4 6 0C H A P T E R 2 1 ■ R e l i g i o u s R e a s o n i n gThe usual response now is to say that, though God could have created a
world without evil, it was better for him to have created the world he did, in
spite of the evils it contains. The occurrence of those evils was necessary for
goods which are even greater. If God had so created the world that it con-
tained no evil at all, that world would have been less good, all things con-
sidered, than it is even with all the evil it contains. This is called the greater
goods defense.
The Christian may say: we humans rightly do many things we expect
to cause avoidable harm. We build a bridge from San Francisco to Marin
County, knowing that in the construction some workmen will fall into the
water and die. We could avoid their deaths by not building the bridge. But
the bridge is a great good. Given our human limitations, we cannot build it
without some people dying a result. So we build it and accept their deaths as
part of the cost of bridging those waters. And God’s permission of evil may
also be justified by the greater goods it leads to.
An omnipotent being, of course, does not face all the hard choices we do.
If he wants a bridge across those waters, he need only say, “Let there be a
bridge.” And there will be. This fact that God is supposed to be omnipotent
puts constraints on the kinds of good he might be able to use to justify his
acceptance of the evils he allows. What kind of good could be so intimately
connected with evil that even an omnipotent being would have to accept the
evil, as the price of realizing that good? And what good could be so great
that it would justify such a being’s accepting the amount of evil there is in
the world as the price of attaining that good?
The usual answer is: freedom. There must be freedom, if there is to be
moral goodness. And the price of giving humans freedom is that sometimes
they will misuse it. Even an omnipotent being can’t cause a person to freely
do good. If he caused one of his creatures to behave well, that person would
no longer be acting freely. His “acts” would no longer be his acts, and he
would not deserve moral credit for them. Freedom, with the moral goodness
which sometimes results from it, is a good sufficiently great that it makes the
evils which also result worth accepting. This is what is called the free will
defense.
There is a problem, of course, about appealing to human freedom to solve
the problem of evil when you also believe in divine foreknowledge and pre-
destination. This is a problem of long standing, which many philosophers
have wrestled with. No solution has gained general acceptance. If Dr. Craig
accepts the doctrines of predestination and divine foreknowledge and also
appeals to human freedom to solve the problem of evil, he will have worked
out a way of explaining how these things are consistent, and I will listen
with interest to that explanation.
In the meantime, though, there are other problems about the appeal to
freedom. There are evils whose occurrence has no discernible connection
with freedom. Theologians call them natural evils, meaning by that such
things as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, diseases, and so on. If a deer dies97364_ch21_ptg01_449-464.indd 460 15/11/13 12:22 3M
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