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Horrific Suffering, Divine Hiddenness, and Hell: the Place of Freedom in a World Governed by God Keith Derose

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Horrific Suffering, Divine Hiddenness, and Hell: the Place of Freedom in a World Governed by God Keith Derose partial draft of 16 September 2020 Horrific Suffering, Divine Hiddenness, and Hell: The Place of Freedom in a World Governed by God Keith DeRose Contents Part One: A Powerful Problem ............................................................................................. 1 1. A Brief Look at Where We’re Going: The Problem of Horrific Suffering, Two Other Forms of the Problem of Evil, and the Place of Human Free Will in a World Governed by a Wholly Good God 1 2. The Problem of Horrific Evils .................................................................................................. 2 3. What’s the Problem Here, Anyway?: Just Look at the Horrific Evils of Our World! ............... 8 4. OK, So What’s the Argument, Then?: The “Simple” Argument from Horrific Evils............... 13 5. OK, But What’s the Case for That Premise, Then? ............................................................... 17 6. But What’s the Case for That Premise, Then?: Rowe’s Appeal and the “Good Cop, Bad Cop” Routine ....................................................................................................................................... 19 7. “Making the Case” for the Premise of the Simple Argument from Horrific Evils ................. 21 8. A Very Powerful Appearance, A Very Powerful Argument ................................................... 25 9. Wykstra’s Challenge: CORNEA and Suspect Appearances ................................................... 32 10. The Importance of the Basis of an Appearance ................................................................... 36 11. What Our Atheologian Is Relying on and How They Pass CORNEA: An Appearance Reasonably Relied Upon ............................................................................................................. 38 12. “But We’re All Newbies Here!”: Sensible Skeptical Theism vs. the More Aggressive Varieties of It 41 13. Plantinga and “Probabilistic” vs. “Deductive” Arguments from Evil .................................... 44 14. Plantinga’s Attack on Probabilistic Arguments from Evil and What the Attack Gets Right .. 48 15. After Plantinga’s Attack: Our Still Extremely Powerful “Probabilistic” Argument from Evil . 51 16. Distinguishing Probabilistic Cases from Evil from the Trash Talking often Associated with Them ........................................................................................................................................... 53 17. Plantinga on the Powerful Non‐Argument from Horrific Evils: “Isn’t It Just Apparent, Just Evident?” ..................................................................................................................................... 55 Part Two: Solutions: Theodicy, Anti‐Theodicy, and Goalposts ............................................ 59 [18. “God Won’t”?!: “Epicurus’s Old Questions” and the God of Standard Theism] ................... 59 19. God Won’t?: Theodicy, in the Form of a Credible Account of What God’s Reasons for Allowing the Horrific Evils of Our World Might Be ...................................................................... 59 [20. Whys, Hows, and Marilyn Adams] ....................................................................................... 61 [21. Really?: Anti‐Theodicy] ........................................................................................................ 61 22. On Goalposts ....................................................................................................................... 62 [23. God, Freedom, and Immortality: Theism as Part of a Package] ........................................... 66 Part Three: The Basic Free Will Defense and the Potentially Immense Importance of Libertarian Freedom .......................................................................................................... 66 24. The Free Will Defense: The Theist’s Best Hope, Only Hope? ............................................... 66 25. The Famous, Intuitive Free Will Defense: The Basic Idea ..................................................... 67 26. The Power of the Free Will Defense: The Potentially Immense Importance of Libertarian Freedom ...................................................................................................................................... 72 27. The Meaning of “Free” in Philosophy‐Speak: An Elucidation by Means of Examples .......... 73 28. The Meaning of “Free”: Our Example of a Free Action ........................................................ 75 29. Actions that Do Not Count as “Free” in Ordinary Talk, but Are “Free” in Our Philosophical Sense ........................................................................................................................................... 77 30. The Meaning of “Free” in Philosophy‐Speak: An Example of an Action (or Is it, Really?) that Is Not Free ................................................................................................................................... 79 31. Pessimism and the Meaning of “Free” in Philosophy‐Speak: But What if This Distinction Is Bogus? ......................................................................................................................................... 81 32. The Libertarian Hope and the Potentially Immense Importance of Libertarian Freedom .... 84 Part Four: The Credibility of the Libertarian Hope .............................................................. 86 33. The Credibility of the Libertarian Hope: Initial Appearances ............................................... 86 34. The Credibility of the Libertarian Hope: “The Best Argument for Incompatibilism” ............ 88 35. The Credibility of the Libertarian Hope: “The Best Argument for Compatibilism” ............... 89 36. The Credibility of the Libertarian Hope: Against Cheap Compatibilism ............................... 89 37. The Libertarian Hope’s Best Hope [or? Mystery and the Nature of the Hope ..................... 89 ii Part Four: Freedom without Risk?: God’s Knowledge of What We Would and Will Freely Do and the Two Gods of the Free Will Defense ........................................................................ 90 38. The Gods of the Free Will Defense: Plantinga’s Molinist God .............................................. 90 39. Middle Knowledge and Simple Foreknowledge ................................................................... 98 40. The Freewill Theist’s Risk‐Taking God and the Problem of Evil .......................................... 100 Part Seven: A Lesson from Hell ......................................................................................... 106 iii Horrific Suffering, Divine Hiddenness, and Hell: The Place of Freedom in a World Governed by God Keith DeRose Part One: A Powerful Problem 1. A Brief Look at Where We’re Going: The Problem of Horrific Suffering, Two Other Forms of the Problem of Evil, and the Place of Human Free Will in a World Governed by a Wholly Good God Asked in a public forum by a fellow philosopher1 to give examples (“without getting into details”) of one argument for and another argument against the existence of God that I thought a reasonable person could find plausible, I didn’t even have to think about which argument to use on the negative side: I’m going to have to be conventional here and go with the usual suspect: the argument from evil. Without getting into any details, you can feel the force of the argument by choosing a suitably horrific example (the Holocaust, children dying of cancer) that leads you to say, “There’s no way a perfectly good God would have allowed that!” There is a huge, often fascinating, discussion that tries to refute such arguments. But I find this intuitively powerful case does stand up to scrutiny, at the very least to the extent that someone could reasonably accept it at the end of the day. I suspect that even God thinks there is something wrong with you if you are not at least tempted by such an argument from evil. That argument from horrific suffering, and the problem it gives rise to for standard theism (belief in a God that is wholly good, as well as all‐powerful and all‐knowing), is the main focus of this book, though our wrestling with this problem will involve us in two further problems for standard theism: the problem of divine hiddenness and the problem of hell. Though I hope to uncover what relief there is to be found from these problems, I certainly 1 “Why Take a Stance on God?”, an interview Gary Gutting did with me in The Stone, the New York Times philosophy blog, 18 September 2014; reprinted with slight revisions as “Religion and Knowledge,” in Gary Gutting, Talking God: Philosophers on Belief (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017) pp. 172‐186. 1 won’t be finally settling any of them. But at least there will be three, and not just one, problems that we will be failing to solve here. “Free will defenses” have constituted perhaps the main type of theistic response to problems like these, and not just in the thoughts of philosophers and theologians, but in wide stretches of the broader culture, to the point that if you ask some theist why there is so much evil in the world, despite its being governed by a perfectly good God, or why some people will end up in hell, what you’re likely to hear as the “short answer” response is some quick version of the free will defense. It turns out that I accept, in about the strongest way possible, the account of freedom that fuels such responses, and I am convinced that human freedom must play a huge role in God’s relation to
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