Making Good: Creation, Tragedy and Hope

This work is intended as a resource for undergraduates, theological students, and general readers who are interested in matters of ethics and theodicy. The author's starting point is that creation, divine or human, involves ethical resonsibility. If there is a God who made the universe, God is resonsible for what the universe is like. What right had God to create a world like this, full of troubles as well as glories? Is it ethical to worship the Creator? These questions, and the belief that human beings are created for God's good purpose, lead straight to an examination of the problem of evil. As Oppenheimer sees it, theodicies generally over-reach themselves. A more modest approach is to consider what we mean by calling any creation good, human or divine, in the hope that human and divine creation may shed light on one another. The value of creation is recognised in the kind of love which strives to bring something satisfying and maybe wonderful into existence, sometimes at great cost: the best may, at last, emerge from the worst. A consideration of the paradox of tragedy develops a notion of things "having come right" and of "making good", which draws together ideas of human and divine creation, and which includes, but also transcends, moral value.