Creation and The Presumption of Goodness

I mentioned in my post on Empiricism and Theism that one might reach the conclusion that our desires are supposed to be fulfilled via a presumption in favor of the goodness of creation. In this post, I want to defend that presumption and articulate how it functions.

First off, then, what do I mean by a presumption of goodness? I mean that we presume things are good unless and until we have reason to think that they are not. This presumption can be based on the original goodness of creation, but more is needed: creation is no longer in its original state.

It is quite easy to view the fall as resulting in the world going from good to bad, and there is truth to that. The world is not purely and very good, as it once was. Nevertheless, it is the same world. Thus, the fundamental structures are the same. Gravity is not a result of the fall, and more importantly, the general constitution of human bodies, when they are functioning well, is not a result of the fall. It is possible that some quirks of human biology are a result of the fall and are bad, but this cannot be the usual case.

So the heuristic can be framed as follows: whatever we expect will remain in heaven, or already existed before the fall, is good. In order to claim that something is bad, then, we need to be able to articulate how a world without it could operate. In some cases, this is easy. In others, however, it is not so easy.

Further, what is bad can only be a twisting of what is good. It is bad because it either obstructs something serving its purpose or because it is no longer properly oriented to its purpose. So even when we identify something bad, we are constrained to say what good it corrupts.

There are some patterns of fallacious reasoning that we are prone to fall into as humans. We tend to justify our claims after the fact, for instance. If our reasoning is purely for the sake of truth, then this is a curious pattern for us to fall into. If we presume that this pattern has some basis in God's good creation, even though it now operates in bad ways, we are directed to ask what purpose something like this might play.