God as Author and the Problem of Evil: A Response to Feser

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Abstract

In a recent article, Edward Feser argues that the logical problem of evil rests on a category mistake regarding the nature of God and of his relationship to the world, and that a proper understanding of God’s nature and how he is related to the cosmos enables us to resolve this problem. To help his readers achieve a correct understanding of the Creator and his relation to creatures, Feser proposes an analogy between God and the author of a novel: God is “the necessary precondition of there being any natural order at all, just as an author is the necessary precondition of there being any novel at all.” I maintain that there are several fundamental flaws in the “author” analogy which render it useless as a tool for eliminating the logical problem of evil, whatever its other merits may be.

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In an article titled, “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil”1, written in response to James Sterba’s book, Is a Good God Logically Possible?2, Edward Feser contends that “when one properly understands what God is and what morality and moral agents are, it simply makes no sense to think of God as less than perfectly good or as morally obligated to prevent the evil that exists.”3 Feser’s central claim is that the “logical problem of evil,” which attempts to show that God’s perfect goodness is incompatible with his allowing the evil we find in the cosmos, “implicitly presupposes that God is himself part of the natural order, or at least causally related to it in something like the way that entities within that order are related to one another.” For classical theists, however, “God is utterly distinct from the natural order of things, creating and sustaining it in being ex nihilo.” Hence, concludes Feser, “the ‘problem’ rests on a category mistake, so to expose the mistake is to dissolve the problem.”4

In the essay that follows, I shall be subjecting Feser’s view to a thoroughgoing critique. However, I wish to make it clear at the outset that I am not arguing that the logical problem of evil disproves the existence of God. Rather, what I will be arguing is that the logical problem of evil is a very real one (as theistic personalists rightly appreciate), and that the Thomistic attempt to nullify the problem fails. For my part, I make no claim to being able to offer a neat solution to the problem. I can only suppose that God has reasons of his own for allowing horrendous suffering which we cannot comprehend, and which constrain what God can and cannot do. God is indeed “all-powerful,” but God alone knows what that term means, in practice.

Is God bound by the Pauline Principle?

Sterba’s argument against the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God hinges on what he refers to as the “Pauline Principle”, so-called because it is endorsed by St. Paul (Romans 3:8)5, which states that “we should never do evil that good may come of it.”6 Although the principle primarily applies to actions, there are at least some cases when permitting evil is itself an evil choice (especially where the evil suffered by the victim is a life-crippling one, with “especially horrendous … consequences”7), so according to the Pauline Principle, in such cases, we are morally bound to prevent the evil we can foresee will happen if we do nothing. Sterba maintains that God’s willingness to tolerate horrendous human suffering, despite being omniscient and omnipotent, clearly falls foul of the Pauline principle. Feser’s response is that God the Creator, being outside the natural order, is not bound by this principle; hence God cannot be blamed for allowing horrendous evils to befall his creatures:

Human beings are obligated to prevent … horrendous actions — and, more generally, are obligated to obey the Pauline Principle — because they are members of the community of rational social animals governed by natural law, of which the Pauline Principle is a part… But God is not a part of that community, and thus he is not governed by the natural law, and thus he is not subject to the Pauline Principle.8

According to Feser, it would be a mistake to regard God as a part of the community of rational social animals, for the same reason that it would be a mistake to consider him a part of the order of natural substances: namely, that as the Creator of the laws of nature, God is not bound by any of its laws, whether they be physical laws or the laws governing our actions (i.e. “natural law.”)

Now, it might be objected that even if God is not part of the community of rational social animals, he is still a member of the community of rational social agents. Feser rejects this argument as flawed on two grounds. First, he says, “the moral obligations we have under natural law follow from our nature as rational animals, specifically, not ‘rational agents’ generically.”9 Second, God is said to be rational not in a literal sense but in an analogical sense. Unlike human beings, God does not need to engage in any sort of reasoning process, because he is unchanging. And because God is simple, it makes no sense to attribute distinct thoughts to him. Clearly, God’s mind is very different from ours.

But even if we grant that God’s infinite, simple and unchanging mind is radically unlike our very limited, ever-changing and complex human minds, it is not at all clear why this difference would lessen (let alone obviate) God’s obligation to assist people who are in severe distress. Indeed, one might argue that it increases the obligation, because God’s knowledge of human affairs is perfect, timeless, universal and infallibly correct, which means that he is not subject to any of the uncertainties that we are prone to as rational agents, when we are deciding whether we should offer assistance, whom we should offer it to, and under what circumstances. Nor does it get God off the hook to point out that people’s moral obligations follow from their nature as rational animals, as Feser does. Even granting for the sake of argument that Feser is right on this point, it simply does not follow that any rational agent who is not an animal has no obligations under natural law. For instance, Thomists such as Feser believe that there are angelic beings10 who are natural agents, but who belong entirely to the spiritual order, as they are intellectual agents without bodies of any kind. Do these beings possess moral obligations? Surely, they do: the obligation to serve God, and to obey his commands. Are these superior beings morally obligated to help humans in distress? The consistent teaching of Christian theologians down the ages is that some of them certainly are: we call them guardian angels11.

A Thomist could respond by pointing out that angelic obligations to assist humans in distress are nonetheless natural obligations, which God does not have, as he entirely transcends the order of nature, as its Creator and immediate Sustainer. But not all moral obligations are necessarily natural. Might it not be the case that God has a supernatural obligation to help us, whenever we are in special difficulty? As we’ll see below, Feser thinks otherwise, and he puts forward an analogy of his own – the “author” analogy – to justify his contention that God has no such obligation. Before I discuss the merits of Feser’s analogy, however, I’d like to briefly examine Feser’s positive arguments for his claim that God need not and should not prevent people from doing wicked deeds: first, a “free-will defense” which opposes regular interventions by God, as interferences with the natural order; and second, a “soul-making theodicy” which contrasts the finite duration of our earthly suffering with the infinite reward that God is preparing us for.

Can God thwart evildoers on a regular basis, without upsetting the natural order?

Feser excludes the possibility of God’s thwarting evildoers on a regular basis, arguing that “[f]or God to systematically prevent our choices from having their natural effects (as opposed to the occasional ad hoc miracle) would be to render this natural order pointless, giving us the power to shape our destinies without allowing us actually to do so.”12 But if God is averse to continually working miracles in order to block evildoers’ agency, he could still thwart evildoers without having to perform any miracles, by having recourse to angels, whose will is held by Christian theologians to be fixed in goodness, after having chosen to follow God when they were first created13. Consider the following scenario, which is loosely inspired by C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy14. Suppose that unbeknown to us, each planet harboring intelligent animal life-forms is protected by a guardian spirit whose divinely appointed responsibility is to ward off any attacks by intelligent life-forms from other planets, which explains why we’ve never been blown up by technologically advanced aliens. Perhaps the angel guarding our Earth has a way of deflecting incoming missiles, for instance. (Angels, according to Thomists, are naturally capable of moving matter by a simple act of will15.) It appears that Feser cannot rule out the scenario I have just proposed, as it involves no miracles, and the planetary guardian angel exercises purely natural powers, and yet it systematically prevents hostile aliens’ choices (to attack Earth) from having their natural effects. Does this render the natural order pointless? Surely not, any more than having a police force does. But let us go one step further. Suppose that each nation on Earth has a guardian angel whose job it is to prevent hostile attacks by armies from other countries. Does this constitute a nullification of the natural order? Again, it is hard to see why. (I might add that the belief that each nation has its own guardian angel is a very ancient one, in both Jewish and Christian tradition, and that Philo, Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine and Aquinas embraced it, among others16.) One could even take the argument further and imagine a scenario where each individual’s guardian angel has the responsibility of ensuring that person’s personal safety. If the foregoing argument is correct, God could eliminate all wars, murders and assaults without having to work a single miracle. So why doesn’t he? (One possibility, as I have argued elsewhere17, is that the notion of a spiritual creature being able to move objects by the power of its will alone is an incoherent one.)

The everlasting reward of the blessed in Heaven is also cited by Feser as a reason for God’s not preventing moral evils. As he puts it, “the good that God may produce out of the evil we suffer is not primarily to be found in this life but in our unending afterlife.”18 This argument would have a certain force to it, if the evils we suffered were all of the “soul-making” variety, required to mold us into better human beings. However, there are many evils we suffer – sexual abuse, rape and torture, for instance – which are soul-breaking, rather than soul-making experiences. These evils do not create better people; instead, they create broken people, who are scarred for life. This problem is especially acute for Jews and Christians, who believe that God is our Father. After all, what father would allow his own children to be abused, raped and tortured, if he could possibly prevent it?

Nor will it do to suggest that perhaps those individuals who are psychologically broken by the suffering they’ve endured in this life would have suffered an even worse fate (i.e. eternal damnation, caused by pride or some other deadly sin), had God not allowed them to suffer.19 For in that case, what are we to make of people – and you can find such individuals in any prison or psychiatric institute – who are raped, bludgeoned or tortured to death, and who cry out to God to console them with his presence in their final moments of agony (“God, help me!”), only to find that God has abandoned them, so that in their final moments of consciousness what they experience is unremitting fear and terror which is unbroken by any ray of divine sunshine? What is most scandalous about such deaths is that the spiritual evil these people suffer – a complete absence of God’s consoling presence in their hour of need – is one which requires neither a miracle nor the thwarting of an evildoer’s actions in order to prevent it. All it requires is grace, bestowed by God during a person’s last moments. To suppose that God withholds his own grace from a dying individual for the sake of some “greater good” is akin to supposing that you can feed a starving person by withholding food from them. We really are in the realm of contradiction here.

Feser’s “author” analogy

But even if the “free will defense” and the “soul-making theodicy” both fail to exonerate God, Feser still has one ace up his sleeve: the “author” analogy. In order to explain why a transcendent Creator is not vulnerable to the logical problem of evil, Feser proposes an analogy between God and the human author of a novel – an analogy which he acknowledges is “not exact,” but which he regards as “useful.”20 The kind of analogy Feser is envisaging here is what is commonly known as analogy of proportionality: A is to B as C is to D. Thomistic philosophers maintain21 that we may use such comparisons when talking about God, as Feser does when he writes that “the necessary precondition of there being any natural order at all, just as an author is the necessary precondition of there being any novel at all.”22 Existentially speaking, God is to Nature what an author is to his novel. Once we grasp this analogy, we can immediately see why God has no obligation to prevent evil, any more than an author is obliged to prevent his characters from getting into strife:

An author stands outside the novel altogether, and though for that reason he is not subject to the rules that govern characters within the novel, there are nevertheless distinctively authorial criteria by reference to which he can intelligibly be said to be a good author—such as skillful plotting, elegant prose, and the ability to construct a gripping story with a satisfying denouement. And an author who puts his characters through the wringer for a few chapters before reaching that denouement would be thought much better than one whose characters are boringly free of difficulty. God, for the Thomist, is analogous to such an author, having created a world whose order reflects his omnipotence and supreme wisdom, and which will culminate in the righteous living happily ever after and the wicked getting their just deserts.23

A proposal for identifying poor analogies for God

Before I proceed to explain why I think this analogy is an unhelpful one for resolving the logical problem of evil, it might be helpful for us to take a step back and ask ourselves: how good does an analogy have to be, in order to be useful? What I would suggest is that when we are dealing with a proportional analogy (such as Feser’s analogy of a human author) which purports to explain an entire class of phenomena (in this case, the evils occurring in God’s world), then in order for the analogy to count as a good one, it cannot be an improper analogy for any states of affairs that are presupposed by the phenomena it purports to explain. On the Thomist conception of evil as a privation, the evils that obtain in our cosmos presuppose: (i) the existence of contingent beings which are capable of instantiating defects; (ii) the agency of rational beings such as ourselves who are capable of failing to achieve their proper good (without which there could be no moral evil); and (iii) the passions (or feelings) of sentient animals, which are disturbed when something in their immediate surroundings is not as it should be, resulting in pain and suffering (which are commonly referred to as natural evils). On the proposal I am putting forward here, if it turns out that Feser’s “author” analogy is an improper analogy for creatures’ existence, agency or feelings, then we should reject it as an explanation for the evils occurring in Nature.

At this point, a Thomist may object that I am pushing Feser’s “author” analogy too far, by expecting it to hold in all these cases. After all, no analogy is complete, even within the natural world: for instance, physicists have to make use of two quite different analogies (that of a wave and a particle) when explaining the properties of light. Why, then, should we expect there to be a single, all-encompassing analogy which explains everything we could possibly have to say about God’s dealings with us? For my part, I am quite happy to concede the force of this objection. But what I am arguing here is not that if an analogy we apply to God is valid for explaining a class of phenomena X, then it should be able to explain classes Y and Z as well; rather, what I am arguing is that if we are going to apply an analogy to God in order to explain some class of phenomena X, then we should at least make sure that it’s not an improper analogy for those states of affairs (call them A, B and C) which are presupposed by X. If it turns out to be an improper one, then we should probably dispense with it. Of course, it may turn out that the analogy is simply non-applicable to A, B and C, rather than being an improper analogy for A, B and C. In that case, there is no need to throw it out.

I make no claim that the principle I am proposing here for evaluating the merits of theological analogies expresses an analytic truth; rather, it is simply meant to raise a red flag. As I envisage it, it serves as a warning that there are strong prima facie reasons for not using certain theological analogies, and that we would be ill-advised to do so.

Below, I shall argue that Feser’s “author” analogy is a poor explanation of (i) the existence of contingent beings, (ii) the moral agency of rational beings and (iii) the feelings of sentient beings. It also suffers from four additional defects. In the end, the “author” analogy turns out to be flawed on no less than seven counts, rendering it useless as a tool for dissolving the logical problem of evil.

1. The “author” analogy fails to explain the existence of contingent beings

In a 2011 blog article titled “Are you for real?”, Feser himself provides an admirably lucid account of why, on a Thomistic account of existence, his own analogy between God and the author of a work of fiction is totally inadequate to explain the existence of contingent beings:

…[T]here is an obvious difference between us and fictional characters: we exist and they don’t. Metaphysically speaking, we can understand the difference in terms of Aquinas’s famous distinction between essence and existence. To borrow an example from his On Being and Essence, a phoenix, unlike a human being, has no “act of existence” conjoined with its essence (if there is such a thing as the essence of a phoenix). That’s why there are no phoenixes – they are fictional creatures – while there are human beings. You exist because God conjoins your essence to an act of existence; phoenixes do not exist because God does not conjoin the essence of any phoenix with an act of existence. To regard ourselves as fictional characters in a story God has written would be to deny this obvious difference, and to make it mysterious what it could mean to say that God has created human beings but not phoenixes.24

Given this gaping hole in the “author” analogy, it is therefore puzzling that Feser continues to regard it as useful for explaining away the logical problem of evil.

2. The “author” analogy fails to account for moral agency

Much of the evil we encounter in the world is moral evil: the result of rational agents doing bad things, such as raping, torturing and murdering other individuals. In the above-cited blog article, Feser vigorously defends the “author” analogy as being “useful for helping us to understand why divine causality is not incompatible with human freedom”:

He [God] is … like the writer who decides that the characters will interact in such-and-such a way. And so His being the ultimate source of all causality is no more incompatible with human freedom than the fact that an author decides that, as part of a mystery story, a character will freely choose to commit a murder, is incompatible with the claim that the character in question really committed the murder freely.25

In his reply to Sterba, Feser invokes the same analogy when he writes that “knows the natural order by knowing himself as the cause of it, just as an author knows the story he has written by virtue of knowing his own mind.”26 Feser thus believes that God determines our choices, as the author of human history.

One thing authors cannot do, however, is reproach their own characters for failing to obey their commands. To give a simple illustration: while Harry Potter is perfectly entitled to reproach Voldemort for murdering his parents when he was little, Harry Potter’s author, J. K. Rowling, is not – precisely because she “transcends the story altogether as its source,”27 as Feser so aptly expresses it in his blog article. And even if (per impossibile) J. K. Rowling could converse with Voldemort and condemn him for his wicked deeds, would he not be perfectly justified in retorting, “I only did what you as an author made me do. Why, then, are you blaming me?”

3. The “author” analogy fails to explain our feelings

The concept of natural evil would make no sense unless there existed beings that were capable of suffering harm – and in particular, sentient beings capable of experiencing physical and psychological pain. (One might regard mildew attacking tomatoes as an instance of natural evil, as it damages living plants, but as no-one gets hurt in the process, I can’t imagine an atheist losing any sleep over such a case.) Human authors frequently describe the painful experiences of their characters in the novels they write. But here is the point: when they do so, they draw upon their own experiences as sentient beings. It is precisely because J. K. Rowling is a sentient being that she is capable of vividly portraying the effects of a Crucio curse inflicted by Voldemort upon Harry, for instance.28

One obvious problem that arises when we apply the “author” analogy to God is that according to the classical theism espoused by Feser and other Thomists (not to mention numerous Christians of all stripes), God has no feelings. He is Actus Purus, or pure actuality, and is therefore devoid of any potentiality for having experiences (whether good, bad or indifferent).

Another glaring disanalogy between God and human authors, when it comes to suffering, is that the suffering experienced by the characters in God’s story is real, whereas the suffering of the characters in a novel written by a human author is not – simply because the characters are not.

We have seen that the “author” analogy fails dismally to describe the fundamental phenomena underlying the evil that occurs in the world: namely, the existence of contingent beings, the moral agency of rational beings, and the feelings of sentient beings. I would therefore ask: if the analogy is inadequate to account for the facts which underlie the occurrence of evil, then why should we bother using it to explain evil itself?

4. The “author” analogy and divine freedom

There are further flaws with the “author” analogy, including one relating to divine freedom. To illustrate this point, let us imagine that God mentally composes a very complex story about a very selfish individual who happens to be the same individual as me, who is mean to everyone around him, and who is damned for his many faults, after his death. Let’s call this individual “possible-me,” since so far, we are only talking about a story within the mind of God. The question that Thomists like Feser need to address is: is it possible for God to mentally compose a story about possible-me, with my many personal flaws, that is complete in every detail, without actualizing this flawed character (i.e. without actually making me)?

If Feser would answer “yes” (as I believe he would), then the “author” analogy fails to exonerate God for the evil we find in the world, as there was nothing compelling him to make it in the first place. The harm done was therefore avoidable. God could, for instance, have written a story depicting the damnation of “possible-me” in the most graphic way imaginable, without there being any “actual-me” who is damned. But if Feser would answer “no,” then that would be tantamount to saying that whatever stories about possible worlds God composes in his mind, he has to realize. In other worlds, all possible worlds are real, and God has no freedom to refrain from creating a world that he has imagined in full detail. Taken to its logical conclusion, the “author” analogy thus entails a Spinozist metaphysics which no self-respecting Thomist – indeed, no Christian – would want to defend.

Feser himself is fully aware of the theological perils of pushing the “author” analogy to its logical conclusion, pointing out in a blog article that it leads to pantheism:

If we and everything else in the universe are, in effect, mere ideas in the mind of a divine Author, then the distinction between God and the world collapses. The universe would be “in” God in the same way that the story an author has come up with is “in” the author’s mind. But pantheism is unacceptable both from the point of view of philosophical theology (since the traditional arguments for God’s existence entail that the First Cause is utterly distinct from the world) and from the point of view of dogmatic theology (since pantheism is unorthodox). Hence any view that entails pantheism – as the suggestion that we are fictional characters arguably does – is doubly objectionable.29

5. The “author” analogy is at odds with the declaration of both the Bible and Christian tradition that God is our Father and that we are His children

An additional major flaw with the “author” analogy (at least, as far as Christian philosophers like Feser are concerned) is that it runs counter to the Bible and Christian tradition in an important respect, by completely ignoring the fatherhood of God. To be sure, the “author” analogy appears to have some Scriptural basis: there are numerous passages in Scripture which speak of God, or his Son, creating and sustaining things by the power of His Word. Taken alone, these passages might appear to suggests that (from the perspective of creatures, at least), God enjoys a relationship with the world akin to that of an author to the novel he is writing. On day one of creation, for instance, God declares, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) and the Son is described as “sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3). However, when it comes to the relationship between God and human beings, it is noteworthy that the Bible nowhere describes us as mere characters in God’s great Book of Nature, but rather as His own children. Acts 17:28 resoundingly declares, “We are all His children,” while Malachi 2:10 rhetorically asks, “Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us?”

The same picture emerges when we examine the Christian tradition. While it is true that for over 1,500 years, Christian theologians30 have consistently referred to Nature as God’s Book, alongside the Book of Scripture, I know of no Church Father or Doctor who ever referred to human individuals as characters in God’s book. The point is a vital one, since the evil in the world relates to the characters, rather than the setting they occupy. Although the Church Fathers say relatively little about the place of animals in God’s world, they repeatedly affirm that human beings are God’s children, made “to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this world, and be happy with Him for ever in Heaven,” as the Baltimore Catechism puts it.31

As I see it, the key theological point at stake here is as follows: when we call God our Father, do we mean nothing more than “God is our Author”? If so, then it is abundantly clear that God has no moral obligation whatsoever to protect us from the various evils that may befall us, any more than a human author is obliged to rescue his characters when they are in distress. But if the word “Father,” as applied to God, means something more than “Author,” then the problem of evil returns in full force. To return to the question we asked earlier: what father would allow his own children to be abused, raped and tortured, if he could prevent it?

6. The “author” analogy renders objective criticism of God’s handiwork impossible

Feser insists that there are objective criteria by reference to which an author can described as a good author — such as “skillful plotting, elegant prose, and the ability to construct a gripping story with a satisfying denouement.” He adds that “an author who puts his characters through the wringer for a few chapters before reaching that denouement would be thought much better than one whose characters are boringly free of difficulty,” before adding that “God, for the Thomist, is analogous to such an author.”32

The problem with this analogy should be immediately apparent. For any human author, there are other people who can independently critique his work, whereas there is no-one who can independently critique God’s handiwork, as we are all his creatures, who depend on him at each moment for our very existence and whose aesthetic judgements simply reflect God’s authorial decisions about what we, his characters, will think and say in the story he is composing. God unlike a human author, has no peers. Hence He can never be judged “wrong” in the way He makes something. At this point, the insight captured in Wittgenstein’s private language argument comes into play: when it is impossible in principle for someone to be wrong about something, it is equally impossible for that person to be right. Similarly, if it is impossible in principle for God’s handiwork to be judged bad, then it is equally impossible for it to be judged good.

In any case, the criteria listed by Feser above cannot be used to evaluate God’s skill as an author, because he could possess the ability to write a story instantiating all of these criteria, while nonetheless choosing to compose a mediocre story instantiating none of them. After all, God is under no obligation to “do His best,” or even to “do a good job.” God might decide that merely adequate job will do.

7. Authors can’t insert themselves in their own books

In his book, The Unnecessary Science: A Critical Analysis of Natural Law Theory, Gunther Laird points out a fundamental inconsistency between the “author” metaphor and the Christian belief that Jesus is God made man:

If the world of our everyday existence is analogous to a story held in God’s mind, then wouldn’t the Incarnation of Christ be analogous to the author of a novel inserting himself into it as a character? But if you think about it, it is metaphysically impossible for an author to literally put himself inside a story. For instance, imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a story in which he was transported from his study into Middle-Earth and helped defend Minas Tirith. But Tolkien-the-author and Tolkien-the-character could not literally be the same person, because they are crucially different in both characteristics and actions. If they were the same, Tolkien-the-author would have to be yanked from his study at the very same time he was sitting down and writing about Tolkien-the-character being plunged into Middle Earth. Thus, we can conclude that Tolkien-the-author is essentially different from Tolkien-the-character, the latter simply being a representation of the former, a fictional character who might resemble in all particulars the author, but is otherwise a separate entity.33

The basic problem here is that an author, precisely because he lives on a higher plane of reality than his characters, cannot turn himself into one of them, as Christianity maintains God did.

What would follow if the “author” analogy were an appropriate one?

Finally, it might be asked: supposing the “author” analogy were an appropriate one, as Feser contends, would it solve the logical problem of evil? The answer I would suggest is: yes, but at an unacceptably high cost, for it would make God’s goodness compatible with the creation of any world, no matter how hellish. The following quote from Feser’s essay highlights the problem:

…[T]he good that God may produce out of the evil we suffer is not primarily to be found in this life but in our unending afterlife. And it includes the offer of the beatific vision, which infinitely outweighs any suffering we could undergo in this life, and which will be refused only to those who refuse the offer.34

The problem here is that Feser’s argument could be used to justify God’s subjecting us to millions or even billions of years of excruciating pain, in order to prepare us for Heaven. An author is perfectly free to subject his characters to whatever trials he sees fit for them to suffer, in order to reach their goal. What’s more, no degree or duration of suffering, no matter how immense, could ever count as evidence against the goodness of God, since on Feser’s account, to say that God is good means simply that “God is pure actuality, with no unactualized potentiality.”35 But in Christian theology, to say that God is good is to say that God is Love (1 John 4:16) – a word that curiously appears not once in Feser’s entire essay on the problem of evil. If God is essentially loving and empathizes with our suffering, we can rest assured that he will not impose more suffering on us that we can bear. However, Feser would reject such a picture of God as anthropomorphic – i.e. as an example of what he refers to as “theistic personalism.”

Another problem with Feser’s “author” analogy is that it may lead many thoughtful people to lose hope of their own salvation. According to Feser, God’s offer of the beatific vision “will be refused only to those who refuse the offer.” However, those who refuse God’s offer do so only because their proud intellects and depraved wills are corrupted, causing them to rationalize their pursuit of the vices into which they have fallen. And on Feser’s account, God knows events taking place in the natural order like an author knows the story he has written: by knowing his own mind. What that means is that all my thoughts and volitions – good, bad or indifferent – have been decided in advance by God. What guarantee do I have, then, that I will persevere in goodness, even if I am currently on the right path? For all I know, God may decide to fill my mind with proud and/or depraved thoughts tomorrow, thereby turning me into a wicked person who is eventually doomed to receive his just deserts in Hell, in God’s great story. To be sure, Feser insists36 that God does not “will or cause moral evil” as such (presumably because evil per se is a defect, and God only creates what is positive), but if God is the author of our thoughts and volitions, which often lead us astray, then it is hard to see how he can escape the charge of causing evil.

The “author” analogy would also rob of of any rational grounds for believing in our own immortality. Feser disagrees, insisting37 that “our rationality entails that our souls are incorporeal and thus do not perish with the death of the body.” But even an incorporeal separated intellect still requires information to process; otherwise, it will grind to a halt. The information which our rational human intellects are able to digest comes to us from our brains and nervous systems. The destruction of these vital body parts at death therefore leaves our minds with nothing to do. Arguably, an entity that does nothing, is nothing. It therefore seems to follow that in the absence of special intervention by God, we cease to exist at death. But if Feser’s argument that an author is under no obligation to rescue His characters from whatever evils they may suffer is correct, then a fortiori, it is also true that an author is under no obligation to provide his characters with a post-mortem lifeline by feeding their disembodied intellects with information about the world so that they are able to continue reasoning. Nor can Feser argue for immortality on the basis of our natural desire for it, since an author is in no way bound to satisfy the natural desires of his characters. In any case, natural desires are often frustrated in real life: only a lucky few animals ever get to mate and pass on their genes, for instance. Immortality might turn out to be a rare privilege, with the vast majority of human beings facing annihilation at death.

Additionally, the “author” analogy would rob us of any grounds for trusting an alleged supernatural revelation – for example, the Christian revelation that God is three persons or that God the Son became man in the person of Jesus Christ. Feser might respond that God would not – indeed, cannot – lie to us, but as an author, he could cause his characters to come to accept false revelations or reject true ones, simply by writing a story in which they engage in faulty reasoning, or in which they allow their passions or their prideful wills to cloud their judgements. The characters’ decisions would, on Feser’s account, be entirely free, even though they were wholly determined by God. No lying would be involved, as God would not be communicating with the characters who are misled in this way.

Finally, the “author” analogy would seem to entail radical skepticism about our own mental processes, except insofar as they relate to practical matters. If God is the author of our ruminations and ratiocinations, he could make us come to believe in all kinds of silliness – and we would be none the wiser.

I conclude that the “author” metaphor for God’s relationship with the world not only fails to dissolve the logical problem of evil, but actually exacerbates it, by depriving us of any grounds for hoping for a hereafter, let alone the Christian Heaven, and by leading us to question not only supernatural revelations, but much of our natural knowledge as well. Christian theologians and philosophers would therefore do well to jettison this metaphor, in their discussions of the problem of evil.

Bibliography

Aquinas, St. Thomas. 1920. Summa Theologiae. Second and Revised Edition. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Online Edition Copyright © 2017 by Kevin Knight.

Aquinas, St. Thomas. 1955-57. Summa Contra Gentiles. (Edited, with English, especially Scriptural references, updated by Joseph Kenny, O.P.) New York: Hanover House.

Catholic Church. “Heaven and Earth,” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2012.

Craig, William Lane. 2011. “What about Natural Evil?” Reasonable Faith podcast. URL: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/what-about-natural-evil/

Feser, Edward. 2011. “Are you for real?” (blog article). URL: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/are-you-for-real.html

Feser, Edward. 2021. The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil. Religions 12(4):268. URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12040268

Harris, Roger. 2007. The Private Language Argument Isn’t as Difficult, Nor as Dubious as Some Make Out. URL: https://www.sorites.org/Issue_18/harris.htm

Laird, Gunther. 2020. The Unnecessary Science: A Critical Analysis of Natural Law Theory. Onus Books.

Lewis, C. S. 2011. The Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength). Simon & Schuster; Reissue edition.

Nicoletti, Michele. The Angel of the Nations. In: Theopopedia. Archiving the history of theologico-political concepts, ed. by T. Faitini, F. Ghia, M. Nicoletti, University of Trento, Trento 2015. URL: http://theopopedia.lett.unitn.it/?encyclopedia=angels-of-the-nations, http://theopopedia.lett.unitn.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/angels-Nicoletti.pdf

Rowling, J. K. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury.

Sacred Congregation of Studies. 1914. The Twenty-Four Fundamental Theses Of Official Catholic Philosophy. (Commentary by P. Lumbreras, O.P., S.T.Lr., Ph.D. Latin translation of theses by Hugh McDonald.) URL: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/24Thomisticpart2.htm

Sterba, James P. 2019. Is a Good God Logically Possible? Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tanzella-Nitti, G. 2004. The Two Books Prior to the Scientific Revolution. Annales Theologici 18:51-83. URL: https://inters.org/tanzella-nitti/pdf/9.TwoBooks.pdf

The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. 1885. Baltimore Catechism No. 1. New York. URL: https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/balt/balt1.htm

Torley, Vincent. 2020. An A-Z of Unanswered Objections to Christianity: F. Superhuman intelligences: angels, demons and aliens. URL: http://theskepticalzone.fr/an-a-z-of-unanswered-objections-to-christianity-f-superhuman-intelligences-angels-demons-and-aliens/

References

1 (Feser 2021).

2 (Sterba 2019).

3 (Feser 2021, p. 268).

4 Ibid., p. 269.

5 (Sterba 2019, p. 44). The verse reads: “And why not do evil that good may come? — as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.” (ESV)

6 Loc. cit.

7 Ibid, pp. 189-190.

8 (Feser 2021, p. 280).

9 Ibid, p. 282.

10 (Sacred Congregation of Studies, 1914, Thesis VII).

11 Catholic Church 336. “From infancy to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession.202 ‘Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.’203 Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God.”

12 (Feser 2021, p. 279).

13 See for instance Aquinas 1920, Summa Theologiae, I.62.5, I.62.8.

14 (Lewis 2011).

15 (Aquinas 1920, Summa Theologiae, I.57.2; Aquinas, 1955-57, Summa Contra Gentiles, II.99.4).

16 (Tanzella-Nitti, G. 2004).

17 (Torley 2020).

18 (Feser 2021, p. 278).

19 For a suggestion in a similar vein, see (Craig, 2011). On the subject of natural disasters, Craig writes: “I think that it’s not at all improbable that only in a world that is suffused with natural disasters would the maximal number of people freely come to know God and his love and find their entrance into God’s Kingdom. It’s not at all implausible that in a world in which there were no natural consequences of pain and suffering to anything we did that people would be spoiled, pampered brats who would forget God and would have no need of him whatsoever.”

20 (Feser 2021, p. 281).

21 (Sacred Congregation of Studies, 1914, Thesis IV).

22 (Feser 2021, p. 273).

23 Ibid., p. 281.

24 (Feser 2011).

25 Loc. cit.

26 (Feser 2021, p. 276).

27 (Feser 2011).

28 (Rowling 2000, p. 713). “It was pain beyond anything Harry had ever experienced: his very bones were on fire, his head was surely splitting along his scar, his eyes were rolling madly in his head, he wanted it to end … to black out … to die …” My point is that only someone who had suffered from severe headaches could have written a description like that of the effects of the Crucio curse on Harry Potter.

29 (Feser 2011).

30 (Tanzella-Nitti, G. 2004).

31 (The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1885, Q. 6).

32 (Feser 2021, p. 281).

33 (Laird 2020, p. 298).

34 (Feser 2021, p. 278).

35 (Feser 2021, p. 276).

35 (Feser 2021, p. 280).

37 (Feser 2021, p. 278).

299 thoughts on “God as Author and the Problem of Evil: A Response to Feser”

  1. vjtorley: I agree that the one thing the analogies are good for is to show that we have no right to complain against God. But Feser wants to go further: he wants to argue that God has no obligations to us.

    But it’s not so that Feser argues that God has no obligations to us. He only says in the article that God’s obligations are not of the same kind as moral obligations between humans to each other and that the Pauline Principle is not how God should be measured.

    vjtorley: I think that’s wrong, as the Bible and the tradition of the Church employ another prominent analogy for God: that of a father. And fathers do have obligations towards their children. As Jesus Himself said: “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11).

    No Christian would disagree with this – particularly when they did *not* claim that God has no obligations to us in the first place.

    vjtorley: So why does God, our Father, allow us to suffer horrendous evils? My answer is that we simply don’t know how His hands are tied, in His dealings with us. That’s very different from saying God has no obligations to us.

    It’s a dubious claim to say that God’s hands are tied. God has solutions, not problems. Humans in the temporal world are just impatient and short-sighted. If you think that the problem of evil is a problem – and should be so for more people than it is -, your faith is on a very shaky ground.

  2. So vjtorley thinks terrible things happen because HIS god’s powers are limited in some important respects. Erik thinks we are simply impatient and short-sighted because HIS god just operates on a different time scale. Both of these gods thus present no problem of evil because evil isn’t vjtorley’s god’s fault, or because Erik’s god hasn’t gotten around to fixing things yet.

    Other Christians’ gods don’t agree with one another as to what’s evil, or they allow evil for inscrutable reasons, or because they cause evil for purposes we can’t guess. Again, I’m amazed at how many gods Christians worship. No wonder religions with pantheons had the gods warring with one another all the time. Christians are apparently content with a single highly schizophrenic god.

  3. phoodoo: If you can throw a baby off a cliff, and the baby just bounces right back up and smiles and says, do it again, I want more, and where is my ice cream-what is a choice? If you can snort cocaine for 24 hours straight, and you will never go broke, and your nostrils won’t get holes burned in them, then that is what everyone will do, right. Or they will have sex all day. Or just eat chocolate.

    I already completely undermined this terrible rationalization in this very thread, but I see you elected to brainlessly repeat it rather than to defend it against criticism.

    You can excuse any imaginable horror with your argument. As long as there are differences of outcome and these differences some times succeed at motivating individuals to make choices for the lesser evils then your argument applies. If any imaginable amount of evil is compatible with the supposed Goodness of God then the concepts of goodness and evil have lost all meaning.

    The simple fact is that we as humans can and do evaluate different systems for how good they are. We can compare systems of government and the behaviors of regimes on outcomes like mortality rates, happiness, health, and so on, and we can say that one system is better than another. And we can say that some systems are bad, and other systems are better, even though no system is perfect.

    And it doesn’t have to be perfect for us to say that some systems are really good while others are really bad. If we can do it for ourselves and our societies, we can do it for existence and the world generally, and for God’s putative role in setting up the world the way it is.

    Given God’s supposedly perfect goodness and infinite knowledge, we should expect a much better system than the one we find, where for the better part of human history, of the >100 billion people who ever lived, over 50 billion of these were children that died before the age of 8 years old. And that is without considering animal suffering, or going into detail about how people all over the world have died and suffered through unimaginable horrors we can now thank human cooperation and ingenuity for having largely eliminated for most residents in 1st world countries.

    Phoodoo’s obsession with excusing atrocities by dismissing complaints as calls for coke-fueled chocolate-orgies are obscene and betrays a really emotionally and intellectually stunted mind.

  4. Rumraket,

    Bullshit. You think you have solved it but you haven’t. I have asked you before, WHAT level of suffering is acceptable, such that you won’t call it evil?

    Is mortality ok with you, or you want humans to be immortal? You have never answered that.

    What about boredom, is that ok? Should people have to work? Should all jobs be easy and fullfiling? Isn’t having to work an unfulfilling job to buy food evil to some people? What about you, that’s ok?

    So, no, I am calling your bluff, you haven’t resolved anything.

  5. phoodoo: Bullshit. You think you have solved it but you haven’t. I have asked you before, WHAT level of suffering is acceptable, such that you won’t call it evil?

    You seem extremely confused, as usual. It is not about whether we want to call the suffering “evil”. The real problem (for you) is that there is no maximum amount of suffering you can’t excuse with this fantastically indifferent, semi-sociopathic fantasy of an argument you have concocted.

    There is no imaginable magnitude of torturous existence you can’t rationalize as being what a perfectly good God would want. It is not my job to tell you how much less suffering it would take for me to say it does not amount to “evil”, it is your job to explain how God can be good despite the evil there exists. You’ve tried to do that with your trash rationalization that differences in outcome are necessary to compel people to act, and I have explained how this argument fails.

    Your inability to comprehend this explanation seems beyond my ability to alleviate, so I guess I will just have to live with it being painfully obvious to everyone else who has not rotted their brain away with apologetics.

    phoodoo:
    Is mortality ok with you, or you want humans to be immortal? You have never answered that.

    Is child-rape evil in your opinion? Let’s start with less childrape, would that be okay with you? Is that an unreasonable demand? Just, fewer children in the world get raped. Is that really an extreme of debased, spoiled, and egotistical luxury to be requesting of an all-powerful being that is purported to be interested in the well-being of it’s creations? If I had the power and knowledge to intervene to make fewer children get raped, I would. At what magnitude would children getting raped make God intervene? 4 more pr. year? 2000? A billion?

    What is that I hear you say – there is no such number? No imaginable increase in the amount of suffering in the world would change anything in your view? No matter how grotesque a reality we find ourselves in, it will always be perfectly compatible with your “good” God as long as the suffering is not exactly equal everywhere and to everyone?
    Then in what way is God really good? What is it about the world that is supposed to lead us to conclude that God is good, if you can excuse any of the world’s evils no matter how extreme with your shit argument?

    I know. God is by definition Good. And God’s existence axiomatic. With these two premises taken as unassailable you will allow yourself to excuse any act or inaction by God with your blindly servile, abiding rationalizations. You’d make the perfect sycophant suckup in any dictatorship.

    phoodoo: So, no, I am calling your bluff, you haven’t resolved anything.

    Unfortunately you’ve put the cart before the horse. It is your job to resolve how God’s goodness is compatible with the world’s evils. Saying that there has to be differences in outcome to compel people to act does not succeed in doing that for reasons already explained.

  6. Rumraket,

    Yea, I knew you wouldn’t answer. As such you really have nothing to say.

    Rumraket: Is child-rape evil in your opinion? Let’s start with less childrape, would that be okay with you? Is that an unreasonable demand? Just, fewer children in the world get raped. Is that really an extreme of debased, spoiled, and egotistical luxury to be requesting of an all-powerful being that is purported to be interested in the well-being of it’s creations? If I had the power and knowledge to intervene to make fewer children get raped, I would.

    This is about as stupid as it gets. In your mind you would be fine with less child rapes, but still some child rapes. Its ok if there are some, just not as many as now.

    Well, how do you know there aren’t already less than there could be? So there you have it, God must be good, because he has made less child rapes than there possibly could be.

    How many child rapes is ok with you?

  7. Rumraket announces if he was an all powerful God, and could stop all rapes of all children, he wouldn’t do it, he would allow some. I guess for kids he doesn’t like.

  8. I believe I have comprehensively demonstrated the insanity of your position. I rest my case.

  9. Rumraket,

    You have demonstrated you are pro child rape in some cases.

    Other than this, you don’t have much to say.

  12. Hi Erik,

    …[I]t’s not so that Feser argues that God has no obligations to us. He only says in the article that God’s obligations are not of the same kind as moral obligations between humans to each other…

    Let me be more precise. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Feser distinguishes two kinds of justice in his essay: commutative and distributive. It is only the latter kind that applies to God, he says, and even then, “only in a qualified sense.” That is, God provides different species of things (not individuals, please note) with “what they require given their nature” (e.g. trees for beavers). But he does this “not because he is indebted to anything he creates, but because the incoherence of creating a world in which things are by nature directed toward ends they cannot even in principle achieve is contrary to God’s wisdom.” So Feser evidently believes that God doesn’t owe us anything; rather, He owes it to Himself not to create in an illogical fashion. While God has certain obligations in relation to us, He has no obligations towards us, on Feser’s view. (I am reminded here of Kant’s views concerning our obligations to animals: he thought cruelty to animals was wrong, but he didn’t think we were wronging animals as such, by being cruel to them.)

    Humans in the temporal world are just impatient and short-sighted. If you think that the problem of evil is a problem – and should be so for more people than it is -, your faith is on a very shaky ground.

    The problem of evil is a genuine problem, as great Christian thinkers have acknowledged. Allow me to quote the words of Orthodox theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart, in his 2005 essay, “Tsunami and Theodicy”:

    There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality—in nature or history—is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of—but entirely by way of—every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome.

    Of course, I believe that God will put everything right, but I don’t believe the crazy stuff that happens is in any way a part of His plan. As to why the problem of evil doesn’t tempt me to atheism: the arguments for theism are much more powerful. They include: the sheer contingency of the cosmos at all levels; the fact that we live in a law-governed world (and one governed by mathematically elegant laws, at that); the pervasiveness of beauty in every nook and cranny of the cosmos (unlike evil, which is confined to our planet, as far as we can tell); the impossibility of defining the properties of objects in purely objective, third-person terminology, without reference to any kind of mind; and much more.

  13. phoodoo: WHAT level of suffering is acceptable, such that you won’t call it evil?

    Well, we already know your answer to that.

  14. phoodoo:
    Alan Fox,

    Oh, live and let live bro…

    Well, glad we agree on that. I mean, what’s the alternative? Let me live and let you die? I’m glad you don’t subscribe to something like that.

  15. vjtorley:
    While God has certain obligations in relation to us, He has no obligations towards us, on Feser’s view.

    And that’s a problem how? The thing is, God’s obligations to us need to be in a different category or on a different level compared to human obligations among each other. God as Father is another analogy not to be taken too literally and anthropomorphically. God does not raise us individually, but rather has provided an environment where we are raised by parents and others, as it is with every species.

    We have arrived from below two billion people a hundred years ago at close to eight. Some would see it as a sign of great blessing. I guess you see it like that. Others, like myself, would see it as God allowing both good and evil go to extremes without interfering. Would God be obligated to interfere? If yes, can you tell when and how?

    vjtorley:
    The problem of evil is a genuine problem, as great Christian thinkers have acknowledged. Allow me to quote the words of Orthodox theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart…

    Allow me to refer to the first book of City of God, where Augustine addresses the question why evil happens, including to Christians. It’s because in this world normally the sun shines and rain rains on the good and evil beings alike. In this world it was never supposed to be any different. If you want any different, you want another world. Evil in this world is a normal feature with its own function, not a “genuine problem” that needs solving by emphasising the father analogy over the author analogy.

    Overall, you mischaracterise Feser’s position and you misunderstand the relevant theologico-philosophical issues just enough to take a break and try again some other time. Preferably against some other writer, if it has to be against somebody. You will be amazed at how different it will be.

  16. One might wonder why Torley is so obsessed with Edward Fesser.

    I am guessing it is because Fesser is a darling of the conservative right, especially at places like the National Review. Heck, he is a Catholic who supports the death penaly, isn’t that great for the Neo-Cons? So I suppose Torley really wants to adore Fesser, but like his struggles with his faith in his own beliefs, he is struggling with adoring Fesser. Why else does he worry so much about one man’s opinion about what God does?

    I would loathe myself if I cared so much about somone else’s opinion who has nothing to do with me. I laugh at the New Atheists and their attempt to control the pop media regarding science-but writing entire books about how silly I find ONE of their opinions-please. For your own good Torley, just find your own opinions. Ok, you think Fesser is an idiot. He is also almost entirely irrelevant.

  17. Erik and phoodoo,

    I shall combine my responses to you both, and leave matters here. If you wish to add anything on the subject, that is up to you.

    As you are both aware, a large number of Millennials today are skeptical that there is a God. It is generally acknowledged that the problem of evil is the biggest single reason for skepticism. In order for religious believers to win Millennials back to belief in God, it is therefore vital to address this problem head-on, in a way that doesn’t turn people off religion. Souls are at stake.

    Among Catholic and Orthodox Christians (who make up nearly two-thirds of the world’s Christians), the number of authors who are currently making a concerted attempt to reach out to atheists is relatively small. Feser, to give him his due, is one of the few Catholic philosophers who is actually doing that: he writes books on philosophy which are aimed the person in the street, rather than at his fellow academics. On top of that, he has a blog that contains highly topical articles on various subjects, and he writes clearly and engagingly. Ordinarily, that would be a cause for celebration.

    What worries me is that Feser spends much of his time attacking his fellow Christians, be they Catholic (John Finnis, Germain Grisez), Orthodox (David Bentley Hart, Richard Swinburne) or Protestant (William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga). This is a pity, because on some issues, at least, they address the issues in a more engaging manner than Feser. For instance, David Bentley Hart’s 2005 essay, “Tsunami and Theodicy,” on the problem of evil, was refreshingly honest and moving. And while I find William Lane Craig’s attempted solution to the problem of evil too much to swallow, he writes with genuine feeling, as someone who has suffered from physical ailments.

    I believe that Feser’s solution to the problem of evil strikes the wrong note, as well as being theologically harmful. Put simply: Feser’s solution maximizes God’s divine Otherness, minimizes God’s Fatherhood, and destroys human freedom. Human beings, he says, are obligated to prevent horrendous actions because they belong to a community; God has no such obligation because He is on the other side of the ontological fence, sustaining everything in existence. God, on Feser’s account, is no more obligated to come to our aid when we are in distress than an author is morally obligated to assist the characters in his novel when they are suffering: like the author, He stands outside the story. And although Feser goes on to say that in the end God will draw good out of all the evils we suffer in the hereafter, the “author” analogy he employs is a theologically harmful one, as well as being philosophically deficient on no less than seven grounds, as I argued above. God, unlike a human author, freely chooses to bestow his characters with the gift of existence (thereby making Him morally obligated towards them in at least some fashion). He is also our Father, Who loves us as His own children – a point Feser never mentions in his entire essay. As Christians, that’s how we are supposed to address God: as “Our Father.” Say what you like: fathers do have an obligation to their children. That comes with being a father. That being the case, it is a genuine puzzle as to why God allows us to suffer as He does, particularly when He is so powerful. (Why, for instance, does He allow torture victims to die in a state of spiritual desolation?) I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question. For my part, I try to thank God for what He has given me, and trust that He has reasons of His own, which I cannot comprehend, that prevent Him from intervening, on this side of eternity, in the vast majority of cases of suffering, much as He might wish to. That’s quite different from saying that the “problem of evil” is a non-problem that can be brushed aside by invoking the “author” analogy: if the analogy were a valid one, our grounds for hope in a hereafter would collapse too, as I argued in my essay above.

    I might add that I’ve spent a lot of time debating atheists on the problem of evil. Telling them that it’s a non-problem and that God owes us absolutely nothing will not go down well, I can assure you. It will backfire. Time and again I’ve had them ask me: if a father would rescue his children when they are in distress, why doesn’t God? For my part, I think it’s better to acknowledge the problem and admit that you don’t have a good answer, before going on to explain the reasons why you do believe in God, in spite of the evil in the world. Judaism, for instance, does not try to “solve” the problem of evil; it regards suffering as a mystery we cannot understand. In the meantime, we must do everything we can to relieve the suffering in our midst.

    Lastly, Feser’s “author” analogy is theologically harmful because it destroys human freedom. I’ve written more about this here, so I won’t repeat myself. When Feser writes that God “knows everything – including the present and the future – precisely by virtue of being its cause,” and that “it is perfectly coherent to say that God causes a world to exist in which someone freely chooses to commit a murder, or to carry out some other act. God’s causal action is no more inconsistent with our having free will than the author’s action is inconsistent with his characters’ having free will” (Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Ignatius Press, 2017, pp. 214-215), he is turning God into the author of murder and attempting at the same time to justify God’s punishing us in Hell for acts that we couldn’t have refrained from doing, given God’s authorial decree that we would do them. On Feser’s account, it is necessarily true that if God chooses to create a world in which I commit murder, then I shall do so. But if I have no power to do otherwise, given God’s decree, then I have no freedom. (And that is why it makes no sense for Feser to describe such an act as “free,” as he vainly attempts to do in an article here.) On a practical level, there is very little to distinguish Feser’s position from Calvinism. That’s not just my opinion. Take a look at what The Catholic Encyclopedia says in its 1911 article on Predestination (by Mgr. Joseph Pohle, Ph.D., D.D.) on the Banezian view (upheld in the sixteenth century by Fr. Domingo Banez, O.P.) that God excludes certain souls from Heaven simply by not choosing to predestine them for Heaven, thereby damning or reprobating them negatively:

    He who has been reprobated negatively, may exhaust all his efforts to attain salvation: it avails him nothing. Moreover, in order to realize infallibly his decree, God is compelled to frustrate the eternal welfare of all excluded a priori from heaven, and to take care that they die in their sins. Is this the language in which Holy Writ speaks to us? No; there we meet an anxious, loving father, who wills not “that any should perish, but that all should return to penance” (2 Peter 3:9). Lessius rightly says that it would be indifferent to him whether he was numbered among those reprobated positively or negatively; for, in either case, his eternal damnation would be certain.

    The grim Banezian view of predestination which Feser upholds is an extreme minority one among Catholic theologians today; its last prominent defender was Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964), whose work is highly praised by Feser. Ordinarily, one might simply ignore anyone propounding such an extreme view. But Feser is not just anyone; he is an influential philosopher, and his word carries weight. He is probably the most widely published (and widely read) Catholic philosopher in America today, and National Review has called him “one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy.” With great power comes great responsibility. A philosopher advocating such an extreme and marginal view as Banezianism has a duty to point out to his readers that the position he is putting forward on Divine causality and human freedom is not the only or even the dominant view on the subject among Catholic theologians, and to uphold such a view tentatively, if at all. It is regrettable that Feser does not do this.

    Lest anyone be inclined to doubt the harm that such views can do to impressionable young minds, let me cite my own experience. I first came across Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s two-volume work, God, His Existence and Nature, as a young man, in my early twenties. The first volume, which defended Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God, made a very favorable impression on me, although I found the author’s attempted proof of the Principle of Sufficient Reason somewhat less than convincing. But the second volume, in which Garrigou-Lagrange defended the Banezian view of predestination, undid all the good work accomplished by the first. More than anything else that I read in my twenties, that book was responsible for my decision to abandon Christianity at the age of 28. I did not return for another 15 years. Make no mistake: bad theology can harm souls. And it will harm Millennials, if they get a whiff of it.

    I shall say no more, except that I respect Feser greatly as a thinker, even when I disagree with him. And whatever his faults may be, he is probably a better human being than I.

  18. vjtorley: He is probably the most widely published (and widely read) Catholic philosopher in America today, and National Review has called him “one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy.” With great power comes great responsibility.

    This is blatantly ridiculous. Feser is not even a blip on a remote radar in Antarctica. His wikipedia page is barely two paragraphs, just listing his books. His lectures on youtube get, 8, maybe 10,000 views. In contrast, just about anyone posting a youtube video with the word karen on it will get 100,000 views. A video with cats will get 1000 times more views than he gets. A video of someone chugging beers will get thousands of times more views. The ONLY people who pay any attention to him are a couple of right wing nutbags, that read the National Review and watch Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder. In a poll of 1 million people in the US under 30 years old, maybe 2 would have ever even heard of him. But I doubt it would be 2.

    I would suggest anyone greatly worrying about the topic of evil has not spent more then ten serious minutes thinking or reading about it. If you have, and are still confused by why bad things are a necessary part of choice, then you are not a person who was ever going to take the idea of faith very seriously. As I have said to you before, if you accept choices, what possible world can you envision with nothing bad happening? You have never attempted to answer this, because there is no world that has choices, and every choice is good-that is a world without choice.

    As Rumraket’s silly attempt to define that world shows, he would allow some child rapes, but just less…Notice he never said he would rule out the possibility of any such bad things happening, but then he knows he is in a trap. A world where nothing bad can happen requires absolutely no effort of any kind. It doesn’t require you to wake up. It doesn’t require you to have relationships. It doesn’t require you to care about anything, because not caring about anything would be just as satisfying as caring- no difference.

    So if you can’t articulate that world, how can one ask why that world doesn’t exist?

  19. vjtorley: But Feser is not just anyone; he is an influential philosopher, and his word carries weight. He is probably the most widely published (and widely read) Catholic philosopher in America today…

    You are greatly overestimating him. And you are overestimating yourself even more. If Feser is someone of some caliber, he needs a response from someone of similar caliber, not from you. With your caliber, you cannot critique Feser. Every issue you pick up is vastly over your head.

    If your overall aim is to save Catholicism, the most widely visible and urgent problem is the Pope. Give it a try.

  20. But even if we grant that God’s infinite, simple and unchanging mind is radically unlike our very limited, ever-changing and complex human minds, it is not at all clear why this difference would lessen (let alone obviate) God’s obligation to assist people who are in severe distress. Indeed, one might argue that it increases the obligation, because God’s knowledge of human affairs is perfect, timeless, universal and infallibly correct, which means that he is not subject to any of the uncertainties that we are prone to as rational agents, when we are deciding whether we should offer assistance

    I think of lines like this, and wonder what you mean. What would assistance be? If someone is unhappy would a great God offer assistance, and make them happy, or would a great God only offer assistance to someone in a car crash? What would he do in the incidence of helping someone in a car crash-would he prevent that crash altogether? Or would he made the crash softer, but still let them crash? Would he allow any bumps and bruises, but not broken fingers, or ankles? And even if he helped in that case, what about the guy who twists his knee and can’t go on the Vegas weekend with his buddies-would God intervene here? Because, you know, the guy who can’t go might be really unhappy about this. And what if the guy isn’t a Christian, would God then have no obligation? Should Christians have fool-proof lives, whilst non-Christians could never expect any help at all. Would Christians ever get fired? Would non-Christians lose at casinos, but Christians could never lose their fortunes there? Would Christians have yachts, while non-Christians lived in shanties? Could Christians commit sins? Could Christian have affairs if their spouses were also Christian? A great God would prevent this so no one gets hurt? How would he prevent it, by taking away the choice of an affair, or simply by taking away any temptations so the person never wanted an affair? But non-Christians would be tempted?

    Please, think longer about this. It makes no sense at all.

  21. vjtortley, I wonder if you really understand what atheism is. Hint: it is NOT a rejection of your god. Atheists see nothing to reject. I’ll try to give you more hints.

    vjtorley:

    As you are both aware, a large number of Millennials today are skeptical that there is a God.

    Oh, atheists are well aware that people around the world believe in many different gods, and every believer is dead certain that HIS god(s) are the only “real” ones, and every other believer is misinformed, misguided, ignorant, or just stupid. And, of course, must be “brought into the faith”. In the US, it seems most true believers in their One True God also believe the 2020 election was stolen. This is what happens because faith denies facts. This denial is the primary, if not sole, purpose of religious faith.

    It is generally acknowledged that the problem of evil is the biggest single reason for skepticism.

    Uh, no. Lack of relevant evidence, and lack of any ability whatsoever to produce any is the biggest reason for skepticism. ALL gods are imaginary.

    In order for religious believers to win

    The word you’re looking for here is “con”, not “win”. Atheists, whatever else they might have in common, recognize this and understand it.

    Millennials back to belief in God, it is therefore vital to address this problem head-on, in a way that doesn’t turn people off religion. Souls are at stake.

    Like all those gods, “souls” are another figment of your imagination. This is a slimy word used by the con artists to grab people by their delusions and shake money out of them. People have personalities, memories, preferences. These often change as we age, and vanish with every other process when we die. I’m sometimes discouraged at the number of people who happily buy into big lies, who think that repeating bullshit endlessly somehow makes it come true.

    Atheists look at you like you might look at a Borneo tribe witch doctor – an aberration that’s an outgrowth of a primitive and stunted culture. But the witch doctor’s faith is as impenetrable as yours, and for the same reason. Like you, he knows he’s right. But this is conviction, not knowledge.

  22. Flint: Uh, no. Lack of relevant evidence, and lack of any ability whatsoever to produce any is the biggest reason for skepticism. ALL gods are imaginary.

    What’s the evidence for that?

  23. phoodoo: What’s the evidence for that?

    The evidence for lack of evidence, is lack of evidence. But imagine the number of things that don’t exist, for which there is no evidence.

    As Isaac Asimov wrote, the most important words in science are not “Eureka, I’ve found it!” but rather “hmmm, that’s funny…” Which is to say, some evidence for something showing up unexpectedly. I’m sure there are plenty of things in the universe which actually exist but for which we have yet to find evidence. The default position is, unless and until some evidence exists, it’s fruitless to search at random for unknown unknowns.

    Conversely, people have been positing gods for millennia, and then trying to rationalize or reify them into being, so far with NO success. The essence of faith is to assert (the more forcefully the better) to dispel doubt, when evidence doesn’t exist and nobody knows any test that might produce it. Indeed, in some religions the very notion of devising a test is rejected.

  24. If God is an author, how would that have been expressed in the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic languages?

  25. Hi phoodoo,

    As I have said to you before, if you accept choices, what possible world can you envision with nothing bad happening? You have never attempted to answer this, because there is no world that has choices, and every choice is good-that is a world without choice…

    So if you can’t articulate that world, how can one ask why that world doesn’t exist?

    As a matter of fact, I can articulate several worlds with non-arbitrary cutoff points for evil, each of which is much better than our own.

    1. A world with the same amount of physical and moral evil as ours, but with one key difference: nobody is ever spiritually broken. That is, anyone in extreme distress who calls on the name of God is provided with the spiritual consolation of His presence, so that although they suffer grievously, they never feel wholly abandoned by Him and are never tempted to despair.

    2. A world in which guardian angels intervene to protect the group of people they’ve been assigned by God to look after, so that the group a a whole never dies out – in other words, genocide is prevented. (See my essay.)

    3. A world in which guardian angels intervene to protect the individual they’ve been assigned by God to look after, so that that individual never suffers horrendous evils, such as rape and torture. (Again, see my essay.)

    4. A world in which each individual is bestowed with special graces that prevent them from ever sinning, so that although they are free to choose between two different goods, they are not free to choose between good and evil, as their wills are confirmed in goodness. (For instance, the Catholic Catechism para. 411, teaches that Jesus’ mother, Mary, was “preserved from all stain of original sin and by a special grace of God committed no sin of any kind during her whole earthly life.” In the following paragraph, it goes on to ask why God didn’t make us all like that, before quoting Aquinas’ “greater good” theodicy as a justification for allowing sin. Be that as it may, the fact remains that God could have made a world in which nobody sinned. And if Feser finds that boring, I don’t.)

  26. Hi phoodoo,

    Feser is not even a blip on a remote radar in Antarctica. His wikipedia page is barely two paragraphs, just listing his books. His lectures on youtube get, 8, maybe 10,000 views. In contrast, just about anyone posting a youtube video with the word karen on it will get 100,000 views. A video with cats will get 1000 times more views than he gets. A video of someone chugging beers will get thousands of times more views. The ONLY people who pay any attention to him are a couple of right wing nutbags, that read the National Review and watch Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder.

    I described Feser as probably the most widely published (and widely read) Catholic philosopher in America today, and pointed out that National Review has called him “one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy.”

    Rather than count blog readers (which excludes people who’ve read his books but not his blog), I decided on a fairer measure. I typed in the names of several prominent Christian philosophers in quotes and counted the number of Google hits I got.

    “William Lane Craig” 519,000 (Protestant)
    “Alasdair MacIntyre” 507,000 (Catholic)
    “John Lennox” 326,000 (Protestant)
    “Alvin Plantinga” 317,000 (Protestant)
    “John Finnis” 278,000 (Catholic; also a legal scholar)
    “Richard Swinburne” 199,000 (Orthodox)
    “Robert P. George” 181,000 (Catholic; also a legal scholar)
    “David Bentley Hart” 141,000 (Orthodox)
    “Edward Feser” 126,000 (Catholic)
    “David Oderberg” 9,270 (Catholic; greatly esteemed metaphysician)

    So as contemporary Christian philosophers go, Feser is quite famous, and as contemporary Catholic philosophers go, he’s very famous. (By the way, I didn’t include N.T. Wright in the list above, because he’s principally renowned for being an Anglican bishop and a Scripture scholar. Likewise, Catholic Bishop Robert Barron has made lots of videos for his highly acclaimed “Word on Fire” website, but he is not a philosopher as such.)

    You described National Review as a magazine for “right wing nutbags.” I’m not a regular reader, but I note for the record that ThoughtCo.com, in its article, The Top 10 Conservative Magazines (updated October 22, 2019), lists it as No. 1, describing it as follows:

    National Review and NRO are widely read and influential publications for Republican/conservative news, commentary, and opinion.

    Both the magazine and the website are the important resources for Republicans and conservatives who shape opinion on the important issues and reach affluent, educated, and highly responsive audiences.

    You need to get around more. I make a point of reading both right- and left-wing news sources daily. Why don’t you?

  27. Erik,

    If Feser is someone of some caliber, he needs a response from someone of similar caliber, not from you. With your caliber, you cannot critique Feser. Every issue you pick up is vastly over your head.

    Listen, I don’t know who you are, but I happen to have several degrees (B.Sc., B.A., B.Ec., M.A., Ph.D., Grad. Dip. Ed.) and I wasn’t exactly born yesterday (I’m 60). My Ph.D. is in philosophy. If Feser considered me ineligible to criticize him, he would never bother replying. By the way, what’s your philosophical background? And what’s your religious background? Don’t get huffy. Lay your cards on the table.

  28. Flint,

    Like all those gods, “souls” are another figment of your imagination. This is a slimy word used by the con artists to grab people by their delusions and shake money out of them. People have personalities, memories, preferences. These often change as we age, and vanish with every other process when we die. I’m sometimes discouraged at the number of people who happily buy into big lies, who think that repeating bullshit endlessly somehow makes it come true.

    I suggest you have a look at the following articles by Catholic philosopher David Oderberg:

    Concepts, Dualism, and the Human Intellect
    Hylemorphic Dualism

    The case for dualism is a strong one, even if you don’t find it compelling.

  29. vjtorley,

    Hold on, you mean the problem of evil is a problem in that some people don’t feel the consolation of God’s presence?

    Or that some “groups” die out?

    Or its a problem that people can choose to sin?

    These are the things that you struggle with understanding why God doesn’t do?

    So in some of your dream worlds murder, rape, stealing, blindness, those are fine with you, but you want people to know God is there, so don’t despair? Why they won’t despair knowing this I am not sure. You can be raped, and tortured, but you won’t mind it as much, because God will comfort you by telling you he is there.

    In another dream world, some members of a group can die out, as long as all of them don’t die out. So at least one is immortal. That world is much better than this one. Same rape and torture, but in every group at least one never dies.

    In another dream world, you can’t choose sin, you can only choose good things. I have no idea what that means, but remember I said if you accept a world where you have a choice. In this world, you have choices , but all are apparently good choices. So why choose at all? Won’t that also be a good choice? Or is that a sin choice, in which case, not choosing is not an option. If in your mind, this makes sense, congratulations.

    And finally, you have a world where angels won’t let anything bad happen to you, like rape and torture, but you can starve to death and have your heart broken, and kill yourself, but you can’t be raped. So people who chose rape can rape some people, but the ones who get the angels, they can’t be raped. I guess if they chose to rape the unrapeable, a glass curtain comes down around them or something.

    And you promise you have really thought about this?

  30. vjtorley: “Edward Feser” 126,000 (Catholic)

    Type in Dorothy Wilks, crochet expert and you get 631,000 hits.

    Put in Duff Goldman (you know him) and you get 2 million 450,000 hits.

    Jason Garfield gets you 17 million plus hits. I am sure you are very familiar with him, even if you aren’t in the juggling world.

  31. Elizabeth Falkner gets you half a million hits. I am thinking of starting a new post here, about how she totally misconstrues the proper use of confectionary powder.

    I will limit it to 620 paragraphs.

  32. phoodoo does not have a problem with rape in this world, as long as the right people are being raped.

  33. vjtorley: As you are both aware, a large number of Millennials today are skeptical that there is a God. It is generally acknowledged that the problem of evil is the biggest single reason for skepticism. In order for religious believers to win Millennials back to belief in God, it is therefore vital to address this problem head-on, in a way that doesn’t turn people off religion. Souls are at stake.

    I didn’t realize we were having a contest. How many souls do we need to win?

  34. phoodoo,

    1. Re Google hits: I’m quite sure Feser isn’t as popular as Jason Garfield, but I thought we were comparing like with like. Garfield is a juggler; Feser is a philosopher. That’s why I selected other Christian philosophers for my comparison.

    2. (a) If (as many Christian philosophers concede) it’s possible for God to make a human individual who is confirmed in grace, so that he/she is free to choose between good X and good Y (e.g. becoming a scientist or becoming an artist, in Leonardo da Vinci’s case) but not free to sin, then it’s a reasonable question to ask why God didn’t make everyone that way. Of course, I think the question can be answered (e.g. God could have made a world in which everyone was like that, but He couldn’t have made me that way, because any individual who couldn’t sin wouldn’t be me), but it’s still a valid question.

    (b) I focused on rape and torture because these are soul-destroying evils which are in no way good for us, and because they often cause irreparable harm to the human psyche. A broken heart is not such a clear-cut case, as people usually get over it, in time, and the sense of spiritual desolation and loss of hope is not the same. I think it’s also possible that a broken heart might be spiritually good for you, but I don’t think anyone would say that for rape and torture: these are soul-breaking experiences, not soul-making experiences. By contrast, you can spiritually benefit from blindness (think of Helen Keller, a blind and deaf woman who changed the world) and having your belongings stolen (think of a rich man who loses everything in a robbery but gains a sense of compassion for the poor). I didn’t include cases of death (such as starvation) because while dying might be spiritually good for you (think of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly), rape and torture cannot be. These are unremittingly bad experiences.

    (c) In the wake of the Armenian genocide, the Nazi holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, the question of why God allows genocide is a particularly pressing one. If God could make a world that was free from this particular ill, it would be no small achievement.

    And yes, I promise you I have really thought about this.

  35. vjtorley: That’s why I selected other Christian philosophers for my comparison.

    Well then try this, type in “Christian philosophers” into google. Guess what, his name doesn’t even appear. It doesn’t even come up on a Wikipedia serach of Christian philosophers.

    And this is why I looked up crocheting experts. Imagine if I picked the 50th most popular crocheting expert. And then starting writing reams and reams of blogs posts (which you do about Feser) about the ideas of the 50th most quoted crocheting experts thoughts on things which they can’t possibly know about! Such as, does God like crocheting. Or does God think it is Ok to kill people who crochet in the gas chamber. Because this is what Edward Feser does. He writes about what God thinks, as if he has any more idea about this then a pastry chef or a crocheting expert.

    And then you say, Oh, but the National Review likes him. One of the most far right so called news sites on the planet. Holy Shit VJ. Do you read Qanon everyday too, just so you can see all sides? What leftist news sites do you read “every day”?

    I am fairly sure if I put my own name in google I would get more hits that Edward Feser. Half of the hits for Feser are because you keep writing about him, and so it refers you to more reviews you have written about him, as if this man is actually a spokesman for God.

    But here’s the important thing. You just wrote about all these possible worlds in which people could still suffer but at least know God, or people could suffer, but if they were Christian they couldn’t be raped and tortured (somehow, you didn’t say how that’s possible without removing the concept of “choice” from the world-the world is now limited choice? Less choice for Christians than non-Christians?). but they could still be suicidally depressed, and they can still kill their children, because THAT is a world without evil, according to you. Or perhaps it would be possible to murder and torture people, but not if they were part of some large group. In that case a just God would prevent the whole lot from being murdered, but some still could be as long as there were enough left to keep going. The one left would then get a God shield, as they can’t be harmed, according to this new rule of choice.

    Which gets us back to the point that if Feser says he knows God likes the death penalty, then I know that God doesn’t like Feser. And on this subject my word (or ANYBODYS word) carries as much weight as Fesers.

  36. But, BUT, here’s the real doozy! You said a just world would be one in which people couldn’t choose to do bad things. And you have thought about this. And you claim that some philosophers have said its possible, in a world of choice, to only have good choices not bad ones.

    And I already explained how in a world with only good choices, its the same as no choice at all. Because in the world of good choices (which nullifies the concept of free choice that is art of the bargain-but still) I don’t have to choose to feed my kids, because I just choose not to, but that would be good. Or do you mean, I HAVE to choose to feed my kids, because the option of NOT feeding my kids is taken away-in which case how is that a choice?

    And I also can’t choose to have an affair, because that option must not be a good one, so that is taken away. Can I choose to bring flowers home to my wife or not? because NOT bringing home flowers to my wife would be a bad choice, so I can only choose to bring home flowers. Can I choose to yell at my wife, because that seems bad, so I can only choose to not yell. Can I choose to get in a fight in a bar? I guess not, because there are no bars, because that choice is taken away in your so called free choice world, so I guess I have to go to church instead, because that must be good, and even though I would prefer to watch the football game instead of going to church, I can’t do that, because going to church is good, compared to watching football. In fact, in football, people hit each other hard, so that is not good, so there is no football anyway. In fact, there are no sports to watch at all, because losing is bad, and there can only be good, so sorry…its a sin to want to beat someone if you know they will feel bad about losing. Or maybe if you lose you will feel good, so its no longer a sin, so there would be sports, but the object is to lose not win, because losing now feels good.

    “Son, go out there and do you best, make sure you lose, make dad proud. ” “Of course I will Dad, because not making you proud is not a choice!”

    This world is fucked up. Sorry, I am not allowed to say that in the just world. This world is Great! (I don’t mean it, but…..). Damn you Jerry Falwell Jr! No more photos with hookers on Yachts, ok? Everyone gets a yacht!!!

  37. “Honey, does this dress look good on me?”

    “I am not allowed to answer that in this world. Lying is a sin, so ….what’s for dinner? Great, meat loaf again, I love meatloaf!”

  38. vjtorley: Listen, I don’t know who you are, but I happen to have several degrees (B.Sc., B.A., B.Ec., M.A., Ph.D., Grad. Dip. Ed.) and I wasn’t exactly born yesterday (I’m 60). My Ph.D. is in philosophy.

    This makes your posts all the more sadder.

    vjtorley: If Feser considered me ineligible to criticize him, he would never bother replying.

    Haven’t you noticed that he stopped replying once he got to know you? (By the way, Feser has bothered to reply to me too in his blog’s comments section. Great that he could, but it does not mean much.)

    vjtorley: By the way, what’s your philosophical background? And what’s your religious background? Don’t get huffy. Lay your cards on the table.

    In terms of degrees, I do not have any cards. (My academic accomplishments are short of PhD. After some Google-snooping, it appears though that I am doing better career-wise than you, but my career is totally off topic here.) Never joined any church, but I take religion seriously and have read (e.g. the Bible from cover to cover multiple times) and grok enough to spot inadequate theologising and philosophising.

    On the internet, I am just a random commentator and you are a random poster. A real philosopher (in terms of career rather than degrees) publishes in actual publications, not on a blog site that is not even his own. In this department, Feser outclasses you, but you still overestimate his influence. The more serious issue is that you overestimate yourself much more than that.

    As to your current post, I sincerely suggest you try to cover the topic again (if it’s so dear to your heart) with these modifications:
    – Take into account that the author analogy is basically the same as the potter analogy, i.e. in best case take issue with the potter analogy instead
    – Do not mention Feser

    Good luck!

  39. phoodoo: And I already explained how in a world with only good choices, its the same as no choice at all. Because in the world of good choices (which nullifies the concept of free choice that is art of the bargain-but still) I don’t have to choose to feed my kids, because I just choose not to, but that would be good. Or do you mean, I HAVE to choose to feed my kids, because the option of NOT feeding my kids is taken away-in which case how is that a choice?

    Sincere question: Is a world without free will choices a worse one than a world without rape, torture and other flavours of suffering? I guess, since you justify the latter with the former your answer is yes.

    No wrong answer possible. Just curious.

  40. Corneel,
    I think phoodoo adopts the role of critic rather than author. He is scathing about the flaws in others’ philosophies but reluctant to present any alternative of his own.

  41. Alan Fox: I think phoodoo adopts the role of critic rather than author. He is scathing about the flaws in others’ philosophies but reluctant to present any alternative of his own.

    Let’s not close any doors in a thread that strongly emphasizes free will, shall we 😉

  42. phoodoo: I am fairly sure if I put my own name in google I would get more hits that Edward Feser.

    Why not just try it then? It’s amazing the things that people like phoodoo are sure about but are unwilling to test.

    But it’s all part of his routine. He claims to be the best in the world at his particular job, but won’t say what that job is. He claims to have inside information on the FBI but cannot say how or why or indeed anything about it.

    I’m fairly sure phoodoo is making it all up.

  43. phoodoo: I am fairly sure if I put my own name in google I would get more hits that Edward Feser.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Feser
    That’s his wiki page.

    We can compare his achievements to yours.

    What is your Ph. D. in?
    How many books have you published?
    Where can I read your thesis?

    As much as I’m sure we’d (Edward and I) disagree on almost everything I can respect someone who has put effort into promulgating their viewpoint.

    Whereas you, well all we have to go on is your word that you are more influential then Feser. And you know what your word is worth in these parts already, I’m quite sure.

  44. Alan Fox:
    Corneel,
    I think phoodoo adopts the role of critic rather than author. He is scathing about the flaws in others’ philosophies but reluctant to present any alternative of his own.

    I laid out many paragraphs discussing why the problem of evil is a false problem.

    This sounds more like your “I don’t believe many atheists don’t believe in free will, proof, it” And then after give you a list of 30 you say, “And…”

    Are you intentionally dense?

    Live and let live man….

  45. Corneel: Sincere question: Is a world without free will choices a worse one than a world without rape, torture and other flavours of suffering? I guess, since you justify the latter with the former your answer is yes.

    There is another universe like the one you are describing. There are no individuals in that universe, because in a world with no choice, where nothing bad can happen to you, and there are no consequences for anything, God, in his infinite wisdom realized that one person in that world was the same as 100 trillion persons, because in every case the person had to do nothing. So he decided if one was enough, zero was also enough. Same thing.

    God is smart like that-he already knew.

  46. phoodoo: There are no individuals in that universe, because in a world with no choice, where nothing bad can happen to you, and there are no consequences for anything, God, in his infinite wisdom realized that one person in that world was the same as 100 trillion persons, because in every case the person had to do nothing.

    Without choices no personality, right?

  47. Corneel: Without choices no personality, right?

    About the same personality as bacteria I would say.

    Without choices, you won’t do anything. So maybe less personality than a bacterium.

  48. phoodoo: This sounds more like your “I don’t believe many atheists don’t believe in free will, proof, it” And then after give you a list of 30 you say, “And…”

    Because that’s not what you provided. Hossenfelder made some assertions about determinism that she claims means there isn’t such a thing. I doubt she believes it. She doesn’t act on it. And nobody has come up with a sensible definition that might be testable. Constrained choice exists and it’s just an intellectual conceit to pretend otherwise.

  49. Alan Fox: Because that’s not what you provided.

    Oh, right, right. I only provided you with reams of quotes from famous atheists who say they don’t believe in free will. But that’s not what I provided in your delusion fueled world.

    Maybe I can write to them and ask if they can tattoo it on your forehead.

    In the meantime, go see, a doctor…or a shrink.

    Live and let live….

  50. phoodoo: I only provided you with reams of quotes from famous atheists who say they don’t believe in free will. But that’s not what I provided in your delusion fueled world.

    Who is deluded is undecidable. That is my view. Do you have one worth sharing?

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