Providence, Evil and the Openness of God

William Hasker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781136891038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Providence, Evil and the Openness of God is a timely exploration of the philosophical implications of the rapidly-growing theological movement known as open theism, or the 'openness of God'. William Hasker, one of the philosophers prominently associated with this movement, presents the strengths of this position in comparison with its main competitors: Calvinism, process theism, and the theory of divine middle knowledge, or Molinism.
The author develops alternative approaches to the problem of evil and to the problem of divine action in the world. In particular, he argues that believers should not maintain the view that each and every evil that occurs is permitted by God as a means to a 'greater good'. He contends that open theism makes possible an emphasis on the personalism of divine-human interaction in a way that traditional views, with their heavy emphasis on divine control, cannot easily match. The book concludes with a section of replies to critics, in which many of the objections levelled against open theism are addressed.

Part 1

Evil, theodicy and defense

1 On regretting the evils of this world

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

(Bertrand Russell)

Tell them that I’ve had a wonderful life.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

After everything was said about how unhappy her childhood had been – her father’s casual death, her mother’s craziness, her sullen older brother, the succession of boarding schools – there remained her sense that she would, now, be less of a person if it had happened any other way. She would be somebody else, somebody she had no desire to be.

(John Updike, Marry Me)

I wish to address what is sometimes termed the “existential” form of the problem of evil – the form in which theism is questioned and/or rejected on the basis of moral protest, indignation and outrage at the evils of this world. In the first section of this chapter I shall ask the reader to participate in a meditative, highly personal sort of reflection, in the hope of eliciting therefrom a certain existential premise which is crucial to the argument. In the second section I present and discuss a thesis concerning personal identity, with the aim of establishing a connection between one’s own existence and the world’s past history. In the third section I introduce certain principles of what might be termed the “logic of regret” – or, more generally, the logic of preference – and connect these with the results of the second section. The final section draws all of these threads together and shows their significance for the problem of evil.

I

The questions we shall be asking in this section are questions each person can only answer for himself. It is necessary, then, for you to meditate on your own life, and the meaning that it has for you; my own reflections will be set down here mainly as an aid to this. I ask myself, then, the following question: Am I glad that I exist? The question is not whether my life is all that it ought to be or all that it conceivably could be. It is not whether the pleasure-pain balance in my life to date has been, on the whole, favorable or unfavorable. It is not whether my life is, in general, a benefit to those who are affected by it. It is not even the question whether my life, all things considered, contains more good than evil. All of these questions are deeply interesting, and the answers to them, if known, might affect my answer to the question which I am asking. But the question is simply, am I glad that I am alive? Or is my existence, on the whole, something which I regret? Is my life something which I affirm, or do I wish, like Job, that I had never been? And what, I go on to ask, of my loved ones, of my wife and sons, and of others whom I know well enough that the question makes sense: Am I glad of their existence? If I could rewrite the script for the tale that we are living, would I leave their parts out?

It is my hope that as you reflect on these matters you will be able to say, as I must say, that I am glad for my existence. It is not that my life has been good without qualification and in every respect. It has had its share of pain – whether more or less than other lives, I cannot say. It has had times of deep anxiety, when the worth of living at all has come into question. Yet I can say, I must say, that it is good to live, that I am glad for my existence and would not wish to replace it with non-existence, either retrospectively or for the future. And when I think of certain “significant others,” then I must emphatically say that I am glad that they exist, that I would not choose to rewrite the script without their parts, that their existence is something which I can and must affirm even as I affirm my own.

It is my hope that you are able to follow me in this, that you are able to be glad for your own existence, and the existence of those whom you love, even as I am glad for my existence and for the lives of those whom I love. If this is so, then you have available to you a premise which you can use in the ensuing argument. For the argument to be developed is “person-relative,” in the sense that each person who uses it to enlighten himself must make use of a different premise, one which applies only to himself and which can be affirmed only by himself. Assuming that you are able to affirm such a premise, let us see what can be derived from it.

II

In this section I shall suggest a partial answer to the question: What is necessary in order that you and I should exist as the individual human beings which we are? I shall not be concerned with those things, such as food, air and water, which are necessary for the existence of any human being whatsoever, but only with what is necessary for one’s own existence as distinct from the existence of some other person who might live in the same house, do the same job and so on. In other words, I shall be proposing a thesis concerning personal identity. The thesis is not uncontroversial or universally acceptable, but I think its appeal is wide enough to make it worth pursuing. The thesis is that a human being is initially individuated by his body, so that, had that body not been conceived and born, that particular human being would never have existed. Or in other words:

(A) A necessary condition of my coming-into existence is the coming-into-existence of my body.

This isn’t acceptable to everyone, of course, but it is entailed by the most widely held views on the mind-body problem. It evidently must be accepted by materialists, identity theorists, etc., for whom the person is his body, as well as by epiphenomenalists and behaviorists for whom the mind results (in different ways, of course) from certain aspects of the functioning of the biological organism. More interestingly, however, the thesis must be accepted by some philosophers who hold more or less dualistic views. Thomists, for instance, hold that the soul, as a form, is individuated by the matter which it informs; the soul is created as the soul of this particular body. In order to dissent from the thesis, one must hold that the soul has an identity of its own which is at least logically prior, if not also temporally prior, to its embodiment.¹ To Cartesian dualists and others (if any) who hold such views, we now bid farewell, in order to explore the implications of the thesis we have proposed.

The chief advantage of this thesis is that it entitles us to include among the necessary conditions of my existence whatever is necessary for my body’s existence. But what is necessary for this? To begin with, it is necessary that the individuals who are, in fact, my parents should have had a child. Had my mother married someone else, none of their children could have been me; none of their bodies could have been this body. But clearly, not just any child of my parents would have been me. I believe it would be widely accepted that personal identity requires an identical genetic heritage – that a child born to my parents at the same time that I was, in fact, born but with a significantly different genetic endowment would have been a different individual. But even genetic identity is not sufficient: identical twins are not identical persons, nor is either identical with the individual who would have existed had twinning not occurred. Thinking along these lines, it seems clear that for my existence it is at least necessary that a particular pair of male and female reproductive cells should have joined to form a viable individual.²

It should already be clear that the coming into existence of any particular human individual is, antecedently, an extremely improbable event, one which is contingent upon a multitude of other highly improbable events.³ Not to put too fine a point on it, let us consider some of the contingencies involved, in some cases at least, in the fact that one’s parents happened to meet one another. My own father and mother came from widely separated parts of the country and met as a result of a complex series of events, some of which affected many other individuals as well. Not least among these was the First World War, which sent my father to France and brought my mother to Washington to work in the expanded Federal government, leading in each case to life-changing experiences. Quite simply: had there been no war, I should not be here. But this is not all, for behind my parents there stands the whole series of their progenitors, persons whose own coming-into-being must have been influenced in similar or even more striking ways by major and minor events of their own times. The conclusion to which we are led, and which is not at all too strong for the argument on which it rests, may be formulated thus:

(B) Had major or significant events in the world’s past history been different than they were, then in all probability neither I nor the persons whom I love would ever have existed.

III

By this time you may foresee the direction of my argument and the use that I intend to make of the points established in the first two sections. But in order to link those points together we need to establish some principles governing the logical relationships between certain attitudes – attitudes which are expressed by the phrases “being glad that…” and “being sorry that…” Attitudes such as these cannot be true or false, as beliefs are, yet it is my contention that they share with beliefs, moral judgments and imperatives the property of being rationally consistent or inconsistent.⁴ In order to see this, it is important to notice that “being glad that…” is not just a matter of having certain feelings of joy and gladness. Normally, indeed, being glad does involve feelings, but this is not true without exception. I am glad that the rate of unemployment declined by one tenth of a percent last month. But it would take a much bigger shift – or one sustained over several months’ time – to trigger any noticeable feeling of gladness. What is the case, however, is that I prefer the rate’s having declined to its having remained constant or climbed even higher. And this, I suggest, is true in general: my being glad that P entails my preferring that P be the case rather than not-P.⁵ Conversely, if I am sorry, or regret that P, this means that I would prefer that not-P be the case rather than P.⁶ And it is in virtue of these preferences that the attitudes in question are, as I claimed above, rationally consistent or inconsistent.

But this is not sufficiently explicit. Suppose I am glad that Indiana won the NCAA basketball championship, defeating North Carolina in the final game. What is preferred to what? Is it not that I would prefer Indiana’s having won under all conceivable circumstances – for instance, if I had placed a large bet on North Carolina. What is the case is that I prefer the actual situation, in which Indiana won, to the state of affairs which would have obtained had Indiana failed to win⁷ – presumably, a state of affairs in which Indiana is defeated by North Carolina in the final round. And on the other hand, my regretting Indiana’s victory would entail my preferring that other state of affairs, in which North Carolina wins, to the one which actually obtains.

What logical principles apply to these attitudes? To begin with, we surely can say that:

(C) If I am glad that P, I rationally cannot be sorry that P.

One may, indeed feel both gladness and sorrow about something; many events in life have such a “bitter-sweet” quality about them. But “being glad” in the sense which is of interest here involves preference, and clearly it cannot be true both that one prefers that P be the case and that one would prefer that it not be the case.

Another principle which may suggest itself is:

(D) If I am glad that P, and P entails Q, then I rationally must be glad that Q.

But there are objections to this. For one thing, I may be quite unaware that P entails Q and if so I can hardly be expected to extend my gladness that P to include Q. This is easily remedied by adding to the antecedent of (D) a clause specifying that I am aware of the entailment. But even with this addition, (D) would still be false. The reason for this may be elicited by a further consideration of the basketball example. Clearly, Indiana’s winning the NCAA basketball championship entails the existence of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its national championship. But one might take the view that the NCAA’s existence is on the whole a bad thing – that the very existence of such an organization with its national championships, television contracts, etc., inevitably fosters over-emphasis on athletics, commercialism and the corruption of which we have recently been hearing so much. An Indiana fan who took this view might very well regret the NCAA’s existence, even though Indiana’s victory could not have occurred if there were no association. Yet it is still true that he is glad that Indiana won. For the alternative to Indiana’s winning (the state of affairs which would have obtained had Indiana not won) would not include the (supposedly beneficent) disappearance of the NCAA; it would, no doubt, be simply a state of affairs in which Indiana was defeated in the final round of the tournament.

The fan we have just described is in no way irrational or inconsistent, and he does constitute a counter-example to (D). But his gladness about Indiana’s victory is qualitatively different from that of the typical fan who is less concerned about the undesirable aspects of national associations and their tournaments. The first fan is glad about Indiana’s victory under the circumstances – circumstances which include the undesirable but inevitable fact that there is a tournament and it will be won by some other team if not by Indiana. We may also say, in the interests of brevity, that he is circumstantially glad that Indiana won, where:

‘A is circumstantially glad that P’ = df ‘A is glad that P, and there is some state-of-affairs Q such that A knows that if Q did not obtain neither would P, and A regrets that Q’.

The other fan, we may suppose, is glad on the whole that Indiana won. He may, indeed, recognize that the national association and its championship tournament involve some undesirable consequences, but he definitely prefers Indiana’s victory under these less-than-ideal circumstances to the alternative of no association, no tournament, and no championship for Indiana. More formally:

‘A is glad on th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Evil, theodicy and defense
• Part 2 Theories of providence
• Appendix: Replies to my critics
• Selected bibliography
• Index