The ‘problem of evil’ is a perpetual thorn in the side of the omnitheist — that is, someone who believes in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. For if God is perfectly good and all-powerful, why does he allow so much evil in the world? He’s powerful enough to eradicate it; and if he’s perfectly good, he should want to eradicate it. So why doesn’t he?
One response, known as the ‘Free Will Defense’, comes from Alvin Plantinga:
A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against his goodness: for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.
Plantinga’s position has multiple problems and shortcomings, which we’ll no doubt end up discussing in the comment thread, but for now I want to present an argument against the Free Will Defense that is similar to an argument I’ve been making in the purpose of theistic evolution thread.
Let’s assume for the purposes of this OP that libertarian free will exists and that humans possess it. (It’s actually incoherent and therefore impossible, but that’s a separate topic.)
Here’s how I presented the argument back in 2012, in a comment addressed to Mung:
You haven’t thought this through. An omniscient and omnipotent God could prevent rapes from happening, and he could even prevent the desire to rape from happening, all without controlling anyone’s thoughts and desires.
Here’s how it would work. Suppose God creates each person with free will, so that everything he or she does during life is freely chosen. If God is omniscient, he knows what all of those choices will be before the person is even created. If God simply chooses not to create the people who will go on to commit rape (or even experience the desire to commit rape), then he has prevented those things from happening without depriving anyone of their free will.
If you object that selective creation would deprive the uncreated people of their free will, then you run into a big problem: There are already zillions of uncreated people for every person who is actually born. If leaving a person uncreated violates his or her free will, then God is already massively guilty of denying free will to zillions of uncreated people. The objection thus undermines the assumption that free will is important to God, which is the basis for the whole argument in the first place!
Plantinga’s Free-Will Defense is not specific to Earth. It refers to all worlds which could be logically actualized by God. If Heaven exists, which all mainstream Christians with whom I have spoken assure me, then it must fall within the set of logically actualizable worlds that God can access. Ergo, the Free-Will Defense must account for Heaven if it is to be valid.
Erik, the topic was your mistaken claim that god can’t have knowledge of something that would happen if he allowed it, but did not.
RoyLT,
Now you are interested in Alvin Plantinga’s view of Heaven? Are you saying keiths also is?
I am not. Alvin Plantingas view of heaven is about as valid as anyone else’s. He doesn’t know the same as everyone.
I thought keiths was interested in the problem of evil in this world. He sure mentions it a lot. If you think this is not his concern, ok, great. Perhaps he has turned over a new leaf.
phoodoo,
So what happens in heaven? Describe an average day.
I don’t know the views of others, nor do I particularly care. What I do care about is whether the Free-Will Defense sufficiently addresses the Problem of Evil. That is, after all, the point of this discussion.
According to the Free-Will Defense, ours is but one of an infinite number of possible worlds that God could have actualized. If all souls suffer from Trans-World Depravity (as Plantinga explicitly states), then we must consider the entire set of worlds. If Heaven exists, it is one such world and must be accounted for by the Free-Will Defense. My assertion above still stands unless you can refute it.
OMagain,
I am not sure if the concept of a day would exist in heaven, who knows.
What’s your evil-less world like Omagain? Keiths has already surrendered.
Wait, looks like I understand what you are getting at. But still, I was not mistaken. It’s just that your statement takes skewed metaphysics to understand. And given skewed metaphysics, keiths’ argument still is not addressing what he thinks he is addressing.
Long story short for now, is it equivalent to say as follows: God can have knowledge of what would happen if he doesn’t allow something to happen.
?
I agree, at most it is evidence against a particular version of a deity.
Only admins can permanently delete comments and I can find no trace of a comment from you either in the spam filter or trash bin (deleted comments – which tend to be user requests for deletion – remain in the trash bin till emptied) so I am a bit puzzled as to what might have happened, especially if your comment was visible to all initially and is now lost. PM me if you can give me any further information.
First, the bomb expert dilemma comes from the fact that he is a finite being. Second you seem to be saying God requires evil to exist in order to do good, without some evil good is logically impossible. The ends justify the means.
Perhaps but In the meantime millions of people died. Any idea what the greater good was accomplished by waiting for Fleming?
newton,
You were hoping for a world where no one dies?
According to one reading of the Bible such a world in fact existed.
newton,
Again, is that the world you were hoping for?
I’d say it’s a valid argument against an omnipotent, perfectly benevolent omniscient God. But we (specks) can’t tell if it’s sound; it may seem to us (as it does to me) that this is not the best of all possible worlds, but What The Hell Do We Know?
Can anyone distinguish between the garden of Eden and heaven? In terms of the free will thing?
RoyLT:
That’s right. I even did an OP on that a couple of years ago:
A dilemma for Christians – is there free will in heaven?
Here’s a comment from that thread:
I am quite familiar with that OP as it is what originally led me to this comment board. I did not feel at liberty to add comments as the OP had been dormant for some time, but I am pleased to get the chance to resurrect it here where it has (IMHO) very immediate relevance to the discussion at hand.
In January, I was looking for discussions of the “Free-Will in Heaven” issue and came across 2 that interested me. One was a piece by William Lane Craig on reasonablefaith.org that discussed an ‘Epistemic Distance’. I found it quite unsatisfactory. The second was your OP which, as my comments thus far hopefully suggest, did a much better job of boiling down the problem in my opinion.
I’m still awaiting a response from @phoodoo on how, given the Christian idea of Heaven, the Free-Will Defense can still be a valid position.
Could not agree more.
I’m always fascinated by the (rubbish) reasoning that God had to cause or allow A in order to bring about B. Arguments like this are usually invoked to get God off the hook when presented with a case of avoidable evil.
For example William Lane Craig during a debate I watched recently suggested that God might use the death of a child because it was the only way to secure somebody else’s future salvation.
The trouble with all this is summed up neatly by Epicurus…
God, we are told, is the creator of the Universe and omnipotent – preventing evil is not a logical impossibility for God. As such God is under no obligation, moral or logical, to use evil (A) in order to bring about a greater good (B). If God so wishes he can simply bring about B without A. But he chooses not to.
Therefore any evil in the world can only be an end in itself.
God is without excuse.
That’s the controversial proposition, the one that Plantinga would dispute. So, for example, if X having free will is a really big deal, producing way more good than the evil produced by X freely killing Y and Z with a sledgehammer, then God can’t bring about this allegedly greater good without also bringing about significant evil.
Please don’t shoot the messenger–it’s not MY argument.
The argument isn’t even valid. I will demonstrate this after you answer this:
walto: Erik, the topic was your mistaken claim that god can’t have knowledge of something that would happen if he allowed it, but did not.
Erik: Long story short for now, is it equivalent to say as follows: God can have knowledge of what would happen if he doesn’t allow something to happen.
?
I’m sorry, but can you restate your question, Erik? Is what equivalent? The first says that god can’t know something, the second that god can know something. Obviously, those are not equivalent. But I think you want to ask something else….
walto,
Well, then I am forced to rephrase yours a bit.
According to you, keiths’ argument presupposes the following: God can have knowledge of something that would happen if he allowed it, but did not (allow it to happen).
I can affirm this: God can have knowledge of what would happen if he doesn’t allow something to happen.
Are they equivalent?
ETA: And you are saying that yours/keiths’ is logically valid?
walto, to newton:
We can’t absolutely guarantee that any of our arguments or theories are sound or accurate. That’s the human condition.
Does that mean we should just give up on cosmology, physics, philosophy, and every other intellectual field? Of course not. The rational strategy is to do the best we can with the evidence that’s available to us at any given time. What’s irrational is to do as most theists do with regard to the problem of evil, which is to pay attention to the evidence that comports with their dogma while ignoring the evidence that clashes with it.
Evidence matters, and beliefs should conform to the evidence rather than overriding it.
Is that “something” an unbound quantifier? I think it would be clearer if it were bound. In any case, I was saying this:
It’s not the case that for all possible events X and omniscient entities G, if X is never actualized than G cannot have knowledge of X.
I’m not an expert on omniscience. But that seems plausible to me.
Re my claim of validity for the problem of evil, I wasn’t referring to anything keiths said in particular. I just think that it’s obvious that an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good god has to produce the best of all possible worlds. Now you have this:
1. If God exists this is the best of all possible worlds.
2. If this were the best of all possible worlds, there would be only so much evil as is required to maximize goodness in it.
3. There is evil in the world that could have been avoided without any diminishment of goodness in the world.
4. Therefore this is not the best of all possible worlds. (from 2 and 3)
5. Therefore God does not exist. (from 1 and 4)
That is a valid argument. However, it’s soundness depends on the truth of 3. keiths, who claims to know almost nothing, insists that he knows that 3 is true. FMM, who claims to know almost everything, insists that 3 is false. I deny we specks can know whether or not it’s true (phoodoo has suggested similar things). Thus, in my view, we have a valid argument against the existence of (an omni) god, but we have no idea whether it’s sound.
Christ, walto. That whole business about the implicit asterisk went right over your head, didn’t it?
I actually LIKE it when dumb ideas go right over my head. Don’t want them IN there, certainly.
How would you know that it’s dumb? The whole thing went right over your head.
Yeah right. And how would YOU know (or know*) that?
Sorry, but it’s a really dumb idea, bro.
Anyhow, so we won’t have to worry about equivocation, I think it’s incumbent upon you to indicate with the asterisk whenever you are making any assertion you seem “behind” so we’ll know whether you know it or merely know* it. In the discussion above, for example, 3 is only partly empirical, so we have no way of knowing (or is it merely knowing*?–ah, who cares!) whether it’s something you think you might be deceived by a demon (or a mule-painting jokester) about unless you tell us.
We’ll have no equivocations regarding knowledge claims here!
Yours is much better. Honestly, keiths is not making the same argument. Different from keiths’, yours does not contain free will, only good and evil. It must be that you are able to read him much more charitably than I am.
As to truth of your 3, it depends on your account of evil, i.e. a moral theory. Insofar as you don’t have it, you are in the dark about 3. If you cannot define evil (it takes a moral theory to define evil), then obviously you cannot measure it either. Whereas moralists feel themselves empowered to make proclamations on this point. Makes sense?
Now to the invalid stuff.
walto: It’s not the case that for all possible events X and omniscient entities G, if X is never actualized than G cannot have knowledge of X.
You are commendably making the distinction between possible events and actualized events. I have been baffled about keiths’ argument, because this is a distinction he is not making.
Namely, nobody can be truly blamed for a possibility. Only about actuality. But keiths emphatically blames God for possibility, saying: “If leaving a person uncreated violates his or her free will, then God is already massively guilty of denying free will to zillions of uncreated people.” This does not work.
The guilt can only accumulate if the zillions of uncreated people are planned and then they will indeed not be created, i.e. the plan fails. If the plan of creation failed, it would be like an abortion or miscarriage, and this is shock and horror for theists. But the plan is in process, so there’s no shock and horror and keiths cannot say “God is already massively guilty”, talking evidently about this actual world, God included. This is a mere emotional appeal on his part, misstating something about the actual world, trying to make the case against an objection to his possible world.
The objection is this: “…selective creation would deprive the uncreated people of their free will.” The objection really concerns the idea of selective creation, i.e. changes to the plan of creation. Creator would unfailingly implement the entire plan. If not, we are not talking about the omni-being that keiths seeks to address. Therefore it’s not possible to plan a person and later, seeing that his course of life would turn out evil, remove him from the plan. This would be like abortion or miscarriage, i.e. evil in itself; it would not diminish the sum total of evil at all. At the same time it would imply something less than omniscience. Omniscient God would not need to try different plans or to constantly revise the single plan. So again keiths’ would not be addressing the omni-being he seeks to address.
I could go on talking about free will, but this is a point your argument does not have in common with keiths. In your argument, everything depends on what evil means and how to weigh or measure it. In keiths’ argument, things additionally depend on what is free will and how it works vis-a-vis evil.
Now I have faith that you can actually fix his argument.
Erik,
1. I have no interest in fixing keiths’ argument, assuming it needs fixing.
2. I actually have a moral theory. Have written a long paper on it that’s currently circulating (so far unsuccessfully, in spite of its wonderfulness).
If your moral theory cannot give something like an answer to your 3, I’d question if it’s really moral theory worth the name. Anyway, success to your paper!
No, I can’t answer 3. But thanks.
Free will is the same, in heaven the presence of God is too overwlming to choose otherwise, the scale is tipped in God’s favor, in the Garden, free will is tipped toward evil since no snake tempted Adam not to eat the apple.
RoyLT,
I already answered you-what makes you think “will” is even a phenomenon in heaven? Christians don’t know what happens in heaven. No one knows what happens in heaven. They know what is happening here on Earth. Speculating about things we can’t possibly experience makes no sense. We don’t even have words in our language to describe what it means to exist outside of space and time. To exist as timeless energy.
WE can describe this world however. Apparently Walto (and keiths, although he is now afraid to admit it specifically, and you) does think that the existence of bad things happening on earth means that a God must not be benevolent. But the problem with suggesting this is then you need to suggest what the alternative would be for a benevolent God. But with that alternative, you still have to allow humans to make their own choices. NOW it gets hard for you.
How can a human be allowed to make their own choices, if the only choices available ALL have good outcomes? That’s a completely impossible contradiction to overcome (thus, I would never propose myself, that in heaven we make choices). If all choices lead to the same quality of outcomes, then no choice also leads to that. If all desires are the same, all consequences for action are the same, then doing nothing is the same as doing something.
Sooooo…I have given keiths, and you, and walto, and Omagain a chance to describe what world God could create that would allow you your own choices with your own consequences, without the concept of both good AND bad. And you can’t do it. And keiths can’t. And Walto can’t. You all steadfastly refuse to even attempt it. So you simply have no position whatsoever with which to suggest a benevolent God should make a world that only has good outcomes.
Thus, the problem of evil is a false problem, based on bad logic from bad philosophers. Evil is tied to free will. You can’t separate them. And that is why you can not overcome the challenge I have given you. Why your side can’t even try.
Ad hockey is another name for bullshit.
Time now to go review comments by keiths and see if he has given an answer yet.
That would be post-hoccery.
Did they make this whole bit up…
Revelations Chapter 21:
21 And the twelve gates [were] twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city [was] pure gold, as it were transparent glass.
22 And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.
23 And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb [is] the light thereof.
24 And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it.
25 And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.
Let’s replace ‘seahorses’ with ‘rape’ and see what we get:
The problem of evil in that case is due to the theistic claim that Frank regards rape as evil. It has nothing to do with whether you or I or the entire population of Bangladesh think rape is evil.
Then why is keiths so concerned about whether I believe rape is evil? Is it because “the problem of evil” is only a problem for theists, and it depends upon a theist making a claim that rape is evil?
keiths,
The rules are that we don’t call fellow commenters stupid. It is fine to challenge each others ideas and that can be done without snark here or it can be done with snark in the “noyau” thread.
It’s quite simple actually. The alternative is that no God, benevolent or otherwise, actually exists.
Well I’m happy to see that we agree on this point so well. Free-will in heaven would be an insoluble contradiction. But since God values Free-Will, then either God or Heaven doesn’t exist. Which limb will you chop off?
RoyLT,
I am glad you are so interested in theology. If you feel you are well versed in it, perhaps you would like to begin a discussion about theology.
However we are talking about philosophy of evil, and you have just made this statement, so I am not so sure I have confidence in your ability to parse out the finer points of philosophy. I have asked (repeatedly) for the atheist to describe a world with free will, that only allows good. Your suggestion to me now is that an alternative to the world that exists now, (in the mind of an atheist proposing a better way) is no God at all. Ok, so then you are saying IF a benevolent God DOES exist, this is the only world you can come up with. Because you now say your only alternative in no God.
So before we get to theology, because you can sharpen your philosophy a bit, deal? Can you describe a God made world, with free will, that doesn’t have any bad consequences?
The answer to that clearly seems to be no, you can’t.
When and where did I say that?
It is more persuasive in Latin
Not quite. I’m asserting that a benevolent personal God cannot be reconciled with the Problem of Evil. Therefore, God does not exist in our current world. The Free-Will Defense, which attempts to refute the Problem of Evil by invoking Trans-World Depravity fails due to the fact that it cannot be logically reconciled with the existence of the Heaven of Christian theology.
You explicitly stated in a prior post that you would never assert that we made choices in Heaven. If that is the case, then why is Free-Will so important on Earth for an average of 78 years (in 1st World countries) if you can do without it for eternity?
When you said this:
We certainly have to make choices when all the outcomes are bad, personally having all good outcomes does not seem to diminish free will. However phoo you believe decisions are made by the immaterial mind, does the mind cease to exist at death or cease to make decisions?