(I take the consequent of (1′) to leave it open whether x is to be charged with doing φ or
with some other offense, such as being an accessory during the fact.)
As a general principle, (1′) is implausible. Suppose that a medical technician knowingly
keeps a patient alive while the patient commits perjury. From knowing just that much
about the case one has no warrant to infer that the technician has acted in a morally
impermissible way. There are, of course, ways in which the technician's case is not
parallel to God's—indeed, that is one of the consequences of the doctrine of divine
conservation—but they do not affect a general point that emerges here. An agent's
knowingly and voluntarily keeping another agent in existence while the other agent does
something forbidden is just one way an agent can allow evil to occur. Some cases of
allowing evil to occur are culpable, but some, like the medical technician's case, need not
be. Until shown otherwise, a theist is entitled to assume that divine conservation, insofar
as it allows evil to occur, is nonculpable. Nothing I have said here diminishes the
seriousness of the problem of evil. But I do not think that divine conservation adds to the
problem.
end p.41
Space and Time
It is natural to suppose that the scope of creation includes all beings. There are two
ubiquitous features about creation, however, that deserve special treatment, namely,
space and time. Space and time seem not to be part of the cast of characters in the drama
of creation, but rather more like the theater in which the drama unfolds. Were they then
always just there, so to speak, waiting to receive creatures? Newton thought so:
Newtonian absolute space and time exist in splendid indifference to the objects that might
occupy them. Leibniz dissented from Newton's absolutist conception, maintaining that
space and time are essentially relational. Instead of a Newtonian container, impervious to
whatever its contents might be, think of space and time as a network constituted in its
entirety by existing things and the spatial and temporal relations—relations like above,
between, to the left of, earlier than—among the existing things. On Newton's view, God
could have created the world so that it consisted solely of an infinitely extended space
and time populated by nothing. On Leibniz's view, not even omnipotent God could have
done that, any more than God could have created a nephew without an aunt or uncle.
Relations cannot exist without their relata. Leibniz contended, in addition, that relations
are “unreal,” in the sense that attributions of relations holding among things reduce to or
can be analyzed into properties inherent only in the things themselves. Thus, for Leibniz
the existence of a spatiotemporal manifold requires that there be a plurality of things
bearing spatiotemporal relations among themselves, and that the relations thereby borne
are nothing over and above the properties inherent to the things (see Alexander 1956).
Theists need not choose sides on the issue of absolute versus relational space and time. It
might seem initially as though Leibniz's view accommodates divine sovereignty more
easily than Newton's. For on Leibniz's view, the creation of space and time is simply a
by-product of the activity of creating a world of sufficient complexity to involve its
creatures in spatiotemporal relations. But Newtonians can rejoin that God's sovereignty