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!
I would say the discovery came at exactly the right time.
I come to this conclusion because I know that God is Good and I trust him to always make the right decision.
Folks who would second guess God with out the necessary knowledge to know one way or the other just come of as spoiled in my opinion. Like a five year old throwing a temper tantrum to avoid his vaccination.
Peace
It’s the dancing that gives the destroying context. It’s all the same act
peace
I am questioning your version of God, to be accurate.
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.
Virgins are spoils of war, to be used by the conquerors. Your god is a nasty piece of work.
The issue of Heaven is quite relevant to the current discussion when your actions according to the Free-Will of this world have consequences in the next. Attempting to apply Plantinga’s defense only to this world is an arbitrary and false distinction. The defense is supposed to apply to all World Segments which God can logically actualize. That includes Heaven.
And by suggesting that we don’t have Free-Will in Heaven, you hold views diametrically opposed to William Lane Craig and most mainstream Christians. If that is your view, then it is necessary for you to explain why we need Free-Will on Earth for a finite lifetime if God does not see fit to allow us to have it for eternity in Heaven.
Interesting question? Why not just start right out with heaven and skip the boring/painful intermediaries. Wouldn’t that be a better possible world?
(Again, I’m not saying it would be. As a teensy speck, I figure I’m not really in a position to opine. But it IS an interesting question for those who are quite happy to give us the straight dope on these issues.)
@keiths’ OP from 2 years ago summed this conundrum up nicely. If there is Free-Will in Heaven but no evil, then it is definitely a better possible world. This is the ‘evil-less’ world that @phoodoo keeps asking me to describe. But if it is logically possible for God to actualize such a paradise, then why not just start there and skip the unnecessary carnage of this world?
The problem there, I think, is the rejoinder that heaven is impossible without the unpleasant foreplay. I don’t get why, but, let’s face it, specks don’t get much when it comes to angels, cherubs, and 40 virgins baked in a pie.
RoyLT,
I find it odd that you don’t wish to talk about the problem of evil, ON THIS WORLD, that you all claim.
As far as I know, William Lane Craig has never been to heaven.
Also:
But according to Platinga, a world with free will is more valuable, so I guess the best possible world must be one where there’s no heaven and this one is eternal (bye bye Second Coming?)
That is William Lane Craig’s approximate approach. He calls the concept an “Epistemic Distance” that must be covered by mortal life before we can be allowed into Heaven. In @keiths’ OP, @petrushka summed it up as life on Earth as a sort of ‘Boot-Camp’ before Heaven.
I see 3 problems with that approach which I have not been able to reconcile.
1) As @petrushka mentioned earlier in this thread, infants deaths of all kinds (regardless of one’s view on beginning of life) need a special consideration since they don’t have an opportunity to cover that same distance.
2) Satan rebelled in Heaven, so it is or was possible to sin at some point in Heaven. What changed? If there was an introductory period where sinning was possible, why not just end sin here on Earth now that we’ve had some time to screw up rather than transporting us to some other realm?
3) Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael have not lived out mortal lives on Earth, therefore they have not had a chance to cover the same Epistemic Distance as we mere humans. However, they are allowed to stay and retain places of honor in Heaven.
Because God already built hell, and he’s not going to let it go to waste.
And the people who lost the arguments will enjoy the ultimate victory. We just invent things like evolution to try to claim that the flames won’t have the final say.
Glen Davidson
It’s not necessary to explain how timeless free will or timeless evil. If this is the best possible world, then heaven can’t be any better. Period. If it is better, then this is not the best possible world and Platinga’s argument fails. Take your pick.
Can you be a bit more specific as to what you want to discuss about this world? There is certainly evil on this world by almost any moral standard. I would suspect that we agree at least up to that point.
dazz,
It can be the best possible world, and heaven doesn’t exist. It can be the best possible world of worlds which are material. It could be the best possible world besides heaven. It could be the best possible world which has time. It could be the best possible world, and heaven is not a world…..
The possibilities are immense.
RoyLT,
Well, I am pretty sure I have stated my reasons for contending that in order to have free will, decision making, functioning life, there MUST be both good and bad. Otherwise, all you have is organisms which feel, yet need not do anything.
So, I have said, if you, or anyone else thinks this is not the case, that you actually can have free will, can have decisions, and also be void completely of anything bad, it is up to you to explain how that is logically possible.
I think you have to include heaven in “the world” when you say this must be the best possible world. So they have to argue that a world without heaven would be worse and without free will there’d be no heaven. (Why not? Who the hell knows.)
Right. As specks, our opinions on cosmic issues of this kind aren’t worth much.
Here, I think the philosophical type theist just throws out all the stuff in 2 and 3. They just say “All I know is that this must be the best of all possible worlds. If there’s no Satan in it, so be it. ” And, as phoodoo says above, maybe there’s no heaven either.
Your statement contains some things (eg. functioning life, good and bad) with somewhat debatable definitions. I’m not interested in crawling down a random philosophical rabbit-hole.
Using any moral standard which you prefer, do you agree that there is evil in this world? Questions don’t get much more straightforward than that.
And there’s no evolution in this world? Or evolution is not what the word means, i.e. there’s no progress, just infinite rearrangement of pre-existing elements?
I offer these options: 1. Heaven is merely possible and never really actual (like all possible worlds – possible logically as just a thought experiment for intellectual entertainment). 2. Heaven is a future r/evolutionary stage of this world (a la Book of Revelation or Communist Manifesto). 3. Heaven co-exists with this world and its virtues are actual as a counterbalance of all the vices of this world. 4. Just in case I’m forgetting something.
Pick your favourite, defend it, and disprove the other options. Let’s bash this topic some more.
RoyLT,
Not only did I say that evil exists, I have said it is a necessity if you allow free will. I don’t know much clearer I can be about that.
This was a possibility that @keiths also explored in his OP. If we all agree that Heaven is illogical and cannot exist, then the Problem of Evil would likely disappear. But I can’t see most theists signing on for that. What is the more likely approach is to try to give Heaven a special category. But this is problematic since, if some segments of God’s creation are exempted from the Free-Will Defense, it loses any meaning.
RoyLT,
I believe your insistence that in order to analyse evil here on Earth, we need to know what heaven is like is completely without merit. We can say we don’t know what heaven is, but still logically conclude that evil is inseparable from free will.
phoodoo,
As discussed previously (at some length) you can’t actually name anything bad that technology won’t eventually mitigate.
Care to try again?
I don’t understand that. Can you explain?
Heartache?
Erik,
I’ll, go with there’s no god, no heaven and nothing to explain. Things are just the way they are
And I completely agree with you up to this point about this world. There is evil in this world and it is not logically possible to have Free-Will in any meaningful sense without evil.
I thought of that, but does it make a difference?
If heaven is part of this world, then it must be possible to have free will without evil in this world or else, heaven is no different than “earth”. If OTOH, they’re different worlds, and this is the best possible world, then heaven can’t be any better than earth. I mean it’s Plantinga who makes this kind of quantitative argument, doesn’t he?
RoyLT,
Yes, well, so I can’t understand what Omagain means that technology is going to eliminate evil. I don’t get that one at all.
@dazz stated it better than I can in an earlier post:
If Heaven doesn’t exist, then this could (according to Plantinga’s logic) be the best possible world and the Problem of Evil is sufficiently refuted. The existence of an eternal paradise complicates things a bit though IMHO.
We have been talking about the problem of evil ON THIS WORLD for the last few comments on the thread. What was your original point?
My thoughts (almost) exactly! Funny how similarly we think sometimes. I’d only add that there are more things than meet the eye. Food for thought, if thought matters.
I’m confused, I thought you were a classical theist?
I dunno. I hear the sex is way better there. I expect to be extremely attractive!
I have that pretty much guaranteed
(quote)
Mathew 20:16
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
I’m still confused about the splitting of heaven and earth into separate worlds (assuming heaven exists). As the argument uses ‘world’ both heaven and earth are included, aren’t they?
I’d think that the those who claim this is the best of all possible worlds will also claim that it has just as much heaven in it as it must.
Yeah, but don’t forget, ‘To them that hath shall be given, and they shall have abundance.’
That’s the one that worries me. The rich getting richer….
Yes. And?
🙂 Best comment on the thread so for in my opinion!!!
You party pooper…
The term that Plantinga uses is “World Segments”. I don’t think it matters much how you slice things up. If Heaven and Earth have different parameters (i.e. presence vs. lack of evil), then I don’t see how trying to package them together achieves anything. And the logical following question is if God was able to make some part of the world such that Free-Will could exist without evil, then why didn’t he use that recipe for the whole thing?
Assuming something like @Erik’s postulate above:
That still presents a problem in that, unless one assumes that this world is purely evil, you can’t counterbalance something that is neutral on balance. Heaven and Hell are the proverbial yin and yang of non-Earthly realms, but I don’t see how Earth and Heaven could fit into that sort of dichotomy.
Again, I’d think the response (assuming a heaven) would be that the best of all possible worlds contains a heaven, and…..no earth, no heaven.
And (I know I’m repeating myself), if you ask WHY could there be no heaven without earth, the answer is “Beats me, but why do I have to know that?”
And the mere fact that it looks suspiciously like the mix of “good and evil” that you’d expect from evolved organisms is of no consequence.
It’s just got to have something to do with God’s Ultimate Plans. Because someone said so, or didn’t, but someone else is very sure that it’s been Revealed.
Glen Davidson
The “no earth, no heaven” qualification appears completely arbitrary to me. Furthermore, it would be denying the antecedent in the case of “If Earth: Then Heaven”.
Well, assuming both that you could have heaven without earth and that heaven’s better, you can derive that there’s no heaven from this being the best of all possible worlds. [ETA: I guess you also have to assume that this isn’t heaven: I hope everyone will stipulate to that.]
It all seems like angel counting to me, though.
Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I’m not sure you can make that derivation. I’m thinking you might also need a premise to the effect that having more earth time would cut into available heaven time.I leave this matter to keiths.
That would be fine but pretty much beside the point in this thread don’t you think?
It’s about whether it’s logically possible that God has sufficient reasons for allowing evil not about the accuracy of my particular understanding.
It’s likely that all of us are mistaken about what God is like in some ways. That has little do with the logical problem of evil or Plantinga’s defense
peace
I’m never cease to amazed at the goofy ideas that atheists have.
The second coming is not about “heaven” it’s about the resurrection of the saints to live on a renewed earth.
peace
According to the definition you are using heaven is part of this world is it not?
Didn’t you say that by “world” you mean everything there is even God
Peace