C
Contarini
Guest
Rephrase “plan” as “permit” and this is an extremely strong objection–the single best reason not to believe in God. The traditional answer is that God permits (He does not cause and so it is problematic to say that He “plans”) evil because He brings good out of it. A more modern answer is to say that to create free human beings involves the risk that they will misuse their freedom, so that the only way God could avoid evil would be to make us robots. Whether or not this is true, it really resolves into the former answer, since God permits evil because of the greater good of freedom. I think that this is only tenable if we are very, very clear that God is not causing evil, God does not want it, and God sets Himself against it. But He creates, so to speak, a field of freedom in which evil operates, because He is trying to produce some good (presumably some quality in us) that can only be produced in this way. A further consideration is that in traditional Christian thought evil is a privation of good, not a thing in itself. So in a sense evil doesn’t “count” in the end. You don’t weigh good against evil and decide which predominates, because evil is simply the absence of some good that ought to be there.
This is not an easy answer for modern people to accept. One senior scholar in my field (church history), himself a minister in a liberal Protestant denomination in Canada, responded to my statement that I was basically a Thomist (a follower of Thomas Aquinas) on these issues by saying, “Can one be a Thomist after the Holocaust?” It’s a good question. But perhaps we can’t afford not to be Thomists after the Holocaust. Precisely because we are so aware of the prevalence of evil, the only way to avoid despair (I’m not even talking about Christianity or theism specifically, though without God I think I would despair) is to maintain this traditional view that in some ultimate sense evil does not “count”–that all the horrors of human history would be worth it if as a result one human being became just a little bit braver or more loving. However, the only way to make this work is to find a way of articulating it that doesn’t trivialize the terrible human cost of evil. And that’s not easy at all (many would say it’s impossible, and I respect them).
Who is the chess player in this analogy? God? But in the traditional view God isn’t in time (as your objection presupposes). So the objection makes no sense. God isn’t “playing the game.” God is the Reality that embraces the players and the pieces and the entire process of the game. God isn’t looking into the future and seeing how things will end–God is already there.
We, however, are not. We are the ones playing the game, and we certainly don’t know how it ends. I don’t see that this is a very thoughtful or profound objection at all.
