Anyone who is ignorant of intellectual history is doomed to repeat intellectual errors. So with the Problem of Evil, which is: “If God exists and is All-Good, why does He permit evil to exist?” Someone always raises the Problem of Evil whenever a natural disaster kills the innocent, like the girls drowned in the recent Texas Flood. The Problem of Evil is obviously connected to the idea of Providence, the claim that whatever happens is the Will of God. Trump turning his head at the precise instant required to dodge the bullet is cited as an act of Providence. But if God can cause Trump to turn his head, then surely, He could have saved those Texas girls.
What was Plato’s solution?
God, being all Good, must actualize all possibilities, all possible worlds. In one world, ours, Trump turned his head, and the Texas girls died. In another world, Trump died, and the Texas girls lived.
Plato claimed goodness required all possibilities be created because goodness requires maximum diversity. Nine hundred years ago, the Christian theologian Peter Abelard expanded on Plato’s explanation by arguing that existence itself is a good. Therefore, God, being All-Good, wishing to maximize goodness, maximizes the size of reality by actualizing all possible worlds. The Texas girls who died in this world still had eight years of existence, and this is better than not existing at all. Further, the same girls will live their full lives in another world.
Arthur Lovejoy, in his book The Great Chain of Being, based on lectures he gave at Harvard a century ago, after discussing Plato’s and Abelard’s solution, pointed out (p. 74) that St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote 800 years ago, and is the greatest Roman Catholic theologian ever, agreed with this solution to the Problem of Evil.
This solution to the Problem of Evil was presented by four of the greatest minds in history 2,300, 900, 800, and 100 years ago. Since everyone at some point in their lives wonders about the Problem of Evil, there is no excuse for educated people to be unaware of this solution, whether they accept it or not.
This solution requires the existence of other universes, containing other versions of us, to exist. Do they? According to quantum mechanics, they do. Quantum mechanics asserts all changes are due to linear operators acting on wave functions, and the existence of other universes follows from this linearity, combined with the assumption that quantum mechanics governs arbitrarily complex molecular systems, including humans and cats. Yes, the solution to Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox is the cat is alive in one universe and dead in another. Schrödinger himself realized this by 1952.
Do the calculation yourself. If you can’t do the calculation, I’ve done it for you in my book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. If you can’t follow my calculation, you’ll have to accept an Argument from Authority.
Which Authority? I recommend David Deutsch, the Winner of the million-dollar 2023 Breakthrough Prize for inventing the quantum computer, who says in his book The Beginning of Infinity (Chapter 11 and p. 310) that quantum mechanics is necessarily a “multiverse” theory. Either the other universes exist, or quantum mechanics is objectively false.
Bottom line: whatever your solution to the Problem of Evil, your solution must refer to the other versions of you in the multiverse. Deutsch showed in his earlier book The Fabric of Reality how the multiverse solves the Free Will Problem. You can truly say “I could have chosen to go to Boston only if you did go to Boston. So, you could really have the Free Will choice of going to New York rather than Boston only if in one universe you really did go to New York, and in another universe, you really did go to Boston. Once again, whatever your solution to the Free Will Problem, it must refer to you going to Boston in one universe, and to New York in another. Everyone knows the Problem of Evil is connected to the Free Will Problem. Watch the end of the 1981 movie Time Bandits. The multiverse shows how the two are connected.
What about Providence, the other half of the Problem of Evil? “Providence” is just a claim of determinism: the state of the multiverse now is entirely determined by the state of the multiverse at an earlier time, which is itself entirely determined by the state of the multiverse at a still earlier time, and so on until the laws of physics say it is impossible to go any further. This infinite sequence of determining instants defines an ultimate determining entity, an “Uncaused First Cause,” which Aquinas claims “everyone calls ‘God’.”
Einstein loved determinism, famously saying “God does not play dice with the universe.” In 2014, I published a mathematical proof in the leading peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing Einstein was correct: quantum mechanics is more deterministic than classical mechanics; that converging infinite sequence of determining instants exists. Deutsch, once again in The Beginning of Infinity, and earlier Schrödinger, showed why: quantum mechanics has nothing to do with “probabilities” because the wave function is a measure of the density of universes in the multiverse, not a measure of probabilities.
If you reject this solution to the Problem of Evil, you are going up against Plato, Abelard, and Aquinas in philosophy, and Einstein, Schrödinger, and Deutsch in physics. Are you sure you are smarter than those guys?
Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press [with John D. Barrow, FRS]), The Physics of Immortality (Doubleday), and The Physics of Christianity (Doubleday).
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