The Sovereignty of Humanity and Social Responsibility for Evil Prevention

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest that James Sterba’s recent restatement of the logical problem of evil overlooks a plausible theistic interpretation of the divine–human relation, which allows for a theodicy impervious to his atheological argument, which boils down to God’s failure to meet Sterba’s “Evil Prevention Requirements”. I argue that such requirements need not apply to God in a world under full human sovereignty, which presupposes that God never intervenes to change the natural course of events to prevent evils, as God has a decisive “greater good justification” for not intervening, namely respecting human sovereignty. This non-interventionist view of divine providence can be made tenable by the great good and dignity of the God-granted human God-like self-creativity implied by human sovereignty (a concept inspired by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola). The Mirandolian theodicy can both accommodate and complement Dostoyevsky’s Russian Orthodox view of “beneficial suffering”, predicated against the background of the conception of “collective selfhood”, overlooked by Sterba despite “featuring” on the cover of his book, no doubt due to his libertarian–individualistic assumptions about human agency and human flourishing, which a proponent of a theistic theodicy may do well to resist.

Keywords

• logical argument from evil
• James Sterba
• Mirandolian theodicy
• the sovereignty of humanity
• Dostoyevsky on evil
• relational conceptions of selfhood