Tomand Isabelasked:

To what extent does conscience prove the existence of God?

Tomand Isabelalso asked:

What is the connection between free will and the problem of evil?

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There is no question of the pangs of conscience being sufficient to prove the existence of God. There
is a question, however, of whether the felt "lure" to approve (or disapprove) of freely chosen actions is
entirely understandable in terms of socially ingrained and reinforced habits.

"Freely chosen" implies the reality of alternative possible courses of action competing for one's
adoption. This invites the question of the status of possibility itself. Is "possibility" a mere word with no
real reference? That is, is everything determined? Could nothing be other than the way it is now given
the way everything was? If everything is determined, then there is only one logical modality, not three.
There is just the necessary: "possible" refers to nothing real, while the impossible is reducible to
negative necessity.

Such is one implication of the denial of freedom. If freedom to choose among competing possibilities
is real, then possibilities cannot be nothing, even if they have no agency of their own (because they
are by definition not actual). But then where do possibilities "reside," and how do they get actualized
in the world of actual things?

From Plato to Whitehead there have been philosophers who have hypothesized God as the answer
to the last question. God envisions all possibilities and guides their actualization in things. In the case
of human beings, God's guidance can enter into their conscious, self-reflective awareness. An initial
aim from God would be felt as a lure to the greatest good possible at each actor's choice-point, but he
or she would be under no compulsion to act for or against that feeling. God, according to such a
philosophy, is therefore the primary, nonsociological, nonbiological source of the feelings we
associate with the goals we entertain, the feelings we call "conscience."

The problem of evil is that of reconciling the great goodness and great power of God with the
existence of great evil. The "free-will defense" of God's goodness is that human beings, who are free
to choose among competing possibilities, are indictable — and therefore God is not — for the evil
consequences of their freely chosen actions. Embedded in the problem is the presupposition that
God is the creator, not only of the contingent order of this cosmos, but also of the sheer existence of
the things ordered: if God wanted to, God could literally annihilate the whole realm of nondivine
beings, i.e., "turn it off" as we would flick off an electric lamp. This notion seems to follow logically
from the idea that God is the exnihilator (to borrow a term coined by Mortimer Adler). That is, God
does not merely transform and rearrange pre-existing things, but rather brings things into existence
without anything and from nothing (ex nihilo) and who can interrupt natural processes. In such a
cosmology, it would seem that God is morally indictable for any evil that may result from the
interaction of created things, insofar as they exist and have the natures that they do only because of
his creative fiat. The traditional free-will defense therefore only lessens the length of the indictment
without reducing its gravity.

The God of classical theistic philosophy is certainly not responsible for the evil that men do, for they
freely undertake to do it. (Let us grant that the world is better with free human beings in it than it
would be without them and that God could not have made free human agents without incurring the
risk that they would bring some evil into the world.) There is, however, the evil of natural disasters
and the pain and suffering thereby visited upon all members of the animal kingdom. There is the evil
of painful and debilitating disease not traceable to human malice. God the exnihilator could interrupt
such natural processes, and perhaps God does from time to time. There is also the excessive evil
consequences that sometimes follows from mere human error. In the great majority of cases,
however, cases in which God is implored to interrupt them, God does not. Even one instance of
natural evil that a human being was able to prevent, at no risk or cost to himself, but failed to do so
would mar forever that person's reputation. Yes, the careening car that is about to mow down that
unsuspecting three-year-old child has faulty brakes due to human error, but that does not excuse any
passerby from failing to try to move that child out of harm's way if he or she can. Nor does it excuse
God.

There are alternative philosophies of God, however, particularly those inspired by Whitehead's
Process and Reality, in which God is neither the exnihilator of the cosmos nor its miraculous
interrupter. In them, God is the supreme being who incessantly interacts with all other actual entities.
Actual entities are not the gross things we perceive, but submicroscopic processes whose time span
is a fraction of a second. All actual entities other than God partly create their successors at each
choice-point, even as they receive influence and ideals from God and from other things. That is, all of
them, not just human beings, have a degree a freedom to choose among real possibilities. The
cosmos at any given moment is therefore the resultant of the choices of all actual entities, not just
God's choices. God is the primary cause of the contingent order of the cosmos, but God does not
make the cosmos either absolutely or unilaterally. God orchestrates the symphony, but doesn't play
all the instruments.

In short, such philosophy more fully develops the insight of the free-will defense, without which such a
defense is too little, too late. Creativity is characteristic of all things, not an anomaly on a small planet.

Anthony Flood