Hyper-Past Evils: A Reply to Bogdan V. Faul

Abstract

A reply to Bogdan V. Faul’s “Can God Promise Us a New Past? A Response to Lebens and Goldschmidt.” In this reply we clarify why it is that we regard a scene-changing theory of time to be an improvement over presentism from a theological point of view. We present two benefits: a scene changing theory allows God (1) to improve the past and it allows him (2) to give free will to human beings whilst ensuring that they hyper-will never have misused it. More generally, the scene-changing theory when compared to presentism has the more compelling account of the badness of past evils.

Keywords

• the problem of evil
• god
• necessary evil
• philosophy of time
• hypertime