Doing, Allowing, and Occasionalism

Abstract

In ‘God, evil, and occasionalism’ Matthew Shea and C.P. Ragland appeal to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing to argue against Alvin Plantinga that occasionalism is morally worse than conservationism. In this article I critically examine their argument and conclude that it fails because it contains an equivocation or is unwarranted. I also offer a case against their position by, first, arguing that on none of three prominent accounts of doing and allowing God merely allows suffering. Second, I develop the ‘Epistemological-Equivalence Argument’ in order to show that even if we grant such a distinction for God's acts, they would be morally on a par.

The doing/allowing distinction in the divine context

“…I have not tried to answer the further question of whether or not it is true that it is easier to justify God's allowing harm than bringing it about, but trust that this analysis provides a beneficial and rigorous conceptual analysis of a concept which has not yet been explicitly defined even though it is implicit or explicitly used in recent discussions (e.g. Lim (2017); Loke (2018); Shea and Ragland (2018); Sen (2022)).…”

“…As stated, however, the account entails that God brings about everything , even the harm brought about by created agents (Sen (2022)). To see why, suppose that Suzy harms Billy by throwing a rock at him.…”

“…1 I suggest that a counterfactual account of the distinction is plausible in the divine context. Some authors (Lim (2017); Sen (2022)) have recently dismissed such an account far too quickly. It is therefore the goal of this article to provide a counterfactual framework for the bringing about/allowing distinction in the divine context.…”