14 July 2023: added a note at the end.
I already wrote one post about how can we trust God given MSLN theodicy.
Epistemic status: I don't know much about economics / labor relations in general, or the areas of those particularly related to this post.
I was thinking today [when I drafted this] that if God negotiates with Satan, what if that means that Satan manages to make it so that there's no Millennium? I would assume that God would institute a time after this life for us, because he wants us to be saved, and very few of us are ready in this life. But would God get to have what he wanted? Or would Satan have a strong-enough hand in negotiations to cripple God's ability to act on his love?
In the negotiation process, God has the ultimate power. He can choose not to go ahead with creation. Let's say God and Satan are negotiating over the terms of a "temptation contract". This is needed before we are created. God can simply wait for a favorable contract. But, God really wants to create us, and needs Satan to volitionally empower temptation. It is better to create us than to not create us, so God has an incentive to allow Satan to have power.
What does Satan get out of the contract? Mainly, the satisfaction of doing evil [other rewards mentioned later in this post]. What does God get out of it? Temptation, which helps us become holy. God can run a cost-benefit analysis and see exactly how much benefit he can expect to get from temptation. If the cost from Satan exceeds the temptation, he simply will not ratify the temptation contract.
Temptation allows people to enter God's rest (/ heaven), by causing them to choose more deeply to reject sin and choose God instead. It would be counterproductive to institute temptation in a way that costs people's ability to enter God's rest through repentance. This puts a ceiling on how bad the world can turn out to be. But, I think if, say, 1,000 people fully repent in their hearts in this life and thus do not need the Millennium to be saved, and everyone else is lost, that's still a net positive. That's not very reassuring.
I imagine God thinking of strategies to elicit good terms from Satan. One thing to note is that "Satan" is really a class of evil beings. So God can choose between competing offers coming from evil beings.
I guess it's possible that there's only one evil being, but if there was, that being would have a strong hand in negotiating, and would probably make a world worse than this one currently is. It seems very unlikely to me that evil is an idea that would only occur to one being, and also, that God would put himself in a position where he only had one evil being rely on to will temptation.
So, if there are competing evil beings, there's a kind of "race to the bottom" to produce better and better evil-affected worlds. In human labor relations, people have some low price (in a globalized world, perhaps very low for some workers) below which they will not offer their labor. They need to be paid enough to buy food, for instance. This sets an effective floor on wages. So, would there be a floor to how good the world could be, given the personal needs of evil beings? In other words, while for Jesus, his bread was doing God's will, and for us, our bread can be literal food, for demons, bread is something like... sadistic enjoyment? the exercise of the will to power? feelings of superiority? a sense of security (derived from job security, perhaps)? the satisfaction of spoiling things for God? ... probably something like that. Some of these listed are not necessarily evil, but let's say all demons hold out for at least some evil inflicted on the world. There's some minimal amount of this that the most "scab-like" of demons would demand, and this sets the basic price (of evil) for temptation.
What if that brings us back around to "only 1,000 people are saved"? What if that's the wage floor? I think we have a kind of anthropic principle going here. Since we exist, generally speaking, our set-up (the way the world works) is favorable to all of us being saved in the end. God wouldn't create us if that weren't possible.
Does that mean that Satan's intrusions in our timeline (i.e. the Lisbon earthquake, fawns burning in the forest as in William Rowe's paper, the Holocaust, the depravity of human nature) have zero ability to lead us to hell? That doesn't seem likely. For instance, the problem of evil has led some people into atheism and lack of trust of God. But maybe in the Millennium (or even partly by posts like this very one, which support theodicies) it's relatively easy to convince atheists that God exists and there's a point to seemingly gratuitous evil. So it's not as fatal to people coming to God as it might seem. But I think that at least some atheists get stuck on their distrust of God, which was first taught to them by their reaction to the problem of evil, and if they stay stuck, they might harden and be lost.
I think it's possible for God to say "While Satan's intrusions (/ negotiated features of the world) might contribute to people going to hell, I can't predict a priori whether that will happen in each person's case before exposing them to those intrusions, and therefore it's in the realm of risk, rather than 'unforced error' if I go ahead with this creation." An "unforced error" being allowing Satan to negotiate for a world in which it simply isn't possible for more than some small number of people to be saved. In other words, it is obviously a bad idea for God to create us if he knows for sure that any of us will definitely be lost if he creates, and that would be the case if there was no Millennium.
How do we know that God doesn't want us to be lost? One intuition comes from the image of "father". God is a person who brings persons into the world. God loves. God is legitimate, and his legitimacy makes him God. As part of that legitimacy, he values all that is valuable, and whatever good there is in us, he values. To love is to value a personal being as a personal being, which is what that being is. So God loves the persons he brings into the world.
Loving beings do not want any of the people they love to be destroyed. God will feel grief over their loss, if they are lost. In the end, that grief will not be unbearable because in the end, there can be no unbearability. But it will still be grief. But the emotional cost is not primarily what means that God does not want us to be lost. Rather, it is his love for us. He loves each of us, and so does not want any of us to be lost. Better that we never exist than that we be lost. People who do not yet exist are only faint ideas, and if they are foregone, there isn't much lost. God will create as many people as he can, but not regret the ones he can't make -- there isn't an infinity of potential people, only the amount that God can make. But people who do come to exist are real, and there are real stakes for their well-being.
--
Let's assume that evil beings come from some kind of process that God can repeat. He can destroy the old evil beings (at some pain to him, if there's some good to them) and "roll up" some more evil beings. The most scab-like of these evil beings could give us a world that is actually very nice. The only evil other than temptation (and where we go given that temptation) being something like the occasional head cold. Why don't we live in this world? Couldn't God have held out until we got that lowest-bidder demon?
One possible reason why not is because to truly will temptation in every circumstance where it can be called for (which is what is needed in the temptation contract) is an act of profound evil, and that the fact that the world that we live in is not far worse than it is, is due to the "race to the bottom". It may be the case that there is an absolute floor to how evil a being can be and still will all temptation, and such a being would not sell their evil will for less than a certain evil reward.
But, couldn't it be the case that evil is its own reward? If that were so, then couldn't there be a lowest-bidder demon who would sell their work as a tempter as cheap as just willing temptation? Perhaps an evil demon would hate that good comes out of temptation, and require extra evil to go through with the contract as compensation. It's like if there was a volunteer position that was its own reward to the class of people who were suited to working on it. This volunteer position was their only way of advancing their tastes/values in the world. But it had a side effect that went against their tastes/values. None of them could be motivated to take the volunteer position unless there was some compensation for the side effect. The compensation would be to cause more of an advance in their tastes/values.
Does that illustration make sense? I guess if I were in the demons' position, I could see myself taking such a volunteer position and making the same demands.
The demon is being rational and calculating to some extent by demanding extra evil as compensation for the good that results from temptation, but not being fully rational, or else they would demand enough evil to almost cancel out the good done. But for some reason, demons seem to be selling their labor for less than it is worth, by not getting the full compensation for their efforts.
This is (basically?) the same as when human employees sell their labor for less than what it is worth, which is common and kind of odd when you look at it in an alien light. Why do humans do that? Probably because they are not fully rational. Businesses can find workers who are not fully rational, but who are partially rational and thus demand some wages. Humans have various psychological factors that compete with "seek your own well-being as effectively as possible", and one that demons might have is their lust to do evil. Demons are lustful, and could be impatient and pragmatic, wanting to just get some kind of evil done rather than pushing for some kind of pure and thoroughgoing evil that might fully instantiate their values or tastes. It only takes one relatively petty-minded demon to sign a temptation contract that leaves a lot of good in the world, but maybe the lust for evil in demons runs strong enough that there is a floor to how good the world can be, given their ability to negotiate for compensation.
--
I notice myself using "tastes" and "values" as semi-interchangeable above. I think that they can work similarly in that they can both motivate people to set up an axiology (an ordering of what is best) but that to have tastes has a significantly different tonality than to have values. "Taste" speaks of enjoyment, consumption, preference satisfaction, being pleased, and in some cases, of lust, while "value" speaks of idealism, self-giving, and (I would say) love.
Perhaps, in a Buberian way (like his "evil is not whole-souled" or "you can't worship God by using the same kind of worship you give an idol and just swap out your idol for God"), to will evil is a matter of tastes and not value. When the intensity of your valuing increases (perhaps), the greater your self-giving and idealism and (true) loving. But when the intensity of your "tasting" increases, the greater your impatience and thus pragmatism, and your hunger, and your lust. So a truly "great" (intense) evil willing is one that is done lustfully, and thus impatiently and pragmatically, costing the evil-willer the ability to inflict a truly rational-scale intense evil.
Now, demons may be crippled by their own lusts, but humans who have been deceived by demons can misguidedly pursue through value what is actually worthless or dangerous and thus bring great evil into the world, in effect. In terms of raw intent and desire, it's hard to beat a demon for evilness, although perhaps there are some people who seem to be possessed by demons but are actually on their side and match them both for the vehemence and impatience of their evil. But in terms of consequences, humans are better instruments of greatness, and the effects of greatness can be both good and bad.
(Notice that demons crippled by their own lusts still manage to demand things like wild animal suffering, earthquakes that kill thousands of people, and the presence of psychological evil (demonic possession / mental illness / personality disorders / urges toward killing and raping, etc.), on a scale that makes life gratuitously miserable for many beings, sometimes horrifying and offending people so that they reject God. Perhaps demons still have us beat as far as causing evil. But perhaps there are evil outcomes that only can be attained if we "semi-wittingly" or unwittingly help them come about.)
Our preferences, deep in who we are and not just as they express themselves through what we are, have a tonality to them. We are not "bloodless" in who we are, and there we either love, value, have tastes for, or lust (or prefer in some other way I haven't thought of).
--
I like what I've written so far, but it doesn't satisfy me. I still feel like somehow God could roll a minimally-evil demon to fulfill the temptation contract. He is patient and reality-aimed, and simply needs time before he can get a demon like that.
However, one thought occurs to me that might explain why God might have to choose a demon without waiting for the ideal demon. The "size" of God may be finite, in that he may have finite memory. In order to remember his own past, which (we could assert) is necessary for him to be who he is (it's part of the story of legitimacy, the exact content of which can change over time as legitimacy becomes more specified), he has to use memory, and so he has a finite amount of time to get to the end of time.
--
14 July 2023:
It occurs to me that a demon could negotiate for a situation where many or most people were lost. For instance, if there were going to be a million people in the world, the demon could negotiate for a reality where 1,000 of them were saved, but only if everyone else (999,000) were lost. So the idea is that the demon could force 999,000 people to be created, only to be lost, using the 1,000 as hostages of a sort.
Is there some reason to think this could not be the case? I think there is. According to MSL, God is Legitimacy. This means that he values what is valuable (what is legitimate), and must keep it going forever if possible. So unless the 999,000 people all themselves rejected him, he would have to save them no matter what. (They would have to be the ones to reject him -- he couldn't reject himself for them and somehow impute it to them.)
So God would be unable to offer the demon the concession of damning some apart from their decisions whether to become holy, in order to save others.
What if the demon negotiates a shorter, or even shorter, Millennium? Up to a certain point, the length of the Millennium helps people have time to be saved.
If you give a person a week to do an assignment, that may be too short. Maybe you should give them a semester. That sounds better. How about a year? Or five years? Perhaps there are two dynamics: people who work slow always benefit from more time, but people who are avoiding the work may find even more distractions over time, find their motivation waning even more. So if you give people 5 years to do a homework assignment, all the people who benefit from having lots of time get done in 1 year, but those who are avoiding the assignment actually take it less seriously in the initial period where they have momentum, and so are less likely to finish with a 5 year assignment period than with something shorter.
So maybe 1,000 years (or if we take that as being non-literal, something else perhaps basically similar in length) is the optimal length for the Millennium, to help both slow workers and procrastinators. All slow workers can finish in that time, perhaps. We might say that God can't offer the demons anything other than that length of a Millennium, because God has to give us the optimal amount of time to make our decision (too long would lose too many of the procrastinators, too short would lose too many of the slow workers). That's his "wage ceiling".
But then, why isn't his wage ceiling a bit lower so that it excludes gratuitous suffering?
(later:)
God wants to maximize the number of people in heaven and minimize those who are lost. A person in heaven is an infinite good (everlastingly alive) while a person who is lost is an infinite loss (the loss of a person forever). But not infinite in the sense that one person saved could somehow be equal to millions lost (nor that the calculation would be indeterminate). It is very important to God to make it so that everyone who is created goes to heaven, if it is under God's power to do so.
However, as evil as intense suffering is in itself, if it does not affect eternity, it is something God can accept if there is some kind of benefit to doing so. A benefit might be that God can more readily get demons to draft and sign temptation contracts if they get to cause us intense, and even seemingly gratuitous, suffering. The sooner they sign, the more memory God has to create people.
If God is deontologically constrained so that if it is under his power to keep us from being lost, he must act, does that mean that he will at some point make up for any lack of anti-temptation in our lives, caused by people failing to anti-tempt us? If so, does evangelicalism make sense?
It might make sense if we ourselves are tempted to not care. We might say "temptations must come, but woe to those through whom they come" -- what kind of person would tempt someone else to sin? But we might also say "anti-temptations will come, but woe to those who do not anti-tempt", as in, if you aren't inclined to anti-tempt, your heart is not like God's heart, and that's a dangerous situation to remain in.
It is also possible that the sooner people are anti-tempted, the less suffering there is in the world, and the fewer regrets people have. And also, God is in a state of suffering when we are out of tune with him, and if we love him, we will want to reduce that suffering -- suffering is felt in the now in a demanding way, even if God knows that it is temporary.
On the other hand, maybe there is still room for tragic outcomes despite God's pure will to save. If God's memory is finite, then there is only so much time for people to come to holiness. People can only process so much psychological input in a given amount of time. If we don't use our time well, there is some chance that though God is willing to anti-tempt us to make up for lacks earlier in life, there might not be enough time for us to respond. (So it makes sense to be concerned about things like hedonism keeping us from growing spiritually in secular time.)
Now, God can build in some slack by allocating more time for the Millennium and creating fewer people (so that he can anti-tempt us to make up for our lack of anti-tempting), and he would. But he allocates the slack based on his estimate of what decisions we will make in the future (the future from his perspective creating the world). If we exceed those estimates, then there might not be enough slack.
It is possible that God and the demon make their temptation contract such that God has to keep the world order the same once creation begins. God believes that we are going to only be "so bad". Perhaps, before he has seen us, God doesn't understand how bad we could turn out to be. (Think of God trying to undo creation with the Flood.) He has some idea, having seen demons, but since he is a good being, his imagination doesn't naturally "go there". (To imagine something that has never been imagined before is to make something real and new in the imaginal world, so to imagine evil for the first time is to create evil. God can't do that, but he does perceive the evil that has been created in the imaginal world by others, and this is his source for understanding evil.) Further, God doesn't know what can't be known (what hasn't happened yet), so he doesn't know exactly what we will decide to do. God bets that our moral nature will conform to his expectations (from the Bible, it sounds like Satan bets that we will be worse than God's expectations), and when we prove God wrong, maybe it's too late for him to put the slack into the plan for the Millennium to compensate for that.
The existence of gratuitous suffering (or other gratuitous evil) is something that only makes sense if God is not against evil (which doesn't make any sense in MSL) or he has some kind of constraint on his power. Here are two constraints: God can't tempt, and God can't imagine evil for himself, only can imagine it once his eyes have been opened by seeing it embodied by beings that were capable of innovating in that area. These two constraints come from his holiness, that he is sinless.
(God is also constrained by having to want what he wants, a consequentialist constraint, while the non-tempting one is a deontological one, and the inability to imagine evil one could be seen as a virtue-ethical one or a kind of "physical constraint". Another "physical constraint" being God's limited memory, and also his inability to relate to what does not exist (future things).)
(later:)
Can the demon make a contract with God that makes heaven worse than God intended? (So much worse that we would not look forward to it?)
Temptation is only needed up to the end of the Millennium. Theoretically, after that, God could break whatever contract he had with the demon. I'm not sure that that would be a legitimate thing for God to do, so what about the case that it is not?
Evil has to end someday. If not, God calls evil good, by never rejecting it, which is illegitimate. Heaven is the time in which evil does not exist anymore. So whatever damage a demon could do through the contract, it could not cause heaven to have any evil in it. (God would be unable to make that concession.) This includes the qualia of unbearability, which are evil. Perhaps the demon could make heaven less pleasurable? Once we are spiritually mature enough to be in heaven, we probably won't care that much about a little foregone pleasure. But could the demon negotiate for all pleasure to be gone?
I think demons are more motivated by raw sadism (inflicting the qualia of unbearability) than by quieting heaven's pleasurablity. Perhaps heaven's pleasure can be protected by more pain in this life (God can negotiate for us to have more pain in this life so that we can experience his desired level of pleasure for us in heaven forever.)
I guess it's possible that there are demons who are relatively more anti-pleasure than they are pro-pain (I would suppose that all demons are pro-pain), and thus who would drain heaven of its pleasure (or add 100% bearable suffering) for all eternity. Assuming that heaven's pleasure(/lack of excess bearable pain) is important to God (and it might be if for no other reason than to motivate and comfort us), he might prefer to work with demons who would allow us to make this life worse, and the Millennium worse, in hedonic terms (though not in terms of whether those lives are effective in leading us to salvation), but keep the last, everlasting life, up to a certain hedonic standard.
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