A Question About Free Will and Suffering

KEVIN HARRIS:

Dear Dr. Craig, Thank you very much for your scholarly work and ministry. The content on ReasonableFaith.org and through the mobile app has been my constant companion for the past year. I drive quite a lot for my work and your podcast, Defenders classes, and debates are my soundtrack. Please tell Drew from Defenders class that whenever I have a burning question while listening to a class he always seems to ask it for me. Perhaps my question is a bit more pastoral than apologetic but hopefully your answer may be helpful to more listeners than I. My question is about free will and the problem of suffering. My 59-year-old father has died suddenly from an illness, a blood clot that could have been relatively easily treated but unfortunately it was not discovered until after it proved fatal. It has set me to reconsider God's foreknowledge and providence from a very personal perspective. I can reconcile explaining the existence of evil via the free will defense, but in explaining the existence of suffering I am unsatisfied by gestures toward God's foreknowledge and providence. I wonder if the free will defense can be stretched to explain suffering as well.

DR. CRAIG: I take it that he is differentiating here between the existence of moral evil which is due to free will and the existence of natural suffering which is not moral but is just pain and misery that is brought about for example in this case through disease. He is wondering can the free will defense in some way be used to address these instances of natural suffering as well as moral evil?

KEVIN HARRIS: He says,

Perhaps in order to have an environment or stage suitable for us to exercise free will and moral responsibility, God can only logically realize a world that includes a kind of openness, an uncertainty, where personal agents and their suffering are involved. My understanding from your teaching is that you see basically four views on this. That God knew (Arminianism), didn't know (openness), set (Molinism), or made (determinism) exactly what moment that clot would kill my father. Of these views the ones where God chooses man's specific sufferings bother me deeply and don't seem to square with the loving, merciful God of Scripture. I guess that would apply to determinism, Molinism, and probably Arminianism. Right?

DR. CRAIG: This seems to me, in all due respect, to be just an emotional reaction to suffering. He says it bothers him deeply. But that is just emotional. I frankly don't have any problem at all intellectually with the notion that God might will for me to die of cancer. Or his will for me might be to have leukemia, or be killed in an automobile accident, or fall down the stairs and break a leg, or I might end my pitching career in the major leagues by having a shoulder injury, or I might be wheelchair-bound. Indeed in my own life I do have a neuromuscular disease that I have genetically inherited from my mother and that has helped shape my life and make me who I am today. I have absolutely no resentment to God for giving me this thorn in the flesh, as Paul refers to it, to bear. It seems to me that is God's prerogative. Who do we think we are dealing with here? We are talking about God! Surely he has the right to assign to us what suffering or misery in life that he should will for his purposes. What we want to say is he doesn't do this capriciously or arbitrarily or without love, but it lies within his sovereign providential discretion what suffering he might allot to our lives. I just don't see the problem.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says,

My intuition leaves me unsatisfied with the Molinist answer that God has morally sufficient reasons for a specific event. I think maybe a universal level of the necessity of suffering would give us a better understanding of why time and chance happens to us all.

DR. CRAIG: Again, unsatisfaction is not a refutation.[1] I often hear this from people responding to positions: I am not convinced, or I am unsatisfied. That is just a report of a personal psychological attitude that you have. It is just giving us a psychological report of the state of your mind. That is not a refutation. The question is: what would be unsatisfactory about the Molinist’s answer that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting a natural instance of suffering entering into our lives. Notice that is not incompatible with what he says here about time and chance happen to us all. It is just saying that God knows what would happen to you and so he would allow or decree a world in which time and chance would bring it about that you die of a blood clot, say.  And that lies within his sovereign prerogative.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says:

Couldn't we say that God puts in place at creation fine-tuned physical laws that he knows will bring about personal agents and fulfills promises and prophecy by acting personally when the time is right and that there are large parts of his creation that are truly undetermined at the time of his creating?

DR. CRAIG: That is what Molinism holds. Molinism holds that God put in place finely tuned physical laws that he knew would bring about or permit personal agents. Certainly it is consistent with him acting miraculously in the universe at certain times. And also there are large parts of creation that are undetermined at the time of his creating, at least in a physical sense because there is freedom of the will. You could also introduce quantum indeterminacy into the picture if you want to. But the point is for the Molinist these causally undetermined aspects of creation are not unknown to God or outside his control as they are for the so-called openness theologian. Don't think that openness requires that God doesn't know how things would turn out.

KEVIN HARRIS: He said, referring back to what he just wrote,

This would give a logical reason God could morally choose a world that would include suffering and not have to choose the individual sufferings themselves. Maybe I am the only one but that would give me comfort.

DR. CRAIG: Again, with all due respect, what would give you comfort is not a determinant of truth. He is reacting emotionally here to these positions and wanting to pick the view that makes him feel the best or feel most comforted, and that is not a good way of doing theology. I think on the Molinist perspective you would say that God would choose a world in which he knew that there would be these natural events that would bring about pain and suffering. But praise be to God he only permits these insofar as he has morally justifying reasons for doing so. That is a wonderful blessing to have that confidence. On the openness view, God sets up this system of natural law that he then allows to sort of go out of control in the hopes that it is going to turn out well, and he doesn't interfere to stop the earthquakes and the tornadoes from ravaging your home and your family. He doesn't do anything when he sees the tsunami approaching the coast to alert the people to flee. It is the openness view, I think, that has real difficulty in explaining how God can allow these natural disasters and not intervene either to stop them when they start to happen or to prevent them or to warn people about them so that they are not victimized by them. The openness view at the end of the day I think has more difficulty with the problem of suffering than does the Molinist view which says that God knew that these things would happen but he only permits them because he has morally justifying reasons for allowing them to happen.

KEVIN HARRIS: He concludes,

Do you think I'm just being emotional and turning to what you would consider heretical doctrines on God's foreknowledge and providence in order to cope with loss?

DR. CRAIG: That is interesting because I have been sort of saying that, haven't I?[2] Though I wouldn't characterize this as heretical. That is not the issue. I would say that on emotional grounds because of the loss he has experienced in his personal life he is clutching at views that are unbiblical and deny not only divine foreknowledge but deny divine sovereignty and providence. The Bible has a very strong view of divine providence. This view that he has enunciated just can't do justice to the biblical data.

KEVIN HARRIS: He signs his letter, “From a heartbroken seeker of God, Brandon in the USA.”

DR. CRAIG: Yes, and I fear that my interaction with his question may have been unsympathetic and cut-and-dried but I am a philosopher and I am dealing with the question on that basis, not as a pastor or counselor.

KEVIN HARRIS: He is asking on that basis, Bill. He is asking, What are the logical grounds for this emotional event that I have suffered?

DR. CRAIG: Look how he closes the question. “Is there possibly a logical argument here about the kind of environment required for free will and responsibility?” I think there definitely is. He hinted at it, but he didn't get to it. And that is this: the free will defense is relevant to the problem of natural suffering in that natural suffering forms the arena in which the drama is played out of people being freely called to come into the kingdom of God and find an eternal relationship with God. I think it not at all improbable that only in a world suffused with natural suffering would the optimal number of people freely respond to God's gracious initiatives and come to enjoy eternal life and salvation.

KEVIN HARRIS: The final question

Dear Dr. Craig, in your paper “Middle Knowledge, Truth–Makers, and the 'Grounding Objection'”[3] you wrote :

But historically the orthodox view has identified truth–makers with such abstract realities as facts or states of affairs–more often than not, the fact stated as a proposition's truth condition, as disclosed by the disquotation principle. . . . That truth–makers are usually conceived to be such abstract entities as facts or states of affairs underlines the point that a causal relation is not at issue here.

 

DR. CRAIG: All right, if we are not to lose 90% of our listeners at this point we had better pause and explain what is going on. We are talking here about these counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that Molinism says God knows. Counterfactuals like “if I had been in Pontius Pilate's place, I, too, would have sent Jesus of Nazareth to the cross.” God knows whether or not that statement is true. Skeptics of God's middle knowledge typically say there is nothing that makes that statement true. You weren't in Pilate's place. You didn't even exist at that time. So there is nothing to make that statement true, and therefore it cannot be true, and therefore cannot be known by God. This article that he references is, I think, an extremely important article in responding to this so-called grounding objection – what makes these counterfactuals of freedom true. What I point out is that these grounding objectors have a very unsophisticated grasp of what a truth-maker is. They typically think that what makes a proposition true needs to be some sort of a concrete physical reality when in fact when you read truth-maker theory (what makes a proposition true) very typically these truth-makers are not physical objects. They are these sort of abstract entities like states of affairs or facts. So what makes it true that I freely chose to have tilapia for lunch yesterday? They would say it is the fact that I freely chose to eat tilapia for lunch yesterday. Or it is the state of affairs of my freely choosing to eat tilapia for lunch yesterday.[4] What makes the propositions true are these abstract states of affairs or abstract facts. In that case it is open to the defender of middle knowledge to say that what makes the proposition true that “if I were rich I would buy a Mercedes” is the fact that if I were rich I would buy a Mercedes, or the state of affairs that my being rich would be a state of affairs in which I would buy a Mercedes. If ordinary truth-makers can be abstract states of affairs or facts then they can be truth-makers for these counterfactual propositions as well. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

KEVIN HARRIS: The disquotation principle?

DR. CRAIG: What that is talking about is you would identify the fact that makes a proposition true simply by removing the quotation marks around the sentence. So, for example, the sentence “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. You just remove the quotation marks. The sentence “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. That is the idea there. That is the fact that makes the sentence quoted true. The person who believes in middle knowledge can say the same thing if he wants about these counterfactuals.

KEVIN HARRIS:

In the same paper you affirm, for my part I should say, that true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom have truth-makers then the most obvious and plausible candidates are the facts or states of affairs disclosed by the disquotation principle. Thus what makes it true that if I were rich I would buy a Mercedes is the fact that if I were rich I would buy a Mercedes.

DR. CRAIG: Right! It seems to me obvious so that if I did feel compelled to find truth-makers for true counterfactuals, these would seem to be the most obvious candidates. These are what most truth-maker theorists appeal to.

KEVIN HARRIS:

My question is: given your current anti-realism about abstract objects and hence your commitment to the non-objectivity of facts and state of affairs as abstract objects, and assuming for the argument's sake that true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom have truth-makers, what other plausible candidates for truth-makers of true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom would you suggest?

By the way this letter is from Giorgio in Italy.

DR. CRAIG: I just simply won't make that assumption for argument's sake. My own view is that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are among those propositions, and there are many classes of them, that don't need truth-makers in order to be true. For example, the proposition “Baal does not exist.” I don't think that has a truth-maker. There isn't anything that makes that true. It just is true that Baal doesn't exist. And it corresponds to reality, that is to say, Baal doesn't exist. So I would just say that given my anti-realism about abstract objects I don't think that these propositions do have any truth-makers but are among those many sorts of propositions that are true without truth-makers.[5]