(September 27, 2013 at 3:12 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote:(September 27, 2013 at 2:14 pm)Vincenzo "Vinny" G. Wrote: -This argument is rich and rigorous. Your terminology is on-point and very accurate. If you wrote all this you obviously know a lot and I am impressed!
I did; thank you.
Quote:-A minor quibble: When you wrote "God can violate free will", did you mean the opposite?
Hah, yeah. That would make the theist have to believe that God cannot reveal himself to people, which would throw modern Christian Biblical interpretation out the window (no prophets).
Quote:-Many responses to this argument would be similar (or identical) to responses given to the problem of evil. The free will defense, for example is most famous.
I don't see how that would work though. If God cannot make at least the method of salvation explicit and obvious in Scripture despite having chosen that medium to convey the method, that would seem in contradiction to his capabilities and desires.
Quote:-A less famous objection that could be forwarded would be the divine providence objection.
Hm? Could you elaborate?
When I say this argument resembles the problem of evil, I mean the PoE tries to demonstrate a contradiction between God's character and reality. In the problem of evil, the reality is evil and suffering.
Your argument seems to do a similar thing. It tries to demonstrate a contradiction between God's character and reality. But the aspect of reality you are focusing on is the "hiddenness of salvation".
I suggested it might be vulnerable to two possible objections prima facie.
The divine providence position basically says "God's omniscience allows God to providentially arranges the world such that his ends ultimately obtain." Applied specifically to your argument as an objection, it might look like "If there exists a set of people who will be victim to false doctrines of salvation, God can providentially arrange the world such that those people who end up becoming victims of false doctrines of salvation are those people who would not accept the real doctrine of salvation even if they had known it."
The free will defense suggests, broadly, that "It might be impossible for God to create a world where individuals with free will accord with any one particular set of stipulations in beliefs or behavior." Applied to your argument as an objection, it might say "All possible world with free-will creatures might lead to doctrinal deviations, and the particular world that we live in could conceivably lead to the least number of people losing their salvation out of all possible worlds."
A third possible objection, this one also by Alvin Plantinga against the problem of evil argument could be made by acknowledging an implicit "noseeum inference" in your argument, namely, your argument infers "Since there seems to us to be no good reason for God to allow these doctrinal differences, we must conclude that in reality, there are no good reasons for a God to allow these doctrinal differences to exist." The natural counter to this inference is skeptical theism, which can also apply to this situation, I think.
I'm sure if I think more, I can come up with more objections that can jump from the problem of evil to this argument. But this is what I can come up with so far.
