Dr. Branden says that a perfect God would not permit evil in the world. He does not define “evil,” and two possibilities suggest themselves. The first is that by an evil he means what I shall refer to as a negative, meaning an instance of ignorance, ugliness, fear, pain, suffering, injury, failure, unhappiness, frustration, or wickedness (in the sense of immoral, unethical, or irrational behavior), or the like. The second is that he is referring only to what we might call unjustified negatives, meaning negatives that God could remove from the world without at the same time removing a greater good and so making the over-all situation worse rather than better. In this section, I shall assume the first of these two possibilities, and direct my remarks to a critic who maintains that a perfect God would not allow any negatives at all to exist.

To make a world without negatives, one would have to eliminate free will on the part of men. There is no way to give men freedom of choice and also ensure that they will never choose wrongly. [01] But a created entity without free will is one whose actions have no moral significance, [02] and who thoughts have no evidential value. [03] To make a world in which no outcome is or can be worse or less desirable than any other, is to eliminate all values, to eliminate struggle, to eliminate the conditional nature of life, to eliminate life itself. [04]

What would an evil-free world, in this sense, be like? Dr. Branden has answered that question, though perhaps without meaning to. He has given us a description of the theists’ idea of Heaven. It does not, I maintain, accurately describe the views of most theists, but it is an excellent description of the evil-free world that the critic thinks God ought to have created. I quote it here.

Heaven, as their dream of a perfect existence, is a place where men will live in total passivity, where no choice, no action, no thought will be necessary, where everything will be provided for them and everything will be taken care of, where they will experience automatic happiness without lifting a finger or stirring a single brain cell, which they no longer will have to have. It is the same kind of ideal as the Garden of Eden, which the mystics project as the utopia man has lost in punishment for the sin of disobedience, for acting on his own judgment.
  Heaven is the projection of a state of existence that would be unbearable to any human being, to the exact extent to which he was human — meaning rational. It is a state of total stagnation, where no choices and, therefore, no purposes and, therefore no achievements would be possible. Only a confirmed parasite could desire such a state as an ideal fulfillment, a parasite who does not mind seeing himself as a contented cow — an ethereal contented cow. Heaven is the dream universe of non-effort. [05]

As Dr. Branden and Miss Rand have pointed out, all or nearly all negatives are due to wrong choices by humans. [06] But even if men always chose rightly, there would still be negatives. If man is to have values or goals, he must be capable of actions that make a difference, for better or for worse. [07] But a man’s values can be known, even by that man, only in terms of what he is willing to give up for them. If he is to distinguish between values, to have priorities, to judge some goods not only preferable to non-goods but more important than other goods, then he must sometimes be faced with a choice between values, must sometimes attain a value at a cost to himself, must sometimes struggle or suffer to attain it. [08]

Again, the sight of a moth struggling to emerge from its cocoon might well move the compassionate observer to “help” it by taking a pair of scissors and cutting away part of the cocoon to free the moth. But if he does so, the wings of the moth will not harden, and the moth will die. The struggle is essential to the moth’s development. Struggling against adversity often seems to be an important ingredient in the building of human character. [09] Before dismissing this notion as heartless, I wish you would try an experiment. Take your copy of Atlas Shrugged, and go through it carefully, crossing out or rewriting every passage in which one of the heroes of the book is described as suffering any kind of physical or mental discomfort. Then read the revised work, and form a judgment of the novel as a novel, and of its heroes as heroes. The notion that there is no heroism without courage and no courage without danger, and that heroism is a better thing than safety, is not merely a notion invented by a handful of theologians to defend the goodness of God with. It is a judgment shared by Miss Rand, and, I suspect, by all thoughtful and rational persons.

It is no accident that Miss Rand, in giving her own reasons for being an atheist, does not mention the Problem of Evil. [10] Her sense of life forbids her from suggesting that Reality presents us with unjustified negatives. Nor, I think can one fairly attribute a gloomier sense of life to Dr. Branden. In his attack on the concept of God, he has simply dug up all the standard atheistic arguments and pressed them into service — “any stigma will do to beat a dogma” — without stopping too ask whether he really believes them, whether they are really consistent with the Objectivist principles or with his own fundamental perceptions of the nature of reality. [11]

The critic’s demand is, in short, anti-reason, anti-value, anti-man, anti-heroism, and anti-life.

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue. Readers who prefer to ignore the links in the text, which go to the bottom of the page, and follow the notes on a separate page, may open a separate page with the references here.]

* In the dot-matrix printout, this section begins with the unexplained notation “(p7) 8 May 81.” Since the discussion of disasters and pain occupies quite a large number of pages of the printout, and are listed as “Section 7” in James’s table of contents, it is entirely possible that this section was completed nearly a year later than the rest of the printout.]

† The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand, chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[01] N. Branden, “Volition and the Law of Causality” 5/3/8f [March 1966]. [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 5, number 3 would be March 1966. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume.] [Parallel passages are found in Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1971), pp. 53, 59.]
  “Free will” — in the widest meaning of the term — is the doctrine that man is capable of performing actions which are not determined by forces outside his control; that man is capable of making choices which are first causes within his consciousness, i.e., not necessitated by antecedent factors.

N. Branden, “Volition and the Law of Causality” 5/3/12g [March 1966].
  To ask “What made one man choose to focus and another to evade?” is to have failed to understand the meaning of choice in this primary sense.

[02] A. Rand, “The Cult of Moral Grayness, 3/6/21bb [June 1964] & VOS 76 [The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964), page 76].
  Morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice (i.e., to his free will)....

[03] N. Branden, “The Contradiction of Determinism” 2/5/17, 19, 20 [May 1963] [A parallel passage occurs in “The Psychology of Self-Esteem,” pages 53-57, and in N. Branden, The Vision of Ayn Rand, pages 135-38. The audio of the argument is available on YouTube.]

[04] A. Rand, VOS 17e-18a [The Virtue of Selfishness, pages 17-18.]
  Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of “value”? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of “good or evil ” in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step in the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.
  The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is.
  ... The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of its body, which requires action to correct it.... [Children] who are born without the capacity to experience physical pain ... do not survive for long....

N. Branden, “IAD: The moral meaning of risking one’s life,” 3/4/15dd-33 [Intellectual Ammunition Department: April 1964; James has given the title as it appears in The Objectivist Newsletter table of contents. The title in the issue is: “In the context Objectivist ethics, what is the justification for knowingly risking one’s life?”]
  Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. The life proper to man is a process of pursuing, achieving and enjoying values — the values which his life as a rational being requires. The pursuit of values entails a struggle — and struggle entails risk. The pursuit of values necessarily involves the possibility of failure and defeat. A rational man does not rebel against this fact — nor against any metaphysical fact of reality. To choose to act for one’s values only when no risk is involved, is to forsake values; and to forsake values is to forsake life.

N. Branden, “Self-Esteem and Romantic Love,” 6/12/2d [December 1967; a parallel passage occurs in The Psychology of Self-Esteem, page 198.]
  “... all life, life by its very nature, entails a struggle, and struggle entails the possibility of defeat....”

G. Walsh, “Herbert Marcuse, Philosopher of the New Left,” 9/9/12/d-g [September 1970; the correct citation is 10/9; October 1970].
  The crucial difference between living entities and nonliving matter, Ayn Rand maintains, is that whereas the existence of nonliving matter is unconditional, the existence of a living entity is conditional upon its own action....
  According to Objectivism, life by its very nature is conditional.... There is no other way to be alive.

N. Branden, “IAD: The moral meaning of risking one’s life,” 3/4/16b [April 1964; see above.].
  Quoting Francisco d’Anconia, “To love a thing is to know and love its nature.” To love life is to know and love the nature of life. Since life is a process of self-sustaining action, this means: to love the process of self-sustaining action — to love the thought, the effort, the struggle, the challenges that such action entails.

[05] N. Branden, “The Concept of God.” [The passage occurs in The Vision of Ayn Rand, pages 110-11. It also occurs in the recording of Lecture 4, starting at 52:54.]

[06] See Footnote ??? below. [James never got around to supplying more identification for the citation. I believe the passage he had in mind is supplied in Footnote 7 in the section “God and Evil: A Summarizing Dialogue.” The relevant citation is N. and B. Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand? (New York: Random House, 1962; hb), page 41 and (New York: Paperback Library, Inc, 1964; pb), pages 37-38. The passage follows.]
  If theologians, philosophers and moralists were less eager to damn existence, man’s nature and his life on earth, if they are less willing to conclude that suffering is man’s inevitable fate — they would perhaps notice that the predominant cause of such suffering as they do observe is not any sort of metaphysical necessity, but the philosophies men have been offered as a guide by which to live.

[07] N. and B. Branden, WIAR 22 [Who Is Ayn Rand? (pb). The reference for the hardback is also page 22.]
  An entity incapable of initiating action, or for whom the consequences would also be the same, regardless of tis actions — an entity not confronted with alternatives — could have no purposes, no goals, and hence no values. Only the existence of alternatives can make purpose — and therefore values — possible and necessary.

[08] N. Branden, “IAD: The moral meaning of risking one’ life,” 3/4/15dd-ee [April 1964].
  To choose to act for one’s values only when no risk is involved is to forsake values; and to forsake values is to forsake life.

A. Rand, “Intro. to Obj. Epistemology,” 5/9/53-f [September 1966] & IOE 44-45. [The reference here is to the original paperback monograph reprinting the articles from the periodical, where the page reference is 35; the corresponding page numbers for the Expanded Second Edition containing additional material by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: NAL, 1990) is pages 34-35.)]
  If one wishes to measure the intensity of a particular instance of love, one does so by reference to the hierarchy of values of the person experiencing it. A man may love a woman, yet rate the neurotic satisfactions of sexual promiscuity higher than her value to him. Another man may love a women, yet give her up, rating his fear of the disapproval of others (of his family, his friends, or any random strangers) higher than her value. Still another man may risk his life to save the woman he loves, because all his other values wold lost meaning without her. The emotions in these examples are not emotions of the same intensity or dimension. Do not let a James Taggart type of mystic tell you that love is immeasurable.

AS 796ff-hh [pb] (857p-s) [hb].
  [Hank Rearden to Dagney Taggart:]
  “I loved you. You knew it. I didn’t. And because I didn’t, I had to learn it when I sat at my desk and looked at the Gift Certificate at Rearden Metal.”

[09] James Dobson, Hide and Seek (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1979), 163f.
  In a famous study by Victor and Mildred Goertzel entitled Cradles of Eminence, the home backgrounds of four hundred highly successful people were investigated. These four hundred subjects were individuals who had made it to the top. They were men and women whose names you would recognize as brilliant or outstanding in their respective fields (Churchill, Gandhi, F.D. Roosevelt, Schweitzer, Einstein, Freud, etc.). The intensive investigation into their early home lives yielded some surprising findings:
  (1) Three-fourths of the children [were] troubled — by poverty; by a broken home; by rejecting, overpossessive, estranged, or dominating parents; by financial ups and downs; by physical handicaps; or by parental dissatisfaction over the children’s school failures or vocational choices.
  (2) Seventy-four of eighty-five writers of fiction or drama and sixteen of twenty poets [came] from homes where, as children, they saw tense psychological dramas played out by their parents.
  (3) Handicaps such as blindness; deafness; being crippled, sickly, homely, undersized, or overweight; or having a speech defect [occurred] in the childhoods of over one-fourth of the sample.
  It seems very apparent that the need to compensate for their disabilities was a major factor in their struggle for personal achievement. It may even have been the determining factor.
  There have been thousands, perhaps millions, of inadequate persons who used compensation to achieve esteem and confidence. Perhaps the most classic illustration is seen in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady. Being orphaned at ten, she underwent a childhood of utter anguish. She was very homely and never felt she really belonged to anybody. According to Victor Wilson, Newhouse News Service, “She was a rather humorless introvert, a young woman unbelievable shy, unable to overcome her personal insecurity and with a conviction of her own inadequacy.” The world knows, however, that Mrs. Roosvelt did rise above her emotional shackles. As Wilson said, “... from some inner wellspring, Mrs. Roosevelt summoned a tough, unyielding courage, tempered by remarkable self-control and self-discipline....”
  [It should be unnecessary to add that admiration for X’s strength of will and character does not imply agreement with X’s judgments.]

[10] WIAR 129 (???) [Who Is Ayn Rand, page 129 (pb); pages 161-62 (hb). I assume that the question marks were in place of the hardback page numbers, though this is inconsistent with Note 7 above, where there is no indication of a hardback page number in the dot-matrix printout.]
  The second incident occurred when Ayn was not yet fourteen. It consisted of an entry in yer diary: “Today, I decided that I am an atheist.”
  ... She wrote the causes of her conclusion in her diary: first, that there are no reasons to believe inGod, there is no proof of the belief; and second, the the concept of God is insulting and degrading to man — it implies that the highest possible is not to be reached by man, that he is an inferior being who can only worship an ideal he will never achieve. By her view, there could be no breach between conceiving of the best possible and deciding to attain it. She rejected the concept of God as morally evil.

WTL 107 [We the Living, page 109 of the paperback, revised edition.]
  [Kira is talking to Andrei.]
  “Do you believe in God, Andrei?”
  “No.”
  “Neither do I. But that’s a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know.”
  “What do you mean?”
  “Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they’d never understand what i meant. It’s a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they do — then, I know they don’t believe in life.”
  “Why?”
  “Because, you see, God — whatever anyone chooses to call God — is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.”

FH 49 [The Fountainhead. The page number is from the New American Library (Signet Books), from the 1971 renewed copyright edition. In the original Signet Books edition, it is page 41.]
  [Henry Cameron is talking to Howard Roark:]
  “... Why did you decide to be an architect.”
  “I didn’t know then. But it’s because I’ve never believed in God.”
  “Come on, talk sense.”
  “Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them.”

[11] “any stigma will do to beat a dogma” — a quip from Dorothy Sayers, of whose apologetic and theological essays James often made use.