The Authorial Analogy & The Problem of Evil

One of the most important philosophical and theological questions we can ask is about God’s relation to the world. There are various ways to think of God’s relation to the world, and the way we prefer would have an impact on our view of God. The Bible itself is fond of the use of analogies to help us understand God’s relation to the world. So there is biblical warrant for the use of analogies. The analogy I think is the best is the authorial analogy. The authorial analogy frames God’s relation to the world as the relation between an author and his story. So God is the author of this story called history. I won’t go into the reasons why this analogy best explains God’s relation to the world in this article (there’s a really good article explaining that here). That’s because in this article I want to highlight the authorial analogy’s strength in dealing with objections to Christianity - specifically, the Problem of Evil.

The Problem of Evil has been a topic of debate in philosophy of religion for centuries. In general, it aims to show an inconsistency between a morally perfect God and the existence of evil or suffering in the world. Over the years, the arguments have taken a variety of forms - from deductive, to inductive, to abductive. Christian philosophers and apologists have responded to the problem (and the arguments that arise from it) in a variety of ways. But the approach to addressing the problem that is becoming increasingly attractive to me is appealing to the authorial analogy. 

The authorial analogy has been commonly appealed to by theological determinists (Calvinists) in order to respond to the objection that theological determinism makes God the author of sin in a way that renders God morally responsible for sin. But I think the analogy has far wider uses than that. I think the analogy sheds light on a lot of issues and can help us answer numerous objections., the problem of evil being one of them. I believe that if the relationship between God and the world is understood properly, the problem of evil ceases to be a problem.

Simply put, if we conceive of the relation between God and the world as being analogous to the relationship between an author and a story, then the existence of evil is compatible with the existence of a morally perfect God. This is because there is a metaphysical discontinuity between God and the world (analogous to the discontinuity between an author and his story). The discontinuity between author and story is such that we cannot infer anything about the moral character of the author from the events that occur in the story. This position is plausible and tracks our intuitions. We do not question the morality of authors when they write villainous characters in their stories. So if the authorial analogy holds, we cannot question the moral character of God on the basis of evil and suffering in the world. The authorial analogy blocks all inferences from the events in this world to the nature and character of God. So the only way for an argument from evil to work is for the atheologian to argue against the authorial analogy. I have no idea what such an argument would look like.

Graham Oppy characterizes logical arguments from evil this way:

A logical argument from evil contains three distinctive kinds of premises. The exemplars of the first kind of premise collectively make up the characterisation: a claim about properties that God possesses if God exists. The sole member of the second kind of premise is the datum: a claim about the existence of suffering in our universe. The exemplars of the third kind of premise collectively make up the link: a claim that, in concert with the characterisation and the datum, entails – or is alleged to entail – that God does not exist. [The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, Chapter 3]

What we want to say is that there cannot be a successful defense of any kind of link premise in an argument from evil. Even stronger, we want to say that a link premise cannot be true because it requires that a morally perfect God be committed in some way to creating a morally perfect world. But if the authorial analogy holds, this is just like claiming that a morally good author must always write a story with morally good characters or events. This is an obviously false claim. So there cannot be any link from evil or suffering in the world to a morally imperfect (or the non-existence of a morally perfect) God.

Evidential arguments from evil do not fare any better. Evidential arguments from evil want to say that suffering in the world makes it more probable that a good God does not exist. But as we have already pointed out, the authorial analogy blocks any inference from the nature of the world to the nature of God. Furthermore, the authorial analogy shows us that the existence of gratuitous evils (evils with no moral justification) is compatible with a morally perfect God. Even if there is no point to the evil and suffering in a story, it does not follow that the author is morally evil. This is not to say that there are actually gratuitous evils in the world. This just to say that even if there were, it does not follow that a morally perfect God does not exist. So the existence of seemingly gratuitous evils does not serve as evidence for the non-existence of a good God.

The authorial analogy does have the implication that we cannot infer the goodness of God purely from the existence of good in the world,  though. The authorial analogy, due to the metaphyseal discontinuity it posits, blocks all inferences from creation to Creator. This means that it takes out pre-dogmatic natural theological arguments as well. But for a Van Tilian presuppositionalist, who has independent reasons to eschew a pre-dogmatic use of natural theology, this is a very delicious bullet to bite!