Marshall Naylor successfully defended his master’s thesis, God, Evil, and Infinite Value

August 1, 2017

Thesis Name: God, Evil, and Infinite Value

Date of Defense: March 21, 2017 11am-12:30 pm

Description: Traditional theism conceives of God as unsurpassably and infinitely good. Mark Johnston in particular, taking a cue from Cantor’s work, understands God's value as absolutely infinite: a value that exceeds the cardinality of every infinite set. Since God is absolutely, infinitely good and since God necessarily exists, every possible world is infinitely good. The result is the leveling of value for possible worlds: every possible world is as good as every other possible world. Since the overall value of each world is absolutely infinite, the prevention of every instance of evil—no matter how much good that also prevents—cannot affect the overall value of the world. The result is that the familiar problem(s) of evil in the literature misunderstand the problem completely and the familiar responses fail.

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