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Are we completely free? I think not. In the beginning we accepted the Plan of Salvation, which included our agency but we also accepted the whole “Plan”! Receiving our agency, our bodies, the resurrection, the Atonement, Judgement, etc. I believe that with giving us our agency we agreed to all the provisions of the PLAN. GOD would retain the right to intervene when He needed in order to assure that the Plan would unfold according to His will and foresight. Thus our agency is not unrestricted.
If I read you correctly, I think you get cause and effect backwards. Our agency is not something God created and gives us. It is an inherent property of our beings. His plan is adapted to the realities encoded in our being which are ontologically prior to the plan. Knowing us better than we know ourselves, he tells us to do the things that, through internal causation, make us happy and avoid the things that, again, through internal causation, make us miserable. Wickedness never yields happiness, not because God says so or imposes punishments but because the laws of cause and effect encoded in our own being say so. To be sure, God enlarges our scope for acting and revealing through our choices and the consequences of those choices, who we are. And through grace, he opens up a path for us to be more than we ever could be if left wholly to ourselves. But he never limits our ability to choose our own destiny. We get to act on our desires and then reap the effects those desires and related actions naturally produce.
Well, let me qualify that claim. He may sometimes restrict our ability to injure others and destroy their ability to live and know themselves. So in that sense, he may intervene to ensure that we do not disrupt the process that can make us, through grace, what God is. We are not the only real entities in the universe. Other persons and things also exist and also have inherent laws of cause and effect that define them. God is shepherding all of us to the telos that is the most we can obtain given our nature and the choices that reveal that nature.
If by God’s Plan, you mean the set of arrangements he has made for souls to move as far as they are able along a course that terminates in divinity for those who endure to the end of the course, then, yes, God does ensure that no one person (e.g., Satan) is able to disrupt that process and stop others from attaining their telos. But I don’t think his doing that ever limits our ability to make choices. It just sometimes limits our ability to impose outcomes on or to limit the choices of others. Perhaps that is what you mean when you suggest that he assures that the Plan unfold properly.
As you so concisely put it: “What God cannot create, he cannot fundamentally change.” That is a real problem for some forms of Mormon pluralism. Because God does have to change us. Eternally co-existing seperate beings who are fundamentally plural (that is, not the same kind) then cannot be made other than what they are. Fortunately, we are neither God’s creations nor His captives. We are His children. If we are the offspring of God then we are of His kind. And if of His kind, then amenable to Godification. I can only make sense of an emantaionist view of LDS Christianity. That is the final peice. Thank you for your cogent analysis of this final problem.
With respect to your second question, let me begin with Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known statement: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” God’s knowledge of natural law is perfect. So though he never does anything that violates the natural laws inherent in the being of other self-existent entities, he can do many things that appear to us to violate natural law. But that is unsurprising. We can do many things—e.g., fly through the air at 600 miles per hour—that would have been miraculous to people 1000 years ago. So the issue is not God’s power to intercede or, more accurately, appear to intercede in natural processes. The main issue is weighing the costs and benefits of doing so. To what degree are his children helped or harmed, benefited or injured by his interventions?
In our extraordinarily complex universe, almost any intervention will yield a mix of help and harm. As we note in the article, a miraculous cure for one child who suffers from a disease brings great joy to the parents of that child and augmented pain to the parents of another child who suffers from the same disease who is not cured. Curing all children of all diseases and remedying all other apparent ills has an immense cost: it destroys human agency, our capacity to choose our own destiny. We are not in a position to weigh the relative costs and benefits of miracles. God is. As you rightly note, the scriptures record many instances where God intervened to stop evil and many where he did not intervene. So it falls to us to repose in the confident knowledge that he always exercises his power in the way best calculated to foster the joint well-being of his children.
The one intervention you mention that he cannot and does not make is changing the hearts of human beings. The Bible states that God hardened Pharoah’s heart. Joseph Smith changed that to say Pharoah hardened his own heart. God can place us in circumstances that help us understand realities we have denied and would continue to deny but for his intervention. We discuss an example, Alma the Younger’s conversion. But God didn’t change Alma’s heart in that instance. Alma changed his heart once he experienced the natural consequences of the choices he had made. Alma sent himself to hell, and once there, was finally convinced that what his father had taught him about Jesus and salvation was absolutely correct. Having come to that realization within himself, he voluntarily changed, called upon Christ, and was redeemed.
Our heart, our agency, is a brute fact that God cannot change. He can modify our nurture and, thus, open opportunities for us that we would not have but for his intervention. But he cannot touch our nature. That is ours alone. Thus, we are ultimately saved by our own choices—to accept Christ’s offer of grace or not accept it—after all that God can do.
Two questions:
1. How do you see your arguments differing from the many other LDS thinkers who have written on this same topic (such as Ostler, Paulsen, Givens, and many others)?
2. Does this then create a problem of miracles? In other words, how do you account for the many, many examples in scripture and LDS history, where God intercedes to stop evil by controlling the weather, moving elements, curing disease, changing hearts, striking people dead, and so on?
The impetus of this article is more logical than scholarly. I mean by this that we wrote the article reasoning from first principles rather than by carefully reading all that has been written on the topic, providing a scholarly review of all that has been said, and then on the margins adding a few novel insights or disputing previous claims. I read Truman Madsen on this topic about 50 years ago and have read some things written by Ostler, Paulson, and Givens since. But I didn’t read anything written by them specifically on the problem of evil until after we wrote this article. We looked at their work mostly to provide supporting citations. The main impetus for this article was not anything written by a Latter-day Saint theologian. It was Hausam’s insightful article, which was an immediate inspiration for what we have written.
Certainly, Ostler, Paulson, and Givens all understand and embrace most of the foundational assumptions upon which this article was built. The one exception I know about is Ostler’s advocacy for libertarian free will, which we reject and argue against. That is a very important, very consequential difference between his reading of LDS theology and ours.
I will list some insights from this article that are, to my knowledge, novel. (To be sure, others may have, independently, reached the same conclusions since some are, mostly, just an elaboration on fundamental doctrines articulated by Joseph Smith.)
–Natural law is encoded in our being and the being of other self-existent things. This idea is often left implicit, not made fully explicit in other LDS theological writing.
–God’s moral law merely specifies causal relationships that are encoded into our being. It is more descriptive than prescriptive.
–The eternal damnation of the wicked is the most important evil that theodicy needs to account for. It is a much greater problem for theodicy than the usual focus: the unmerited suffering of innocents.
–It is reasonable for God to have a preferential option for the wicked. He rightly arranges matters on Earth to most benefit his least righteous children who are most in need of help.
–Those who kept their first estate, though they had free will, were not able to sin while still in the presence of the Father.
–We provide a reading of Alma at Ammonihah, with attention to implications for the problem of evil and theodicy. Our reading is in some respects novel.
–We argue that the two logically viable Christian theologies are Calvinism and what we used to call Mormonism (Restoration theology). Arminian Protestantism falls between the logical stools.
–We discuss the most promising recent approach to the problem of evil in Christianity, “open theism,” but ultimately argue that it fails to account for evil because one of its main pillars, libertarian free will, is not consistent with moral accountability.
–We suggest that the destruction of the wicked is an act of grace for the wicked.
–We argue that God saving the righteous (Alma and Amulek) is harder to explain than his failure to save the righteous (the women and children burned in Ammonihah). In a properly framed LDS theology, God stopping evil is harder to explain than his not stopping it.
–We suggest that, like human beings, God feels considerable pain that is a function of what are for him natural evils.
–We argue that LDS thinkers who embrace libertarian free (e.g. Ostler), or the mass rather than the count conception of intelligences, forfeit most of the theological advantages of the Restoration.
While all these insights can be logically deduced from texts handed down to us from Joseph Smith, to our knowledge, most of these points have not been made, specifically, by other LDS writers. But since they are logically deducible from LDS texts, it would not surprise us to learn that some authors have previously offered similar or related insights.
Let us say, in conclusion, that while some LDS theologians have understood the depth and power of LDS theology and have celebrated it, many Church members are not as aware as they could/should be of how many advantages our theology has over other theologies held by other Christians, Jews, and Muslims—the people of the book. We hope this article will help more of our coreligionists appreciate the pearl of great price that has been given to us through Joseph Smith.