better world than W2, it is clear that a gracious God would not love the persons in W
more than the persons in W2. Or, at the very least, it is clear that were God to love the
persons in W1 more than the persons in W2 it would not be because they are morally
better and/or happier. As Adams remarks, “The gracious person loves without worrying
about whether the person he loves is worthy of his love” (324). So, by virtue of his grace,
either God would love all persons to an equal degree, or the fact that he might love one
person more than another would have nothing to do with the fact that the one has a
greater degree of merit or excellence than another. As Adams puts it, “The gracious
person sees what is valuable in the person he loves, and does not worry about whether it
is more or less valuable than what could be found in someone else he might have loved”
(324). And he explains that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, grace is held to be a virtue
that God has and humans ought to have.
Given that grace is as Adams has defined it and that grace is a virtue God possesses, what
may we infer about the world, God creates? Can we infer with Leibniz that if there is a
best world, God must create that world? It is difficult to know what to say here. All that
we've learned from Adams thus far is that it would be something other than love that
would motivate God to choose the best world, or any other world, for that matter. For
because grace is a disposition to love without regard to merit, God will be unable to
select one world over another if all he has to go on is his grace. His grace (love toward
creatures independent of their degree of merit) will leave him free to create any world
that has creatures able to do moral good or evil, regardless of how good or bad they may
be in that world. So, if God has a reason to choose one creaturely world over another—
rather than blindly picking one out of the hat, so to speak—that reason will have little or
nothing to do with his grace. For given the doctrine of grace, God's love for creatures is
not based on the quality (moral, religious, etc.) of the lives they lead, and it is difficult to
see what else about their lives it could be based on. In fact, the implication of the Judeo-
Christian doctrine of grace for God's selection of a world to create seems to be entirely
negative: rather than giving a reason why he might select a particular creaturely world, or
rule out other creaturely worlds, it simply tells us that if God creates a world with
creatures, his love of the creatures in that world cannot be his reason for creating it. For
his love for creatures is entirely independent of who they are and the kind of lives they
lead. To base his love on who they are and the kind of lives they lead would be to take
those persons and their lives as more deserving of his love than other persons and their
lives.
What we've seen thus far is that God's grace—his love of creatures without respect to
their merit—cannot provide God with a reason to create the best world, or any particular
world less than the best. This means that whatever reason God has for choosing to create
one creaturely world over another cannot be found in his gracious love for creatures. In
what, then, given that God has a reason for creating one world over another, would that
reason reside? It would reside, I suggest, in his desire to create the very best state of
affairs that he can. Having such a desire does not preclude gracious love. It does not
imply that God cannot or does not equally love the worst creatures along with the best
creatures. Loving parents, for example, may be disposed to love fully any child that is
born to them, regardless of whatever talents that child is capable of developing. But such
love is consistent with a preference for a child who will be born without mental or
physical impairment, a child who will develop his or her capacities for kindness toward
nextflipdebug5
(nextflipdebug5)
#1