Work In Progress

It's not much of a spoiler to say that in Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, Joey leaves Dawson in order to "find herself". More about that later, but it reminds me of an exchange from The Thin Blue Line:

"It's an alternative culture now, Sir. People are asking questions. They want to know who they are."

"Then they should damn well look at their passports."

To the idea that a person is trying to find themselves, there are several tempting responses:

1. Go look in a mirror. There you are.
2. Look around. You're right here.
3. Check your driver's license. It's supposed to have a current address.

There's some validity to the idea of a person needing to find themselves, in that a person can be in a situation so overbearing that no decision that the person makes is ever their own; it's highly dubious, though, that people ever really fall into this. There's an idea that some people have that they can be so much in love with someone else that they themselves disappear. If this were ever to really be true, I suspect the relationship between the people would be more like a dog and its master than a relationship between two people.

But even so, I don't know that the one person would be truly subsumed in the other. To use the names from Dawson's creek (since they sound better than "Person A" and "Person B"), if all of Joey's interests were actually Dawson's interests, it means that the energy to enjoy them came mainly from Dawson. (Interest, like all good things, always requires energy. As Chesterton observed, "There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.") The nature of friendship is to look together at something else; even if it starts by Dawson providing all of the energy, the friendship could never last if Joey couldn't look at them herself. In the worst case, she would gain an appreciation of Dawson's interests that she could share with someone else. The great thing about knowledge is that it doesn't lose anything by being borrowed.

Stories require conflict; it's more or less a truism that in order to have a plot you have to have some challenge facing the main character; your hero must be in danger. In order to come up with conflict, many (screen) writers go for the easy way out: they have their characters make stupid or immoral decisions, and the danger ends up being whether they're going to pay for their sins.

(Drama is a separate category, of course. Drama is supposed to be about the repercussions of immoral actions. In its Greek origins it was largely about people paying for their sins, or the gods sins, or someone's sins. Occasionally for the sins that they would later commit.)

But with a little more skill, I think that something far less morally offensive would be equally as interesting, and really more so, since it would leave you with characters who you could care whether they survive their danger. In particular, the danger can be whether the character gives in to temptation. I don't mean this in the morality-play sense, but rather in a realistic sense. Let me give an example:

Suppose that you have a happily married man who has a life, and so meets women. Being an actually healthy man, he'll become friends with some of them, some of them will be attractive women, and some of them will be attractive women that he makes friends with. You could have quite a series of plots of the man nearly falling for the women he meets, and nearly cheating on his wife. Some people will object that unless he occasionally cheats, people won't believe that the danger is real. These same people rarely suggest that the hero of an action series should die occasionally to show that the danger is real. And besides, fiction is all about getting caught up in the moment. Believing the danger isn't about how many times people have succumbed before, it's all about story telling. In Serenity, several main characters were killed off, but I never for a moment doubted whether River was going to be killed by the gang of Reavers she was fighting. When the door opened to reveal her standing, the only thing that I doubted was whether she was going to be standing there alone, or finishing off the last Reaver. The story wasn't crafted in a way that would make any sense if River didn't win the fight easily, so I never believed that anything else would happen. Making danger believable is about crafting a story that would make sense either if the hero avoid the trap or if the hero falls into the trap. If the story would make (artistic) sense with the bad ending, it will feel dangerous. If the story has only one conclusion in which the story isn't a steaming pile of crap, no one will expect the story to go anywhere else. If you craft a police drama in which nothing supernatural has happened for the first 15 seasons, and there's a character that the hero grows fond of who claims to have been abducted by aliens, it's true that the most likely explanation is that the character is crazy. But if you write the story so that it would make sense if the aliens really existed — if you really give it emotional reality and somewhere to go — the audience will wonder if the character really was abducted by aliens.

I pick the example of possible infidelity because it's an example where you can really dwell on the temptation. The temptation can be interesting, and in some sense shared. You can almost start to root for the character to do the wrong thing, and then share in the triumph when they don't. And to some degree in the regret, too; someone who is tempted will always be tempted to wonder what it might have been like if they had given in.

There are other possibilities, of course. Most other sins have fairly ugly or esoteric temptations, or the temptations are very short lived. If you show a person tempted to murder another, the immediate temptation of having both strong motive and opportunity are not likely to last long. Stealing would be very difficult to examine simply because the temptation is generally too petty or too pathetic. The damage done is also less obvious, since what is stolen can always be restored. Still, it might be possible to come up with a story about nearly stealing. At least a few good stories have been told about rehabilitated jewel thieves, now that I think of it. (To Catch a Thief.)

Having watched Season 1 and most of Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, and having read the episode synopses for the remaining 4 seasons, one of the things which really struck me is that a drama — written like Dawson's Creek — is fundamentally cruel. The same people need to be fodder for drama all the time, and so they must be constantly tormented. Everything given must eventually be taken back, and it often is before long.

This is the fundamental weakness of television — it can't tell love stories. Television doesn't end, so it can't have a "happily ever after"; it must go on, and it must be entertaining.

I think that dramatic series are fundamentally stronger when something good is permitted to last. I occasionally think that television is largely written by sadists who can't stand there to be anything good. It's very difficult to find a television show with an arc which isn't all about destruction. (Another thing which television suffers from is that actors often move on, making television character's lives even more unstable.)

The exception, I think, are comedies. The Nanny was about a romance between Miss Fine and Mr Sheffeild; eventually they were married. There are, surely, other examples of this, though they don't come to mind at the moment. The reason, if I'm correct about this trend, is that comedies get their primary material from the small things, whereas drama takes its main material from the big things. Thus comedies can have happy characters, whereas dramas are always mean to their characters.

In literature, characters are never interesting for their flaws. They're always interesting for their virtues.

Opinions to the contrary stem from the fact that when writing it's often easier to show a person's virtues by way of their flaws. Heroes don't need burning buildings, it's just easy to show them off as a hero when there is a burning building.

Incidentally, there's a really great song by The Mountain Goats, called "Love Love Love":

King Saul fell on his sword
when it all went wrong
and Joseph's brothers sold him down the river
for a song
and Sonny Liston rubbed some tiger balm
into his glove
some things you do for money
and some you do for love love love

Raskolnikov felt sick
but he couldn't say why
when he saw his face reflected
in his victim's twinkling eye
some things you do for money
and some you'll do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

love love is gonna lead you by the hand
into a white and soundless place
now we see things
as in a mirror dimly
then we shall see each other
face to face

way out in seattle
young Kurt Cobain
snuck out to the garden
put a bullet in his brain
snakes in the grass beneath our feet
rain in the clouds above
some moments last forever
and some flare out with love love love

You really need to listen to the song. It's got a beautiful melody and the singer really sings it with a pretty voice. But the point is the singer/writer's explanation of the song:

the point of the song is we are very well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poet, that we think of love as a thing that is with strings and is this force for good and then if something bad happens thats not love...I don't know so much about that I don't know that the Greeks weren't right, I think that they were, that love can beat a path through everytihng, that it will destroy alot of things on the way to its objective which is just its expression of itself. You know my stepfather mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us and well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing aot of what I percieve is terrible damage, yet we talk about love as this benign comfortable force: it is wild.

Love doesn't always mean romantic love. In English, love doesn't always even mean love. Sometimes it means desire. Sometimes it means need. Sometimes it means a gaping hole in a person's soul that they're desperately trying to fill. Sometimes it means slave-like devotion to some ideal gone mad because it was taken in isolation. In English, the word love can mean nearly anything at all.

You can show how much a character loves something by how willing they are to be immoral for the sake of their love. Most of the time*, writers use characters' flaws in order to show their love for something.

*When the flaws aren't simply a crutch to move the plot along, that is.

So, I'm watching Dawson's Creek, which is a drama full of, well, drama. Anyhow, one of the characters is writing a love story, and an ex-girlfriend of his offers him the advice not to give it a happy ending, because they're unrealistic. Now, this is largely supposed to be a highly cynical comment (the person saying it is drunk towards the end of a spiral out of control). Yet it actually contains a rather insightful metaphysical point, though it's in the words that the person said, rather than in the meaning that she had for them.

There are no happy endings, there are only happy middles.

Happiness comes from something real, something that is, something that has being. Endings are a transition from existence to nothing; when the end is over, there is nothing. (In the physical world in which we live, there are no complete endings; all endings are also beginnings. In the spiritual world there are, presumable, complete endings.) And nothing can never bring happiness.

Discussions of movies always muddy this, because the movie's ending is (if you take the fictional reality seriously) not an end to the events in the movie, but only an end to the viewer's glimpse into it. Movie endings are almost universally ambiguous: "And they lived happily ever after" doesn't mean that the characters were henceforth immortal. In most cases it means that nothing very remarkable happened to them. They did at some point die, and few deaths are completely without suffering. What "happily ever after" means is that the characters never again had the same sort of troubles that made them interesting to us. It doesn't mean that they were free from all human cares.

In the book C.S. Lewis at the breakfast table, Derek Brewer told of a compliment given to C.S. Lewis which has always struck me:

A very eminent Cambridge scientist, who had practically nothing in common with Lewis, once remarked to me — and it is one of the finest tributes to Lewis I have heard — that he met Lewis only once, at some evening occasion, and felt that he was a very good man, to whom goodness did not come easily.

(First, a tiny bit of background information: the universe which we live in has some really strange properties. If you look up the formula for the force of gravity between two masses, you'll see that there's a constant there. (The value of that constant was discovered experimentally.) If the value of that constant were different, the universe would be very different. If it was much bigger, or much smaller, planets would never have formed. And the same is true of many other things. The formula for the force of attraction between electromagnetic charges looks the same but also has a constant. It happens to be much, much bigger than the gravitational constant, and it's responsible for the properties of all physical substances. Now, these constants aren't artifacts of the units we've chosen to measure things in. There's a fundamental relationship between the strength of gravity and the strength of magnetism, regardless of how you measure it, that changes everything. There are also the relationships of these forces to size, and other things; if these constant were different, chemical bonds would either be too strong or not strong enough for life to exist.)

I was thinking, recently, about the parallel universe idea that some materialists use to explain the universe. That is, that things are so strangely tuned to produce life as we know it because every possible configuration of physical properties (and outcomes) exists in some parallel universe. Only such outcomes in which sentient life came to be has anything living in it to ask why something so improbable came to be.

This does answer the question of "why is there life", but it's an explanation which explains too much. If you accept the multiple parallel universes hypothesis, you completely throw out any use of Occam's Razor.

(Occam's Razor is often quoted as "if you have two competing explanations for something, the simpler explanation is probably the right one". Apparently a better statement of Occam's Razor is actually, "never unnecessarily multiply entities".)

You'd think that anyone who's a fan of Occam's Razor would wonder about the theory that there are infinitely many entities. Why, then, do people who might otherwise like to invoke Occam's Razor go and accept something which is essentially its complete antithesis?

I think that the answer lies in personality. Some people simply can't stand oddities. The idea of something real which is arbitrary irritates them. It's the same phenomenon which is behind why people don't like human choice — when a human makes a choice, something odd has happened.

This is the same problem that Job had. Job's mistake was in thinking that the universe had a simple answer. In the book of Job, God answers Job out of the tempest and point out how strange the world is, and how little of it makes sense to human beings. Job is comforted because he realized that none of the world is simple.

So, apparently, some atheists try to avoid Job's realization by making the world simple.

As some people might know, Amanda Marcotte resigned from John Edwards campaign (for those who don't you can get some idea by starting here and following the links around; I couldn't easily find any good summary of it

For those who don't know her, Amanda Marcotte is an atheist/feminist/liberal who writes material which is highly offensive to anyone who disagrees with her. What really struck me, though, wasn't the degree to which her writing is impolite.

Politeness is only worth so much, especially politeness to people who aren't in the room. At the end of the day, those of us who disagree are all working at cross purposes and as far as we can all tell, everyone else is making the world a worse place because they're acting on bad information. There's only so nice you can be to people who are making the world worse, even if they're doing their best. I can respect people who think that I'm evil and say so, though of course I wouldn't be likely to invite them over to dinner. (I don't mean that they aren't fit subjects for charity; if they were naked I would give them clothing; I just mean that discussing how bad we are wouldn't be very entertaining.)

No, what gets me about Amanda Marcotte is how badly she misunderstands those she disagrees with. To whit, one of her famous posts:

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

This is just plain stupid. Granted, it's more trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive than trying to be accurate, but it's on par with an anti-evolution joke about someone's mother evolving from a gold fish — the only way that you can say something this nonsensical is by either not caring at all what you're saying (which is probably the case here; she reads like an angry child trying to lash out at the grown-ups that it's far too small to hurt), or by not understanding what you're criticizing at all.

It doesn't make any sense to talk about Mary taking plan B, as she was explicitly given a choice as to whether she would become pregnant with God. This is, incidentally, why Catholics reverence her so much — if she had said no, Christianity would never have happened. Her choice, which she was free to make differently, saved the world.

More illustrative is this more recent one:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

Here Marcotte is actually trying to explain, and shows how thoroughly badly she misunderstands Christianity. At best she only somewhat misunderstands the manichaen heresy. Claiming that this is the Christian version of the virgin birth is simply ludicrous. How the God who created Mary's vagina would befoul himself through touching it, when it's his power which maintains its existence, needs some explaining. The entire point of the story of the virgin birth of Jesus is that God does not despise his creation; God humbled himself so far as to ask one of his creatures for permission to be born of her. And not just any creature, but a poor member of a group which was fairly well despised by the rich and powerful of the world. And not only was he born of her, he was born in a cave among the animals.

The entire point of the virgin birth of Christ is not only that God does not despise his creation, but that he positively cherishes the lowest of it. The point of the story is that the humble shall be exalted. The point is that God loves everything, even that which most people despise. Even when human beings avert their eyes in horror, God looks on the world and sees that it is good.

But it does occur to me that this mistake is a little more natural if you think that the point of sex is a penis in a vagina, and children are only a side-effect. If sex is first and foremost pleasant rubbing, then it's not so odd to ask why God bypassed it. It's only if you think that sex's purpose is procreation does the question of why God didn't use a penis to impregnate Mary make no sense.

The Modern religion is, aside from being a sort of decayed Christianity, based almost entirely on modern wealth. That is, it's based on the material comfort in which the middle (and upper) classes live. In ancient times only the wealthiest of people could be ignorant of evil. It took a prince, and really a young prince, to be ignorant of suffering. The middle and upper classes are almost like millions of Siddhārtha Gautamas who never left their palaces.

This also explains why some atheists (like Richard Dawkins) can be so committed to science (and hence to atheism). Believing (somewhat erroneously) that science leads to technology, it's science that holds the possibility of permanently sealing off the palace walls. It's almost as if we've entered the garden of eden through a breach in the wall, and are now trying to seal off the breach. There's something to the idea (which is why they can hold it so fervently); religion, like clothing, is a thing for outside of the garden of eden. Inside of the garden, people talked directly with God and there were no priests.

The flaw in this thinking, of course, is that removing temptation is not at all the same thing as moral improvement. (Removing temptation can help, since morality can be buttressed by habit, but morality is always a matter of free will, however strongly habit pushes.) Relatedly, you can never truly remove temptation, since we're all in competition with each other for earthly goods such as popularity. (The desire for popularity is mostly a mis-direction of the desire for our creator to look on us and see that we're good; we use each other as surrogates for God, though of course the appreciation of people by each other is quite legitimate too.)

The idea of determinism usually starts from one of two premises: the supremacy of nature or the supremacy of God. Both routes are fairly circuitous, and both involve a leap of faith. But what if we address the question directly?

First, I need to introduce a concept which I'll call "the unprovable". The unprovable is the things which may or may not be true, but cannot be proved even if they were true. The simplest example is this: what evidence would you accept that you don't exist? Not that I, the author don't exist, but that you, the reader, doesn't exist.

The answer, of course, is that there's no evidence which could be presented to you that would lead you to believe that you don't exist; your experience of any evidence is based on the premise that you exist to experience it. There's nothing that you can see, touch, taste, hear, or feel that can disprove your existence; at best they can totally disprove that your senses accurately correspond to reality. (Just to be rigorous, I'm using the standard definition of "reality": that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.) Thus, while you may or may not exist, to you your non-existence is unprovable.

I don't think that determinism is quite in the category of unprovable, but given how strong the evidence for free will is (how many things in the world seem more true than our ability to choose?), the evidence for determinism should be very strong. In particular, what evidence would actually prove determinism?

Clearly the ability to interfere with the brain and thus with free choice does not prove determinism. If it did, chairs would disprove gravity. The fact that something can be interfered with does not disprove its existence. No, the important feature of determinism is predictability. If something must happen, then you should be able to say in advance that it will happen. This was the position of the materialists of the 1800s and early 1900s. They thought (incorrectly) that the world was basically a big 3-dimensional pool game, and that if you could get precise enough measurements, you would be able to predict the future. They were superceded by the materialists of the mid 1900s who concluded that you can't possible take precise enough measurements (due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), and so while the future is determined, you can never predict it.

Some of them presume a restricted form of prediction. That is, they assume that the brain is large enough that quantum indeterminacy can be disregarded and that with precise enough measurements one could predict the brain fully. Of course, we don't have the ability to get precise enough measurements without interfering with the brain yet, so the theory is untested. The test, to constitute strong evidence, would have to be something to the effect to taking the appropriate measurements of the brain without interfering with it, and then predicting, with strong accuracy, every movement that the person will make and every thought that they will think (in some restricted environment, of course) over some reasonable period of time, like an hour. No one's ever done an experiment even remotely like it. So let's be clear: those of us who believe in free will do so upon strong evidence constantly before us. Those of us who believe in free will have yet to produce any direct evidence of their claim. And for many determinists, they can't possibly ever produce direct evidence for it.

In the introduction to The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis said that the book was a very imperfect work because it told only one side of the story. Presumably it should also have included the letters that an angel might have sent the main character's guardian angel, but Lewis decided against this because while he could write as badly as a devil, he could not write as well as an angel.

He did later put words into the mouth of an angel (technically, an eldila, which he may not have quite meant to be the same thing), and I think proved himself correct (Lewis is one of my favorite authors, I don't say this to knock him). What especially struck me about the way the eldila spoke was its use of what I call parenthetical praise. The style is very common throughout all human attempts at reverence. It's easily recognizable; the style is to take a sentence like:

"We can see that God must intend us to exercise our own will and judgment because he never criticized the us building houses because he knows best whether we should be wet or dry."

and recast it to:

We creatures of the Lord Most High (all praises and glory be to Him) can see that God (The Most Glorious Lord of All Creation, Alleluia! Alleluia!) must intend, with his divine and glorious will which overflows in Love, that we His creatures (thanks be to Him for our creation!) should exercise our own will and judgment, which he created in his glorious image that we may be like Him united in happiness and Love to His Glory, let all the nations sing his praises! because in all of His Words (let us rejoice for our ears hearing them is greater than all of the wine in the world, glory to God!) one reading in prayerful love of His glory and wisdom cannot find any criticism of our practice of building houses (Glory ot God for the creating for us wood, nails, wood glue, fiberglass insulation, and all of the other wonders of His world we use in houses, Glory! Glory! Glory! Alleluia! Alleluia! All Praise and Honor to His Name!) though surely God in his infinite Love (Praise be to Him!) and (Thanks to the lord for giving us, in his Holy and Wonderful Wisdom, conjunctions!) Wisdom (All Glory be to Him most High!) must sure know best (For who may know better than the Lord of all Creation, the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, He who knows the number of hairs on our head and without whose knowledge no sparrow every falls to the blessed ground!) whether we should be wet (Praise the Lord for giving us the wonders of Water, in which we see his Glory and Love) or dry (Praise the Lord for the miracle of water being contained in the sea, in the lakes, rivers, streams, resoirvoires, plastic bottles, and select drinking glasses, all of which he created in His infinite Love for us)! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! ...

I exaggerate a little, of course, but the style should be recognizable. When I see authors use it, I always remember something Lewis said in God in the Dock about how the fact that you can say a prayer while you're brushing your teeth doesn't mean that you should brush your teeth in church. The practice is somewhat reversed, but the point holds. When God told us to keep holy the Sabbath, he also told us to work on the other days. This sort of parenthetical mess seems to be trying to inject the Sabbath into every other day, and the result is that it's neither a very good prayer, nor good work. I wrote it, and I can't make heads or tails of the parenthetical version.

All of this stands in contrast to the way that Angels spoke in the New Testament. Consider the way that angels relate news in the beginning of Luke:

Rejoice, so highly favoured! The Lord is with you. Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God's favor. Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David; he will rule over the House of Jacob for ever and his reign will have no end... The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God. Know this too: your kinswoman Elizabeth has, in her old age, herself conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible to God.

Do not be afraid. Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people. Today int he town of David a savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. And here is a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

It's true that when the Angel's message to the shepherds was complete, a great throng of the heavenly host was suddenly there, singing, "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace to men who enjoy his favor." (Incidentally, if you read the footnote, it's not that peace is only for people who enjoy God's favor, but rather peace is for people, and an addition that human beings are favored by God; it's apparently much clearer in the original greek. I've also heard this translated as, "Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.")

But the angel spoke clearly, and then moved on to pure praise. (It must also be remembered that the praise probably sounded much more musical in the original words, while we make do with very un-lyrical translations.)

The case of Jesus is even more striking. He spoke very plainly; I don't think that you can find anywhere in the bible where he interrupted himself to sing praises to God.

I think that this literary style is very unfortunate, it renders both the point being made and the praise of God far less effective. In many cases it leaves a bad taste in one's mouth for the praise, because one wanted to know what the speaker was saying, and the praise got in the way.

You can't rewrite old books, and I doubt that many new books are likely to fall praise to this tendency, but it's still a pity that people have fallen prey to it.

Did you ever get the idea that God was telling you something?

I was really burned by my experiences of grad school. I've been trying to let it go ever since I graduated, and I haven't really. On the plus side, it's taught me something: the most important skill for a dreamer to learn is to be able to forgive people and things for not being what you want them to be.

God help me, some day I'll forgive academia for being what it is rather than what I want it to be.

If God is All powerful and infinitely good, why is there suffering in the world?

This question was called The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis in his book by that name in which he tried to answer it. He did a fairly good job answering some of the more common questions of this form, but unfortunately he also left some both unasked and unanswered. In trying to answer one such question, it occurred to me that the root of all these variants amount to one, simple question: why isn't this the best of all possible worlds?

All of the answers that I've seen amount to proving that this is the best of all possible worlds, given that it's infested with free-willed and sinful creatures. But is this really the best of all possible worlds? If God exists and is infinitely good, would he necessarily create the best of all possible worlds?

There are of course some of the more trite reasons why God might create a merely good world. Some people claim that you can't know good unless you also know evil. While this may sound unlikely, there is some suggestion of this in the book of Genesis: the forbidden tree in the garden is, after all, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's also possible that one can't tell the difference between a good man and a bad man until you've tempted him — it's possible that a free will is not actual until it's in a circumstance that forces it to make a decision. This might be something like quantum mechanics — that a thing isn't in a definite state until it's interacted with. If this were the case, even omniscience couldn't know whether a man was good or not until the man was tempted — even God would have to test people to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It's also possible that there are some forms of goodness which can only exist in a partially evil world. There are soldiers who have been saints — the virtues of a swordsman or marksman seem likely to be only real when there's an imperfect world which makes their talents the lesser of two evils.

On the other hand, to say that God created a world which is not the best of all possible suggests something like the manichean heresy, which I have no desire to tread near. And perhaps the reasons for a mediocre world given above are actually just reasons why this might yet be the best of all possible worlds if one knows how to measure correctly.

And that, really, is the key. What is the right measure of goodness in the world?