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Is it wrong for God to create persons? A response to Monaghan

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Abstract

Some have put forward a normative principle that it is immoral and highly disrespectful to create free, rational creatures (like human beings) without their prior consent. (See, for instance, Monaghan in Int J Philos Relig 88(2):181–195, 2020) If true, this principle constitutes a new argument against the existence of God since it is logically impossible to acquire the consent of someone before they are created. Thus, God’s existence is taken to be incompatible with creating any persons. I shall examine this normative claim and show that it is not plausible. In the first place, it fails to meet three criteria that are commonplace to the “logical problem of evil.” In the second place, the principle has clear counterexamples that show many plausible exceptions that could justify God in creating persons.

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Notes

  1. Monaghan (2020).

  2. For reasons he does not provide, Monaghan still affirms the soundness of Mackie’s argument, see Monaghan, 182. For the sake of this argument, however, he is willing to grant that Mackie’s argument is unsound.

  3. Monaghan, “God* Does Not Exist.” Monaghan uses the phrase of a being’s “perfectly moral character,” which I shall echo in this paper. I think it would be more accurate to say, “morally perfect character,” but since nothing of consequence turns on the point, I’ll defer to Monaghan’s verbiage.

  4. Monaghan’s normative principle overlooks the possibility that the scenario may be an overwhelmingly objectively positive good for person y. For example, it is hard to imagine that y has been disrespected if x freely and knowingly pays off all of y’s debts that total over $50,000, and all of the other conditions specified above have been met. My further discussion of Monaghan’s principle brings out the implicit prima facie nature of the principle’s intended moral force or that it is a defeasible moral principle with implied exceptions to the stated rule.

  5. Monaghan, “God* Does Not Exist,” 186.

  6. The quotations around my use of “disrespect” and “disrespectful” throughout my article intend to convey that these actions conform for Monaghan’s definition of “disrespect,” not that they actually are disrespectful.

  7. The reasons Monaghan’s argument is against God* stem from his idiosyncratic ideas about the origins of the idea of God and his concern that the traditional attributes of God lead to incoherence. See Monaghan, 182–84.

  8. Hume (1993).

  9. Mill (1874), Ducasse (1953, chap. 15), Flew (1955), Mackie (1955) and McCloskey (1960).

  10. Compare how this type of argument is described by Pike (1963).

  11. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” 200.

  12. Mackie, 200.

  13. The logical problem of evil is exclusively framed as one of logical consistency in Beebe, (2005), Tooley, (2013, Sects. 1.2 & 2).

  14. Two of the most prominent accounts of the evidential argument from evil are Rowe (1979) and Draper (1989). For some evidence of the general consensus that the evidential problem of evil acknowledges that theism is logically compatible with some evil see the following reputable encyclopedia articles: Tooley, “The Problem of Evil”; Trakakis (2013).

  15. This is a central tenet of Rowe’s “friendly atheism.” See Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” 339–41.

  16. If someone believes that the essential difference between the logical and evidential formulations of the problem of evil is simply that former is logically deductive and the latter is probabilistic, then Monaghan’s argument cannot even meet this criterion if it is to maintain prima facie plausibility.

  17. Some modern accounts of the goodness of being include: MacDonald (1991), Delio, (2009) and Oderberg (2014).

  18. Augustine (2021). See also Augustine (1992, bk. 13.1).

  19. Anselm (1995).

  20. Aquinas (1920).

  21. For example, Swinburne (1998, Chap. 3) and Plantinga, (2002, Chap. 2).

  22. Adams (1989).

  23. Monaghan, “God* Does Not Exist,” 188. An anonymous reviewer helpfully points out that the EMT case seems to be in tension with Monaghan’s application of the principle to a surprise party (189), which he takes to be a morally wrong instance of “disrespect.” This is perplexing given that surprise parties seem to have no significant moral downside. This example seems to support an absolutist reading of Monaghan’s principle, rather than a prima facie or defeasible approach to it. I’ve opted to work with the prima facie reading of Monaghan’s principle because it is the most charitable to his overall argument in my view.

  24. Monaghan, 184.

  25. Monaghan, 187.

  26. See, for example, Parfit (1982), Parfit (1984, pt. 4), Shiffrin (1999), Harman (2004) and Roberts and Wasserman (2009).

  27. A notable exception is Adams (1972).

  28. Similarly, Richard Swinburne argues that God’s moral obligation to His creatures is analogous to the moral obligations of carers for their dependents. See Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, chap. 12.

  29. See Adams, “Must God Create the Best?,” 320. I have excluded Adams’s condition that the created person does not exist in the best of all possible worlds because I believe that this condition is trivially satisfied because there is no best possible world, and it is a complication that does not need to be addressed in this paper.

  30. I direct interested readers to the work of Marilyn Adams who attempts to answer this type of question in her provocative and insightful book, Adams (2000).

  31. Specifically, I have in mind the validity of “noseeum inferences” and the applicability of skeptical theism. See the following influential essays and the vast literature that responds to them: Wykstra (1984), Alston (1996) and Bergmann (2001). My preferred approach to skeptical theism is given in DePoe (2014), DePoe, (2017), DePoe, (forthcoming).

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    John M. DePoe

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DePoe, J.M. Is it wrong for God to create persons? A response to Monaghan. Int J Philos Relig 93, 227–237 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09862-5

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