The theory can also absorb almost any necessary truth you might propose (if it is well justified). Maybe there is a necessary criteria that places some limits on the worlds that exist but that there is at least a tendency to create worlds in spite of some evil.

> it must involve more actualized worlds than the MWI entails.

yes I presume so.

His argument for (3) is based upon (1) and (2) but doesn’t follow. Some (say Blake Ostler) would say that for God to be really free God must be able to choose evil but doesn’t. He thus confuses two different senses of “won’t.” Admittedly this might cause a problem for some non-deterministic forms of free will. But it definitely won’t for the Libertarian. The problem is that he’s taking “won’t” in a strong sense of necessarily will not.

But this then gets one into fairly subtle distinctions in the free will debate – not all of which everyone will agree upon.

Regarding your argument, I wasn’t quite sure what all the variables you listed in the comment you linked to were supposed to represent. So I skimmed through most of the comments. Earlier on you had a comment that seemed to have the key assumption.

the god seems to want people to exist even if they suffer terribly and want to die (think of the marginal case)

That might work but ends up with the counterargument of asking why it is good for some to exist and not others. I think it only works if God must actualize all possibilities because that is an intrinsic good. (Which is what I think you’re going after) Sort of using the Multiple Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics to resolve the problem of evil. Although if we are talking about a classically omnipotent God it must involve more actualized worlds than the MWI entails. (Since MWI entails just the actualization of all worlds compatible with the laws of physics – with an omnipotent God one must entail the actualization of all logically possible worlds).

In effect one has to discard the distinction between the actual and the possible. This might be an evil world but we’re just lucky enough to not be in a really evil one but unfortunate enough to not be in a really good one.

The question is whether this could be reconciled to other typical theistic beliefs. I suspect that most Christians would be pretty uncomfortable with such a view. But it does solve the problem of evil if actualizing possibility is an intrinsically higher good than any evil in what is actualized. A big if.

As a side note, it’s interesting to me that research into feasible nanotechnology is bumping into something like the question of whether persuasion or force best describes promising methodologies for bottom-up molecular assembly.

http://transfigurism.org/community/blogs/lincoln_cannon/archive/2008/05/06/4452.aspx

The reason why I think freedom is a successful solution to the logical problem of evil is that if God creates even one agent who is free then that agent can choose something against God’s will. In that case evil can exist and thus freedom explains evil logically. The reason why I call anything more the evidentiary problem of evil is because you now move to particular evils like natural evils that aren’t logically necessary.

Now your point about terminology is fair. And one I agree with for the most part, as the examples I gave shows. The evidentiary problem of evil is more for more or less successful theodicies and asking, “why these evils.”

The problem with the free will defense is that even with respect to logical evils it can’t explain them all away. But to simply deal with the logical contradiction of the problem of evil it’s fairly successful in my view. The problem is that it doesn’t explain enough.

Now if one expands the free will defense to the universe as a whole then it still doesn’t work since you end up with the Deist position. As soon as you have an interventionist God then clearly you reject any kind of free will defense that could resolve the problem of evil.

My own view of theodicy is that one has to reject logical omnipotence. Of course Mormons did this already by rejecting creation ex nihilo which logical entails the rejection of logical omnipotence. Now as I mentioned limits on God by itself doesn’t provide a successful theodicy. At best it points to where a theodicy is possible. The typical (although not universal) Mormon position is that God is limited in how he can help other intelligences progress or grow. So God is limited in preventing evil due to what exists independence of him and the nature of their existence. Then you are left with evidentiary evils like earthquakes. The skeptic can say that it seems implausible that many evils are necessary for growth.

The former argues that individual ‘free will’ is no grounds for a theodicy, what one must instead appeal to is collective freedom or sovereignty. The latter post argues that “evils that it seems like a free will defense simply can’t address” are still a form of logical, not evidential, problem of evil. It’s merely a terminological point, but you shouldn’t use needlessly misleading terminology.