Ramchal

The world-building theodicy borrows an idea from Italian Jewish philosopher and kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707–1746), known by the Hebrew acronym Ramchal. Ramchal writes:

The idea of God creating evil to give humanity the task of perfecting themselves is also featured in the soul-making theodicy, but the world-building theodicy emphasises the second task that Ramchal mentions – perfecting the world by removing evil and bringing about good (see also Soloveitchik Reference Soloveitchik1986, 86–87; Ashkenazi Reference Ashkenazi2009, 109–110). This fits particularly well with the biblical narrative that God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and to preserve it (Genesis 2:15), which may imply that a human’s assignment in this imperfect world is to perfect it and preserve the good in it too.Footnote ³

Ramchal describes how God is honoured when humans fulfil the task of perfecting the world (Luzzatto Reference Luzzatto2005, 223). Nonetheless, the important question is how this arrangement is beneficial to God’s creatures, not just to God himself. After all, a God who submits his creatures to evil just for his own honour can hardly be characterised as wholly good. For this, Ramchal introduces his famous shame argument. Ramchal argues that if God had put his creatures in a ready-made perfect world, their enjoyment of the benefits of life in a perfect world would be mixed with a feeling of shame for having received an unearned gift. Ramchal compares this to the shame a beggar may feel when receiving charity. Tasking humans with the burden of perfecting the world through their own hard work gives them the opportunity to earn the benefits of life in a perfect world, thus enabling them to enjoy those benefits without shame (Luzzatto Reference Luzzatto1982, 17–19).

Although Ramchal’s shame argument may have some initial appeal, it has two main problems. Firstly, an omnipotent God can arguably create creatures who lack an emotional capacity for shame. Such creatures can enjoy a ready-made perfect world without feeling shame, even if they didn’t earn it. Therefore, it seems that the existence of evil isn’t really necessary for creatures to enjoy a perfect world without shame. Secondly, the benefits of enjoyment without shame don’t seem to outweigh the badness of the evils our world contains. It seems worthwhile for creatures to live in a ready-made perfect world where evil never existed, even if the creatures’ enjoyment will be mixed with some shame. If God chooses to enable the existence of evil because God wants creatures to enjoy a perfect world without shame, God seems to be doing creatures a disservice rather than benefitting them.

Due to the philosophical difficulties with Ramchal’s shame argument, the world-building theodicy I am putting forward focuses on a different great good that creatures may enjoy by perfecting the world through their own hard work – the great good of being a ‘mini creator’.Footnote ⁴ My suggestion is that God wanted to create a world with creatures in his image. God’s limitless love for his creatures inspired him to make them powerful and significant like him, and he wished for them to manifest their godlikeness by participating in the creation of the world as autonomous mini creators. To give them such an opportunity, God created the world in an unfinished state, one full of natural dangers and evil-doing people, leaving his creatures to develop the world and bring it to its final utopian state where they will live in unalloyed bliss.

Being a mini creator

Unlike Richard Swinburne, for whom being a mini creator consists in having the ability to impact the world through one’s free choices (Swinburne Reference Swinburne1998, 90), the world-building theodicy is not interested in what a creature may potentially do. Instead, the world-building theodicy is built around the great good a creature may enjoy by actually performing world-building actions – actions that impact the world in a way that brings it closer to becoming the utopian world God designated for us.Footnote ⁵ Creatures who perform world-building actions share a common creation-project with God, and they are mini creators in this sense.

The great good of mini creatorship is a good with non-hedonistic intrinsic value. According to the world-building theodicy, it is intrinsically good for a creature to become significant like God by managing the many needs of our world and influencing it for the better. It is also intrinsically good for a creature to mirror God by displaying knowledge, power, and benevolence in the way a creature devises and executes their world-building endeavours, even if creatures do not possess these traits to the same extent God does.Footnote ⁶ By tasking creatures with world-building, God gives them an opportunity to fulfil themselves by manifesting God’s image in them, and also an opportunity to live a deeply meaningful life by actively engaging in highly valuable and worthy projects (see Wolf Reference Wolf2015).

Additionally, by partaking in bringing the world closer to its final utopian state, one becomes a channel through which God bestows good upon the world. In this, one shares a special partnership with God and works with God towards a common goal. Sharing with God a long-term, all-encompassing project such as world-building may greatly contribute to one’s relationship with God (see Nozick Reference Nozick1989, 82–83; Smith Reference Smith2024, 9) and constitute ‘a kind of intimate sharing in the divine mind and will’ (Yadav Reference Yadav, Crisp, Arcadi and Wessling2020, 75), more so than sharing smaller projects with God like righting minor wrongs or promoting the good in isolated situations.Footnote ⁷

The type of impact that constitutes creaturely world-building can be made in one of two ways. One way is through actions that make the world more similar to how it will be in its final utopian state.Footnote ⁸ That is, more similar than it would have been had the action not been done. A second way is through actions that make the world closer than it would have otherwise been to reaching its final utopian state, even if it is not made more similar to how it will be in its final utopian state. To do this, one’s actions must reduce the amount of work left to do to bring the world to its final utopian state. For example, developing a new technology may make the world less similar to its final utopian state if the technology is mostly used for evil, but it may still reduce the workload left to bring the world to its final utopian state if the technology will later serve a good purpose. The same may also be true about philosophical ideas or political systems that serve as steppingstones towards better ones.

When measuring the degree of mini creatorship a creature may enjoy from their world-building actions, the underlying principle is that the more key features a creature shares with God in God’s role as the ultimate creator, the more that creature is a mini creator. Thus, one is more of a mini creator to the extent that the impact of their world-building actions is more profound, far-reaching, and long-lasting,Footnote ⁹ though even small-scale good actions that don’t produce ripples throughout the world may manifest a modest measure of mini creatorship, as long as they make the world more similar or closer to its final utopian state, even if only for a moment.Footnote ¹⁰ Someone can also be a mini creator without contributing anything new to the world, instead only working hard at preserving elements of the world’s final utopian state that were already implemented into the world. This is not exactly world-building, but it is world-preserving, and one who engages in world-preserving is a mini creator too, because part of God’s job as the world’s creator is sustaining the world after its creation.Footnote ¹¹

One’s mini creatorship is increased to the extent that, like God, their world-building is intentional. To meet this criterion to the fullest, one’s actions must have the same impact they intend for them to have, and one’s actions must constitute world-building for the same reasons one intends for them to do so. Similarly, insofar as God created the world on his own initiative, a creature is more of a mini creator to the extent that they initiate their world-building endeavours – both the forms of world-building they pursue, and the fact that they engage in world-building at all. Likewise, a creature is more of a mini creator to the extent that they initiate creative ways to complete world-building tasks efficiently. Theologians differ as to whether God acts freely, and this has implications for mini creatorship because if God is free, one is more of a mini creator if their world-building actions are free too. Notwithstanding, even if creatures are significantly less free than God, perhaps lacking free will altogether, they may enjoy meaningful mini creatorship by mirroring God’s ultimate creatorship in other ways.

World-building and evil

Now for why evil exists. Let us begin with ‘natural evils’ – dangers, imperfections, and inconveniences in the natural world. According to the world-building theodicy, God could have placed his creatures in a naturally perfect world, but this would prevent them from becoming mini creators by bringing about the natural perfection of the world’s final utopian state through their own hard work. God therefore placed his creatures in a world where natural causes can greatly harm them and make their lives hard. God left it to his creatures to create their own ways to make the world liveable despite difficult weather conditions, famines, and sicknesses. Until now, humans manifested themselves as mini creators by building themselves houses and developing technologies, medicines, and economic and political systems. The natural evils we continue to face today are what remain for us to overcome as we bring the world closer to becoming the utopian world God designated for us. Thus, one may view natural evils as worldly conditions meant to be remedied in creaturely world-building.

The explanation regarding natural evil may make it seem as though world-building is merely a task of developing technologies and other secular enterprises. The explanation why ‘moral evil’ exists is where religions and other moral or spiritual endeavours come into the picture more clearly. The final utopian state at which creaturely world-building is aimed isn’t merely a world of physical comfort and materialistic pleasures; it is also a world of moral and spiritual perfection. Thus, just as natural evil provides creatures with projects for materialistic world-building, moral evil provides creatures with projects for moral and spiritual world-building. Evil people and evil desires are part of the world’s unfinished state. God created his creatures in an initial low moral and spiritual state to give them the benefit of ascending to a higher level of morality and spirituality through their own hard work. A creature who overcomes their own lowly desires or makes a difference for the better in their society manifests themselves as a mini creator through their moral or spiritual world-building.

God’s desire for creatures to manifest mini creatorship can explain why God does not directly and openly instruct each creature exactly which world-building endeavours they are tasked with and how to execute them, or alternatively endow creatures with innate knowledge containing detailed blueprints for world-building. God’s limited visible involvement in creaturely world-building makes it so creatures who take on endeavours of world-building do so as private contractors who need to make creative and executive decisions on their own and draw on their own resources to overcome obstacles and complications. World-building isn’t merely a matter of applying brute force; it is a challenge that requires research, strategising, and reminding oneself of one’s motivations and values. This enables creatures to manifest mini creatorship much more than if their participation in world-building were as low-ranking subordinates who follow detailed, foolproof instructions and enjoy all the supervision and moral support they need.

God’s desire for creatures to manifest mini creatorship can also explain why God does not implant in creatures an innate motivation to pursue world-building endeavours. A creature’s mini creatorship is greater to the extent that their world-building is of their own initiative. For this reason, to enable creatures to enjoy more mini creatorship, God did not create his creatures innately inclined to pursue extensive world-building endeavours, and instead each creature is born with only an innate natural inclination to attempt to improve their own conditions and ensure their own well-being. This leaves room for creatures to develop extensive world-building motivations themselves, making it so creatures can potentially become not only the initiators of their particular world-building endeavours but also the initiators of the fact that they engage in world-building at all.

I have thus far illustrated a general relationship between the existence of evil and the possibility of creaturely world-building, but this does not yet explain why an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God might enable the existence of the enormous amounts and various forms of suffering our world knows. There seem to be ways for God to create an unfinished world with room for creaturely world-building without creaturely suffering, or at least without the amount our world knows.

One may imagine God setting up a situation where creatures can toil at creating a perfect world ex nihilo. In this kind of situation no-one will suffer from worldly evils, because the transition will be from the absence of a world to the presence of a perfect world, instead of a transition from an evil-infested world to a utopian world. Alternatively, one may imagine creaturely world-building taking place in an evil-infested world where evils never harm anyone because God protects everyone with a real-life form of ‘plot armour’, the phenomenon in which fictional characters are guaranteed to survive dangerous situations because the writer finds the characters’ well-being necessary for later points in the plot. For example, God can make sure that earthquakes and hurricanes always occur close enough to creatures to be noticed, but far enough away that no-one is harmed. It may be hard for us to imagine how God can pull off this feat regarding some of the natural evils we are familiar with, and maybe even more so regarding moral evils, but an omnipotent and omniscient God can surely avoid the enormous amount of creaturely suffering our world knows.

It may be that creatures in a world-building-ex-nihilo situation or in a plot-armour world would become wary of their toilsome world-building, and they would take it less seriously than creatures who know that their well-being depends on it. If so, God would have reason to create a world where evils harm creatures enough to keep them sufficiently motivated to pursue world-building endeavours. However, God can arguably orchestrate things to prevent creatures from realising they have plot armour and to keep creatures sufficiently motivated to pursue world-building endeavours with much less creaturely suffering than the amount that occurs in our world. This calls for a theory that explains why God does not seem to be trying to keep worldly evils to the minimum necessary. For this, I introduce yo-yo theology.

Yo-yo theology

I use the term ‘yo-yo theology’ to refer to the idea that God has reason to allow plentiful creaturely suffering to occur in the world’s unfinished state because every bit of creaturely suffering increases the mini creatorship creatures will eventually enjoy through world-building. This is similar to a yo-yo trick where the more the yo-yo becomes unravelled, the greater a stunt it is for the yo-yo handler to make it roll itself back up. Let us see the reasoning supporting yo-yo theology.

A wholly good God would want his creatures to manifest mini creatorship by bringing about many utopian aspects of the world’s final state themselves. This gives God reason to create a world that does not exhibit significant premade utopian aspects. For example, world-building-ex-nihilo situations and plot-armour worlds are somewhat utopian states from the very beginning, because although certain pleasures may be unavailable in the world-building stage of these scenarios, creatures are protected from any form of suffering, constituting a significant premade utopian aspect of these scenarios. For God to enable creatures to bring about the suffering-free utopian aspect of the world’s final state themselves, there must be suffering in the world’s unfinished state.

For the same reason, God has reason to reject moderate applications of plot armour too. If creatures had moderate plot armour in the world’s unfinished state, the absence of widespread severe suffering would constitute a significant premade utopian aspect of the world that creatures do not get a chance to bring about themselves. The same reasoning rules out an ‘easy-bake world’ where creatures are always able to solve problems and remove threats effortlessly, as this too would constitute a significant premade near-utopian aspect of the world that creatures do not get a chance to bring about themselves.

Accordingly, a wholly good God has reason to place his creatures in a world that initially contains many different types of widespread and severe evils, both natural and moral, which cause copious suffering for many generations before they are eventually overcome. The worse a particular evil is and the more suffering it causes and the harder it is to overcome, the less utopian the world is in its unfinished state for containing that particular evil, and the more impactful creatures’ world-building actions are for eradicating it, and the more mini creatorship they manifest. This entails that every bit of creaturely suffering and hardship in the world’s unfinished state increases the mini creatorship creatures will eventually enjoy through world-building – yo-yo theology.

All it takes for the world-building theodicy to be able to explain a worldly evil is it being plausible that the relevant evil may be removed someday through creaturely efforts. With some faith in science and with the optimism characteristic of theists, this seems plausible for every evil our world knows. At the very least, God can perform miracles to eradicate particularly hard-to-remove evils, and if such a miracle is in part a response to a creature’s prayers or virtuous deeds, the creature seems to manifest mini creatorship in their contribution, making the relevant evils fit into the world-building theodical scheme. This enables the world-building theodicy to account for many worldly imperfections that most other theodicies ignore, including phenomena in nature that have been thought to support atheism, such as ugliness (Aikin and Jones Reference Aikin and Jones2015), decay (Strickland Reference Strickland2021, 227–231), and extreme brutality (Nosal Reference Nosal2025, 229–232). This also enables the world-building theodicy to provide a response to many explanatory challenges that philosophers have raised for theism. For example, to explain why God might choose to remain hidden from people who may have otherwise enjoyed a loving relationship with him (Schellenberg Reference Schellenberg2015), why God might let people be blamelessly morally ignorant (Elbert Reference Elbert2021), why God might choose not to reveal his plans to us even when we suffer from them (Russel and Wykstra Reference Russel and Wykstra1988, 147), and what might be God’s reason for making it so hard to construct a compelling theodicy (Ruczaj Reference Ruczaj2024). All of these are worldly imperfections and inconveniences that provide opportunities for manifesting mini creatorship when they are remedied by creaturely world-building – material, spiritual, or epistemic – so yo-yo theology can explain why God might incorporate them into our world.

Note that yo-yo theology can also help explain the existence of worldly evils regardless of who they harm. If taken seriously, most opportunity theodicies would lead one to expect worldly evils to occur only when the sufferer or someone in their vicinity will cultivate moral growth out of it, get closer to God from it, or otherwise seize some valuable opportunity not long after. However, this does not seem to be the principle governing the distribution of evils in our world. Sometimes the only people in a position to seize a valuable opportunity provided by a particular evil are people who lack the relevant mental capacities – infants, non-human animals, and people with cognitive disabilities or severe mental illness. As Paul Draper and others point out, the actual distribution of evils in our world appears to be the kind of distribution one would expect if it was determined by ‘blind’ natural processes (Draper Reference Draper1989; Linford and Patterson Reference Linford and Patterson2015). The fact that mini creatorship can be manifested long after the suffering takes place – even centuries after the sufferers are dead – enables the world-building theodicy to accommodate this appearance and even regard it as truthful, since there is no expectation for people to seize world-building opportunities shortly after an evil occurs. Thus, for example, the world-building theodicy can easily explain the hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering that preceded human existence to the best of our scientific knowledge, as long as at some point in time all of the evils that those animals suffered from will be fully eradicated.

Given yo-yo theology, one may wonder why God did not make the world’s unfinished state even worse. A Hell on Earth that lacks even the slightest hint of a premade utopian aspect would give creatures even more opportunity for world-building and manifesting mini creatorship. One possible reason why God did not make the world’s unfinished state any worse involves a restriction of yo-yo theology – it may be that some suffering is so severe that it outweighs the benefits of the world-building it enables. The yo-yo metaphor would describe this as the point at which the yo-yo would come off its string if it were unravelled any more. It may be that if a world contained any more suffering than our world does, it would pass this point.

However, we needn’t give up an unrestricted yo-yo theology so quickly. Another possible reason why God did not make the world’s unfinished state any worse may be that for every possible world, there is another possible world that contains more suffering in its unfinished state. If so, God cannot create a world with absolutely no premade utopian aspects. Every world is somewhat utopian for not being as bad as a worse possible world, and God must choose somewhere along the spectrum if God is to create a world at all.Footnote ¹² Importantly, even if it is somewhat arbitrary how much suffering God decides for the world to contain in its unfinished state, there is no gratuitous suffering, because every bit of suffering enables creatures to manifest more mini creatorship than what would be possible without it.

Compatibility with different views about free will

We are now in a position to see how the world-building theodicy avoids making particular assumptions about free will. To appreciate the range of views that are compatible with the world-building theodicy, let us examine two versions of the world-building theodicy from opposite ends of the spectrum.

One who is inclined towards indeterminism-favouring accounts of free will may imagine that God planned out this world as it is, with all of its evil and suffering, but they may also contend that God did not. They may imagine that evils result from Original Sin and The FallFootnote ¹³ or from an angelic rebellion against God (or angelic negligence; see Cutter and Swenson, Reference Cutter and Swensonforthcoming), which left our world in an unfinished condition where natural evils run amok and creatures are morally and spiritually imperfect. One may imagine that God saw fit not to fix the world himself because God valued the opportunity it offers us to freely redeem the world ourselves and manifest ourselves as mini creators, though sometimes there are setbacks when we make bad choices. On this version of the world-building theodicy, creaturely world-building may be likened to a jazz ensemble with God at its head, improvising together to produce a masterpiece that rewards its participants by the end (Steen Reference Steen, Clark and Koperski2022, 319–326).

On the other end of the spectrum is my personal favourite version of the world-building theodicy, one where God creates a deterministic world where creatures may or may not have free will. God can be seen as the masterful planner who plans in advance the entire course of history down to minute details, prearranging exactly how and when each evil will come about and eventually be removed as the world advances towards its final utopian state. There is no need for an appeal to creaturely free will to explain apparent setbacks in the world-building process or apparently pointless suffering, and this is an upshot of yo-yo theology combined with the fact that the world-building theodicy allows for mini creatorship to be manifested long after the suffering takes place. As I mentioned earlier, most opportunity theodicies need to appeal to specific controversial doctrines regarding free will and divine omniscience to frame apparently pointless suffering as opportunities that, to God’s dismay, were freely wasted by ill-choosing people. However, for the world-building theodicy, every instance of suffering increases the mini creatorship to be manifested in the long run, so God has reason to willingly bring them about, and there is no expectation for the world-building actions to take place soon after the suffering. Thus, there are no pointless evils, and there is no need to blame evils on free creaturely choices that were unplanned by God either. This enables the viability of a deterministic world-building theodicy, and even one where creatures are believed to lack free will.

One may think that creaturely world-building is less meaningful if it is not done freely, and they may be right. Nonetheless, this does not entail that unfree creatures cannot manifest meaningful mini creatorship. When one discusses a version of the world-building theodicy that assumes that creatures do not have free will, the background assumption is likely that creatures cannot possibly reach whatever standards qualify someone as having free will, otherwise God would have created them free, or God would have some overriding reason not to do so. If that’s the case, the mini creatorship attainable by the type of unfree world-building creatures God would create is the most significant form of mini creatorship available. Since these creatures would still have some agencyFootnote ¹⁴ and they would be capable of mirroring God’s ultimate creatorship in ways that do not require free will, their world-building actions can still make them mini creators in a meaningful way, making a world-building theodicy viable even under the assumption that we don’t have free will.

Reincarnations

At this point, if all one wanted was a theodicy that explains how every worldly evil leads to a valuable greater good, they should be satisfied. Nevertheless, many theodicists and theodicy critics set a higher standard for theodicies, expecting a theodicy to explain how God is good to each and every one of his creatures, valuing them as individuals (see the many sources I cited in Ron, Reference Ronforthcoming). To satisfy this higher standard, the world-building theodicy needs to address the unfortunate people whose lives seem bad for them overall, and those who suffer throughout their lives but don’t enjoy significant opportunities for world-building, including people who die in infancy and non-human animals. Something needs to be said also about people who live their whole lives as evil-doing world-destroyers, not world-builders, as the world-building theodicy is meant to be compatible with the claim that these people might be unfree to do otherwise.

Yo-yo theology can help explain why God might let there be people like this. If everyone was gifted with a good, fulfilling life in the world’s unfinished state, that would constitute a significant premade utopian aspect of the world that creatures do not get a chance to bring about themselves. For creatures to be able to manifest mini creatorship by making it so every creature enjoys a good, fulfilling life, it must not be so in the world’s unfinished state. However, the pressing question is how this is compatible with divine righteousness and divine justice.

Like many other theodicies, the world-building theodicy can address these concerns simply by arguing that God compensates people in the afterlife. However, there is another option that fits especially well with the world-building theodicy. As I argued in detail elsewhere (Ron, Reference Ronforthcoming), if God wants not only for each creature to enjoy an overall good existence but also for each and every one of his creatures to manifest themselves as a mini creator and partake in world-building, God can achieve this through reincarnations.

The world-building theodicy can argue that God makes sure that all creatures end up receiving a worthwhile share of worldly goods and opportunities for world-building in the grand scheme of the many incarnations of their souls, including an incarnation in the world’s final utopian state. Creatures might also gain closure in later lives by contributing to eradicating some of the same evils they suffered from in previous lives. Reincarnations seem especially fitting for the world-building theodicy because they enable each creature to mirror God and oversee and partake in world-building from the beginning of history until the world reaches its final utopian state, engaging in world-building endeavours in different eras in history, from within different cultural backgrounds, in different personal circumstances, with different personalities, and perhaps even as different species. This adds up to a significant amount of world-building, but perhaps more importantly, it enables one to become more like God by echoing God’s possession of infinite attributes that all express his divine nature. The world-building theodicy does not need to incorporate these claims about reincarnations, especially if one finds them implausible,Footnote ¹⁵ but it might be worthwhile.