🙏The Odyssey Theodicy

Why, if there is a God who created all things out of nothing, did God not just make good people, in a world in which only good things could happen to them? Maybe that is what God did.

Maybe God created a heavenly world in which a variety of good people were much closer to their creator than we are here. Wiser and better informed about that creation than we are, about this universe, might some of those people have wanted to spend some of their limitless time in a less heavenly world? There are various reasons why they might have.

And in particular, their creator would presumably have been above and beyond that creation, not too dissimilarly to the way in which any story’s author is above and beyond that story. That means that there would have been various limits to the relationships that those people could have had with their creator. Those people might have had many interests: music, maths and each other, for example. Some of them might have been good at music and wanted to be as good at maths, and eventually they would have got better at maths. Etc. And some of them might have wondered if they could get better at their relationships with their creator.

Perhaps, for example, they wondered if their creator knew about a lot of horrible possibilities and associated virtues, possibilities and virtues that those people would not have dreamt of. For some reason or other, those people might have asked God if there was any way in which they could get closer to Her. And She might have said that while they could not step closer to Her, they could step back and then step closer, adding that that might help them to know more about those horrible possibilities. Most of them might have not liked that idea, but maybe some of them liked it. Maybe they thought that their relationships with God would improve if they spent a relatively small amount of time in a world in which their creator was even less evident.

Or maybe they thought that their relationships with each other would improve if they spent some time in a world like ours. From their heavenly perspective, it might have seemed like going camping seems to children. It might not have seemed like that once they were there, of course. But presumably a God could guarantee that they would all end up at least as well off as they had started. Maybe they reincarnate, for example, with some of their later incarnations being therapeutic. The fact that we cannot recall past lives does not tell against that possibility because we cannot even recall being born. Still, a lot of them did not like it once they were there. And because some of them dimly recalled having set out on a heroic expedition, not without success, they told stories about how it had all gone wrong. Others were more philosophical, and told themselves that life was death and death life. The main thing is that they all lived happily ever after.