​In a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Pope Francis made a few statements that I have seen many people describe as contrary to basic Christian doctrine. I think this is a mistake. First, let me give the quotes from the 60 Minutes translation of the interview.

At the close of the interview, Norah O'Donnell asks what gives him hope, and this is his response: "Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good."

I also note that immediately just before this in the interview, he says the following:

"The Church is like that: Everyone, everyone, everyone. "That so-and-so is a sinner…?" Me too, I am a sinner. Everyone! The Gospel is for everyone. If the Church places a customs officer at the door, that is no longer the church of Christ. Everyone."

So however we want to interpret the quote that I placed first, it has to be taken in light of his immediately prior statement that everyone is a sinner, not just the occasional "rogues and sinners" that he refers to at the end. What might he mean, and is it truly incompatible with the historic teaching of Christianity on such doctrines as original sin and total depravity? I don't think so. And I will look to Augustine as a guide for how these not only fit together nicely but can explain what he means as an expression of historic Christian teaching.

​​What Pope Francis says in this interview is an affirmation of fundamental human goodness. Christian doctrine has always taught that. It also teaches that we are fallen. Augustine expressed this as the doctrine of original sin, which under a Protestant understanding has been expressed by total depravity.

Total depravity does not mean we are as fallen as we possibly could be. It means that every aspect of our being is fallen. Is this compatible with holding that we are fundamentally good? It sure is. Take Augustine for a good example of someone saying both things.

In Augustine's view, virtue is well-ordered love. Being perfect would mean loving everything according to how good it is. All of our desires are lined up in the right order, meaning we love what is most good the most and what is less good less.

Augustine sees evil as a privation, i.e. a falling from what is best. Everything that exists has some good to it, or it wouldn't exist. There is no negative value, then. Some things are not as good as they could be, but they all have some positive value. We thus should love everything God created as good.

But some things are less good than they should be. That's what we call evil. It's a distortion. Some things are evil because good things are missing, such as when the keyboard I am typing on right now has a missing key. It doesn't function as it ought to, because the J key is not present.

Other things are evil because they are in the wrong order, such as when you try to connect the hard drive of the computer in backwards. All the parts are there, but the disorder prevents it from working as it should. In Augustine's view, all evil is one of those two things -- something missing or something in the wrong order.

Sin is a kind of evil. Typically sin is when we love good things but in the wrong order. There is nothing wrong with seeing my well-being as good and seeking it out. But when I place my comfort, which is good, above higher moral concerns, I am disordered.

Total depravity and original sin are concepts Augustine would affirm. He would say that every aspect of my being has fallen desires. I want things that are good, but they are disordered. I place things that are not as good as God above God, which is idolatry. I place self-interest above the good of others, which can be selfish. And I might value good things but in a distorted way.

Yet Augustine would affirm that humans are all fundamentally good in the sense that our desires are all for good things. Everything we seek after can be conceived of as a longing for good, even if it's distorted. What we want is not bad in that sense, even if it's bad in another sense. We were created good, indeed in the image of God. That is what gives us a moral status not possessed by other animals. It's not because we are morally perfect that grounds universal human rights. It's because God made us to have intrinsic value. God declared us good, and we represent God to the world. That image has been distorted, but every human being is fundamentally good. Every desire we have is for something good, even if we have it in a distorted way or out of order with other desires for good things, because everything created by God is good, and having desires for good things is good.

Augustine also insisted on finding ways to talk that allow most of what we say to come out as true. He was a defender of ordinary speech. This manifested in his response to skepticism. He thought of skeptical approaches as having too high a standard for what counts as knowledge. Expecting knowledge to be 100% certainty, as the skeptics did, was misusing knowledge-language in a way at odds with how the words for knowledge are actually used by real people.

He criticized the Stoics for defining emotion in a way that is at odds with ordinary language use, taking emotions to be the bad ones and thus getting the conclusion that all emotion is bad, but they had to pretend that righteous indignation is not anger and is not an emotion to make such a claim, since they had no problem with that emotion. They simply refused to call it an emotion. And he insisted that when we call people good, we are not speaking falsely.

On this issue, he insisted that the perfect life is not possible in this life, but it still makes sense to speak of some lives as better than others. So we can call someone's life a good life and, speaking relative to other lives, be speaking truly, even though the truly blessed life is only possible in the afterlife, Similarly, he is very clear that there's nothing wrong with saying that someone is good, in a way that is totally compatible with the doctrine of original sin or what later came to be called total depravity. We can say that Mother Theresa is good, relative to Adolf Hitler. Some people are morally better than others. And we can say that one person is better than they were several years ago. Our desires can become more in line with what they ought to be. We can make such comparative judgments, and they are relative to each other, not to the absolute standard. So we can call someone a good person and not be saying something false, even if the person is not good in an absolute sense.

What Augustine would insist on is recognizing that we are fundamentally good but distorted from the goodness that would be ideally present in humanity's original state. Total depravity is traditionally presented as being fallen in every aspect of our being but not as being fallen to the greatest degree. Every aspect of our being, in Augustine's view, is below where it ought to be. We don't want what is most good as much as we should. We want other things that are less good more than the things that are most good. But that is compatible with recognizing that the things we want are good and with seeing our hearts as mostly directed toward good things.

The pope said that most humans are fundamentally good. In what sense? He says we mostly want good things. Our heart desires good. That's pretty much all he actually said. But isn't that precisely what Augustine says? And Augustine was a firm believer in original sin and what later came to be called total depravity. So I don't see anything here that necessarily is at odds with historic Christian doctrine on this issue. Is it possible that he could have been clearer, perhaps by saying right before this that everyone is a sinner? Sure, and he actually did do that, but the clips posted on social media are conveniently cutting that out in order to make this look worse than it actually is. But that is what the Bible calls false witness. I will have no part of that.

I once thought David Hume's reasons for being skeptical about scientific laws were inconsistent with his arguments against miracles. He argues that we can't know about scientific laws or causes, because all we perceive are one thing happening followed by another thing happening. We don't perceive any causing, just the things we take to be cause and effect. Our taking it to be cause and effect is thoroughly irrational, Hume says, and thus we know nothing about whether there are any causes or scientific laws. For all we know, a ball you throw into the air could come back down, as you expect it, or it could turn into a bird and fly away. We expect it to do the former, but there's no reason we have to think it can't do the latter.
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Hume goes on to say that we should never believe in miracles, because you should always proportion your belief to the evidence, and there is zero evidence for miracles. He rules out the very possibility of miracles, it seems, and he does this in the very same work where he has spent so much time setting up worries about whether our entire scientific understanding of the world might be wrong, leaving us with the result that, for all we know, basketballs might turn into seagulls and fly away. How can he consistently say both of these things?

But then I read Hume more closely in subsequent readings, and I came to the conclusion that Hume's approach is consistent after all. What he says in his skepticism about science is that we don't know there are scientific laws of the sort that we believe in if we think one thing makes another happen. He also says that, for all we know, unexpected things that would seem to violate the laws of physics that we believe in could be possible. But he does go on to give a pragmatist account of why we might as well believe in scientific laws anyway, since it's served us well so far, and it's not as if we can help it anyway. It's also not as if we have a choice.

But then in the miracles chapter, he gives a careful argument. He first defines probability as how often something happens in our own personal experience. Then he says that, if you haven't experienced miracles, it follows that miracles have zero probability. But why, then, could he say that plants could sprout legs and start walking around, as far as we know? Isn't that like a miracle? But he's careful here. If we believe that a plant did such a thing, we'd be believing in a miracle. We shouldn't do that, because it has zero probability. It's never happened, in my experience, so I should think it has zero probability. At the same time, I can't rule it out. So it's not impossible, as far as I know. If I did witness it, I'd have to proportion my beliefs with the evidence I then had. But as it is, I shouldn't believe in such things. I should just believe in their possibility, but I shouldn't allow for anything more than zero probability.

The key here is in defining probability in terms of how often it's happened in your experience, while defining possibility in terms of whether it's consistent with your experience. Something could then have zero probability but be well within the realm of possibility. So, because of that, I came to think that Hume's view was indeed consistent, even if it's a strange set of views.
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But now I've become convinced again that there's a deep inconsistency in Hume's approach to these two issues. It has to do with his willingness to extend pragmatist arguments toward functioning the way we ordinarily do with respect to the scientific skepticism he begins with, while not extending pragmatism toward functioning the way we ordinarily do with the issue of miracles. He accepts our ordinary views on scientific laws, even though he insists that such beliefs are irrational and not grounded in anything more likely to produce true beliefs than crystal-ball gazing, at least as far as we can be sure. He relies on the testimony of other people in order to believe in regularities in nature that he can rely on to live his life. He refuses to accept the testimony of other people when it comes to miracles, however.

I recently rewatched the 1975 Doctor Who episode "Genesis of the Daleks" by Terry Nation. Some online discussions I looked at about "Genesis of the Daleks" made some interesting, and to my mind obviously false, claims about how it fits (or doesn't) into the overall canonical fictional world of Doctor Who.

One claim in particular claim that caught my interest was the accusation that Terry Nation contradicted some of his earlier Doctor Who episodes about the Daleks in giving the origin of the Daleks in this serial. One discussion pointed out that Nation had made an effort not to contradict his first serial "The Daleks" from 1963, where he establishes the Daleks as creations of a race called the Dals in their war against the Thals. The supposed contradiction comes with "Genesis of the Daleks" when Nation actually shows us this war between the Thals and the race that created the Daleks, and the creator race is not called the Dals but is called The Kaleds.

Here's my problem. This is not a contradiction. A contradiction takes the form 'P and not-P". There is nothing of that form here. What you do have is:

1. The race who created the Daleks at the time of the Daleks' creation called themselves the Kaleds.
2. The Thals also called them the Kaleds at that time.
3. At a much later time, probably many centuries later, after an apocalyptic destruction of all civilization and a loss of a good deal of accurate information about the details of that earlier time, someone speaks of the race that created the Daleks as the Dals.

I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing how any of that makes for an inconsistency. If we were sure the person telling us they were called the Dals was speaking the truth, that would even be difficult to get a contradiction, because it's possible they came to be called the Dals at some time after "Genesis of the Daleks" or that they were called that at some earlier time, and that name came to be the more common one to use again after the apocalypse. But we can't even be sure the Thal telling us this has the right information. Maybe it's just that the wrong name was preserved. There are quite a number of things that could explain how 1-3 might all be true. Terry Nation simply did not contradict his earlier Dalek stories. What he did is use a different name without explaining why different names were used at those two different times, but it's not a contradiction.

I think there's a certain personality type that just likes to find contradictions in everything. A lot of fan criticism of science fiction and fantasy stories exhibits similar problems to the one I've been discussing here. I could point out lots of other examples. That doesn't mean there aren't legitimate criticisms to level against authors. I've criticized J.K. Rowling in print about her concept of changing the past in the third Harry Potter novel, although I did so after pointing out some rather implausible ways of making the story work to avoid the problem I raised. The implausibility there would involve reliable narrators who would know better telling untruths, however, which is more of a stretch than someone centuries after an apocalyptic event getting a name of an extinct civilization wrong or the possibility that the group was actually called by two different names.

How you evaluate such attempts to make canonical worlds coherent in part does depend on how plausible the explanation might be to avoid the contradiction. It's nice for fictional worlds to be coherent. Sometimes that's impossible. Sometimes it involves an implausibility but is possible. And sometimes it's not all that implausible if you just think a little harder to see how things might fit together, when at first they seem not to.

It's hard not to think of critics who like to find contradictions in the Bible when I look at these stories. There are some genuine difficulties in fitting together some parts of the Bible. I've never seen one that guarantees a contradiction, especially when you take into account that inerrantists don't take the current manuscripts to be inerrant but allow for errors in transcription from manuscript to manuscript. But I have seen places where it's not easy to come up with one highly plausible explanation that shows for sure why the apparent contradiction is not a real one. In most of them, there have been several explanations, where not one stands out as the most plausible, and even most of them involve something somewhat unlikely but possible. There's none I know of where I would judge all the explanations as so implausible as to require rational evaluators to think it has to involve two contradictory statements that can't be resolved. But I'm coming from an epistemological standpoint where I think the prior plausibility is relatively high. I consider myself to be in a position where I think I have good reasons for taking the Bible as it presents itself, as God's word, and it follows from that that it's more likely that there is a solution even if I don't know what it is than that there isn't. So I'm going to take the less-plausible-sounding accounts as less certain, but I'm going to be more likely to think that one of them is probably true.

That's one difference with fictional worlds. I don't believe there even are Daleks or Time Lords, never mind that the entire Doctor Who canon is consistent. (I think it certainly isn't coherent when it comes to fundamental questions of time travel, for example.) But someone who thinks God is real and is basically the way God is presented in the Bible is going to place a higher prior probability on there being some resolution to a proposed contradiction than someone who has no prior trust in those documents. And I would argue that someone doing this is right to do so if the prior probability is based on a good epistemic state to begin with. And that makes accepting truth in texts that are hard to fit together much easier to do (and not in a way that undermines rationality, assuming the prior probability itself has a rational grounding.
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That assumption of prior probability, of course, is one of the fundamental disputes to begin with, but you can't just assume at the outset that someone who is more willing to trust a set of scriptures is wrong in doing so, and pointing to potential contradictions isn't necessarily going to turn the tide of the conversation unless you first undermine the prior probability. Supposed but not actual contradictions, even if they are difficult to put together, are therefore very weak evidence against the coherence of a worldview when the person who holds that worldview is more sure of it than they are of the irresolvability of the supposed contradiction. That makes for people coming from very different standpoints evaluating the supposed contradictions very differently, and from within their world view each seems to themselves to be right in how they do that. That's something that I think not enough people on either side of such debates can see.

In the first post, I gave some indications of why I think denying God's foreknowledge of free human acts doesn't really explain that much evil. What I'd like to do now is lay out a number of elements of the traditional response to the problem of evil, the one that open theists find unsatisfying. This will all be at a fairly basic level, but I'd like to get all the general things on the table before going into depth on how denying foreknowledge is supposed to help.
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One of the primary strategies for responding to the problem of evil is to treat some good as a higher-order good in the sense that it can't exist without allowing some evil to exist yet the good is worth the evil it allows in some sense. Many traditional presentations of the problem of evil have assumed utilitarianism, and thus they will talk about the consequences for happiness and unhappiness, saying that more unhappiness is created than the happiness that requires it, so it's not ultimately worth it. Some theists have responded that utilitarianism is false, and thus the theist has more resources to explain evil. Some kinds of evil may simply be wrong to prevent, with no relevant questions about how much evil is allowed by not doing that wrong thing. If it's wrong to do it, then God shouldn't be expected to do it. So I don't want to assume utilitarianism here, even though it's easier to frame the problem of evil if you do have such assumptions. The way to think of higher-order goods in a non-utilitarian framework would be to see some goods as being so important that it would be wrong not to pursue them. Alternatively, one might simply see preventing certain evils as morally wrong, because any method of preventing that kind of evil would involve doing something wrong. Most theodicies or defenses (I'm not going to deal with the distinction some philosophers make between the two) fall under some kind of higher-order good, I would say.

I've gotten the sense that the problem of evil is the primary motivation for many who subscribe to what's commonly called open theism, i.e. the view that God does not know the future, takes risks, and changes his mind due to learning new information.

Some open theists take God to have voluntarily given up the right to have knowledge of the future for the sake of human freedom. The assumption is that divine foreknowledge and human freedom are incompatible. Other open theists take God's ignorance of the future to be a necessary fact about the nature of time, since there's no future to be known. This view assumes what I call a growing block theory of time. Some think it follows from presentism, i.e. the view that the present exists but the future and past don't, but if presentism is going to justify the view that there are no truths about the future, then it must also justify the view that there are no truths about the past. So it assumes a growing block view, according to which past and present exist but no future, since those truths aren't somehow sense "fixed".
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I share neither of these assumptions, so I have little sympathy for open theism, but my concern here isn't to deal with those elements. I'm interested in a different motivation for open theism, the motivation that God's ignorance of the future can explain the kinds and amount of evil in the universe in a much more satisfying way than any other view. I just don't think that's true.