Reasonable Faith

Guest (Male): Dear Professor Craig, I have been considering your argument that the purpose of life is not primarily human happiness, but the knowledge of God, and that suffering may therefore be permitted in a world ordered toward bringing persons freely to the knowledge of God. I would be very interested in your response to the following possible world's objection. Suppose that a coherent possible world contains free persons, love, meaningful relationships, moral agency, and genuine knowledge of and relationship with God, but contains no cancer, catastrophic suffering, animal suffering, war, or death. I call this world two. If world two is logically possible, what greater good supplied by severe suffering would justify preferring our world one to world two?

Healing, rescue, forgiveness, and redemption seem to be what I call reparative goods. Healing requires illness. Rescue requires danger. Forgiveness requires wrongdoing, and redemption requires a condition from which one needs to be redeemed. Their value within world one can be immense. But does the value of the repair provide a reason for preferring an order in which the damage occurs over one in which it never occurs? I am not arguing that God and evil are logically incompatible, nor that Christ's voluntary suffering is equivalent to involuntary human suffering. My question is only whether the world one slash world two comparison leaves suffering with a necessary greater good that could not also be present or be unnecessary without loss in world two.

Where, in your view, does this possible world's argument fail? With kind regards, Peter, Germany.

Dr. William Lane Craig: It seems to me that your scenario is incomplete, Peter. If it's intended to be a response to my claim that suffering may be permitted in view of God's overriding purpose of bringing people freely to the knowledge of himself. You envision a world two without suffering, but say nothing about moral evil. For all we know, such a world two could be suffused with horrible moral evils that make it less preferable. Indeed, it would have to include moral evil in order to include the great good of Christ's self-sacrificial atoning death for sin. More fundamentally, you failed to tell us how much genuine knowledge of and relationship with God world two contains.

World two would need to have at least as much, if not greater knowledge of and relationship with God than the actual world in order to be preferable to the actual world. If you stipulate that it does, then there is no reason to think that such a world is feasible for God. See my question of the week, 1013 for further discussion.