146 ARGUMENTS: MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONSinfer what will happen from something else God knows. So God would,
even regarding chancey worlds, know what will occur and so create only
a world in which there will randomly occur events that, if they are evils,
have a point. In sum: God’s allowing an evil E to occur because it has a
point does not entail God caused or planned that E occur.
Suppose (differently and dubiously) that God would not know what
would happen in a chancey world until it happened. Still, God could set
limits on what could happen in such a world so that no event that might
take place within those boundaries was one God could not bring
sufficient good out of to make it not morally wrong that the evil be
allowed. This suggests a second definition of having a point:
Definition 2: Evil E has an actual (or metaphysical) point if and
only if there is some good G such that (i) God can
bring good G out of E’s occurrence, and (ii) G’s
obtaining is of sufficient worth to justify E’s being
permitted, whether or not E is a logically necessary
condition of G.
In one way it does not seem that the possibility of such a world as W
changes much. In a chancey world, God is morally justified in allowing
evils even though God did not cause them or plan them in any sense in
which planning includes causing. It still may be that the evils in W are
of a sort that the presence in W of evils of their sort has a point (in one
or the other defined senses) though perhaps a point that might be
served by other instances of their kind of evil or by instances of evils of
some different kind. Let an evil be divinely unjustified if and only if
God would be morally unjustified in allowing it to occur. It seems that
the constraint that no divinely unjustified evils can be allowed applies
to W as much as to any world God created. And it seems that the evils in
W that are not planned are nonetheless permitted for morally sufficient
reason, even if that reason is of a sort that could instead have applied to
other specific evils, or to evils of some other kind, or been replaced by
some other morally sufficient reason which would have applied had a
different chance outcome arisen. What follows is that God can have a
point in permitting an evil even if God did not plan the world in such a
way that that evil occurred in it. It does not follow that God could allow
an evil that was actually pointless. It does follow that even under
conditions of randomness, where our ability to judge whether an evil
has a point or not would be even less than whatever it is now, evils could
have actual or metaphysical points. Not even the randomness of such a
world would be forceful evidence of there being actually or
metaphysically pointless evils – evils that were divinely unjustified.