(April 19, 2014 at 2:24 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:(April 19, 2014 at 1:20 pm)Counterapologistblog Wrote: You are confusing logical with actual impossibility and so are undermining the very point on which your argument was supposed to turn.
I, as a human being of limited powers, might easily find myself in a position where in order to cure one evil, I was obliged to enact another (but in my judgment lesser) evil. To save a life, I have to amputate a limb (or to save the ants from total annihilation, I have to subject almost all of them to annihilation to use your analogy).
But that is not a logical requirement. Saving a life without amputating a limb or saving a group of ants from extinction without killing any of them are both logical possibilities. The amputation and the ant massacre are both means to an end. As limited non-omnipotent beings, we do not have the luxury of achieving all our ends without having to go through means, sometimes pretty unpleasant ones. But the same cannot be true of an omnipotent deity. If he wants to save a life, save an ant tribe or prevent the spread of evil, he only has to will it.
If you want to preserve your argument, you will have to do much more work on making out a case for why God was LOGICALLY unable to achieve his end without the drastic means of killing people.
Why? It sounds like you expect frodo to prove a negative as in "prove that human powered flight is impossible." In order to make your point stick it seems you must show why perfect worlds without suffering are a logical necessity.
Nuh-uh. Frodo's claim is that it is not logically possible to save humanity without sacrcrificing some. That is what he needs to establish by argument and has failed to do (so far - if he has an argument, let's hear it).
BTW if you think that there is some philosophical rule to the effect that you cannot prove a negative, you're wrong. See here for why:
http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy...gative.pdf
