I’m delighted to see this brilliant paper by my friend Ken Gemes (Birkbeck College, London) is now available on-line. The core idea:

“[C]onsider the world we know and inhabit. It is a possible world, hence one that God has thought of. Furthermore, our world pretty clearly, pace Descartes, contains evil. Now God being perfect would not create a world containing evil. Ergo God did not create this world, he merely thought of it. Our world then is a merely possible world, one God thought of but chose not to create. Presumably it was his knowledge of the evil in this world which led him to decide that it was beneath creation. The actual world is some other world that contains none of the evil of this world or any other possible world.”

Not everyone, admittedly, may like the solution, but I’m convinced it’s the only one in the offing, absent rejection of some other premise that those exercised by the problem typically want to retain.

UPDATE: Alan Carter (University of Colorado at Boulder) asks: “Does this mean that good people in this world don’t really go to heaven? God just thought they do.” (By the way, since a few philosophers have e-mailed with counter-arguments, rest assured this posting was done for humorous intent: everyone knows no philosophical problems can be solved!)