THE CASE OF CREATION. A Case File on the Responsibility of the Creator

This essay asks whether the attributes traditionally ascribed to God — freedom, knowledge and control in their highest degree — entail a corresponding responsibility for the evil of the world. Adopting the sustained analogy of a legal case file, it reconstructs, in their strongest form, and then tests the major defences of classical theism, Christology and modern philosophy of religion: the categorial exemption (Davies), divine simplicity and modal collapse (Mullins, Tomaszewski), the satisfaction reading of the cross (Anselm), the free-will and soul-making theodicies (Plantinga, Hick), the aesthetic theodicy (Augustine), and divine self-limitation after Auschwitz (Jonas). Its central claim is that a gratuitous creation cannot house an instrumental evil: every theodicy, in justifying evil, must make it useful, and thereby contradicts the gratuitousness of the whole; the only remaining path is not a theodicy but the acknowledgement of an unfinished work — a suspension of judgement rather than an absolution. The argument is deliberately bounded. Read alongside Kant's On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy (1791) and the book of Job, it halts at a confessed limit and returns no verdict. The essay is the first extended application of a wider metaphysical framework on which it draws but which it does not here set out to establish. Additional notes: Except where otherwise indicated, CC BY 4.0. Third-party quotations (Scripture — New Jerusalem Bible, 1985 — and primary sources) remain under their respective copyrights. Translated from the Spanish original under the author's direction. Related works: is translation of → 10.5281/zenodo.21548658 references → 10.5281/zenodo.19277992, 10.5281/zenodo.19488444, 10.5281/zenodo.21196360, 10.5281/zenodo.19370461