Please note that I really am thinking out loud here.  I've done absolutely no research on this thesis and precious little background reading.  The upshot is that someone else very well may have come up with what follows and it all may very well have been shot down long ago.  If so, I am willing to cheat a bit.  Send me citations!  I would love to read up on the topic.  Some of this may sound somewhat familiar in places.  For instance, I've heard, though never read, that Josiah Royce attempted to turn the problem of evil on its head in manner similar to what will follow.  And of course the doctrine that goodness in bound up in being goes back to at Plato.  So, here goes.

The existence of evil is supposed to make belief in God hopelessly problematic.  If God is good, then God would prevent evil; if God is almighty, then God can prevent evil; if God is all wise, then God can see evil coming before its a problem.  If God is all these things essentially, then God cannot exist.  So the argument goes.  However, the notion of goodness itself is problematic, and, I would suggest, that any solution to viewing the notion of goodness might point out a proper frame for viewing the problem of evil and the existence of God.

As mentioned above, goodness or the Good has long been seen as tied up with Being.  That is to say that beings as beings are inherently good, that existing things have value by virtue of existing.  So, how can Being admit to evil?  Evil would seem to be non-being, but evil most evidently exists.  One might immediately object that even assuming that all things are of some value and participate in the Good to a certain extent that there is a difference between this so-called metaphysical goodness and moral goodness.  I think two replies could be offered here.  First, a great deal of evil is natural evil and the sort of natural evil that cannot be traced back to any moral agent.   So, we still have evil, even if we don't have moral agents.  The second reply is that "goodness" when applied between Being as Being and morality may not be equivocal at all.  The difference may be that moral agents are capable of comprehending goodness and able to direct themselves to realize potentialities in themselves and others (or by contrast, act in a way that is counter to the best end of others or one's self).  So, the question remains, whence evil?

One answer that I think we can dispose with is dualism  One can think of dualism in two ways (there are two kinds of people, those who divide things in two and those who don't--I'm among the former ) either that there this realm called "Good" and certain things are in that realm and other things are in a realm called  "Evil."  This is the view some have of God and the Devil, two eternal beings essentially occupying different realms. The other is that Good and Evil and separate properties that one may acquire in varying amounts.  Either view has one major problem.  Dualistic views make Good and Evil  incongruent with each other.  On such a view there is no reason to prefer one to another.  Put another way, what is so good about goodness?  In a weird way if evil has a positive existence, then it is of inherent value and so, well, good.  This is clearly incoherent, but if it weren't the problem of evil evaporates.  Either God cannot be omnipotent outside of the realm of Goodness or it really is all good and so there is no problem at all.

Another answer might be to reject the thesis altogether, namely deny that there is any such thing as metaphysical goodness at all.  Where this leaves moral reasoning is an open question, however.  At the very least it would seem to make all moral reasoning anthropocentric.  Even that much seems to be in trouble.  But let's set that aside for now.  If goodness is not inherent, then it is more or less conventional.  Goodness would not really exist.  If goodness in not inherent in Being then it is impossible that it would be in God's nature because there is no such animal.  Well then we can hardly complain if God lacks something that can't exist. 

On the other hand, moral reasoning does seem to presuppose that there is something inherent, something that we cannot fully objectify (and so is transcendent) and make a means to an end but is an end in itself.  For instance, let us say that human nature determines our moral obligations.  However, if we understand such a nature so that we can manipulate it, human nature then becomes a mean to some other end that we can choose.  (Please note, I haven't concluded on this basis that the transcendent thing is God--I would be happy with Being as Being for now).  As far as I can tell, the only thing we cannot fully objectify is the nature of existence bare and simple or Being as Being,  So, if the Good is inherent Being and Evil has no positive existence, how is it that Being suffers evil to exist?

Next time: A Rather Unoriginal Response.  In the mean time, feel free to make any corrections.

Last time in this rave I stated,

Muserion99 queried:

I am sure that proper etiquette would urge me to place this as a comment to part 7, but such a reply just might stand on its own.  So, shooting from the hip, here goes.

The query is a bit loaded because it is either asking whether God directly caused evil or more broadly whether God is morally culpable regardless of whether he directly caused evil.  I have added "directly" simply because in a counterfactual sense had God not created, then there would be no evil and on a counterfactual analysis of causality God's creating is arguably an indirect cause for the existence of evil, though it is not obvious that God is somehow culpable.

Even if God could be shown to have directly caused some evil, it does not necessarily follow that he is culpable.  Take the following example I first found (from all people) William F. Buckley,

1. Little Fred push an old lady onto the sidewalk

Did Little Fred do a bad thing?  That rather depends on why.  If Fred likes injuring old people, yes, but if he was pushing the woman from the path of an on-coming bus, no--not even if he did injure her.  Now I am not going to argue that God causes anything of the sort, but if God has a good enough reason, then even his indirecting causing evil might be justified.

The question about whether God directly causes evil, however, was dealt with in part 6 of this rave.  Basically the distinction Alvin Plantinga made between weakly and strongly actualized states of affairs still holds.  The difference here is that if P can strongly actualize either S or S', God can weakly actualize either of these states of affairs.  Put more specifically, if Chad can either steal a cookie from the cookie jar or not, whether Chad does is still up to him, but God can weakly actualize either of those states of affairs.  God is not causing Chad to do anything.  So, no, I don't think that God directly causes evil.

Does God indirectly cause evil?  Well, yes, but I don't see how God is any more culpable on this theory as on the several variants of the the Free Will Defense.  On the Free Will Defense, freedom is such a great good that God either risks its misuse or knows exactly how it will be misused and decides to create anyway.  Freedom is seen as a great good because it is a requirement for moral action.  Personally I've long seen this as backwards.  A degree of freedom is simply a given to any actual being and what makes our freedom what it is is that we are consciously  teleologically directed, that is we make practical moral decisions.  Since I really don't have a good argument for that, lets set it aside and simply say that I am substituting one good (morally significant freedom) for another (beatitude).  Between the argument that God is not causing us to act as we do and that on balance this world is better for us having fallen than not, I see this argument as structurally analogous to the Free Will Defense.