Augustine defends the orthodox Christian concept of God on...

Augustine defends the orthodox Christian concept of God on grounds that he did what was good in creating free beings yet they used their freedom to do evil. Some suffering is the just consequence of sin. Furthermore, where evil is a lack of good we cannot ask why God created it since it is merely the absence of something. Aquinas, Leibniz and others recognize that some good things exist only in the presence of certain types of evil. For example, forgiveness exists only where there is sin.

In the light of these secondary goods, Leibniz argues that out of all the possible worlds God created the one with the best possible balance of good and evil. Some thinkers appeal to a future life to settle apparent discrepancies in the balance of good over evil. God's future blessing, it is said, can more than make up for suffering in this world.

William Alston develops the idea that as limited beings we are incapable of discerning-and therefore questioning-whether God has sufficient reasons for allowing the evil that exists. 7. Omniscience While a few like Avicenna and Averroes seem to have held that a God who lacks certain types of knowledge would be more perfect, most have claimed that God knows everything. This is sometimes refined, for example, to the claim that God knows everything that is logically possible to know.

An area of concern going back to Aristotle (On Interpretation 9) is the claim that propositions about future contingent events (i. e. , those whose causes are not determined by past events) have no truth value. If so they are unknowable, even by an omniscient being (a view held in modern times by so called Open Theism). Some have claimed that even if future events have a truth value, they are logically unknowable.

Of special concern is the relationship between omniscience and human free will: if yesterday God knew infallibly that I would do x today, it seems I have no alternative but to do x today--a conclusion that seems to violate free will. To solve this, Boethius and Aquinas appealed to the concept of God's timelessness, which entails that none of God's knowledge is past or future. Aquinas also said that God determines all events and determines that they will be done freely.

De Molina objected that this amounts to removing free will. He constructed his own view, which said that God's knowledge is logically prior to his decree of what will be.