The Irenaen Theodicy

St Irenaus (130 - 201AD) was one of the early ‘fathers of the church’, he distinguised two stages of Human beings.

1. Image, in the first stages human beings were not the perfect beings which Adam and Eve were, they were immature creations with immense capacity for spiritual and moral development.

2. Likeness, in the second stage, occuring now, humans are being transformed into ‘children of God’.

The Irenaen Theodicy relies heavily on the importance of human freedom. Irenaeus suggests that human ‘goodness’ comes from it’s response to moral decisions made in an imperfect world, when temptation is resisted it is infinitely more valuable a lesson learnt than if it had been an inherent part of the being. The idea being that the human race was not created in a state of perfection but in a state of imperfection but leading to a state of perfection. Also if Humans were created with a knowledge of their creator they would not have the complete freedom to do as they wished, so human kind had to be made at an epistemic distance from God, (Remember kids epistemic=knowledge). So, they are formed within a universe which God is not a blatently obvious intrusion into their lives, but available to be known through the faith of the individual. We have a tension between the selfish needs of survival and the spiritual and moral needs to ‘rise above’ our self centeredness, in this war of life choices we develop into ‘good’ creatures more the ‘likeness’ of God.

Basically, in order for us to develop morally toward God we had to be created (and exist) at a distance from him, therefore there had to be horrid things in the world.

we know need to concentrate on the problem of pain and suffering in the world. The normal assumption of the skeptic is that God has supposedly created a perfect world and that if there is suffering in it it must mean that...

a) God is a nasty or weak character.

b) God does not exist.

For Irenaeus this problem is overcome by the idea that the world is not finished, we are ‘moving toward’ perfect but we are not there yet. God’s purpose was not to construct a paradise where the world was free of pain and suffering, but as a place where soul-development can take place, where mankind may become ‘children of God’.

This is where the ‘conterfactual hypothesis’ comes in.

(note: conterfactual hypothosis, in other words think of the opposite alternative and see if this could have worked if it doesn’t then there is no real alternative. In this case imagine a world with no suffering, properly mind, think of all the implications!).

So, God wants us to develop freely to become ‘children’, he must threrefore be epistemically removed from creation in order to give us the perfect environment to develop both spiritually and morally into top quality individuals, without pain suffering and other nastiness this could not happen.

The Irenaean Theodicy however does need an after life (heaven to be precise) for three reasons.

uno - although it can be seen that pain and suffering can produce a response of selflessness, love and moral steadfastness, often it may not. If this is the case the development must continue after death for life to be anything other that a useless and unnecessary cause of pain for some people.

dos - for all the pain and horibleness in the world there must be a top quality reward at the end to make it all worth it. Realistically I’d rather be morally corrupt and happy than the greatest saint who walked the earth living in constant pain and yuckiness. There must therefore be some further development.

thirdly - for the theodicy to be complete all humans must attain the heavenly state otherwise God’s intentions of humanity becoming his ‘children’ will have been ruined (and we can’t have that now, can we?)