Two quotes by Mill really hit home. Substitute “intractable material” for “the free wills of creation” and the meaning doesn’t change in the slightest.
“One only form of belief in the supernatural respecting the origin and government of the universe stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity. It is that which, resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator, regards Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle between contriving goodness and an intractable material, as was believed by Plato, or a Principle of Evil, as was the doctrine of the Manicheans. A creed like this, which I have known to be devoutly held by at least one cultivated and conscientious person of our own day, allows it to be believed that all the mass of evil which exists was undesigned by, and exists not by the appointment of, but in spite of the Being whom we are called upon, to worship. A virtuous human
being assumes in this theory the exalted character of a fellow-labourer with the Highest, a fellow-combatant in the great strife ; contributing his little, which by the aggregation of many like himself becomes much, towards that progressive ascendancy, and ultimately 'complete triumph of good over evil, which history points to, and which this doctrine teaches us to regard as planned by the Being to whom we owe all the benevolent contrivance we behold in Nature.”
If the maker of the world can all that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion. The more consistent of those who have deemed themselves qualified to " vin- dicate the ways of God to man " have endeavoured to avoid the alternative by hardening their hearts, and denying that misery is an evil. The goodness of God, they say, does not consist in willing the happi- ness of his creatures, but their virtue ; and the uni- verse, if not a happy, is a just, universe. But waving the objections to this scheme of ethics, it does not at all get rid of the difficulty. If the Creator of man- kind willed that they should all be virtuous, his designs are as completely baffled as if he had willed that they should all be happy : and the order of nature is constructed with even less regard to the requirements of justice than to those of benevolence. If the law of all creation were justice and the Creator omnipotent, then in whatever amount suffering and happiness might be dispensed to the world, each person’s share of them would be exactly proportioned to that person’s good or evil deeds ; no human being would have a worse lot than another, without worse deserts; accident or favouritism would have no part in such a world, but every human life would be the playing out of a drama constructed like a perfect moral tale. No one is able to blind himself to the fact that the world we live in is totally different from this ; insomuch that the necessity of redressing the balance has been deemed one of the strongest arguments for another life after death, which amounts to an admission that the order of things in this life is often an example of injustice, not justice. If it be said that God does not take sufficient account of pleasure and pain to make them the reward or punishment of the good or the wicked, but that virtue is itself the greatest good and vice the greatest evil, then these at least ought to be dispensed to all according to what they have done to deserve them ; instead of which, every kind of moral depravity is entailed upon multitudes by the fatality of their -birth,; through the fault of their parents, of society, or of uncontrollable circumstances, certainly through no fault of their own. Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.
The only admissible moral theory of Creation is that the Principle of Good cannot at once and altogether subdue the powers of evil, either physical or moral ; could not place mankind in a world free from the necessity of an incessant struggle with, tlie maleficent powers, or make them always victorious in that struggle, but could and did make them capable of carrying on the fight with vigour and with progressively increasing success. Of all the religious explanations of the order of nature, this alone is neither contradictory to itself, nor to the facts for which it attempts to account. According to it, man’s duty would consist, not in simply taking care of his own interests by obeying irresistible power, but in standing forward a not ineffectual auxiliary to a Being of perfect beneficence; a faith which seems much better adapted for nerving him to exertion than a vague and
inconsistent reliance on an Author of Grood who is supposed to be also the author of evil. And I venture to assert that such has really been, though often unconsciously, the faith of all who have drawn strength and support of any worthy kind from trust in a super-intending Providence. There is no subject on which men’s practical belief is more incorrectly indicated by the words they use to express it, than religion. Many have derived a base confidence from imagining them-selves to be favourites of an omnipotent but capricious and despotic Deity. But those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the sympathizing support of a powerful and good Governor of the world, have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omni- potent. They hare always saved his goodness at the expense of his power. They have believed, perhaps, that he could, if he willed, remove all the thorns from their individual path, but not without causing greater harm to some one else, or frustrating some purpose of greater importance to the general well-being. They have believed that he could do any one thing, but not
any combination of things : that his government, like human government, was a system of adjustments and compromises ; that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to his intention. And since the exertion of all his power to make it as little imperfect as pos-sible, leaves it no better than it is, they cannot but regard that power, though vastly beyond human esti-mate, yet as in itself not merely finite, but extremely limited. They are bound, for example, to suppose this irresistible conviction comes out in the writings of religious philosophers, in exact proportion to the general clearness of their un- derstanding. It nowhere shines forth so distinctly as in Leibnitz’s famous The’odice’e, so strangely mistaken for a system of optimism, and, as such, satirized by Yoltaire on grounds which do not even touch the author’s argument. Leibnitz does not maintain that this world is the best of all imaginable, but only of all possible worldi ; which, he argues, it cannot but be, inasmuch as God, who is absolute goodness, has chosen it and not another. In every page of the work he tacitly assumes an abstract possibility and impossibility, independent of
the divine power : and though his pious feelings make him continue to designate that power by the word Omnipotence, ho so explains that term as to make it mean, power extending to aU that is withia the limits of that abstract possibility.
that the best lie could do for his Imman creatures was to make an immense 'majority of all who have yet existed, be born (without any fault of their own) Patagonians, or Esquimaux, or something nearly as brutal and degraded, but to give them capacities which by being cultivated for very many centuries in toil and suffering, and after many of the best speci- mens of the race have sacrificed their lives for the purpose, have at last enabled some chosen portions of the species to grow into something better, capable of being improved in centuries more into something really good, of which hitherto there are only to be found individual instances. It may be possible to believe with Plato that perfect goodness, limited and thwarted in every direction by the intractableness of the material, has done this because it could do no better. But that the same perfectly wise and good Being had absolute power over the material, and made it, by voluntary choice, what it is; to admit this might have been supposed impossible to any one who has the simplest notions of moral good and evil. Nor can any such person, whatever kind of religious phrases he may nse, fail to believe, that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect good- ness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man."
From his 3 essays on religion - which are *very *good.
as a serious philosophical argument, though as to form I think it’s valid, as given above, with the caveat that all the words used would have to be defined, and that could be an endless exercise.