Authored by: Mitchell LeBlanc.

In a previous article I introduced Mark Walker’s Anthropic Argument Against the Existence of God. Shortly thereafter, RK, from ChoosingHats, posted a response. The criticism was harsh as RK even went so far as to call the argument “dumb” and “ignorant.” As is usually the case with interactions between myself and the folks at ChoosingHats, the conversation deepened in the comment threads following the post. In this article, I hope to reintroduce the Anthropic Argument and offer responses to the objections raised by the critics.

The Argument

Assume we can rank moral beings on a scale from 1-10 with 10 being reserved for morally perfect (God) natures and 0 for perfectly evil (Satan, for example) natures. Suppose further that human beings are ranked at 5, neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil.

Let S represent the set of worlds comprised of being with morally better agents than humans, that is, S is a composite of all those worlds in which all moral agents score higher on the moral continuum than humans do in the actual world:

(1) God is omnipotent

(2) So, it is possible for God to actualize a member of S

(3) God is omniscient

(4) So, if it is possible for God to actualize a member of S, then God knows that He can actualize a member of S

(5) So, God knows that He can actualize a member of S

(6) God is morally perfect

(7) So, a morally perfect being will¹ attempt to maximize the likelihood of moral  goodness and minimize the likelihood of moral evil in the world

(8) If God knows He can actualize a member of S, then every world in which God exists is a member of S

(9) Therefore, every world in which God exists is a member of S

(10) Therefore, if God exists in the actual world then the actual world is a member of S

(11) The actual world is not a member of S

(12) Therefore, God does not exist

Objections

We shall now look at some objections:

Standards

The initial uproar at ChoosingHats centered around this idea of “holding God accountable.” This objection can best be summarized by directly quoting RK²:

Look at the assumption required for the second half of this sentence.“creating humans is not the morally best action”. Says who? By what standard? As usual, I think we can guess what that is.

Walker suggests that God is morally culpable for creating human beings with defective natures (defective in comparison to God’s).

Is He, now? Culpable to who? Oh, wait. That’s the assumption! The same assumption all of these dumb arguments make. God is answerable to man. That’s funny, here I thought Scripture answered that sort of ridiculousness.

See, man always believes that he can pass judgment on God. That he is morally autonomous. Scripture says differently.

By what standard is creating humans “not the morally best action”? That is the problem. You should know Christian theology quite well enough to understand that God is definitionally good. His actions, by virtue of being His actions, are definitionally good.

As I stated in the comments following RK’s response, the argument is not attempting to suggest that God is culpable to anyone but himself. Rather, the argument is making a consistency check in asking: if God exists, and his moral character were perfect, could he do action X?

RK states that the Christian God is definitionally good, but I am sure he would want to stay away from insinuating that God’s actions are arbitrarily good. To take RK’s statement at face value, that God’s actions are good because they are God’s actions, obviously raises the following question: Can a morally perfect God perform any action, and would that action thereby be considered good? Most Christian theists are quick to deny this, as it renders God’s goodness entirely arbitrary. Rather, it is stated that there are certain things that God cannot do by virtue of his perfect moral nature. For example, God cannot will that rape become morally permissible. It is claimed that God’s condemning of rape is not an arbitrary decree of God, but rather one that flows out of his perfectly loving nature. But how does this apply to the Anthropic Argument? Well, if RK wants to state that God can do whatever he wants and that whatever is thereby rendered “good” it seems that he is in some theological trouble. Presumably, RK would not want to embrace this line of reasoning and would affirm something similar to the idea that goodness flows necessarily out of God’s nature. But then what is his objection? In response to the statement found in the abstract of Walker’s paper, that “creating humans is not the morally best action” RK retorts by saying that God is definitionally good. Dismissing the idea of arbitrariness in God’s decrees it seems then that RK must be affirming something similar to:

If God exists his actions are always the morally best, and thus, creating humans is the morally best action

This is clearly question-begging, since we are discussing precisely what God’s nature would and would not allow him to do. This statement, if endorsed by RK, would merely affirm that God did create human beings and be utterly fallacious.

Perhaps RK would want to argue, in true presuppositionalist fashion, that if the conclusion of the argument holds, the terms “good”, “evil”, etc. lose their meaning. Of course, in the philosophy of religion throughout the literature on the various problems of evil, we see what is called “bracketing”, as explained by Mark Walker himself in a personal correspondence:

…theorists may agree that the Holocaust is evil but not agree why it is evil. Utilitarians would appeal to its massive disutility, whereas Kantians would explain the evil in terms of violations of the categorical imperative. I take it that there will be agreement that the Chumans³ lack some of the goodness we enjoy, but theorists may disagree on what this goodness amounts to: happiness or the development of intellectual or moral excellence, for instance. I am not suggesting that there are not serious disagreements about how to understand these terms, or that there are not serious philosophical issues here that need to be resolved, but I do believe that these disagreements can be bracketed for the purposes of my argument. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but I do take some comfort in the fact that most discussions of the problem of evil take a similar position.

Brain Knapp of ChoosingHats also had some comments:

Mitch said: “The principle of course is that God, being perfectly good, creates the best possible world. And if it is not logically possibly to create a world without evil (free will defense), he creates the world with the best ratio of good to evil.”

I will ask the same question I asked earlier, as it applies to your summation of the author’s quote … “according to what standard?” It is paramount that any moral evaluation of God (I shudder to even say such a thing) take into account the proper *standard* of evaluation. In this case, the author presumes that the current world is not the “best world”. Well, I will ask it again – “best according to what standard?”

What has yet to be demonstrated is that the “best” possible world is a world where moral goodness is maximized and moral evil is minimized. It may be “best” according to your standard, or Walker’s, or Leibniz’s, but that’s entirely irrelevant to God, of course.

Unless you have an objective moral standard that even God is held accountable to, that is.

He further states:

However, it has not yet been demonstrated that *not* maximizing moral goodness is, itself, a morally *imperfect* action. I mean, it may be a morally imperfect action “according to Mitch”, but if Mitch is the standard being used to evaluate such actions, then (as RK has stated already) what is being argued is a strawman.

Brian’s objection follows the same line as RK’s. I responded:

Firstly, the author is not presuming that this world is not the best possible, it’s demonstrably not the best world possible unless someone can present some logical impossibility in God creating the type of world Walker proposes. It clearly is a greater conceivable world (which gives us our modal possibility). Greater according to who’s standard? Is anyone actually going to argue that a world with more evil and less goodness is the greatest possible world? Again, we can deal with this counterfactually: what type of world would God’s nature desire? If one is going to answer that the current world is such a world, the questions of “why?” and “which characteristics make it desirable?” and “why are these not able to be employed in a demonstrably greater world?” arise.

Also, Brian has asked why if a being possesses the capability to maximize moral goodness, but does not, that being is thereby referred to as “morally imperfect”. He’s inquiring, like his peers, to the standard being utilized. The response is of course the same as it was to RK:

…theorists may agree that the Holocaust is evil but not agree why it is evil.

It is also addressed analogically, if as a human being you had the ability to stop the creation of a severely deficient race of people that you knew would only harm each other and themselves and you do not, can one conclude that you are morally good let alone morally perfect? There may be many different reasons for why this is the wrong thing to do, Utilitarianism, De-ontological and even Divine Command Ethics would have an answer and this perhaps shows some prima facie intrinsic quality of evil. With regard to a world, we can perhaps even extract from our idea of perfection, namely God, and ask what does he possess that a world might possess? We might say that God is loving, so a world with love is good, as such a world with more love than non-love is better than a world with less love than non-love etc.

On a somewhat related note I will say that given my recent reading of Swinburne’s material, the idea that there may be no best possible world seems more and more cogent. That is to say, assume a world in which having 5 ontological equivalent beings is good, a world containing 6 may be better and so on and so forth ad infinitum.  Given this, it is logically impossible that God choose the “best possible world” since there is no such thing. As such, it would follow that God merely (perhaps arbitrarily) actualizes a world. But this does not absolve him of moral duty, for his nature is still in effect and he must create a world in accordance with his nature.

God’s Attributes

RK has also expressed concern that criticisms of God put forth to the reformed tradition do not take his attributes into proper account. As explained by RK, the reformed version of Divine Simplicity differs greatly from the understand employed by traditional philosophers. For the reformed tradition, Divine Simplicity means merely that we cannot speak of God’s attributes as devoid from his being. That is, a God who is purported to be omnipotent but not omniscient is not the concept of God being held by the reformed believer.

This comes up in a disagreement with the Anthropic Argument. Does the Anthropic Argument fail to take into account the entirety of God’s attributes? Well, it certainly focuses on omnipotence, omniscience and moral perfection. There are other attributes which the Anthropic Argument does not introduce because any good deduction is one that only introduces what is needed for deduction. That is to say, should a contradiction be found between the aforementioned three attributes and the existence of human beings, then any being which possesses the three attributes and is purported to have created human beings cannot exist. Now, should one of God’s other unmentioned attributes directly effect the manner in which any of the aforementioned three is enacted, then we certainly do need to take account of them.

Chris Bolt raised the objection that in a world where God creates ontological equivalents rather than ontological deficients (a state of affairs proposed by Walker) he is unable to display his wrath, and this necessarily conflicts with the fact that wrathfulness is a part of God’s nature. Bolt states:

God is the Creator who reveals His glory in what He has made by displaying, among other things, his wrath. Now can you tell me what a world without evil might look like where our just and righteous God is still able to display His wrath and thus also the riches of His mercy and grace?

To which I responded:

It is important to note, though, that Walker suggests that there might still be evil in a world in which God has created ontologically equivalent beings but it certainly would be a different ‘type’ of evil than what we see in our Universe. In this possible world, perhaps it is still possible for God to display his grace.

One seemingly obvious example is that instead of moral wrath or moral grace, the world might contain natural wrath and natural grace. The idea that Bolt presents sounds strikingly similar to some East Asian theories of morality, wherein good exists only because of its contrast with evil and vice versa. Perhaps it is the case that if no evil existed, then no good could exist. This might entail that God, if he did not create a world of sentient beings, was not intrinsically good. Surely this is absurd, for if there is to be any intrinsic goodness in the Christian tradition, God himself is a prime candidate.

A commenter by the name of Justin made a further reply about a characteristic of God being overlooked:

God’s ultimate purpose is His own Glory. This is the premise that the Bible presents, yet you insist on putting forth the argument that He is restrained only to maximizing the moral goodness in the world, and with the presence of morally corrupt beings it could not be the case. That is a strawman argument. God is the definition of what is good, What is good is His glory, He can use morally corrupt beings for His purposes. Even though they may do these things for evil purposes, God is doing it for Good purposes. Therefore it He does not compromise any aspect of His perfection.

Let us briefly introduce the scriptural justification for this point (Isaiah 43:1-7 NASB):

But now, thus says the Lord, your creator, O Jacob, and He who formed you, O Israel, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine! When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they will not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, nor will the flame burn you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior; I have given Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in your place. Since you are precious in My sight, since you are honored and I love you, I will give other men in your place and other peoples in exchange for your life. Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and gather you from the west. I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring My sons from afar, and My daughters from the ends of the earth, everyone who is called by My name, and whom I have created for My glory, whom I have formed even whom I have made

And a brief explanation by John Piper:

But this means that when God says, He made us for His glory, He does not mean He made us so that He could become more glorious in Himself. Instead what Isaiah 43:7 means is that He created us to display His glory, that is, glory might be known and praised. This is the goal of God that we must be aligned within our hearts and actions if we hope to escape His wrath at the judgment.

Now, with our understanding aligned we can examine Justin’s comment. Recall when he stated:

God is the definition of what is good, What is good is His glory, He can use morally corrupt beings for His purposes. Even though they may do these things for evil purposes, God is doing it for Good purposes

We want to be careful not to slip into calling God’s goodness wholly arbitrary, so perhaps we should not read this with a “God can do whatever he wants and that whatever is good because God did it”. Further, this statement seems to miss the point. If the argument holds, then the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of morally corrupt beings, and as such the above statement simply begs the question. What seems to be required here is an argument showing that the only way in which God can glorify himself is to create morally corrupt human beings.

If it is possible that God can be glorified in a world with ontologically equivalent beings (they can still pay homage to their creator) then the argument still holds.

Equivalence

Chris Bolt brings up two other objections:

A being ontologically equivalent to God would be indistinguishable from Him and hence at the very least is difficult to propose excepting that such a being is created at which point it is creation rather than Creator which not only serves to distinguish it from God and apparently resolve the difficulty but also then makes it ontologically non-equivalent to God… Further, God created humans morally perfect, a claim which is assumed to be false throughout the argument.

In response to the first objection, I stated:

I see no reason to accept that a being that is ontologically equivalent to God would be indistinguishable from God. You’re invoking Leibniz’s principle of indiscernibles and this was actually the first objection I had hoped to raise against the argument. However, the created being would have, as a property of its existence, at least contingency in that he relies upon the first Creator God for his existence. As such, he cannot be identifiable with the Creator God because they would not share all properties in common. You argue that this no longer makes it an ontological equivalent but this is not true according to Walker’s definition. When Walker states “ontological equivalent” he means equivalent in omnipotence, omniscience and moral goodness. I see no such problem once this definition is understood.

and in response to the second:

As for God creating humans morally perfect, are you suggesting that God made human beings with precisely the same moral nature that He has? If this is true, it should be as impossible for man to “fall” as it is for God to “sin”. If this is not the case, then in which manner have human beings been created morally perfect? It seems that there is still some distinction between the moral nature of God and the moral nature of a morally perfect human being.

Clearly, I disagree with Chris on both accounts. I think my first objection is clear so I would like to address the second in further depth.

If God is a 10 on the moral scale we introduced earlier, and is thus morally perfect and human beings were also created as a 10. Then it seems we have a problem, for if human beings share the same moral nature as God but did indeed “fall into sin”, it is logically possible that God also fall into sin. This seems absolutely absurd, God’s morally perfect nature renders God unable to sin/fall and if this is true and human beings share the same moral nature as God (moral perfection), they too should be unable to sin/fall. Clearly though, according to Christian tradition, man did fall so it follows that his moral nature is not equivalent to God’s.

Conclusion

Though I expect that my interlocutors will have further objections, I trust that having a compendium of the topic will be useful in the future.

___________________

¹There was some disagreement over the usage of the term “should” in the previous formulation of the argument. The usage does mean the same as “will” so in order to avoid any discussion on that issue I’ve amended the argument so that it includes “will” rather than “should.”

²These comments were made specifically to the form of the argument which utilized the term “should.” I am only assuming that RK would apply the same objections to this formulation as well.

³Chumans are a proposed race of beings engineered by human beings that have severe deficiencies and a propensity towards violence. It is utilized as an analogy to outline precisely why God’s creating of human beings may be morally abhorrent. In the same manner that we would be morally culpable for creating such a deficient race, God is culpable for creating beings deficient in relation to himself.