Plantinga's "Free Will" defense contradicts Christianity

[The Grand Nudger]

Christian notions of grace, free will, and predestination aren't based on anything in the OT. They got all that from their synthesis, not their borrowed ladder.

[LastPoet]

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Remember when god made that perfect place on earth for the first two people?  That was ossum.  He gave them a choice to see if they were worthy, as if he didn't already know what choice they would make.  It's like giving an 8 year old a wiffle bat and saying, "now don't hit your brother with this."

It’d be more like saying ‘now don’t hit your brother with this’ but saying it in Mandarin. Since Adam and Eve could not possibly have known that disobeying God was wrong until they ate the fruit that gave them that knowledge, the injunction would have been so much gibberish.

It wasn’t so much ‘original sin’ as it was ‘original set up.’ The entire Christian notions of grace, free will, and predestination are based on a confidence trick.


Boru

Usually parenting comes with nerves of steel, level-headedness and pouting. The former works with my 3 year old daughter. Its working for me. Why didnt their god pouted, and told them "now that you know, don't eat from that tree again?"

[The Grand Nudger]

If we believe the story, god was the first first time parent. We weren't even his first try. That would be the angels. Also went tits up.

Just as Platinga maintains that god cannot be held morally accountable for what he cannot do, I say god cannot be held morally accountable for what he could not know. Raising the first pair of breeding humans must have been chock full of circumstances like that. We have the benefit of so many generations of parenting behind us, but poor ole G-O-D was flying blind.

[The Grand Nudger]

...anywho, moving forward.

We can see that it's not at all surprising for Platingas defense to contradict some individuals christianity. That's just the way things go with a fractious religion divided into sub-cults and sects. A more difficult problem, is that Platinga's defense tacitly contradicts his own christian principles, right down to the underlying assumptions of his own defense.

Platinga depends on a notion called transworld depravity..which is to say that human beings in any possible world would produce moral evil. We have no choice in this matter, neither does god.

A competing assertion would be transworld virtue - why couldn't god have created us such that..yes, we get to freely will this and that, but we only -want- to do good? Well, that would damage freedom, Platinga contends, the greater value making property in his soul forge.

Damage freedom? Damage it more or less than being such that we can only choose sin, that in no possible world could there be human beings without moral evil? If we genuinely believe that damaging freedom is a greater evil, than evil....then the god of this world has both committed that specific greater evil, and the commission of this act, by that god, was then the source of all lesser evil as well.

[John 6IX Breezy]

I'm not sure why Boru is saying Adam and Eve couldn't have known that disobeying God was wrong until eating the fruit. We know from Eve's interaction with the serpent that she understood she wasn't to eat it and that the consequences would be death.

[The Grand Nudger]

There are christians who believe that the fruit represents knowledge of good and evil. No amount of situational detail is necessarily equivalent to a moral detail. If I don't know about good and evil, I can know that I was told not to eat a fruit, and I can know that I was told I would die if I did...but I wouldn't know that it was wrong.

(frankly, it's unclear what moral wrong was done even in the context of the story)

This cuts straight to our notions of good and evil. If we're morally unaware, can we be morally culpable? In Platinga's formulation, an inability discharged gods moral responsibility. Would that not also apply to us? What..then, would the moral status of gods subsequent curse become?

[John 6IX Breezy]

The tree is said to represent the knowledge of good and evil, but it is also ambiguous as to what that means.

Even if taken at its most extreme interpretation, knowing something is wrong isn't required in order to not do it. We don't put our hand on the stove not because it's wrong but because it's hot. Not wanting to die is sufficient for avoiding the fruit, whether or not they knew it was wrong.

I personally view the knowledge of tree as representing experiential knowledge rather than semantic knowledge, but it doesn't matter.

[The Grand Nudger]

I most certainly does matter, to the great many christians who have a different take on christianity than you.

Moral knowledge is commonly seen as a precondition for moral responsibility. If human beings lacked moral knowledge prior to eating the fruit, it is difficult to justify the subsequent consequence. Not wanting to die isn't moral knowledge by anyone's reckoning. Sure, it's probably enough to keep you and I from doing something...but it didn't stop Eve.

Here's something to consider. Would greater honesty on gods part have stopped Eve? God told his two pets that they would die, but I don't recall him ever laying out the hundreds of thousands of years of pain and misery that would have to follow. Not just hers, but her childrens, and her childrens childrens children..so on and so forth until a literal end of days. Whatever we knew and didn't know before we ate the fruit, we don't seem to have been as completely informed as we might have wanted to be.

[John 6IX Breezy]

It didn't stop Eve, not because she didn't know, but because she didn't believe the information. Moreover, scripture tends to attribute their partaking of the fruit as a result of deception. God is aware that the blame doesn't lie entirely with Adam and Eve, and that they were lied to by the serpent. Which is perhaps why there is a plan of salvation for mankind but not for fallen angels, which perhaps willingly chose their transgression.

[The Grand Nudger]

None of these musings on dragons and vicarious redemption offer a resolution to the moral quandaries described. Assume that all of that is true, and the moral dilemma remains. This is why people go through the trouble of coming up with theodicies and defenses (such as platinga's) in the first place.