a kleptophiliac. Will has a desire to steal but, unlike Gil, Will has a second-order desire to
maintain and nourish his first-order desire to steal. Gil would like to disown his first-
order desire, while Will cheerfully endorses his. Setting aside further fictional elaboration
about how Will came to acquire the desires he has, we can say that Will's thievery is
more lamentable yet freer than Gil's. In particular, those theists who want to blame much
of the world's evil on human misuse of freedom will deny the claim that because Will's
thievery is wrong, it must be unfree.
If God is omnipotent, he cannot be subject to external compulsion. Thus, God's choosing
to create cannot be like Jill's “choosing” to participate in a bank robbery. But perhaps
there is something in the structure of God's desires that makes him a compulsive creator?
If God's creative activity were to be labeled compulsive, there would have to be a conflict
between a first-order desire to create and a second-order desire not to have that first-order
desire, and the first-order desire would have to drive God's behavior. God would have to
be in relevant respects like Gil, not Will.
Theists are entirely within their rights to suppose that no such conflict characterizes the
divine mind, for a conflict of desires betokens an imperfectly integrated personality. But
in arguing for the lack of compulsion in God, have theists left room for one of (3)'s
distinctive claims, that God could not have refrained from creating? A defender of (3)
must suppose that the uncoerced desire to create flows from God's self-transparent, self-
ordered, and self-endorsed nature. That nature includes—or is—perfect goodness. A
defender of (3) is likely to follow the steps first taken by Plato, maintaining that a good
being must want to share its goodness with others. But others have to exist in order to
share in this goodness. Thus, a perfectly good being must have the desire to create (see
Plato 1997, 1236). The desire is an entailment of God's nature; the desire along with the
nature are freely embraced by their possessor.
The other part of position (3) maintains that if God creates, then God must create the best
world he can. This part of (3) presupposes that there is a best world God can create. One
might suppose, given God's omnipotence, that the best world God can create is in fact the
best of all possible worlds. It would take us too far afield to probe these suppositions. The
question more directly before position (3) is this: Can God be free if God must choose the
best?
In response, an advocate of (3) can develop the following line. Suppose that Antonio has
the skill and resources to make violins of unsurpassable sonority and beauty. Suppose
that the investment of time, energy, and resources is the same whether Antonio makes a
superb or a mediocre violin. Suppose further that Antonio is under no special obligation
to anyone concerning what sort of violin he will make, and that Antonio bears no malice
toward the potential owner of the violin he will make. Suppose even further that there is
no greater good that could have been realized had Antonio refrained from violin making.
Suppose finally that Antonio knows all this. In the teeth of all these suppositions, Antonio
nevertheless produces a mediocre violin. How do we explain Antonio's performance?
Antonio displays weakness of will, or knowing the good but failing to do it. Plato found
such cases so unintelligible that he declared them impossible: any agent who fails to do
the good must be lacking a relevant item of knowledge. We may not be persuaded by
Plato's thesis as a piece of human psychology. It seems more attractive, however, as a
thesis of divine psychology. For how could omnipotent God lack the willpower to do
what omniscient, perfectly good God sees is the best thing to do? So if God creates, he
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