Bruce Little is a professor of Philosophy of Religion at Southeastern Theological Seminary, USA. Little developed the Creation-Order theodicy upon interpreting deficiencies in widely accepted theistic Greater-Good theodicies. His theodicy seeks to maintain the existence of gratuitous evil while holding to the sovereignty of God (Little 2005:156). Little rejects the major premises of Augustine and Aquinas, namely the negation of gratuitous evil (pp. 40, 45). Little disagrees with the overarching “assumption of inference” of the Greater-Good theodicies, this being that an all-powerful and good God would not allow anything evil in His creation that did not achieve a greater good (2010:28). Little utilizes Gottfried Leibniz’ “best of all possible worlds”1 and the created order to frame his ideas. The created order “is this modus vivendi that makes it possible for two persons of different ontological order to have a meaningful relationship in which the relationship is volitional and not determinative or coercive” (Little 2010:85). Through libertarian freedom, man is capable of choosing to love God, yet also capable of choosing not to love God. Regarding gratuitous evil, Little argues that it is real
and “God is morally justified in permitting such” (p. 103). Creation is not perfect in the same way that God is perfect. A created thing cannot possess the same perfection as that which created it, but only the perfection available to its kind (Little 2010:83).
Author: Johnson, Connie