Enhanced Agency Theodicy: An Eschatological Solution to the Problem of Evil

Enhanced agency theodicy is a new afterlife-centred solution to the problem of evil which I show has greater explanatory power than two influential rivals, the soul-making and redemptive suffering theodicies of John Hick and Eleanore Stump. Derived solely from the concept of an omniperfect God, enhanced agency theodicy is also potentially compatible with concepts of God, human nature and the afterlife in Islam. I suggest that a formulation of Islamic theism that incorporates the theodicy might be a good candidate for a Graham Oppy-type inference to the best explanation evaluation of naturalism and theism as worldviews.

Central to this solution is a good-maximising view of God’s purpose and an analysis of the kind of ideal world such a God might be expected to create: a realm of enhanced agency that fully realises the scope for agency of self-aware embodied beings with freedom and goodness of will. An earthly life with the freedom to set our wills towards good or evil is created to test our capacity to flourish in this dynamic afterlife of transformative choices where neuro-physical flexibility and a durably good will is needed to thrive. A human nature that is innately good yet potentially bad depending on how we use free will and an ungovernable natural order that constrains the power of organised human evil to corrupt this nature are two conditions of earthly life that contribute to bringing as many as possible into a realm of enhanced agency and so maximise its goodness. This account of human nature and our freedom to preserve or corrupt its essential goodness combines Robert Kane’s neuroscientific theory of free will with a dualistic holism in which the immaterial dimension of our beings is the source of our goodness of will, moral sense and desire for truth.

Enhanced agency theodicy is contrasted with the solutions of Hick and Stump with respect to four main difficulties concerning the role of the afterlife in explanations of evil: 1) the normatively relativised logical argument from evil challenges how heavenly union with God could be supremely good as a personal relationship when God contrives and sustains the conditions of our earthly suffering so that we may be rescued from these conditions by means of and for the sake of personal relationship with God; 2) problems of heavenly freedom contest whether affirming the supreme value of a heaven where we are not free to make good and evil choices can be made consistent with appealing to the great value of such freedom when justifying the creation of a world with moral evil; 3) problems of hell and post-mortem suffering focus on whether belief in a perfectly good God is consistent with the continuation of suffering in forms of afterlife outside of heaven; 4) the fate of creatures without free will concerns the post-mortem existence of young children, the severely cognitively disabled and animals in theodicies that make free will central to achieving a good afterlife. Hick and Stump fail to evade these problems due to their reliance on Christian concepts of divine love, human fallenness and heavenly redemption through union with God, while enhanced agency theodicy’s construction outside of this framework of ideas provides for coherent answers to each of these challenges.

The study endorses Graham Oppy’s proposal to progress the debate on God and evil within an inference to the best explanation comparison of naturalism and theism as rival worldviews. To minimise epistemic bias Oppy’s methodology is amended to ensure no particular worldview is presupposed when explanations are evaluated. To prepare future work to incorporate enhanced agency theodicy into a wider formulation of theism for comparison with naturalism, further research is needed to investigate its potential compatibility with Islamic conceptions of divinity, human nature and the afterlife.