consequentialism

Has anyone else noticed that, among Christian philosophers, Utilitarianism is a definite minority position EXCEPT when dealing with the problem of evil. Suffering is bad in itself, but a necessary condition for character development or a necessary byproduct of the goodness of free will.

What is especially strange about this is, if anything, utilitarian cost/benefit analyses make less sense from "God's perspective" so to speak, than from ours. For us, we live in a world with many difficult situations and forced choices. War is hell, but if the alternative is Nazi domination of Europe--what are you going to do?

But God is in no such situation. To be sure, Plantinga et al may insist that God is restricted in creation by those mysterious "counterfactuals of freedom," and others hold that God's ignorance of future contingents and respect for free will is likewize restrictive. But the crucial differences remain. God makes these moral calculations before creation (on traditional views of omniscience, God fine tunes everything before creation)

Isn't there a moral distinction between (1) finding yourself in a lifeboat forced to thow some over to save the rest and (2) creating the lifeboat scenerio itself when there is the alternative not to?

I may be, in some circumstances justified in sacrificing some for the greater good, but if this is true it is only because I am forced to-I have to pick the 'lesser of two evils'. But God could have chosen not to create at all. For us, life being what it is, there are hard choices that are forced on us. God, too, has to choose, but the choices are not forced in the same way since God always has the option not to create at all.