never to choose evil? Plantinga responds with the concept of transworld depravity — the possibility that every possible free creature would choose at least some evil in every possible world — but this is highly speculative and difficult to evaluate. There's a deeper objection: is the free will of perpetrators really worth more than the suffering of their victims? The Holocaust involved free choices by the perpetrators. Was preserving their freedom to choose evil really worth six million deaths? The free will defence seems to assign infinite value to the freedom of the person making the choice and zero value to the suffering of the people affected by it. This is a strange moral calculus — and it's especially strange to attribute it to an omnibenevolent God.
The Soul-Making Theodicy
Irenaeus of Lyon, developed by John Hick: suffering exists to enable moral and spiritual growth. You can't develop courage without danger, compassion without witnessing suffering, or resilience without hardship. God created a world with suffering because it's the kind of world in which genuinely good character can develop — a "vale of soul-making" rather than a pleasure garden. Hick argued that God didn't create humans as finished, perfect beings (as Augustine assumed) but as immature beings with the potential for perfection. Suffering is the environment in which that potential is actualised. Just as a muscle grows through resistance, character grows through difficulty. A world without challenges would be a world without growth — a spiritual nursery from which no one ever graduates. Hick also added an eschatological dimension: the suffering of this life will be redeemed in the afterlife, where all souls will ultimately reach fulfilment. This makes present suffering a temporary stage in an eternal process — painful, but ultimately justified by the infinite good it produces. Without this eschatological promise, the soul-making theodicy seems to justify potentially unlimited suffering for the sake of character development — a poor bargain by any standard. The problem: The suffering seems wildly disproportionate to the character development it allegedly produces. A child who dies at age three doesn't develop character — they don't live long enough. Communities destroyed by genocide don't grow through the experience — they're destroyed. An omnipotent God could presumably design a world where character growth occurs through less extreme challenges — challenges calibrated to the capacity of each person, like a well- designed curriculum. The actual world looks nothing like a well-designed curriculum. It looks like a random distribution of suffering that bears no discernible relationship to anyone's developmental needs.
Hick's response: If the connection between suffering and growth were too obvious, it would undermine genuine moral development. If people could see that every hardship was precisely calibrated for their growth, they would endure suffering as an investment (knowing the payoff was guaranteed) rather than genuinely confronting it as a moral challenge. The opacity of suffering — its apparent meaninglessness — is a feature, not a bug. But this response asks us to accept a lot on faith, and it doesn't address cases where suffering simply destroys rather than develops.
The Best-of-All-Possible-Worlds
Leibniz argued that God, being omniscient, surveyed all possible worlds and created the best one. This world — with all its suffering — is the best that was logically possible. Every evil it contains is necessary for some greater good that could not have been achieved otherwise. The suffering is, so to speak, the cost of the overall optimum — like the dissonance in a symphony that makes the resolution more beautiful. The problem:
Voltaire demolished this in
Candide
(1759), written after the Lisbon earthquake killed tens of thousands. The satire made the position seem absurd — how could a world containing the Lisbon earthquake be the best possible world? More formally: if God is omnipotent, he could create a world with less suffering. If this is the best he could do, he's not truly omnipotent. If he chose not to create a better world, he's not fully omnibenevolent. And the claim that this particular arrangement of suffering is necessary for the overall good requires a cosmic accounting system that we have no access to — which leads us toward the mystery defence.
The Mystery Defence
God's ways are beyond human comprehension. We cannot understand why God permits suffering because our cognitive limitations prevent us from grasping the divine plan. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways" (Isaiah 55:8). We are like ants trying to understand human architecture — we see fragments of the design but can't grasp the whole. The problem: This is not a theodicy — it's a refusal to give one. It asks you to trust that an explanation exists without providing it. And it's unfalsifiable: no amount of suffering could ever count as evidence against God, because any counterevidence can be dismissed as beyond our understanding. A theory that can't even in principle be proved wrong has no explanatory content. Moreover, the
mystery defence is selective: believers don't apply mystery to God's good actions (those are attributed to his love and power). Mystery is invoked only to explain the bad. This asymmetry suggests that the defence is ad hoc — a patch applied to save the theory rather than a genuine insight into divine nature.
Every theodicy sacrifices one of the three attributes. The free will defence limits omnipotence. Soul-making limits omnibenevolence. The mystery defence limits our access to omniscience. The pattern is consistent, and Chapter 15 will explain why. Notice the structure of the debate. Each theodicy attempts to make the three attributes consistent by qualifying one of them. But every qualification makes God less than the classical definition requires. A God who can't prevent free-will- caused evil is not fully omnipotent. A God who allows suffering for the sake of growth is not straightforwardly omnibenevolent — benevolence is being redefined to include what would normally be considered cruelty (inflicting suffering on those who haven't consented to the "lesson"). A God whose reasons are incomprehensible is one whose omniscience is operationally useless from our perspective. The defenders of theism have two broad options. First, accept that one or more of the three attributes must be qualified — perhaps God is very powerful but not omnipotent, or very good but constrained by logical necessity. This produces a coherent theology but not classical theism. Second, insist that all three attributes are literally, unqualifiedly true and embrace the mystery — accepting that the problem of evil is genuinely beyond human comprehension. This preserves classical theism but at the cost of abandoning the project of rational theology. Chapter 15 will argue that neither option is necessary — because the problem dissolves once you recognise that the three attributes are the three modalities, and that the contradiction is not a puzzle to be solved but a structural impossibility to be acknowledged.
Discussion Questions
1. The logical problem says omnipotence + omnibenevolence + evil = contradiction. Can the contradiction be resolved, or must one of the three be surrendered? Which would you surrender, and what God concept would remain? 2. The soul-making theodicy says suffering builds character. Does your experience confirm this? Does suffering always produce growth, or does it sometimes just destroy? What determines which outcome occurs? 3.
The evidential problem focuses on gratuitous suffering — suffering that serves no apparent purpose. Can you think of an example of suffering that genuinely seems pointless — that couldn't plausibly serve any greater good?
How would a defender of theism respond?
4. The mystery defence says God's reasons are beyond our comprehension. Is this intellectually honest humility, or is it a conversation-stopper that immunises theism from all criticism? How do you tell the difference between "I don't understand why" and "there is no reason why"?
Chapter Fifteen
The Three Modalities and the Divine
The last two chapters have walked you through the Western canon's great debate about God: the arguments for God's existence (Chapter 13) and the problem of evil (Chapter 14). You've seen the ontological, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments. You've seen the logical and evidential problems of evil. You've seen the theodicies — free will, soul-making, best-of-all-possible-worlds — and the ways they strain under their own weight. This chapter doesn't take sides in that debate. It does something more radical: it suggests that the debate is built on a structural confusion, and that once the confusion is identified, the entire landscape of the question shifts.
The Three "Omni" Attributes
Classical theism — the God of Anselm, Aquinas, and the major Western monotheisms — defines God by three essential attributes: Omniscient: God knows everything. Every fact, every truth, every state of affairs — past, present, and future — is transparently available to the divine mind. Nothing is hidden. Omnipotent: God can do anything. There is no limit to divine power. God is the creator and sustainer of all that exists. Whatever is logically possible, God can accomplish. Omnibenevolent: God is perfectly good. Every divine action is motivated by love. God wills the good of all creation, without exception, without limit, without failure. These three attributes — knowledge, power, goodness — are held to be simultaneously true of a single being. God is one, and God is all three. The entire apparatus of classical theism rests on this conjunction. Now notice something.
The Three Modalities, Again
Recall from Chapter 3 the three modalities of the IDM:
The omniscient modality: the perspective from which a domain is perceived externally, structurally, completely. The "view from outside." Third-person, objective, encompassing all knowledge of the domain.
The transcendent modality: the perspective from which a domain is created, originated, generated. The "view from beyond." The source that exceeds the domain, that brought it into being and sustains its existence.
The immanent modality: the perspective of being within, engaged, in-relation- with. The "view from inside." First-person, participatory, characterised by care, by felt engagement, by qualitative richness. The classical theistic attributes map directly onto these modalities. Omniscience is the omniscient modality. Omnipotence is the transcendent modality.
Omnibenevolence is the immanent modality. This is not a coincidence. The reason classical theism arrived at exactly these three attributes — and no others — is that these are the three fundamental ways of relating to any domain. The theologians who developed the concept of God were identifying something real: the three irreducible modalities of relation. Their mistake was not in identifying the modalities. Their mistake was in projecting all three onto a single being .
The Axiom III Problem
Recall Axiom III: the three modalities are always distinct, inseparable, and non- interchangeable . They cannot be collapsed into each other or attributed to a single entity in the same way. They are irreducibly three. Classical theism says: God is omniscient and omnipotent and omnibenevolent. One being, three attributes.
The IDM says: this is an Axiom III violation. The three modalities are distinct and non-interchangeable. They cannot all be properties of a single being in a coherent way, because each modality defines a different kind of relation to the domain — and a single entity cannot simultaneously be external to the domain (omniscient), beyond the domain (transcendent), and within the domain (immanent) in the full, unrestricted sense that the "omni" prefix demands. You can be outside the room, looking in. You can be the person who built the room. You can be inside the room, participating in what's happening there. You can be all three at different times, or in restricted senses. But you cannot be all three simultaneously, unlimitedly, and essentially — because each position excludes the others when taken to the absolute. To know everything about a domain from outside requires that you are not a participant within it (if you're participating, you're part of what would need to be known, creating a self-reference problem). To create a domain from beyond requires that you are not identical with it. To be in genuine caring relationship within a domain requires that you are not standing outside it in detached observation. At finite scales, we navigate these tensions easily. A parent can know things about their child's life, have power to shape it, and genuinely love the child. But the parent is not omni -anything. The "omni" prefix — the extension to the absolute — is where the coherence breaks. An all -knowing, all -powerful, all -good being requires the simultaneous absolute occupancy of all three modalities, and Axiom III says that's structurally impossible.
The Problem of Evil, Dissolved
Now the problem of evil becomes transparent. The standard formulation: if God is omniscient (knows about suffering), omnipotent (could prevent it), and omnibenevolent (wants to prevent it), why does suffering exist? Every attempted answer sacrifices one attribute. The free-will theodicy limits omnipotence (God can't prevent suffering without removing free will). The soul- making theodicy limits omnibenevolence (God allows suffering for a greater good, which means God's goodness is not straightforward care but a complex calculus). The mystery defence limits omniscience (we can't understand God's reasons, implying God's knowledge is inaccessible even in principle).
The IDM says: of course every answer sacrifices one attribute.
Because you can't have all three simultaneously. The problem of evil is not a flaw in the concept of God that needs to be patched with clever theodicies. It is the inevitable consequence of trying to project three irreducible modalities onto a single being. The contradiction is built into the definition. No theodicy will resolve it, because it's not a problem of insufficient ingenuity — it's a structural impossibility. This is not a proof that God doesn't exist. It's a proof that a being simultaneously possessing all three omni-attributes in the unrestricted sense is incoherent. What exists — what the theologians were pointing at — are the three modalities themselves: the reality of comprehensive knowledge, the reality of creative power, and the reality of unconditional care. These are real. They're just not properties of a single being. They're properties of the structure of reality itself . What does this mean for religious practice? More than you might expect. The contemplative traditions within every major religion — Christian mysticism, Sufi Islam, Zen Buddhism, Hindu Vedanta, Kabbalah — have long emphasised that God transcends any particular description, that the divine is not a being among beings but the ground of being itself, that the most profound spiritual experiences involve contact with something that exceeds all categories. These traditions, read through the IDM lens, are describing genuine contact with the three modalities — with the structural depth of reality itself. The mystic who reports experiencing "the ground of being" is not hallucinating. They're perceiving (in the immanent mode) the same structural features that the philosopher identifies (in the omniscient mode) and that the creative artist expresses (in the transcendent mode). The experience is real. The theological interpretation — that the experience is caused by a personal God with specific attributes — is where the error enters. The IDM therefore takes religious experience seriously while rejecting the classical theological framework. Prayer, meditation, contemplation, and ritual are not wasted effort. They are practices through which human beings cultivate their connection to the three modalities — deepening their understanding (immanent mode), clarifying their knowledge (omniscient mode), and participating in the creative unfolding of reality (transcendent mode). The sacred is real. The sacred is not a person.
What the Arguments for God Actually Prove
Reread the classical arguments with this lens:
The cosmological argument (everything that exists has a cause; there must be a first cause) identifies something real: the transcendent modality. Reality does have a generative aspect — an origin, a creative source, a "why is there something rather than nothing?" The argument correctly identifies this modality. It incorrectly personalises it as a being with intentions and will.
The teleological argument (the universe exhibits order and purpose; this implies a designer) identifies something real: the omniscient modality. Reality does exhibit deep structural order — mathematical regularities, physical constants, the emergence of complexity. The argument correctly identifies this modality. It incorrectly infers a mind behind the structure.
The moral argument (objective moral truths exist; they require a moral lawgiver) identifies something real: the immanent modality. There is a genuine "oughtness" built into the structure of interaction (as Chapter 11 showed — the is-ought bridge). The argument correctly identifies that ethical principles are not merely human conventions. It incorrectly sources them in the commands of a divine will rather than in the structure of interaction itself.
The ontological argument (the concept of a greatest possible being entails its existence) is the most interesting case. It attempts to capture all three modalities at once — the maximally great being would be maximally knowing, maximally powerful, and maximally good. The argument fails precisely because this conjunction is incoherent (Axiom III). But the intuition behind it — that there is something maximal about reality, something that exceeds any particular domain — is sound. The IDM calls this the transcendent modality. It's real. It's just not a person.
The Sacred as Structural
If the three modalities are real features of reality — if there genuinely is comprehensive structural order, genuine creative origination, and genuine relational care built into the fabric of existence — then the impulse toward the sacred is not a mistake. It's a recognition. What people have historically called "God" is, in the IDM's analysis, the recognition — often intuitive, often inarticulate — that reality has these three aspects and that they matter. The awe you feel looking at the stars is a response to the omniscient modality: the staggering structural order of the cosmos. The
gratitude you feel for being alive is a response to the transcendent modality: the generative miracle that anything exists at all. The love you feel for another person is a response to the immanent modality: the relational care that is the most fundamental feature of interaction. These experiences are real. They point at something real. The IDM doesn't dismiss them. It says: what they point at is not a being but a structure — the triadic structure of reality itself. And that structure is, in its own way, worthy of the same reverence that the traditions have directed at a personalised God, because it is more fundamental, more pervasive, and more intimately connected to every moment of your existence. The sacred is not supernatural. It is structural. It is built into the fabric of every interaction, every relationship, every moment of genuine engagement between self and world. You don't need to go to a special building or perform a special ritual to encounter it. You encounter it every time you pay attention.
"I'm spiritual but not religious. Is that incoherent?" Not at all. What you're doing — whether you know it or not — is recognising the three modalities without accepting the classical theistic projection of them onto a single personal being. You sense that reality has depth, that there's something worthy of awe and care in the structure of existence, that the ethical and the aesthetic and the sacred are real. You reject the institutional packaging that historically accompanied those recognitions — the specific doctrines, the hierarchies, the moral codes tied to particular cultural moments. The IDM says: your instinct is correct. The modalities are real. The projection onto a personal God is a structural error. And the institutional forms that grew around that error are failing because the error is becoming visible. What comes next is not the death of the sacred but its relocation — from the supernatural to the structural, from the otherworldly to the deeply-this- worldly, from the dictates of a cosmic authority to the inherent integrity of interaction itself. That relocation is already happening. This framework gives it a name and a foundation.
Creation as Ongoing Relationship
One more implication. Classical theism treats creation as an event — God made the world at some point in the past. The IDM treats creation as an ongoing process — the transcendent modality is not a one-time act but a continuous generative dynamic. Reality is being created at every moment, in every interaction. The "first cause" is not a historical event but a structural feature of every moment of existence. This matters because it changes the relationship between you and the creative principle. In classical theism, you are a creature — made by a creator, separated from the creator, dependent on the creator's will. In the IDM, you are a participant in the creative process. Every choice you make is an act of creation. Every genuine interaction generates something new. The generative principle isn't above you — it's operating through you, in every moment of genuine engagement with reality. This is not a diminishment of the sacred. It is an intensification. If creation is a one-time event in the distant past, then the sacred is far away and long ago. If creation is happening now, in this interaction, in this choice — then the sacred is as close as your next breath.