Quote:
Originally Posted by Acemanhattan
Okay. I just started studying formal logic and argumentation so be patient with me. I read Plantinga's defense and it doesn't feel right, so I'm just working through if that feeling is valid or not.
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4 So Free will is not compatible with evil
5 because of 4 If Gods intention is to create a world where free will exists it can not have evil in it
6 If God creates a world with evil in it God either does not know the consequences of allowing evil
7 Or God is not benevolent.
Just to get clear on what Plantinga's defense is doing. He's giving a response to the logical problem of evil. The logical problem of evil comes from these propositions (from the article you cited):
"1. An all-powerful (omnipotent) God could prevent evil from existing in the world.
2. An all-knowing (omniscient) God would know that there was evil in the world.
3. An all-good (omnibenevolent) God would wish to prevent evil from existing in the world.
4. There is evil in the world."
The claim is that all four propositions cannot be true (the logical problem), and since 4 is evidently true, some or all of 1-3 are false. Plantinga's argument is that this claim is incorrect; that it's at least
possible that all four propositions are true, and this possibility is what his free will defense aims to establish.
This is Plantinga summarizing his argument (also from the article):
Quote:
A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.
So here I'd say notice that he doesn't mention omniscience (that's why I said earlier that your omniscience point doesn't seem relevant to Plantinga's argument). It does seem odd to me that a consequence of an argument would be that God can fail at knowing that free will enabled creatures are capable of doing evil. For example, one thing we can say about God's knowledge is that he is at least as knowledgeable as humans, and humans know that free will can lead to evil. But maybe that's not necessary, you could have a God who is like a jolly good bodybuilder who doesn't know the limits of his own strength and crushes people to death when he hugs them. At any rate, it's not relevant that it's possible that God isn't omniscient, what's relevant is if it's true that it's possible that God could be omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent and that evil exists.
The way you're getting to omniscience is that God created free will and you are assuming that free will is not compatible with evil (I agree with OriginalPosition, 4 is an assumption/premise not an intermediate conclusion). You argue that if free will is not compatible with evil (and God created free will), then God is either not omniscient or not benevolent . In 8 you say "Plantinga's argument is for a benevolent God" so we conclude that God is not omniscient. The problem here is that 8 is not the conclusion of Plantinga's argument, that is to say, he's not giving an argument that "God is benevolent". The argument is that it's possible that God is benevolent and omnipotent and that evil exists. The only part of your argument that ends up being relevant to Plantinga's conclusion is your premise that free will is not compatible with evil, but you need an argument for that and you need to say how that proposition defeats Plantinga's solution (and this is partially a lost cause, it seems pretty sensible that if you're significantly free, you can make bad/evil choices).
Last edited by smrk; 10-17-2011 at 01:02 AM.