Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy

I have just read Boyd’s book, Satan and The Problem of Evil and have a mixed impression of his argument. I am a graduate philosophy student and have picked up his book just to throw a wild card into my readings for a formal paper I have been writing on the problems of evil. Since no other reviewers seem to have cared to offer a careful reflection on his arguments here, I will provide one with the following summary and then turn to some criticism. As a philosopher, I grateful for the excellent clarity with which Boyd writes and the organization of his book. It is organized into 2 parts, the first developing his “Trinitarian warfare theodicy” and the second part exploring some of its applications. His six theses are as follows: 1) love entails freedom, 2) freedom entails risk, 3) risk entails moral responsibility, 4) moral responsibility is proportionate to the power to influence, 5) the power to influence is irrevocable, and 6) the power to influence is finite. I will briefly summarize each of these before turning to some comments and criticisms. The very first sentence of the first chapter reads, “This work is an attempt at making philosophical sense of the warfare worldview of the Bible” (29). Since he is claiming to make philosophical sense, I evaluate his work's philosophical worth. But I also recognize this work is directed toward a Christian audience and will make a comment on this at the end of this review.As a side note, when I was a Christian, I had vaguely been aware of Boyd’s writings on Open Theism, but since I had not directly read his work, I was unaware of his excessive Biblicism. No doubt, I assumed from the title that he is a Christian, but it is a little surprising that a historical critical scholar treats Biblical references to Satan and his minions as somehow consistent with a single conception of them, as if Job’s accuser were John’s dragon, or as if the Babylonian spirits were Mark’s demons. This hermeneutic was distracting for me and I guess it would be for others who recognize it. After exploring the warfare motif from some mythological texts and of course citing some church fathers in chapter 1, Boyd moves on in chapter 2 to claim knowledge of God’s goal in creating. He says, “love is the reason God created the world” (50). This is a very interesting assumption as most Christians seem to accept that God created the world for his glory. This is also important because it contextualizes all of Boyd’s theses, and so I will come back to this (no doubt, well thought out) assumption later. He further says that for love to be genuine, it must be self-determined, that is to say, it must be freely chosen by the creature (thesis 1), whereas the creator is necessarily loving. He argues against compatiblistic freedom with an illustration of God designing a robot to “freely” love him. Boyd also points out that incompatibilistic freedom makes the most sense out of our notion of moral responsibility. His second thesis is developed in chapter 3. What he means by “freedom implies risk,” is that for human actions to be genuinely free, the agent must be able to have done otherwise than what was done (this is otherwise known as the Principle of Alternative Possibilities). But for this world of possibility to be real to contingent beings, God’s foreknowledge must not be construed in such a way that it precludes such possibility. He takes issue with the traditional theistic view that God has “exhaustively definite foreknowledge” (86). Boyd says of this view, “It is exhaustively definite because it consists exclusively of eternally definite facts: the future is, from all eternity, definitely this way and definitely not that way” (86). He abbreviates this view EDF and responds to it by introducing the open view of God’s foreknowledge. He criticizes the “simple foreknowledge” view which is that God knows the future, but only as it will happen and not with the advantage of changing that knowledge of the future. In replacement of this view, Boyd says the open view means that “the future is partly comprised of possibilities” (91). What this means is that at any point in the future, T1, there will be a number of possibilities open to both God and creatures at T1, and at T2, T3, and T4, there will be new sets of possibilities. God knows the possibilities as possibilities for each point in time. In other words, if a course of action, A, is possible at T1and becomes an actuality at T2, then this opens up a new set of possibilities at T2 that may not have been possibilities at T1. If a course of action B, were taken instead of A at T1, then a whole different set of possibilities would be available at T2 than would be if action A were taken at T1 instead of B. Boyd makes a long appeal to Scriptures about God changing his mind and making conditional prophecies, and concludes that the open view makes a conception of God’s foreknowledge more robust because God knows the possibilities that would result from certain possibilities becoming actual, and so like a branching tree of infinite combinations of causal relations, God’s knowledge is indeed magnified. Boyd is not finished yet with thesis 2 though, and continues into chapter 4 arguing for its cogency, and rightly so, because this is the most important thesis among all of them. He here builds on the Molinist conception of middle knowledge which espouses that God knows counterfactual statements about human decisions. In other words, he knows what Fred would do if Fred lived in another world. In contrast to simple foreknowledge, God is able to act on his knowledge of counterfactuals such that he can create the world in which Fred freely does what God wants him to. Boyd baptizes the Molinist position in Open Theism by saying that there are not just counterfactual statements like, agent x “would do” y in situation z, but there are also counterfactual propositions like, agent x “might not do” y in situation z, and God knows about both kinds of propositions (126-27). He says that God “sometimes thinks and speaks of the future in terms of what might or might not come to pass” (127). There are some other arguments in chapter 4 about the nature of time according to science, which I will return to.In chapter 5, he argues for theses 3 and 4, that risk implies moral responsibility and that moral responsibility is proportionate to the power to influence others. Thesis 3 seems to follow naturally from his arguments for incompatibilistic freedom, but 4 is a little more theological. He cites Scriptures to the effect that “to whom much is given, much is required,” and so on. He quotes a lot of C.S. Lewis in chapter 5 and points out that Aristotle saw that humans were more responsible than animals. There is also a lot of warding off what he calls the “blue-print” model of God’s sovereignty which is the idea that God meticulously controls everything. This part of the book seems to be an in house Christian debate about the aesthetics of God’s power (murky waters I think), and so I will pass over it. Theses 5 and 6 are developed in chapter 6. Thesis 5, that the power to influence is irrevocable is just the idea that if God would take away one’s freedom as soon as one abuses it, then it would raise questions about the point of freedom and God would look like a meticulously controlling parent. For this reason, one’s power to influence or freedom, must be irrevocable. It is given and not taken away. Boyd believes that God voluntarily limits himself in this respect inasmuch as he could take the power away from the Devil or other creatures, but does not (183-85). Finally, he argues that the power to influence is finite, that is, limited, because sometimes God can intervene and one’s sphere of influence is obviously not infinite (186). That concludes part one and his development of the 6 theses. Since Part II is mostly about what follows from this and it is where he develops the Biblical ideas of evil spirits, I will just move right to some comments and then to objections to the theses, especially thesis 2. First, some praise for Boyd’s work is in order. The relationship between his theses forms a coherent bond which is natural and intuitive. Boyd’s familiarity with the philosophical discussions on the problems of evil is thorough and commendable. He also took the time to really delve into theories in contemporary science and found creative ways to relate this to his argument. Further, his concern for the practical, pastoral implications of his theory shows that he is a good humanist (Although, I think his being a pastor also made it impossible for him fashion his argument in the carefully disinterested way philosophers try to fashion their arguments). Also praiseworthy is Boyd’s acceptance of contemporary knowledge about ancient Semitic mythology and what this means for our understanding of Scriptural monsters like the Yom and Leviathan. Even though he fails to follow this through to the logical conclusion that Hebrew myth says nothing more about the real world than Canaanite myth, his recognition of the significance of the Ugarritic texts is on the right track. Now, on to some criticisms. Boyd says, “If it is true that agent x might or might not do y in situation z, it is false that agent x would do y in situation z, and vice versa” (126). He tries to establish that the “might” counterfactuals are true and so the “would” ones must be false. However, one must notice that the very language Boyd uses involves an easily overlooked assumption. If it is true from a human perspective that I might or might not do y in situation z, why must it be true in the same sense for God also? God’s point of view may be that it is true that I will do y in situation z, and the “might” proposition is only conditionally true to a contingent creature. A few sentences later, Boyd argues, “If the world God created is a world in which some might-counterfactuals are true (as I argue in this case) then this world must by definition contain open possibilities” (126). He may as well have said here that “if the world has open possibilities, then some might-counterfactuals are true.” But that means he argues P ⊃ Q and Q ⊃ P without establishing P or Q first. It is clear that he is intentionally allowing his conclusion of libertarian freedom to function as a premise in his argument about God’s knowledge of the future. He says, “Insofar as might-counterfactuals are true—agents possess libertarian freedom—there is no eternal facticity” (128). However, what is thought to be God’s knowledge of the future is the very reason philosophers find incompatibilistic freedom untenable! So it would seem that according to Boyd, libertarian freedom, L, implies openness of the future, O, which implies “no eternal facticity” F: L ⊃ O and O ⊃ -F. By hypothetical syllogism, he concludes in the quote above that libertarian freedom implies that there is no eternal facticity (L ⊃ -F). Yet, philosophers often argue that the fact that God knows factual truths of the future implies that there is no libertarian freedom (F ⊃ -L). So how does one methodologically establish the nature of God’s foreknowledge? If he argues that libertarian freedom is true and that it implies that the future is open, then he seems to beg the question of whether libertarian freedom as it relates to God’s foreknowledge is true. If one argues that God has EDF and that this implies that there is no libertarian freedom, this also seems to beg the question as there is no way of actually justifying the belief that God has EDF. This seems to be what Kant called an antinomy: either position contradicts the other and neither one can be argued for without begging the question. To be fair, it is important to understand that Boyd and other open theists do not say that the future is entirely open to God, but it is only “partly open.” They do not deny God’s knowledge of factual events in the future, but simply add that God has knowledge of indefinite propositions as well. So it is only “insofar” as libertarian freedom is true, there is no eternal facticity. But there is eternal facticity for God on some other events, like the ministry of Jesus, and in that case, Boyd allows facticity to imply the negation of libertarian freedom (F ⊃ -L), but these are only single occurrences according to Boyd. However, this is an awkward view to espouse. The only sense in which Boyd allows God to foreknow human actions is if God has determined to so influence a human that he guide that person to a definite action. Otherwise, God foreknows that the sky will be blue in a hundred years because that definite foreknowledge does not impinge upon anyone’s freedom. The problem is that Boyd cannot possibly draw a definite line between what foreknowledge threatens libertarian freedom and what foreknowledge does not. If God foreknew that there would be a missing piece of fruit on the tree of knowledge, could he not foreknowingly infer that Adam and Eve would be the one’s to eat it, thereby making their decision a necessary one? If God is at least that intelligent, then he does foreknow human actions if only in a round-about way. How is it that he has a general knowledge of future facticity, but there is some blind spot when it comes to human actions? Does that not seem odd? Well, it is odd because it is the conception open theists like Boyd have invented because of their equally suspicious view of the ontology of freedom, i.e. that one’s actions must not be definite facts of the future which God foreknows. Boyd argues in the body of his work and in an appendix that EDF is incompatible with libertarian freedom. Despite his pressing this point, I remain unconvinced that God’s knowledge of a definite future somehow changes the ontological nature of freedom because this just seems to be a definitional tautology. He says, “The issue of self-determination is an ontological, not an epistemological issue. The question is whether we really are or are not free, not whether we think we are free or not” (135). I think it should be obvious that because we can have no real knowledge of the ontological nature of our freedom or of the state of God’s relationship to time (aside from what science would lead us to believe), it follows that what we think of these things is the best answer to be had. In any case, few considering this debate observe that the fact of the matter of one’s ontological freedom, can be contingent on one’s epistemology. The ontological nature of freedom can be causally influenced by one’s view of his own freedom. For example, if I don’t believe I will stay fit, my belief causally decides whether I am ontologically free to stay fit or not. I wonder if this could not be generalized into, “Since I believe I can do otherwise within a specified set of options, I can indeed do otherwise than what I plan to do.” Boyd observes that incompatibilistic freedom can develop into compatiblistic freedom by one’s fashioning of his character over time, but he fails to connect this observation back to the relationship of the ontology of freedom to the epistemology of freedom. Now, Boyd’s arguments about contemporary science and the nature of time seem to me to be seriously flawed. He argues that Quantum Physics implies that the future is indeed open (136-38). It may not be completely open to anything, but a number of possibilities are really open within a limited domain, like the location of an electron around an atom. The obvious rebuttal here is that our future may indeed be settled as Einstein taught us that time is relative. However, Boyd tries to downplay the theory of relativity by pointing out that it teaches that time is relative to finite creatures, but not that time is relative to a being such as God (141). He says, “[Einstein’s theory] does not preclude our speaking about a cosmic ‘now’ and ‘future’ from God’s all encompassing perspective” (142). Yet, this assumption of “God’s perspective” is exactly what Boyd (elsewhere in his book) criticizes Calvin for doing when Calvin urged those opposed to his doctrines to avoid a “human perspective” and take “God’s perspective” on predestination. In any event, if relativity is just relative to us, then this logic can cut both ways and quantum indeterminacy is only absolutely undetermined to us, but may be fully determined “from God’s perspective.” Boyd also points out that relativity is just that, and that it does not preclude an absolute future and past. But we can have no knowledge of where that absolute edge of time is and so I see this as an insignificant point to make if it is intended to establish that some particular human event could possibly be in the absolute future where God is not (140). If anything, language about God’s being in the same temporal domain as humans, is itself relative to the writers of Scripture and does not tell us anything about God’s true relationship to time. God’s omnipresence implies that he is in the past, at the location of those stars we see at night, and in the relative future of those stars, where their light is seen by us on Earth. It may be he is indeed in our definite future and in our definite past. In that case, open theism fails and the EDF view is made credible by contemporary science. Ultimately, Boyd’s whole argument flows from his premise that the reason God created the world was for love. If that is not true, then it is not necessary to argue that humans be self-determinedly free, nor do all the rest of the theses of the book find any grounding. While I’m sure Boyd has thought much about this premise of God creating us all for love (seems natural enough to hope for anyway), it is important to realize that if it is not true, his entire system loses its impetus. A much more serious problem for this premise though, is that the apparent “warfare” situation that we seem to find ourselves in might better be explained as a material struggle for survival than a consequence of God creating in order that love be possible. Indeed the good and evil we witness, on its face, seems to imply that God is indifferent about human life (that's what evolution structurally implies). Again, both ways of viewing God's interest or disinterest in creating just seem to be irresolvable antinomies to me.I give Boyd 3 stars for excellent scholarship, creative thoughts, and admirable stylistic and organizational attributes. If the philosophical mistakes I think he has made are set aside, I am sure Christian readers will count this very Scriptured book a wonderful success.If I have mistaken anything, Boyd or others, feel free to correct me: [email protected].

Glad to get this book at the very reasonable price.

This is a book that requires a lot of thinking and reflection. It was helpful to have a dictionary close at hand (smile). Dr. Boyd continues on from "God at War" but takes a closer look at the classical positions regarding what it means for God to be "in control", freedom and the origin of evil, risk and the sovereignty of God to mention a few. He also shares a different perspective to the "blueprint" plan. This book is premised on six foundations that structure this trinitarian warfare theodicy and how God interacts with this world as well as their implementation;1. Love must be freely chosen.2. Love entails risks.3. Love and freedom entails that we are morally responsible for one another.4. The power to influence for the worse must be roughly proportionate to our power to influence for the better.5. Love entails freedom and this freedom, within limits, must be irrevocable.6. Angels and humans are finite beings who thus possess only a finite capacity to embrace or thwart God's purposes for our lives.He spends quite a bit of time discussing the open view of the future but whether you agree with his position or not one has to grapple personally with the warfare worldview of Scripture and the trinitarian warfare theodicy on its own merits. It is well worth the effort.This is another book that is a resource to be returned to often. I highly recommend it.

It is true that the focus of the book is anti-Augustinian in its emphasis, but there is no reason any Armenianist should have a problem with the book's central thesis. The author argues that Augustine's emphasis on God's will being the overriding factor in all that happens logically led to a de-emphasis of the importance of the forces of evil (since if nothing that happens except as God's will, the evil forces become as puppets in his hand to accomplish His will). Boyd argues that the emphasis of the early Christians, and of Scripture, is on their being an actual battle between good and evil. This is the central thesis of the book. The Open view stuff is a sideline, which Boyd points out several times in the book is not necessary in order to hold to the central premis of the book. I'm mentioning this because it seems to me that there are reviewers who have gotten hung up on this issue (i.e. the Open View issue).I really liked the book a lot. It supported exhaustively the concept of warfare in Scripture, from virtually every book in Scripture. Seeing the problem of evil as one where what happens is not necessarily God's will, but the result of those opposed to His will, has profound practical applications.

The late missionary strategist Dr. Ralph D. Winter recommended this book in his Mission Frontiers column. Boyd certainly does right by re-stating the question correctly. Winter pointed out (I heard him) that the census David was incited to take was ascribed to "the LORD" in Kings, but re-stated as "Satan" inciting David in the later Chronicles, which focused on the spiritual aspect of David's kingdom. The Bible does not contradict itself. Rather, this shows an increased revelation of the reality of the supernatural. Yes, all things are under God, but there are opposing wills even in the spiritual realm. When Jesus came on earth's scene, Winter pointed out, we see much more revelation of demonic activity. In fact, there is relatively little about this in the Bible before that time. Greater light, greater responsibility; and ow, the power to destroy the works of the devil. If I didn't already own it, I would buy this book just on the strength of Ralph Winter's recommendation.

Boyd's thinking is a challenge for us all not to remain passive in a world that calls us into action

Brilliant illuminating