacceptable to most theists, given what it requires believers to give up of God), but perhaps more relevantly here, it amounts to a rejection of the possibility of saintly freedom, and thus a rejection of the response to the Heaven dilemma that we are here considering. For that reason I shall set his view aside and concentrate on possible ways that the response could be saved. Perhaps the theist could offer a tweaked version of T6, viz: 8 J.L. Mackie, Evil and Omnipotence, Mind Vol. 64, No. 254 (Apr., 1955), p Mackie later pointed out how assumptions about Heaven imply that theists should recognize the existence of saintly freedom: they are explicitly recognizing the possibility of a state of affairs in which created beings always choose the good. If such a state of affairs is coherent enough to be the object of a reasonable hope or faith, it is hard to explain why it does not obtain already, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p

7 T6* There cannot be a state of existence with the features that are essential to our Earthly plane and containing beings with free will wherein evil will not eventually occur. For example, suppose that the relevant Earthly features are our body-bound appetites and desires. That is, the flesh truly corrupts, but once we are pure souls in Heaven, the very idea of sin will not occur, and all our choices, while no less free than here on Earth, will be the right ones. The Drugging Judge The trouble for the theist with such a claim is that the FWD cannot survive anything less than a universally necessary connection between freedom of any kind and in any circumstances and evil. If it is possible for beings to be free in Heaven without committing evil and bringing about the attendant miseries simply because they lack bodies (say), then the theist must answer the question Why didn t God just create us without bodies? 9 In effect, the problem of evil would just become the problem of bodies (or whatever feature Earth has that Heaven lacks). The problem of bodies is actually exacerbated by T12, because it gives us the following combination: Our bodies (or other Earthly feature) are not essential to us (because we are still us in Heaven without them) Our bodies cause us to do evil that we would not otherwise do (T6*) God punishes us for evil by sending us to Hell (T12) This combination means, in effect, that God is responsible for creating humans in a situation whereby some of them will freely choose actions that will condemn them to Hell, when God could have created humans with free choice, but in circumstances whereby they will always freely choose good. God on this view would be like a judge who first gets a person thoroughly hooked on a drug that is so ferociously addictive that it is literally impossible to resist the desire to take more, then puts that person in a room with the drug and says if you take it, it s an eternity of punishment for you! when the Judge could perfectly well not have got that person addicted. Indeed, it is worse than that, because of course the temptations to sin are not all equal. If you are born in wealth and health and surrounded by good people who love you, then your bodily urges are much less likely to lead you astray, as we know, whereas those born to drug addicts in abject poverty and abused as children are much more likely to stray. And once again, their circumstances are under God s control. I suspect that a theist resistant to the accusation behind this Drugging Judge analogy will think that I have misunderstood the nature of freedom. But I believe that the converse is true, and any appeal that the FWD has rests on muddled thinking about freedom. Part of the problem in discussing this issue quickly is that the topic of freedom is tied up with other deep metaphysical issues, including divergent ways to interpret the key theistic claims. These issues cannot be addressed in depth here, but I feel the need to forestall objections to my case that appeal to the very existence of these disputes. Those 9 If the answer is, because you can t have a worthwhile existence without one, then so much for claim T10! 7

8 who find my analogy compelling enough to undermine this first response to the Heaven Dilemma may skip this digression and go on to the second response. A Digression: God, Time, and Freedom In general, it seems almost paradoxical that defenders of free will would endorse the first thesis of the FWD (T6). This thesis asserts that freedom inevitably results in evil. But shouldn t freedom be the absence of inevitability? T6 implies that free beings (perhaps taken as a group over a suitable length of time) are predestined to evil. How is that freedom? And if this were so, would it not make the evil that results in some sense not our fault, and thus the allotment of eternal destiny according to one s actions (T12) an appalling injustice? How a theist can respond to such an accusation depends on which of two distinct conceptions of God and reality in general he endorses, which in turn affect the interpretations of the basic theistic claims, especially claims T2 and T3, omniscience and eternity. I will now sketch each conception in turn. Conception 1: God outside time God is eternal in the sense that he is outside of time, able to see the beginning and end (should it have them) of the universe (or universes, if there are several) and all events in between simultaneously (or rather, atemporally). His omniscience includes knowing all that anyone who will ever live will ever do because in effect all time is to him as the past would be to the perfect historian with all events laid out. This view of God s relationship to the world faces the problem of the apparent inconsistency of God s omniscience and human free will, if free will requires that, for any free being considering action A at a certain moment, that person genuinely could either do A or not do A. If God already knows that that being will do A, then not-a is not a genuine option. The theist could avoid this problem by being a compatibilist, essentially denying that freedom requires genuine options, and instead insisting that all freedom requires is that one s actions be the result of one s decisions, even if deciding otherwise was not an actualizable possibility. However plausible an account of freedom this might be (compatibilism between free will and the laws of physics is probably the most widely accepted philosophical view currently), compatibilism in this context has the unpalatable theological implication that God knew before he created any beings that those beings he created would choose to do evil, created them as such, and then punished them for doing what he created them to do. 10 God on this view looks like a scientist who programs a robot to do something then angrily destroys it for following its program. A belief in Hell as somewhere where one receives just punishment (T12) is hard to maintain alongside this conception. Alternatively, one could insist that in some sense one does have genuine options, even though God knows which one one will choose. I think this view is unsustainable, but it wouldn t help the theist s position even if it were true. It would just mean that we freely act when we do the one thing God knew we would do, and is compatible with God having had the option to create free beings who would do otherwise. The effect of this 10 There is a problem with saying before creation, if creation includes the universe and if time itself is a property of the universe. But this is not really a criticism that a theist who claims God is the Creator can raise. 8

9 use of free is to break the connection between freedom and desert, at least, desert from the viewpoint of an omnipotent God. In sum, if God is outside time, then either we are not free, or if we are, it is a freedom that allows that our actions are completely predictable at every nanosecond such that we can only assume that our actions were what God wanted, as he could have created equally free beings to do something else, if our actions displease him. This option appears to require that this world is the Best of All Possible Worlds, a view that was unpalatable even before it was skewered so devastatingly by Voltaire in Candide. I conclude that a convincing response to the Heaven Dilemma is not compatible with a view of God as outside time. Conception 2: God in time According to this conception, God is in time, in that He experiences it as we do, and what it means to say that God is eternal is that that he has always existed and will always exist. Doughty Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne calls this being everlasting rather than eternal, and I shall henceforth follow his example. 11 On this view, God experiences each moment just as we do in a moving now, and neither the future nor the past strictly speaking exists. Of course, being omniscient, God is a lot better able to predict what is coming, and, if determinism were true, he would, like Laplace s Demon, be able to predict with perfect accuracy all we would ever do. This would again raise the challenge of the apparent incompatibility of God s omniscience and human free will. However, there is a view of the nature of freedom that would allow God to be omniscient but still unable perfectly to predict the behavior of free beings. This view, sometimes called metaphysical libertarianism presupposes that genuinely free actions are undetermined and thus could not be predicted with perfect accuracy even by omniscient God, because omniscience only means knowing everything there is to know, and an undetermined act in the as-yet-unformed future is not a fact to be known. Swinburne is committed to a view that combines an everlasting God and metaphysical libertarianism, and his position appears to offer a response to both of the unflattering analogies I ve sketched. In response to the Drugging Judge an adherent can say that even if it is hard for the addict to resist the drug, it is never impossible that he could and thus he cannot be said not to have a genuine choice, and that being so, he can legitimately be punished for making the wrong choice. Furthermore, it is not a choice that God could have known he would make in advance, and thus God cannot be said to be like the Unfair Scientist, creating a robot and then punishing the robot for carrying out its program. That is not to say that Swinburne s view is without costs for the theist. For one thing, the view seems to presuppose a Newtonian view of time rather than an Einsteinian one. If Einstein was right, then time is a feature of the universe, not, as Newton thought, a pre-existing framework. If God was indeed the creator of the universe, how is it that he comes to be stuck within his own creation? 12 Nor can I imagine that most theists would 11 Richard Swinburne, Is There A God? (New York: Oxford, 1996), p Even if we understand creation simply in terms of dependence, so that, even if the universe has never not existed, God is still its creator because without God it would not exist, God s being in time still creates special problems. We would normally think that if God is the creator, then there is a one-way dependence 9

10 be happy with the idea that God s omniscience doesn t preclude the possibility of any free being surprising him. Even if the theist is prepared to accept these costs, however, on closer inspection the Swinburne view will sustain neither of the desired necessary connections between freedom and evil and freedom and desert that the proposed response to the Heaven Dilemma requires. First, why is it the case that evil has to result from libertarian freedom? If freedom is truly undetermined action, then nothing can be said inevitably to result from it. Of course, the law of averages would make it incredibly likely that evil would result from enough beings acting freely over enough time. Even were that so, it would be true neither that that free choice of evil should deserve punishment nor that God could not ensure all good actions chosen without constraining freedom. Let me explain why. According to metaphysical libertarianism, my truly free action is genuinely undetermined by the sum of facts about me (and indeed the entire universe). 13 That is, you could imagine two parallel universes with completely identical histories up to a particular point where I, a free being, am making a choice; the metaphysical libertarian insists that the nature of freedom allows that it is perfectly possible for me to make one choice in one universe and my counterpart another in the other, and that both would be rightly endorsed by the me in that world as the choice that he fully intended to make. 14 But if this is so, then it does not matter which action I perform whichever act I perform will be equally a free action. This point in itself could be enough to subvert the supposed relationship between freedom and desert that T12 seems to require. Surely I only deserve punishment if something about me determined my choice of evil. But if for every evil choice I make there is a good choice that I, with exactly the same history, beliefs, desires and current mental state could have made, then in what sense would I deserve condemnation for the evil choice or praise for the good? Neither is a product of me or a reflection of my character. However, even if the libertarian can block this apparent implication of his view 15, there are further problems for the theist who wishes to use this libertarianism to respond to the Heaven Dilemma. For it would appear that it implies that God could prevent all evil without disrupting freedom. Let us suppose, for example, that I am contemplating a heinous murder. I raise the knife. At this point I could genuinely go either way stab or not. The future where I go ahead and kill is as possible as the future where I put the knife aside, and both are equally consistent with everything about me up until this moment (so that, on Swinburne s view, not even God can predict which would happen). Suppose, at relation, the universe to God and not vice versa. But if God is in time, and time really is a feature of the universe, then in some sense God cannot exist without the universe. 13 A prominent proponent of just such a view is Robert Kane. See for example his Responsibility, Luck, and Chance: Reflections on free will and indeterminism, Journal of Philosophy Vol. 96, No. 5 (May, 1999), pp For example, Kane imagines a businesswoman genuinely undecided between two options: The businesswoman who wants to go back and help the assault victim is the same ambitious woman who wants to go on to her meeting and close the sale. She is a complex creature but hers is the kind of complexity needed for free will. And when she succeeds in doing one of the things she is trying to do [and which one it is is undetermined], she will endorse that as her resolution of the conflict in her will, voluntarily and intentionally She will not disassociate from either outcome, ibid., p. 232, my emphasis. 15 It should be noted that Kane would vehemently deny that such an excuse follows from his view. 10

11 this point, God intervenes and ensures that I do not kill, and that therefore evil is averted. Has he subverted my freedom? I do not see that he could be said to have. This action is just as in keeping with all of my character and intentions as the evil action. I can endorse it as my choice just as willingly as the action of committing murder, and with just as much justification. It is possible that I would have done it anyway, but if I had, it would feel no different to me from the case where God intervenes. Nobody can claim that God has altered my character or intentions or made me do anything against my will. But if all that is true, then it is surely within the power of an omnipotent God to have a world of free beings without evil, provided he is prepared to intervene (which, as an omnibenevolent being, he certainly should be). 16 Finally, supposing there is something wrong with my reasoning here, and an everlasting God combined with the truth of metaphysical libertarianism means that freedom unavoidably leads to evil, then it would seem that we would have to deny T9, that there is no evil in Heaven which brings us to the second response to the Heaven Dilemma. Response 2: Evil in Heaven If, as I hope I have shown, trying to deny that freedom would lead to evil in Heaven inevitably undermines the FWD, then the theist must concede that it is impossible to make all of T1-T10 consistent. It remains to see what is the least damaging of that set of claims for the theist to jettison. In this section we will consider the implications of dropping T9 and conceding that there could be evil in Heaven. Would this be so hard to take? After all, according to Milton, Lucifer rebelled while in Heaven. But would a Heaven with evil in it be truly Heavenly? It would appear that giving up on T9 puts T10 in serious jeopardy: for Heaven to be the best possible state of existence, wouldn t there have to be at least significantly less evil in Heaven than on Earth? A Heaven with at least as much torture, war, disease (because, if the free will of non-humans can explain natural evil on Earth, then presumably the same would be true of Heaven), et al., suddenly doesn t sound deserving of the name. Perhaps one way to argue that there would be at least less evil in Heaven is to revisit the idea that Heaven is stocked with those who have been good on Earth, and as such, while they not only can do evil, they actually will do evil (because there is no such thing as the saintly freedom that led to problems for the FWD in the previous section), they will do a lot less of it. But to think this way is to forget exactly how long existence in Heaven is supposed to last our experience on Earth will be an infinitesimal part of our total existence and how much the FWD is committed to the idea that our good or bad actions must be freely chosen and not determined by characters that could depend for their quality on genetics or environment. These two factors combined mean that it should be very possible at any point for a previously good person to go off the rails in Heaven. 16 Kane does not believe that all actions have the character of being undetermined, only what he calls selfforming actions. One might think that this means that many evil actions could not be prevented, either because the action was determined, or because all of the equally probable options was evil. However, presumably in the first case, one s action is determined, and one cannot be held responsible for the evil that results, and in the second, either there was a previous SFA which led to this Greek Tragedy so that God could have preempted it, or, if it is the first SFA in a person s life, then isn t God to blame for the deterministic path that led up to there being no good options? 11

12 With this in mind, if we still insist that it is certain that there is less evil in Heaven than on Earth, we would need to know how it could be certain. Is it because the freedom of the inhabitants is in some way curtailed? If so, then the second thesis of the FWD (T7) is threatened. If the freedom is not curtailed, yet we can be sure there will be less evil, then the connection between freedom and evil required by the first thesis of the FWD (T6) is undermined. Either way, the FWD is compromised. Moreover, even if these difficulties could be avoided, the idea of evil in Heaven opens up an interesting can of theological worms: do we get kicked out of Heaven if we do evil? Let us consider the possibilities. Suppose that we do not get kicked out of Heaven for doing wrong. There are eschatological reasons to be committed to the idea that entry into Heaven is final. But then, either we have to abandon T12 (the Desert-Based Afterlife) or the standards of punishment seem very arbitrary. That is, if T12 is true, and Heaven and Hell are reward or punishment for behavior on Earth, then timing of one s sins is enormously important: sin on Earth can get you eternal punishment, but the same sin after death goes effectively unpunished (how bad can your punishment be if you re still in Heaven?). This seems perverse and unfair: shouldn t you be punished more for transgressions in Heaven, where life is so easy and the existence of God so self-evident? Alternatively, if exit from Heaven were possible, and we did get kicked out of Heaven upon committing evil acts or thinking evil thoughts (again in keeping with Milton s account of Lucifer), then T6 would seem to imply the inevitable emptying of Heaven into Hell. After all, if you cannot have freedom without evil, and each of us faces an eternity in Heaven, then inevitably somewhere along the way, each of us would have to commit evil. Perhaps, though, the ever-emptying Heaven could be re-stocked by reformed ex- Hellions. Just as evil in Heaven leads to a demotion to Hell, one might allow that it is possible to escape Hell after time served. The story of the Harrowing of Hell suggests that Hell is exitable. However such a to-ing and fro-ing between paradise and the inferno seems downright unseemly, and again, eschatologically suspect. Would God really favor such a revolving door policy? It would certainly rob both destinations of much of their power to deter evil and encourage good here on Earth. To the extent that all of this seems implausible, then I think T6 and its insistence on the inevitability of evil given freedom is the culprit. Of course, I have made my reservations about T6 clear in the digression on freedom above. But if we want to try to salvage what the theists values in it while avoiding the problems that evil in heaven would bring, some tinkering is in order. Response 3: Evil is relative Let us assume that the theist is most loath to give up the idea that freedom is the cause of evil on Earth, and yet does not want to allow evil in Heaven. The first response suggested that agents in Heaven could do evil but just wouldn t. The second response suggested that they both could and would. Both responses have implications that I argue would be unacceptable to the majority of theists. But there is a possible middle ground: that free beings in Heaven could and would do (or think) things that would be evil were they done (or thought) on Earth, but that in Heaven such things just are not evil. That would preserve the idea that you cannot have true freedom without evil (T6), but still 12

13 allow Heaven to be a much better place than Earth (T10). There are two ways that this could work: either the actions or thoughts in Heaven do not have the consequences that they would on Earth, or that simply the value system in Heaven works differently from that on Earth. Let us take each in term. 3.1 No evil consequences in Heaven The first move, to distinguish this response from the saintly freedom response, is clearly to divorce things that are under the control of free beings their thoughts and actions from the effects that they have on other sentient beings, most importantly for our purposes here, the suffering they might cause. 17 According to this distinction we could say that there is an internalist and an externalist aspect to the typical instance of moral evil, where the former might include the plan of one inhabitant of Heaven to torture another and the movements the former requires to achieve this end (if any being in Heaven could be said to have anything that moves) while the latter would include the suffering of the latter that results. 18 The suggestion at hand, then, is that, while thoughts and movements like those of my would-be torturer above (constituting evil in its internalist aspect, or i-evil) all-too-often lead to suffering in victims (evil in its externalist aspect, or e-evil) here on Earth, on Heaven there would be no such link, and while freedom would allow the possibility of i- evil in Heaven just as it does on Earth, it would never bring about e-evil. In effect, this response re-writes claims T6 and T9 as follows: T6* There cannot be a state of existence containing beings with free will wherein i- evil will not eventually occur. T9* There is no e-evil in Heaven. Thus the essential link between freedom and thoughts and actions that would be considered evil on Earth is preserved without it either necessitating that there be suffering in Heaven or that humans in Heaven lack free will. All thoughts and behaviors are possible in Heaven, but no suffering in others results. I think making the internalist/externalist distinction rescues this response to the Heaven Dilemma from appearing completely ad hoc and perhaps lends it a prima facie plausibility. This appearance, however, is illusory. The response requires that we find acceptable a Heaven wherein the most monstrous thoughts and behaviors are possible (and, if T6 is correct, just about inevitable) simply because they are impotent. This would be like saying that an evil brain in a vat that controls a body that inflicts harm is truly evil, but the same brain, having the same perceptions but that are, unknown to it, only part of a virtual reality program, is no longer evil. Or, to return to the torture 17 One could object that some actions are only instances of such if they have effects on others marrying somebody, for example. For the purposes of this distinction, let us think of actions in purely behavioral terms - going through the motions as it were. 18 From this it should be clear that internal does not solely or uniquely denote mental activity but rather things under the control of a particular being in question, and by extension, external does not mean material after all, beings in Heaven might not have any material aspect. 13

14 example: while actual torture cannot happen in Heaven, it allows that our heavenly torturer may gleefully imagine such an act and draw pleasure from vivid images of inflicted agonies. Such a thought would surely be evil or evidence of evil character. To look at it from a different angle, let us imagine Heaven stuffed full of beings capable of such thoughts and ask of them are the inhabitants of heaven good? If T9 were true, I think we can say so, but the scenario allowed by T9* conjures up images of cloistered beings, sheltered from the effects of their wickedness, but still undeniably wicked. A theist forced to say otherwise is giving up on our commonsense understanding of evil and must concede plausibility as a result. In effect, then, I do not think a theist should be content merely ascribing an absence of e- evil to heaven. That is necessary, but not sufficient for Heaven to be truly Heavenly. Furthermore, even this adapted, supposedly non ad hoc response to LAFE fails to avoid the original problem that summarily dismissed its crude original version. For the most compelling presentations of the problem of evil focus on the suffering that God s creatures undergo in such profusion which we are now bracketing under e-evil and the Free Will Defense argues that such suffering is a necessary result of our freedom. But if we can have i-evil without e-evil, then this is not so, for i-evil is what we do freely, whereas e-evil is the suffering that we find objectionable. If the former does not necessitate the latter then God could have made the Earth a world where humans are free and there is no evil, the very thing the Free Will Defense denies No Concept of Evil in Heaven We have rejected the idea that simply removing the consequences on others of one s thoughts and actions would remove evil from heaven. But what about the idea that the very concept of evil is intrinsically Earthbound, such that the same behavior with the same consequences that on Earth would be evil, is not in Heaven. (By analogy, the concept hippie is time and culture-specific, so that people in ancient times, perhaps early Christians, who otherwise might seem to be behaving like the cast of Hair, could not be said to be hippies just because that concept is inapplicable to their place and period.) It seems that such a claim can only be made by those who are externalists about evil. Somebody with a purely internalist view of evil would be anti-relativist: if my thought and actions are identical to my twin-earth counterpart s thoughts and actions, then either both he and I are instantiating evil or neither is there can be no difference. However, the externalist about evil can allow that one of us is evil while the other is not because of differences between social attitudes or resulting effects of the action and/or thought. I think, in general, most people have elements of both attitudes in their conceptions of evil. For the purposes of the response to LAFE that we are considering here obviously the externalist attitude is required, with the suggestion being that the 19 I will not here get into the discussion of this Earth being a place of soul-making, which requires evil, but Heaven as a reward that does not, in part because that is a distinct theodicy, and also in part because I find the idea rather repellent, given the vastly unequal tasks humans are set. 14

15 circumstances are such in Heaven that no action or thought can be evil, no matter what an internalist might say about that action or thought. Perhaps a solution to the challenge of the Heaven Dilemma can be drawn by analogy with cultural relativism. Cultural relativism allows that practices that would be morally abhorrent in one setting can be perfectly acceptable in another. A favorite example from cultural anthropology is so-called female circumcision (less favorably referred to as genital mutilation): Placed in its cultural context, Hofriyati female circumcision is neither irrational nor deliberately cruel and oppressive and is, moreover, a practice as much subscribed to by traditional Hofriyati women as men. We may find the consequences of such practices repellent, but we are hard pressed to find a moral basis for advocating its suppression that does not also violate the cultural autonomy of the Hofriyati. 20 Whatever we might think of relativism between cultures here on Earth, perhaps there is room for a relativism of value between the vastly different settings of Earth and Heaven. Suppose, let us say, that freedom on Earth inevitably produces actions that either are or bring about evil, but that freedom does not have this effect in Heaven. That is, we limit the scope of T6 to Earth. At first blush this response seems blatantly ad hoc, and worse than that, appears to undermine the FWD altogether, just as the possibility of saintly freedom did. For the point of the FWD is to get an omnipotent God off the hook for the existence of evil by arguing that he is responsible for a greater good (freedom) that unavoidably brings about evil. But if Heaven can have freedom without evil, then clearly it is possible to have freedom without evil, and God is to blame for not accomplishing this happy confluence on Earth as it is in Heaven. But let us see if this suggested response to the Heaven Dilemma can be spelled out in a more convincing way. 20 John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology, a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp

16 Response 4: No Freedom in Heaven I have assumed thus far that the theist would want to defend the claim that we are free in Heaven, but perhaps this assertion is inessential. It could be said that once we reach Heaven, there really aren t any choices necessary to be made, so our capacity of free will is redundant; that is, 11* is true. Our freedom could be like the brains of Sea Squirts: possessed by the juveniles until they find an ideal lodging place. Once the Sea Squirts find their place in life, they have no further need for those brains, and proceed to digest them. However, we cannot discard 11 alone: claims 7 and 10 jointly imply claim 11, so by modus tollens, denying 11 requires abandoning one or other of 7 or 10. Claim 10 would seem to be an obvious casualty as an unfree Heaven would be a hard sell as the best possible state of existence. A traditional criticism of crude hedonic utilitarianism has been to imagine a world of lobotomized humans with wires triggering the pleasure centers of their brains ecstatically happy, yet incapable of autonomy. Wouldn t Heaven be analogous on this view? Along similar lines, I once heard a televangelist say that if you like the quiet, Heaven won t be for you because it will be millions on millions of people yelling Hallelujah! every minute of every day. My thought at that point was there goes my last incentive to be good. 16