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INFINITE VALUE and the BEST of ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS 367 Worlds

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INFINITE VALUE and the BEST of ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS 367 Worlds Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. XCVII No. 2, September 2018 doi: 10.1111/phpr.12383 © 2017 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC Infinite Value and the Best of All Possible Worlds1 NEVIN CLIMENHAGA University of Notre Dame A common argument for atheism runs as follows: God would not create a world worse than other worlds he could have created instead. However, if God exists, he could have created a better world than this one. There- fore, God does not exist. In this paper I challenge the second premise of this argument. I argue that if God exists, our world will continue without end, with God continuing to create value-bearers, and sustaining and perfecting the value-bearers he has already created. Given this, if God exists, our world—considered on the whole—is infinitely valuable. I further contend that this theistic picture makes our world’s value unsurpass- able. In support of this contention, I consider proposals for how infinitely valuable worlds might be improved upon, focusing on two main ways—adding value-bearers and increasing the value in present value-bearers. I argue that neither of these can improve our world. Depending on how each method is understood, either it would not improve our world, or our world is unsurpassable with respect to it. I conclude by considering the implications of my argument for the problem of evil more generally conceived. One atheistic argument from evil proceeds as follows: (1) If God exists, he would only create a world if there is no better world that he could have created instead. (2) If God exists, he could have created a better world than this one. Since, if God exists, he created this world, the consequents of (1) and (2) cannot both be true. It follows that their antecedent is false, and that (3) God does not exist. Call this argument the Argument from Surpassability, or AFS for short.2 Leibniz (1710) famously denied (2) of this argument, claiming that ours is the unique best of all possible 1 This paper was written with the support of a generous grant from the Templeton Foundation on Contemporary Moral Theory and the Problem of Evil (grant number 43655). I am grateful to Jim Sterba, the leader of that project, and my fellow research assistant Meg Schmitt for their helpful discussion and comments on early drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank participants in the Center for Philosophy of Religion Discussion Group at Notre Dame for their feedback on a draft of this paper, and Dustin Crummett in particular for his extensive written comments and extremely helpful discussion of the issues explored in this paper. 2 The AFS is expressed in basically this form by Perkins (1983), Sobel (2004: 468), Wielenberg (2004: 57), Hudson (2013: 236), and Kraay (2013: 399). Some presentations of the argument replace (1) above with the claim that God must create the best possible world. However, this presupposes that there is a single best possible world. (1) leaves open the possibility that there are multiple equally good or incom- parable worlds such that no world is better than any of these worlds. Another variation on this argument replaces (2) with the stronger claim that for any possible world, there is a better one creatable by God. Since the second premise of this argument is logically stronger than (2), my argument against (2) in this paper also challenges this argument. INFINITE VALUE AND THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS 367 worlds. Contemporary theistic philosophers have generally been reticent to follow him in this. Robert Adams (1972) denies (1) by arguing that by failing to create a better world than he did God would not necessarily be violating anyone’s rights or manifesting a defect in character, and could in fact be manifesting grace.3 Other theistic philosophers have objected to (1) with the following argument: there is no best possible world; for ev- ery world that God can create, there is a better one that he could have created instead.4 Thus, it is unreasonable to blame God for not creating a better world, because it is logi- cally impossible for him to both create a world and satisfy the consequent of (1). Skep- tics of this move have responded that if (1) is false, this implies that a perfect being (like God) is impossible—for a perfect being would never perform a surpassable action, and yet the fact that there is no best possible world makes it impossible for a creator to avoid performing a surpassable action.5 In this paper I follow Leibniz in arguing against (2). Unlike Leibniz, however, I do not think that our world is the uniquely best world. Instead, I argue for the weaker con- clusion that there are not other worlds better than ours. It is compatible with this conclu- sion that the goodness of some other worlds is equal to or incomparable with that of ours. My argument proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that given theological assumptions that the proponent of the AFS ought to accept, if God created the world, then there is an infinite amount of value in our world. Second, I argue that, given these assumptions, not only is our world infinitely valuable, it is unsurpassable: on any plausible principles that allow us to rank different infinitely valuable worlds, there are no other infinitely valuable worlds better than this world. I should stress at the outset that I do not think that my argument solves the “prob- lem of evil” more generally. There remain serious philosophical objections to theism based on the existence of the evil we find in our world even if my argument works. However, I think that my argument does show that the AFS is not the best way to formulate the problem of evil. While God’s existence may be incompatible with or disconfirmed by the evils in the world, this is not because those evils make the world as a whole worse than it may have otherwise been. I explore the relation between my argument and the problem of evil more generally in the final section of this paper. 3 For criticisms of Adams, see Quinn (1992), Grover (2003), Wielenberg (2004), and Rowe (2004: 74–87). 4 See, e.g., Plantinga (1976: 61), Schlesinger (1977: ch. 9–10), Forrest (1981), Reichenbach (1982: 122– 28), Morris (1993), and Swinburne (1994: 134–36) and (2004: 113–15). 5 See Quinn (1992), Perkins (1983: 247), Grover (1988, 2004), Wielenberg (2004: 56–59), Rowe (2004: 88– 142), and Kraay (2010). Leibniz explicitly rejected the possibility of an infinitely improving series of worlds, on the grounds that this would make God’s choice to create violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason (see Blumenfeld [1975] for discussion). Contemporary defenders of the claim that a God with no best world to create could not be perfect frequently appeal to the possibility of morally or rationally superior “rival cre- ators.” This basic idea was suggested in Kant’s Lectures on Philosophical Theology (1978: 137): That the world created by God is the best of all possible worlds, is clear for the following reason. If a better world than the one willed by God were possible, then a will better than the divine will would also have to be possible. For indisputably that will is better which chooses what is better. But if a better will is possible, then so is a being who could express this better will. And therefore this being would be more perfect and better than God. But this is a contradiction; for God is omnitudo realitatis. 368 NEVIN CLIMENHAGA I. Preliminary Remarks In this essay I understand God to be the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good cre- ator of all contingent things. I understand the world to include all of space and time and anything that exists outside of space and time. In other words, ‘the world’ refers to all of reality (including God). Importantly, on this definition of ‘world,’ there can be only one actual world. Now, (for all I know) God could create multiple spatiotemporally closed systems; in this case I will say that God creates several universes. So there can be only one world, but many universes. Strictly speaking God creates universes (and the things in them), not worlds, since a world includes God. However, I will sometimes speak loosely of God creating worlds; the reader should understand this to mean God’s creating the contingent things in a world, including the universe(s) it contains. I assume, for simplicity’s sake, that God has knowledge of all future events, including (if such there be) indeterministic events or libertarian free actions, and I will ignore pos- sible constraints on what possible worlds God can create arising from indeterministic events or libertarian free actions. I will also speak as if God acts in time; later, I will con- sider how to reformulate relevant parts of my argument without this assumption. I further assume that it is possible to rank worlds according to their goodness or value.6 (In this paper, I use ‘value’ and ‘goodness’ interchangeably.) Although I proceed as if world-values are measurable by some precise number, my arguments could be refor- mulated with ranges or sets of numbers representing the values of worlds. (In section V I consider whether the AFS can be defended if it turns out that world-values are not mea- surable at all.) The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section II I present the three most common arguments for (2) in the literature.
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