RE: Plantinga's "Free Will" defense contradicts Christianity
February 8, 2020 at 12:14 am
(This post was last modified: February 8, 2020 at 12:24 am by ColdComfort.
Edit Reason: Added last line
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(February 7, 2020 at 4:35 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Welcome back. You can find plantingas argument here.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=Plantinga+free+will+defense
Or, if you'd prefer the lf of the boards, here-
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/
Or, if you like a quick wiki link..here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plan...ll_defense
Well thanks. That's polite as I get. I think I'll download one of his books as I'm not sure what the fuss is about. There must be more to it as it's not a particularly original thought. And it doesn't contradict Christianity unless he's saying all suffering is due to free will which is stupid. And professors never say stupid things.
One thing got me thinking though and that was from one of his critics. God could maximize the conditions so that human freewill would be less likely to chose moral evil. Take serial killers like Ted Bundy. He was not insane in any legal sense. He knew what he a doing was evil and he had a choice not to commit his crimes. I read a biography of him years ago and you can't point to anything in his upbringing that would produce a guy like that. He associated sexual pleasure with the torture of young women! There must have been something wrong with his wiring. How his brain developed. And there appears to be a least some other men who are like that.
God could easily have prevented his brain developing in that way and not in any way interfere with his free will. So not the best of all possible worlds God could have made.
There are a lot of similar things. Addictions, I have read somewhere, may have a genetic foundation. God could change the gene. No interference with free will. You could come up with plenty of other examples but I think you get the drift.
Just to forestall those ho may misunderstand. Nothing I say here mitigates how evil Ted Bundy was. The desire to torture women and find sexual pleasure in it is one thing. To act on it another. For all we know there are men who seek help or otherwise do not act on the same desires.
