RE: The Problem of Evil (XXVII)
June 8, 2016 at 10:02 pm
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2016 at 10:05 pm by wiploc.)
(June 8, 2016 at 8:58 pm)SteveII Wrote:(June 8, 2016 at 9:17 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: All of your objections assume that God had no choice but to make humans so frail that all those things pose terrible dangers to us. I guarantee there are no laws of nature that prevent a being that can do anything that is possible from making biological organisms that are hard to kill by falling or drowning.
There are safe places where people are never subject to natural disasters and never will be, but you won't name one?![]()
The most common Christian version of free will is a joke: use your free will to be a Christian or suffer forever. And if the greatest good is knowledge of God, a being that can do anything possible ought not to have a problem with arranging things so everyone has knowledge of God.
Why hasn't God arranged for everyone to be able to have knowledge of God? Romans 1:20 comes to mind: "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." There are many more verses that speak about how the heavens, etc. declare this or that about God. That seems to be the "God Shaped Hole" in our psyche that psychologist like to talk about.
So, this time, "good" equals something like "vague alleged hints that gods exist, but which aren't strong or logical enough to persuade the Hellbound"?
If you think that's going to keep the PoE from working, you are wrong.
Quote:In addition, I think that God has a different idea than you do about where the line between freely choosing God from a) the amount of information that has been revealed and b) the amount of information needed that would be so obvious that freely choosing God would not play into it. I think philosophers call it morally sufficient freedom.
Perhaps "morally significant free will"?
An omnipotent god could combine morally significant (or sufficient) freedom with everybody freely choosing god. No problem.
Plantinga works it this way (though of course an omnipotent omniscient god could work it in an infinity of other ways, many of them beyond our comprehension):
God, at the beginning, knew of every possible world. He was omniscient, so he knew which worlds had free will, and which worlds had evil. He knew which had free will without having evil (call these "goodworlds"). He could start any one of these possible worlds that was made by a god. (He couldn't make a world that wasn't made by a god. Worlds that both were and weren't made by gods were impossible worlds.) He knew, in each of these god-made goodworlds (as well as every other world, possible and impossible) whether he would intervene, and, if he would intervene, exactly how many times he would intervene, and to what effect.
And, knowing all this, he chose to start one particular world, Kronos, this world, the actual world. But he could have chosen any one of the possible god-created worlds, including an infinite number of god-created goodworlds. But he chose a bad one.
But the point is, one way to have morally significant freedom plus everybody freely choosing god is simply to create one of the worlds in which god knows that will happen. Then nobody is forced to do anything, and everybody has morally significant free will.
This is no problem for an omnipotent omniscient creator god.
Quote:Another question: If we are in a "fallen state" or a have a "sin nature" affecting us, why wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude (as does the Bible) that our cognitive abilities have been impaired and our built-in selfcenteredness (pride) prevents us from seeing evidence that conflicts with the selfcenteredness (a kind of noetic effect).
That doesn't help your case. A good god wouldn't give us a sin nature. A good god wouldn't start us off with Adam and Eve he knew they were going to Fall; rather he'd start us off Solomon and Ruth, or whoever it took to achieve success. A good god wouldn't have put that particular tree in the garden, or he would have fenced it off, or put the serpent somewhere else, or he would have made it cloudy that day, or any one of the other infinity of ineffable (to us mortals) butterfly-effect causal factors that would have resulted in our not Falling. Or he wouldn't have declared eating fruit to be a sin. Or he wouldn't have made having a sin nature be the punishment for sin. Or he would have created one of the infinity of possible worlds in which self-centered cognitively-impaired people happen to choose, uh, to know god, or whatever. I'm actually having trouble following your above sentence.
Anyway, the above may not be compelling arguments. They seem obviously correct, but they're just obvious, not logically bulletproof.
What's logically bulletproof is the PoE: If a tri-omni god existed, evil would not. There's no way around that.
ETA: I'm not quoting Plantinga. I'm not paraphrasing. I'm building on his ideas, following them to their logical conclusions. I didn't know where I'd wind up when I started the above with "Plantinga works it this way." Plantinga obviously didn't reach the conclusion I did. Though he should have.