#768 Could God Have Brought about a Better World?

Dr. craig’s response

Although your question is somewhat confused, Patrick, I think that it embodies a deeper question that is struggling to get out, a question that has confronted me in writing my systematic philosophical theology. Your question seems to suggest that God could actualize another possible world simultaneously with or after the actual world. That’s a mistake. Typically, by a possible world, philosophers mean a maximal state of affairs that is broadly logically possible. So only one possible world can be actual. What you should be asking is whether God could have brought about a better world than this one and, if so, what that implies for God’s perfect goodness.

Now since every world includes God’s existence and God is infinitely good, every possible world seems to be equally good in virtue of God’s existence. Assessing the comparative worth of possible worlds requires us to consider in addition to God’s existence the existence of the things God has created. In that case, rather than weigh the comparative goodness of maximal states of affairs, which may be impossible to do, we may as well focus of the created orders that God might make and ask about their comparative goodness.

Still, a fateful ambiguity exists concerning the notion of a possible “world” in the context of this question. God is confronted with a collection of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom concerning how free creatures would act in any circumstances in which God might place them. These counterfactuals are true prior to and, hence, independent of the divine decree of a created order. As a result, there are created orders which are broadly logically possible for God to create but which are infeasible for Him in view of the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that are true. So what we’re really interested in is, not possible worlds, but rather feasible worlds that God might have decreed and brought about. Could He have decreed a better feasible world than ours?

As you note, I have elsewhere suggested that God’s overriding desire, in light of His universal salvific will as expressed in the New Testament, is to bring about a created order in which an optimal balance between saved and lost obtains, where optimality is a function of both absolute numbers and the ratio between saved and lost.[1] Not only is it not implausible that such optimally balanced worlds are among God’s options, but it is not implausible that the actual world is among them. In view of the eternal consequences, it’s hard to conceive that any factor could be as important to God in assessing the value of feasible worlds. This might suggest that the goodness of such optimally balanced worlds might just swamp any value in less than optimally balanced worlds. In particular, earthly evils might be justly permitted in order to obtain the optimal balance of saved and lost. Such optimally balanced worlds would be the best feasible worlds.

Nevertheless, even if we limit God’s options to worlds featuring such an optimal balance between saved and lost, there might be other considerations making one such world preferable to another, for example, greater sanctification of the saved in one world as opposed to another.

In that case there may be a limitless hierarchy of ever better worlds from which God chooses one. But then, for any world that God picks, there is always a better world He could have chosen instead. So what should God do?

Intriguingly, this question overlaps with secular decision theory, which is a field of study exploring both normative and descriptive accounts of how decisions are rationally made, whether individually or collectively (game theory). Decision theorists point out that general principles of decision-making can be overridden in specific cases by countervailing considerations. For example, it would normally be better to choose a better option if such an option is available. But that general principle is subverted when one is confronted with a limitless hierarchy of ever better options. Then one finds oneself in the admittedly uncomfortable situation of choosing an option even though one knows that a better option is always available. In the literature this is called “satisficing.”

If God “satisfices,” is His moral goodness thereby impugned? Analogous situations suggest not. For example, Dean Zimmerman of Rutgers University imagines the case of an ideal gambler whose bets are a function of his confidence in the outcome: the more confident he is, the more money he bets. So imagine that someone is willing to bet him that 2+2 = 5. In this case he has to pick some finite amount of money to bet, knowing that he could always bet more. But his choice of a certain amount to bet is no expression of a lack of confidence in the outcome.

Even more analogous to God’s case would be the case of an ideal philanthropist who can bestow any finite amount of money on his beneficiaries. The fact that he must pick some finite amount, always knowing that he could have picked a greater amount, is no infraction of his generosity. In the same way, God’s choice of a good world to create is no detraction from His goodness, even though by the very nature of the case He could have chosen a better world instead.

What worlds would be minimally acceptable to God? Where is the cut-off line? The answer will depend on our assumptions about the values whereby the options are ranked. Are they such as to permit us to delineate options which are “good enough” from those that are not? As mentioned above, it seems to me plausible that the salvific balance displayed by various feasible worlds will be of paramount importance to God in the ranking of worlds. There are options displaying so terrible a balance between saved and lost that they are unacceptable to God. If all the worlds available to God that are inhabited by moral agents were such worlds, then God would choose simply to refrain from creating any of them and might well choose to refrain from creating altogether.

“Worlds” that are not choice worthy will be so because they are inconsistent with God’s nature as a perfectly just and loving being. Seen in this light, such options are not really possible worlds after all, since they are incompatible with God’s nature and so are not actualizable. Indeed, given that all feasible worlds must be consistent with God’s nature, it is not clear that there are worlds exhibiting a minimally acceptable salvific balance in comparison with worlds having a better balance. God necessarily chooses a world which exhibits an optimal balance between saved and lost, and choosing any such world is an equally good action. So it is very far from clear that there are, in fact, worlds that just barely escape being unacceptable. Any world which is consistent with God’s perfectly just and loving nature is acceptable and choice worthy. If there is an infinite hierarchy of ever better feasible worlds, God may freely satisfice by decreeing any one of those exhibiting an optimal balance between saved and lost. All such worlds are good enough.