THE CASE OF CREATION. A Case File on the Responsibility of the Creator

This essay asks whether the attributes traditionally ascribed to God —freedom, knowledge and control in their highest degree — entail acorresponding responsibility for the evil of the world. Adopting thesustained analogy of a legal case file, it reconstructs, in their strongestform, and then tests the major defences of classical theism,Christology and modern philosophy of religion: the categorialexemption (Davies), divine simplicity and modal collapse (Mullins,Tomaszewski), the satisfaction reading of the cross (Anselm), the freewilland soul-making theodicies (Plantinga, Hick), the aesthetictheodicy (Augustine), and divine self-limitation after Auschwitz(Jonas). Its central claim is that a gratuitous creation cannot house aninstrumental evil: every theodicy, in justifying evil, must make ituseful, and thereby contradicts the gratuitousness of the whole; theonly remaining path is not a theodicy but the acknowledgement of anunfinished work — a suspension of judgement rather than anabsolution. The argument is deliberately bounded. Read alongsideKant’s On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy(1791) and the book of Job, it halts at a confessed limit and returns noverdict; its aim is not to acquit or to condemn, but to conduct theenquiry as far as reason can carry it and to mark honestly where itcannot. The essay is the first extended application of a widermetaphysical framework on which it draws but which it does not hereset out to establish.