There is a Problem

There is a problem, of course, about appealing to human freedom to solve the problem of evil when you also believe in divine foreknowledge and pre- destination. This is a problem of long standing, which many philosophers have wrestled with. No solution has gained general acceptance. If Dr. Craig accepts the doctrines of predestination and divine foreknowledge and also appeals to human freedom to solve the problem of evil, he will have worked out a way of explaining how these things are consistent, and I will listen with interest to that explanation.

In the meantime, though, there are other problems about the appeal to freedom. There are evils whose occurrence has no discernible connection with freedom. Theologians call them natural evils, meaning by that such things as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, diseases, and so on. If a deer dies in a forest fire, suffering horribly as it does so, that is an evil. It is not only human suffering we must take into account, when we are weighing good against evil in this world.

Now, if you accept anything like the theory of evolution,* you will be- lieve there were other animals on this planet long before humans appeared on the scene. Many of them must have suffered horribly as their species became extinct. None of that suffering can be justified as a necessary con- sequence of permitting humans freedom. We weren‘t around then. So none of it seems beyond the power of omnipotence to prevent without the loss of that good.

Another objection: The greater goods defense can easily lead to a kind of cost-benefit analysis which is deeply repugnant to our moral sense. Con- sider the kind of case which troubled Ivan in Dostoevsky‘s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov.** A little girl is treated quite brutally by her parents, who

* You don’t, of course, have to accept the full Darwinian explanation of evolution for this to be a problem, so long as you accept what the evidence of geology and paleontology seems to make as certain as anything in science can be: that the earth has been around for a very long time, and that many, many different species of animals flourished and then became extinct before man appeared on the scene.