In my opinion this is THE question. I’d like to work off of these suggestions:
- Existence in hell, as bad as it is, is better alternative to non-existence.
- Free-will, in and of itself, is the highest good.
- God needs to create those beings because through them and their actions, more people go to heaven than are lost to hell. (Judas?)
4.God can’t actually know our choices until he creates us.
- This just seems wrong on its face. Why would it be better for those who lead others to sin to be “tossed into the sea with a millstone around their necks?” Does the lake of unquenchable fire sound better than non-existence? Even if I lived for a trillion years and filled this life with every imaginable kind of pleasure but at the end I earned a sentence to hell for eternity I would rather simply never have existed. Hell is a place of unimaginable suffering and separation from God, while a state of non-existence is simply nothingness. It scores a “zero” in terms of goodness, while hell scores a negative infinity in my opinion.
- I’d like to leave this one aside. A discussion of this can be quite complicated and I think this one is a dead end regarding this particular question.
- I doubt this very much. Although this is NOT an official doctrine or dogma of the church (I’m referencing Molinism), it only seems reasonable to believe that God’s omniscience includes knowing what would have* or would happen as well as what does or will happen. In fact, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is based upon this kind of reasoning, in my opinion (God knew that Mary would say “yes” and Jesus would be born, live, and die or else the grace of his saving death could not possibly have been applied to Mary at the moment of her own conception!)
I think some version of #3 is our winner. However, I would say that the justification for allowing the creation of people God has always and will always know are damned is not that they are a minority (although that
could be true) but rather because our sexual and reproductive choices are also under the domain of our operative free will. In other words, we
really do participate as creators with God in terms of human reproduction. Although God creates the soul, our free actions determine who is created in some fundamental way. Although God has always and will always know that some of our children will choose sin, death, and hell, he nonetheless allows our human reproductive abilities to operate freely whether two wills are effective (love) or one (rape) or neither (accident of nature, etc). God will not abridge our will or the operation of nature in this context, and therefore some people are born although God has always and will always know that they are ultimately doomed.
However, this explanation does nothing to explain why God would willingly create Lucifer, knowing who he would become and the evil and pain that would flow from his will. It does seem like God could have created an angel named “Billy” instead of Lucifer, knowing that “Billy” would freely choose virtue and good rather sin an separation. In fact, I would wager that there is an infinity of creatures God has NOT created (for whatever reason). So, it makes me question: why Satan? Was Satan REALLY the best choice? Knowingly rejecting an infinite diversity of possible creatures, God chose to create Lucifer! That seems ridiculous!
The only answer I can come up with is what Job (42:2-3) says “I know that thou canst do all things, and no thought is hid from thee. Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have spoken unwisely, and things that above measure exceeded my knowledge.”
St. Anselm wrote an entire book about this same question, and comes to the conclusion that we simply cannot figure out the answer, and we must have faith. I hope that I am not being intellectually lazy in my desire to agree!*
