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!
Let’s not forget that about one-third of conceptions end in spontaneous abortions, rendering life itself somewhat unnecessary in the grand scheme of existence.
I’m aware that there are some disagreements about whether unbaptised people make it to heaven. Making stuff up can lead to disagreements.
And I am showing you why this is bad logic. If a benevolent God is to give free will, then there is NO choice but to allow good and bad both to exist. Otherwise the point of a choice no longer exists. You have not refuted this in any way.
Talking about what exists in heaven is another topic, because no one can say what free will means in a timeless, dimensionless world. Without time, events and consequences no longer exist.
To put it mildly
So free will is not so much about choices but about dealing out consequences for choices.
Why do you have to make a choice if all outcomes are bad? What prevents one from making no choice?
What do you mean by “dealing out” consequences? If one is allowed to make a choice, then there must be a consequence to that choice, or else choosing or not choosing would be the same thing.
I like the “no one can say” part.
For some reason this doesn’t apply to the rest of the ad hockey.
phoodoo,
Do you understand the difference between validity and soundness, phoodoo? If so. And you think the argument I put is invalid, I’d love to hear how.
walto,
Which argument?
When you said this: ” I’d say it’s a valid argument against an omnipotent, perfectly benevolent omniscient God.”
I believe I have shown why this is clearly wrong. If you wish to defeat my argument, you have to show how you can have free will, without having both bad and good. Thus far no one has offered any viable scenario of how you could. Keiths, who is enthralled with talking about the problem of evil seems particularly afraid to tackle the challenge.
Yes,
The world is a pretty nice place despite being populated by billions of folks who would if left to their own devices destroy it all and dance in the rubble.
peace
Depends, but making no choice is also a choice
I have a theory. But it’s just a theory and therefore not worth much.
Just a side note FWIW
suppose penicillin was discovered 40,000 years ago, most assuredly bacteria would have developed resistance thousands of years ago and there is a good chance that none of us would be here to complain about it.
The point is there are lots of logically possible reasons that Fleming’s discovery happened at just the right time. Since we are not God we just have no way of knowing this stuff.
peace
Apparently you know less about the incarnation than you do about heaven. maybe you should read the book.
peace
Great point.
peace
Can you please post or PM me a link?
I see you don’t know what ‘valid’ means. The argument from evil can be valid even you can’t have free will without there being evil.
Actually, I think it could probably even be sound if that were true, although, as I explained above, I don’t think any human being can justifiably claim that it is sound.
It’s probably stupid and indefensible,but I’m reluctant to put any unpublished work of mine on the internet that I think has some chance of getting accepted somewhere. If you’re interested, though, (and you promise not to pass it around) I can email it to you,
I’m kind of proud of it and have been rationalizing its rejections to date, by blaming these failures on its length. It’s a bit longer than most philosophy journals will accept. One place said they might consider it if it were broken into two or three pieces, but I haven’t wanted/have been too lazy to do that.
Fwiw, a bunch of my stuff is available online both on scribd and on my academia.edu page.
walto,
Found you on those sites!
As for the moral theory paper, well I can email you back to reveal my identity if that helps you make sure your work is safe. No one would ever believe I could come up with anything like a moral theory, especially if you’ve already submitted it to a journal. I can certainly promise I wouldn’t try to take advantage in any way, but you don’t know me at all, so…
It would be pretty ironic if you were to steal someone else’s moral theory. 🙂
I stole one once, but it was a moral theory that states that thievery is all right so long as certain conditions are met.
Hence, I’m pretty self-righteous about it all.
Glen Davidson
The idea that anybody would steal any writing of mine is probably ridiculous to begin with. Just can’t seem to lose it.
You forgot the rest of the question.
Why is rape evil, according to your own personal, subjective morality?
Is this the part where Keiths replies….
….and then, eyes narrowed, heart rate elevated, hands shaking with anticipation, you reach for the keyboard….
Perhaps he believes rape is evil because he would never rape anyone. Perhaps he believes rape is evil because he would not want to be raped. Perhaps he believes rape is evil because rape is unnatural. Perhaps he believes rape is evil because he was raised in a Christian home. Perhaps he has no reason for believing rape is evil. Perhaps he thinks it’s a self-evident truth.
Perhaps he has no objective reason whatsoever for believing rape is evil and has no objective basis to object to anyone who does not believe as he does.
If you could ask god, what answer would you find satisfactory?
If I could ask God what?
Why rape is evil, or any other thing
Because rape is inconsistent with the nature of God. Anyone who is capable of rape is not God. It’s this incongruency that atheists like keiths try to feed on. But no human is God. But then keiths wonders why God is not a rapist, without ever bothering to define what it means to be a rapist.
I called keiths out by questioning his assumptions. Leave it up to him to turn that into a claim that I am a freak and I don’t think that rape is evil.
How do you know that? And that’s not what I asked, I said what answer would you find satisfactory if you asked god. What if a moral subjectivist told you “Rape is OK because I feel like it is OK. It’s my nature and that’s how I feel” ?
Butchering men, women and children (inc. the unborn) is perfectly consistent with God’s nature.
Why so squeamish about rape?
I am not squeamish about rape. keiths is the one harping on rape. Perhaps he served time in prison which offers him a perspective I lack.
You seem to think not, else why would you bring them up?
Deuteronomy 22:28-29: If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
Numbers 31:15-18: And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? … Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Looks like the Christian god is fine with it.
One attribute of god for the list. God thinks rape is icky.
Depending on which god you believe in and whether she asked for it.
Looks like the Christian God is fine with what?
Rape. Read your bible.
How about two weeks earlier? How did say the dozen extra deaths contribute to the greater good or was it just their bad luck?
Seems to me you should just leave your God out of the interfering business but to each his own.
Is it the dancing or the destroying you object to?
Define Rape. Read your dictionary.
Mung,
Is there an “unless God approves of it” clause in your definition of rape?
keiths, to walto:
Alan:
I didn’t call him stupid, Alan. I said that the whole thing went right over his head. Can you really not tell the difference, after all the time you’ve spent as a moderator?
phoodoo:
I have. Read the OP.
By the way, do you think God has free will?
So you are still unconvinced that his argument is invalid? Let’s try again.
When keiths tries to refute the objection (i.e. read his last paragraph again), he blames God for not having created zillions of people. The blame is effective if we suppose that the uncreated zillions of people are in the creation plan and the plan has failed. If we accept all these conditions, then his main proposal in the argument (namely, let’s leave evil people uncreated) also blames God. Therefore his conclusion is ineffective, because when you can blame someone for something, such as God for leaving people uncreated, then there is guilt for wrongdoing and thus there is evil after all.
This means that keiths is equivocating on “uncreated”. Uncreated people are either in the plan of creation, in which case it’s possible to blame God for leaving them uncreated, or they are outside of the plan of creation, in which case keiths cannot blame God for leaving them uncreated.
Your own proposition escapes this equivocation, because you properly make the distinction of possible and actual. There’s no fallacy in saying that God can know things he never planned to do, but since keiths is blaming God for never-planned things, he is evidently not taking seriously the distinction of possible and actual.
Now let’s try keiths argument by leaving the entire objection bit (his last paragraph) out of it, because it’s unnecessary to his argument anyway. Now we are supposing that there’s no blame in leaving evil people uncreated and we are granting keiths’ insistence that evil people’s free will is not being infringed by leaving evil people uncreated.
Granting all that, let’s re-read keiths’ conclusion: [God] has prevented those [evil] things from happening without depriving anyone of their free will. It still doesn’t follow. Either keiths’ free will is so narrow as to be insignificant (notice Plantinga’s first statement “A world containing creatures who are significantly free…”) or he must remove the part “God has prevented those evil things from happening”. If God really prevented those not-yet-done evil things from happening by leaving evil people uncreated, i.e. those not-yet-done evil things are significant, then free will of those uncreated evil people is also significant, no matter how narrow the definition, and it’s really being deprived. But if keiths still hammers on that God didn’t deprive anyone of free will, then it follows that God didn’t prevent any evil things from happening either.
You escaped these problems by removing free will entirely from the argument. Thus you created a valid argument which does not address Plantinga’s argument. But keiths’ argument is not even valid.
Erik,
You’re making the same mistakes, again and again.
I don’t blame God for leaving people uncreated. How that point has managed to evade you for so long is beyond me.
I argue that he can blamelessly leave people uncreated, and that doing so, in the way I’ve described in the OP, would prevent the existence of moral evil in the world without compromising anyone’s free will.
You are the one arguing that God would compromise the free will of at least some of people who would remain uncreated in my scheme:
I debate that claim here:
You’ve tried to evade the problem with an unjustified, ad hoc patch: claiming that if God leaves a person uncreated, it only violates their free will if they were already on the “to be created” list.
For one thing, that’s just silly. Those who remain uncreated cannot exercise their free will regardless of whether they are are (or were) on the list. The list makes no difference to that point.
Second, even if you were correct, it wouldn’t help your case, because God could simply screen out the future evildoers before placing anyone on the “to be created” list.
Your objections just don’t hold water, Erik.
You hypothetically do in your latter paragraph. You should be happy about two things: 1. I have read your argument in its entirety, including the hypothetical objection bit. 2. I immediately discovered what was wrong with that bit.
On my part, I am thankful for that latter paragraph because it points out emphatically that you equivocate.
I understand. To this I replied:
Now I hope you see that I finally understand your argument. It’s quite a nut to crack due to the equivocation.
Your conclusion is, “[God] has prevented those [evil] things from happening without depriving anyone of their free will.” If it be so that free will of uncreated people has not been deprived by leaving them uncreated, then their evildoings have not been prevented either, because their evildoings are also left uncreated. Therefore that’s the concept (“create”) where you equivocate in your premises, but you have to make a distinction, if free will is to be significant as required by Plantinga, and if prevention of evil is to be significant as you conclude.
Walto understands, so to speak, your argument by removing free will from the equation altogether. I seek to understand all of your argument and in the process hopefully to explain something to you about theism. Or let’s set a more modest aim: how choices, evil, free will, and good are interrelated.
keiths:
Erik:
In order to show that it doesn’t make sense to blame him for that! It’s a reductio, Erik.
You know what that is, right? If you don’t, please Google it.
With the meaning in mind, read the paragraph again:
Sure. Except that it was an unsuccessful reductio due to the equivocation.
Now, can we finally move on to your main argument? Hopefully you see that I have addressed it.
Erik,
Sure they have. If those people had been created, the evil acts would have occurred. By declining to create them, God prevents the evil acts from occurring.
Erik,
What equivocation? Please be specific.
Meanwhile, I’m off to bed.
In other words, in your argument, God is not really preventing evil. God is simply leaving evil uncreated. This must be so, if you argue that God is not depriving free will of evil people – God leaves them simply uncreated.
Not specific enough?
ETA: “Create” must be used in the same sense all the time.
The same point yet again: Either non-creation has consequences or it doesn’t. If, by virtue of not creating evil people, you say their evil deeds are being prevented, then, again by virtue of not creating evil people, their free will is being deprived. If you insist their free will is not being deprived, then also no evil is being prevented.
The implications of your argument reduce to this: God is not really preventing evil. God simply creates a different world with no evil in it. And presumably you would have nothing against that kind of God. Basically, God would be okay if he only created heaven.