130 ARGUMENTS: MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONShave conquered evil, and in the best possible world everyone’s quiver of
virtues will be filled with all virtue’s varieties. So maybe the best possible
world would contain evil after all.^8
Third, suppose the best possible world will contain moral agents who act
only freely and rightly, and that if an agent acts freely then that agent is
not merely acting in the way God has built into her that she act. In the
strictest sense, to create a world W is to fiat W – so to act that W obtains
simply as a result of one’s having so acted. But then the free actions of a
created moral agent cannot themselves be created by God. If God fiats that
Eve speaks truly, Eve does not freely speak truly. So, perhaps, even should
there be some notion of a best possible world that is not self-contradictory,
that world is one that God cannot fiat – cannot, strictly speaking, create –
because it is logically impossible that this be done. But then it is false that,
strictly speaking, if God creates then God creates the best possible world.
Fourth, there is an argument to the effect that there being a best possible
world is not compatible with God being omnicompetent. The idea is that
God is omnicompetent entails No world God created would exhaust God’s
competence or For any world W that God created, God could create a world
W such that W was better than W. There is reason, then, to be dubious
about the claim that (N1) Necessarily, if God creates at all, God will create
the best possible world, and the best possible world will contain no evil is a
necessary truth.
Perhaps things will go better if we appeal to
N2 Necessarily, a perfectly good being prevents evil insofar as it can, and
an omnipotent and omniscient being can prevent any evil.
Reflection on (N2) brings us back to at least one of the considerations
already raised regarding (N1). If a best possible world can contain evil, why
think that a perfectly good and omnicompetent God would not permit evil?
There are other problems with (N2). Let the partial description of a
possible person (a PDPP) be a description of a set of fully determinate
properties such that, were God to, strictly speaking, create – i.e., fiat –
something having those properties, God would have fiated a person. To
each PDPP X, one might say, there will correspond a person if God chooses
to follow the recipe that X contains. Suppose that for each PDPP X there is
a truth about how the corresponding person would act if he was created.
Whatever the truth is, if there is one, about whether there is any PDPP
whose corresponding person would always freely act rightly, that truth is
not a necessary truth. Suppose, finally, that the logically contingent fact of
the matter is that there is no PDPP whose corresponding person, were she
created, would always freely act rightly. A world possessing the highest
possible moral worth, or any reasonable facsimile, will contain moral