Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

Why Does God Allow Bad Things to Happen, #2209

I am in a hotel in San Jose. Tomorrow I will be interviewed for a long time for the documentary on the Fed. The strategy is that if you keep a camera on me for 4 hours, surely I’ll say something profound.

This post is not going to be bulletproof by any stretch, but I went through a stream of consciousness yesterday and I thought some of you might appreciate hearing my views on some big issues in a slightly different way.

I believe Dr. Pangloss was almost right. This isn’t the best of all possible worlds, but it’s the best of all possible worlds that God has the power to design. He made it as good as it could possibly be, subject to humans having free will. And He decided (and I agree with Him) that the world is better with free will than without.

So when someone says something like, “How could a benevolent God have allowed the Holocaust?!” I think that’s a rather ill-posed question. I would say, “OK, what would you have changed? You have absolutely no idea what the ramifications would be, if (say) Hitler hadn’t been born, or if he had been struck by lightning, etc. You are simply assuming that God was sloppy and could have retained all the good things about the universe, but without the regrettable necessity of allowing the Holocaust to unfold as it did. Do you really think you are more upset about innocent people being killed–people whom you probably only know about as a statistic in history book–than does their Creator and Father, who actually watched them die?”

My understanding is that God designed the very fabric of the universe–from picking the charge on an electron and deciding how much mass/energy to create at the time of the Big Bang (assuming the cosmologists are right)–knowing beforehand what choices people would make. So ultimately He makes the best of the Holocaust and other awful events, but yes there is a reason (actually an infinity of reasons) that they had to happen. I believe that people who want to spend eternity with God will do so, and when they die they will understand why He made the choices He did. We will then say, “Ohhhhhh, thank you” when we see what would have happened had He allowed history to unfold any other way.

Now my views raise two objections or concerns, which I’ll briefly address:

OBJECTION 1: So it doesn’t help anything if we choose not to sin?

No, this is wrong. You do make the world a worse place when you sin. Conversely, when you obey God’s laws you make the world a better place. Remember, God has made the world as good as it can possibly be, given our free choices. If you are familiar with game theory, it’s as if God moves first, designing the physical universe and all its attributes, and deciding how many souls there will be etc. Then He can look ahead and see all the choices people will make in that particular timeline. He does this for all possible universes, and then actually creates the universe that is best. So one of the constraints He faces is our free choices in the “subgames” after He has moved and designed the universe and its laws of transformation. Every time you sin, you close off avenues to God, forcing the universe into an even less optimal path. When you obey God’s will, you give Him more to work with.

The choices you make really are free; you really do have free will. God doesn’t cheat. He won’t force you to love Him or obey Him; He doesn’t want slaves or dupes, unlike Satan (and unlike some religious leaders). But He does know beforehand what you will do in every possible circumstance, because God is outside time. Every moment of history in our universe’s timeline is the manifestation of one unified decision, a single action (in the Misesian sense) that God performs to create the best of all possible worlds.

OBJECTION 2: Why does God allow sin to be so painful?

This one used to trip me up for a long time. Sure, we understand that unless people have the option of sinning, we really can’t have free will. But why couldn’t the world work such that the worst you could do would be to cause someone momentary pain? And then a forcefield kicks in, shielding the person from any serious damage?

Well, given how complex and interrelated everything in the universe is–how scientists can tell you that life wouldn’t work (at least as we know it) if some of the physical constants were changed by 0.01% etc.–I think it’s a bit sophomoric to say, “Let’s keep all the good stuff, like love and poetry and the first season of 24–but change all the stuff we don’t like.” The point is, that is impossible. You can’t just tweak things a little bit. The present state of the world is directly tied to the initial configuration, whether or not you believe in physical determinism.

The other thing is that we humans have naturally adjusted our expectations to think that “the worst thing in the world” is, well, pretty awful. But we can certainly imagine universes in which being waterboarded would be child’s play. For example, remember Jabba’s sentence to Luke and Han? I don’t remember the exact wording, but he said they would be slowly digested in the belly of a monster for hundreds (thousands?) of years. Now that sounds pretty bad! We can imagine cynics in the Star Wars universe saying, “If George Lucas loved us, why would he allow such awful possibilities?” And then a Lucastian would say, “But look at how cool our world is! We have Jedi knights and get to blow up Imperial walkers.”

I’m trying to be humorous but I’m dead serious. If the worst thing in the world were a wet willy, people would say things like, “I can’t believe God allows such horrors! I just saw on the news that in Uganda, soldiers held a man down, got in line, and gave him 20 wet willies in a row–in both ears at once!”