The Pre-Existence Theodicy

on being just a little bit Mormon

When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought

I. Introduction

The problem of evil — If God, why Bill Nye? — can be cashed out in two different ways: axiologically, which has to do with axes, and deontologically, which has to do with Dion (a wanted animal rapist.)

More precisely, the axiological problem of evil asks, If God exists, what greater good is served by all the evil he permits on Earth? The axiological problem, in other words, has to do with value. Given all the badness in the world, what’s the goodness, if any, that makes allowing the badness worth it from God’s point of view?

The deontological problem of evil, in contrast, asks what might strike some as a kookier question. It asks, If God exists, and he allows evils for the sake of some greater good, how does he have the right to use us as a means to that end?

This is a loose way of putting the question, but it captures the broad idea. Put more precisely, the question is about how God — if he exists — can sit back and watch all the evils we endure, and maybe even cause some of them (earthquakes, the evolution of parasites, etc.), without violating any deontic constraints.

Common sense morality — and a plurality of normative ethicists — accepts what we might call “Constraintism”¹. According to Constraintism, there are deontic constraints on permissible action. All this means, simply put, is that you can’t kill one person to prevent two killings, torture one person to prevent two tortures, or insult someone to prevent two insults. In other words, sometimes it’s wrong to do certain actions even when those actions will have the best consequences. Morality puts up guardrails — deontic constraints — to protect against certain acts, even if those acts would, in a given situation, make the world a better place overall.

As well as believing in deontic constraints on acts, some ethicists endorse deontic constraints on omissions (i.e., failures to act). For example, imagine you pass by a shallow pond and see a small child drowning. Just as you move to fish her out, an Infallible Utility Oracle falls from the sky and informs you that — if you let her drown — the world will be marginally better off down the line. Many judge that you should save the child, even if the oracle is trustworthy. You have a duty to save the girl, you might think, even if failing to save her would make the world a better place overall.

Now let’s set our sights on God. God — conceived of in a traditional, plausible way — is a morally perfect being. Since being morally perfect means respecting morality’s demands perfectly, then if Constraintism is true, God won’t violate any deontic constraints. (Either he could but won’t, since immorality isn’t a perfect being’s style, or he flatly can’t, as a necessary result of his nature.)

Of course, this picture is controversial. Some theists think moral duties are whatever God says they are (Divine Command Theory), and so — as long as God doesn’t issue any commands to himself — God has no duties at all! Others think that, for some reason or other, God is unbound by moral norms, even though we humans are.

I’m just going to assume — for the sake of your valuable time — that these theists are wrong and that if God exists, he’s a moral agent who always does what’s his duty. This is partly because I think these theists are wrong, and partly because I want to make things hard for myself.

In his essay, “Is the problem of evil a deontological problem?”, Justin Mooney argues that many of our intuitions about God and evil have a strikingly deontological flavour. Certain evils, Mooney writes, “strike us as impermissible independently of their consequences”.

In what follows, I want to suggest an answer to the deontological problem of evil. Even if the strictest forms of deontology are true, and some acts and omissions are just wrong, there’s a plausible way to get God off the hook for every such evil he part-causes or declines to prevent.

II. The Theodicy

Here’s the basic proposal: each of us — before our births — consented to God allowing us to suffer through the evils we do. In this act of consent, we waived whatever rights we once had against God — at least for short stint of time on Earth. Consequently, God doesn’t violate any deontic constraints by letting us suffer.

We have to tread carefully here. Philosopher James Spiegel—in a paper her wrote on this topic—frames the idea as follows:

[F]or any given person, […] all of the pain and suffering she experiences in this world was chosen in advance, prior to her soul’s union with her earthly body, and thus was a result of the exercise of her own free will.²

But if what we consented to was “all the pain and suffering” we endure, then it might turn out that none of us has ever had our rights violated by anyone, which no deontologist will want to say. Suppose, for instance, that I consent to being punched in the face. If Bentham's Bulldog were to go ahead and punch me with all his might, knocking off one of my eyelashes, he wouldn’t have violated my right against being punched in the face, since I waived that right already. Intuitively, this is so even if Bentham's Bulldog didn’t know I’d waived my right. In that case, he’d be subjectively guilty of punching me while thinking he was violating my right. (Deep down, he knows deontology is true.) Nevertheless, he wouldn’t have transgressed any of my rights, objectively speaking.

Here is an easy fix: the theodicy shouldn’t say we consented to the suffering we endure; what it should say, rather, is that we consented to God’s role in that suffering — either to his passive role in standing back and letting the evil take place, or to his active, causal role in the evils we end up enduring.

III. Some Objections Considered

I’m sure you have objections. Before you comment it, here are some you might have thought of — with that are more recherché — and what I’m inclined to say about them.

Objection #1: The Power Difference Objection

My argument hinges on the idea that we could validly consent to God allowing us to suffer horrendous evils on Earth. Valid consent isn’t just saying ‘yes’ — if you say ‘yes’ to a mugger at gun point because he makes you, you haven’t waived your right against mugging. If we can’t validly consent to God, it’s lights out for my theodicy.

Here’s one, slightly recherché argument that we can’t validly consent to God, with Blake Hereth suggests in his paper, “Mary, Did You Consent?”. Maybe, the thought goes, it’s impossible for humans to give valid consent to God because God is way more powerful than we are.

To take an analogy, imagine a therapist who propositions her client for sex. Some intuit that if the power gap between the therapist and client is sufficiently large, the client can’t validly consent to sex. If we want to hold on to this intuition, the thought goes, maybe the best explanation of it is that, in general, you can’t validly consent to anyone who has way, way more power than you.

In reply: I think this principle has nutty results. If God — who we’re supposing is perfectly loving — asked you to surrender one of your leg hairs, is it really impossible for you to validly consent to that, even if he trustworthily assures you that you won’t be punished if you refuse?

Second, as David Boonin argues in his new book on consent, Sexual Ethics and Problematic Consent: When Does Yes Mean No?, there’s a better explanation for our intuition about the therapist: namely, the client might reasonably fear that her therapist would react badly to being denied, ending their sessions, spreading her secrets, or messing her up psychologically. This fact — not the mere presence of a power gap — explains why the consent might be invalid.

Imagine a version of the case where, instead of the therapist asking for sex, the client sees her therapist’s profile on a lesbian dating site and decides to match with her, simply because she wants to hook-up. Even if it would be unprofessional for the therapist to say ‘yes’, surely, by saying ‘yes’, she wouldn’t violate her client’s consent. But if the mere presence of a power gap means consent can’t be validly rendered, consent would still have been violated if they agreed to hook up. This seems like the wrong result.

Verdict: the mere fact that God has more power than us doesn’t mean we can’t validly consent to his wishes. Maybe we’d have to approach God, or something, but surely God could just show us the majesty of his plan for us — including whatever greater goods are involved — and wait patiently till we summon the courage and agree to be sent to Earth.

Objection #2: The Transformative Knowledge Objection

In many cases, we can’t validly consent to something if we have no idea what we’re consenting to. If that’s right, the objection might go, we can’t have validly consented to God allowing us to suffer horrendously because — before we’ve suffered horrendously — we can’t know what that's like.

I feel the pull of this objection, but I’m pretty sure I can convince you that there’s at least some way God could secure our valid consent, even if it was for him to stand back and allow us to suffer something worse than we’d ever suffered before.

Presumably, it’s possible — sometimes — to validly consent to someone letting you suffer the worst pain you’ve ever felt. Suppose, for instance, that the worst pain I’ve felt is 10 disutils, and I want to be allowed to suffer 10.1 disutils. Seems like I could release you of a duty to step in by saying, “it’s OK — please don’t step in.”

Presumably, then, if I can at least imagine — to some degree — what my pain will be like, I can consent to being left to suffer it in the right conditions. For this objection to work, then, it’ll have to be the case that there’s no way for an all-powerful, all-knowing God to give us the requisite imaginative capabilities to get even a rough idea of what it would be like to suffer horrendously.

I can’t see a way to argue for this.

Maybe the thought is that if we haven’t experienced pain in the past, we can’t consent to being allowed to suffer any amount of pain since we’d be clueless as to what pain felt like.

In reply: let’s grant, for argument’s sake, that to be able to have some idea of what pain is like, one needs to have experienced pain in the past. Even on this assumption, it still seems like you could consent to being allowed to suffer pain for the first time, thereby giving you the conceptual apparatus to consent to even more of it.

Imagine, e.g., that I’ve never experienced pain before and I want to know what it’s like, because, e.g., I want to be able to empathise with you when you stub your toe against the fridge. Presumably, if I were told in advance by an omniscient, truth-telling being that I wouldn’t regret my first minor pin-prick, you don’t have to intervene when you see me pick up a sewing needle. After all, I have a right to revelatory autonomy — sometimes, it’s OK to let me try new things!

But once I’ve acquired the concept of pain (and surely God to rig up the conditions where I could freely choose to acquire it), I can then learn more and more about pain — enough to be able to consent to a pain worse than any I have ever felt. At this point, with my permission, God can wipe my memories and pack me off to Earth.

Objection #3: The Memory Objection

Speaking of memories, if I existed before my birth, why don’t I remember any of it?

The answer is I don’t know. More precisely: I don’t know, but that’s not a huge problem for the view. Presumably, whatever solution the theist comes up with for the axiological problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness will have to explain why we, mere Earthlings, have highly imperfect knowledge, including of things divine.

But then whatever the theist says in response to that problem she can say in response to the question of why — with our permission — God would see fit to temporarily wipe our memories.

If you’re a Christian reading this, you might be wondering whether you can believe in this theodicy? Sure, some Christians (including some heretics, like Origen) have believed in pre-mortal existence; still, it’s not a mainstream part of the tradition. Isn’t this a barrier to embracing the theodicy?

Normally I’d agree that if Christianity doesn’t mention theological doctrine X, that’s a reason for Christians to be wary of X. But in this specific case, the fact that we have no memories of our lives before birth should give us special reason to think that this doctrinal heuristic won’t apply.

If the pre-mortalist theodicy is true, God must have had some reason to make us forget our pre-mortal lives. But then, whatever we think that reason was, it will be enough to make it unsurprising that God didn’t make it part of revealed Christian teaching.³

IV. Conclusion

There are oodles more objections to consider: objections related to animal suffering, the number of auxiliary hypothesis the pre-existence theodicist has to accept, the possibility of pre-existence on different theories of personal identity, the possibility of consenting to something that will happen after your memory has been wiped (which opens up a massive bioethics debate about advance directives from people who go on to lose their memories), and so on. But my thoughts on those are still crystalising, sorry, so you’ll have to hold on for part II!

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1. Lingo from Bruns, A. (2021). The Paradox of Deontology (Doctoral dissertation, University of Leeds): p. 19.

2. Spiegel, J. (2024). The premortalist free will defense. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 95(1), p. 51.

3. Also, as Jimmy Akin argues here, pre-existence is strictly compatible with Catholic teaching. Anyone can believe this theodicy!