Mark Johnston on the Problem of Evil

The Primordial Free Will Defense

Mark Johnston has published an extremely creative Neoplatonic theodicy in response to James Sterba’s deductive argument from evil. In this article, I would like to summarize Johnston’s account. In a follow up article or podcast, I will indicate places where I disagree, though I should note that none of my disagreements — so far as I can tell — amount to having to jettison Johnston’s theodicy. If anything, they would be refinements around the edges. But that is for next time. For now, let’s get Johnston’s theodicy on the table.  

Here is Johnston’s response the deductive problem of evil, with the necessary stage-setting.

In His initial act, God creates angels (or “archons”, as Johnston prefers to call them), which are entirely spiritual entities as close to God in power and knowledge as any creature can be. God creates because God loves – that is, because God wants to invite other persons into union with Himself, since God is motivated to diffuse his goodness. What’s more, Johnston contends that God’s primordial act of angelic creation is something we can know as a matter of natural, not just revealed, theology.

Unfortunately, some archons reject God’s invitation to love – they turn from entering the beatific vision, opting instead for self-valorization, that is, to put their own good over and about The Good. Johnston argues that angelic sin is not only possible, but a necessary possibility grounded in the metaphysics of free creation and holiness, but you’ll have to read his article for details.

For various reasons, some if not all these archons make material universes of their own, many planning for sufficient material complexity wherein God might bring about other embodied wills. (According to Johnston, only God can create wills, though God may make use of sufficiently complex materially evolved structures in doing so.) Why? Because the archons want the allegiance of such wills. God permits this because God must not “play pen” his creatures, if, that is, they are to be rationally uncoerced (itself a necessary condition for love between persons). God remains omnipotent even in his inability to coerce free choice, because the coercion of free choice is contradictory. And contradictions are impossible. Indeed, a significant aspect of Johnston’s theodicy is the claim that the range metaphysical possibility narrows by the internal constraints related to creation and God’s reasons for creating. This leads Johnston to say that God won’t intervene “in the wind and waves of matter” because God can’t intervene, and this is no mark against his omnipotence, since omnipotence only relates to what is metaphysically possible. A strong thesis, no doubt.

Minor quibble: I don’t think it’s right to say the range of metaphysical possibility narrows when God creates. Metaphysical possibility just is what it is. Rather, it’s that in creating God fulfills certain conditionals concerning what can then happen (or not). For example, *if* God creates free creatures, *then* God cannot intervene in this way or that.

Anyway, concerning the physical universe, God will only bring about other free wills in such material conditions if there is a real possibility of God redeeming them, of his using non-coercive grace to bring them into communion with Himself. However, there is still the chance that these embodied wills could freely reject God. The stakes, then, are high and real.

As Johnston summarizes his own position (emphases mine):

“What I have offered… might be termed a Primordial Free-Will Theodicy. Creation is God’s free, rationally uncoerced, self-manifestation, and it has a doubled aspect. Its first movement is the bringing into being of created wills, its second is the invitation to them via grace to deploy their libertarian freedom to enter into the joy of God’s own inner life.

An internal necessary condition of the acceptance of that offer is holiness, the free uncoerced subordination of one’s good to the Good. For the two movements to succeed, God must knowably abjure. Specifically, he must knowably intend to let those archons who choose to valorize their own good over the Good have free reign in the use of their creative powers, even up to not interfering in any of their created universes, except by way of grace’s effect on the wills, if any, that God then embodies in those universes.

God, consistent with his aim in creating, cannot play-pen his first creatures. They know that. Though only God can create a will, there is the possibility that a Demiurge creates a universe where possible wills that require some embodiment or other could find suitable embodiments. If God then creates and embodies a will in such a universe, the Goodness of God guarantees that however things go for that will in that embodiment, the concrete offer of grace will continually remain. This aspect of the Theodrama of Redemption is, I believe, a source of great hope.”[1]

Johnston argues that God is justified in creating and abjuring, though God was not compelled to create. There were good, as in adequate but not decisive, reasons for creating – namely, the possibility of love with others persons, and the goodness of other persons existing; and there were good (adequate but not decisive) reasons for not-creating – namely, the risk of significant evil and suffering, brought forth by persons who opted for self-valorization instead of being God-bearers. Johnston says this helps to explain the contingency of creation, since neither set of reasons is compelling nor decisive – it is seriously a close call. Nevertheless, God was justified in creating, which is just to say the act is entirely consistent with God’s goodness (there is no moral standard above God, that’s true; nevertheless, everything acts according to its nature, and God is goodness itself). What’s more, Johnston contends the scope of possibility constricts not just once God creates but as creation unfolds. Because God can only do what is metaphysically possible, it is no charge against God’s omnipotence that God cannot make water sing Yankee Doodle. It is not metaphysically possible for water to single Yankee Doodle. Nor is it metaphysically possible to coerce rational free choice, internally or externally. This means — and here is another important part of Johnston’s thesis — that the conditions of creation must have made it such that the ability to reject God originally by the archons was not an entirely irrational choice, even if it was definitely an evil choice.

OK. So, the “upshot” of Johnston’s account is that all evil – natural and moral – is ultimately the result of free choice run amok (particularly among the archons), hence why he calls his account a primordial free will defense. The material universe we inhabit is, for Johnston, a secondary creation, one literally fashioned by a demonic demiurge, not just as a display of his own power but an arena in which that demiurge might secure the allegiance of emergent wills. For obvious reasons, the demiurge would want the material conditions to tip the odds in his favor as much as possible (that is, without ruining the chance of God creating other wills therein), hence the cruelty of nature and inherent inclinations of material creatures toward their own perceived welfare interested and power instead of The Good as such. Nevertheless, Johnston maintains that no demonic demiurge can fashion an inevitable hell where all wills suffer perpetually, since there is an intrinsic lower bound below which God will not create wills at all. God must be able to redeem wills if He is going to create wills, so no matter how awful the conditions around us may seem, we should have hope that salvation is available for all embodied wills, given that embodied wills exist in this world.

Nevertheless, God’s necessary abjuration means God cannot prevent the horrendously evil consequences of creaturely action, though Johnston insists this is not technically a case of God permitting horrendous evil — at least not in the sense that leaves God morally blameworthy. To illustrate, Johnston gives the example of two parents that may reasonably adjure from strict oversight of their 16-year-old-child. From there, suppose that child acquires a baseball bat and bashes a schoolmate at school. While an onlooking teacher who could have intervened but failed to intervene might be blameworthy, this is not to say the parents permitting the bashing are blameworthy, either in a similar sense or at all. Instead, what the parents permitted was the scope for their son’s free action “not hemmed in by their oversight.” This is a higher order permission, if anything, and one that does not necessarily render the parents blameworthy in the sense the teacher may be. Unless, of course, the parents took an unreasonable risk in relinquishing their oversight – say, because their son had known psychopathic tendencies, or whatever. However, Johnston explains that even in such an instance as that, “the object of appropriate blame is not that they permitted the bashing, but that in abjuring, they wrongly took a significant risk of such things occurring. Taking that risk is the morally indefensible thing.”[2]

The question then is whether God is blameworthy for not play-penning his creatures, which is just to say for creating other libertarian free beings in the first place (since Johnston maintains that if such beings are created, God must abjure). Throughout the article Johnston maintains that the creation of libertarian free agents is a necessary condition of love, holiness, and union with God, and with that creation comes abjuration. Thus, the very possibility of creating other beings for the sake of love inherently runs significant risks, many of which have been painfully actualized.

Once all that is appreciated, Johnston takes it that the crucial premise to run a deductive argument from evil against God would have to be something like, “It all should not have been: Considering the scope of significant and especially horrendous evil, no all-good being would abjure even if there would be no creation without that being’s abjuration.”[3]

But there is nothing obviously true about that statement. In fact, Johnston claims that is clearly not the correct moral reaction. So, the strong form argument from evil fails.

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[1] pp. 27.

[2] Pg. 22.

[3] Ibid, 23.