Well, I’d say it depends—if giving alms is merely morally permissible in a given situation, then not doing so may be, as well. But then, there’s also not really any moral value to the choice: you could just take it or leave it without it tipping the scales, so to speak. On the other hand, if giving alms (in a given situation) is morally obligatory, not doing so is morally impermissible, hence, an evil act—and that’s a choice that does have moral value riding on it.
True, free will doesn’t necessitate suffering (we could all just always make the correct moral choice, for instance), but the argument doesn’t need that—it suffices that it makes suffering possible, which means it’s consistent for us to observe it.
“Your Johnny is beating up my Billy! Make him stop.”
“I can’t do that - it would violate his free will.”
In any case, this refutes one of the arguments justifying divine hiddeness. Supposedly, if we had good evidence for god, our free will to do evil would be diminished. (Though it didn’t seem to affect the Hebrews building idols right after the Exodus.) The devil knows god exists, so if he has free will we would also if god revealed himself to all in a convincing way.
But if God made mass murder an option not available to us, no problem, right? There are still plenty of options. Yelling. Suing. A strongly worded letter to the Times. I think most of us are incapable of certain atrocities. Does that mean we don’t have free will?
If you assume that we live in the best of all possible worlds, any change would make the world worse. But you can’t argue against a change making a better world by pointing to your assumption.
By the same reasoning, I can claim this is the worst of all possible worlds, and anything you point to as a positive isn’t because changing it couldn’t make the world worse than it it. For example, point to a blissful relationship, and I’ll tell you that if it had been worse the pain of it ending through death would have decreased, so while it looks nice it just adds to the misery of the world.
I’ve repeatedly made arguments, but I’ll repeat them (again).
God supposedly made the universe, therefore it’s foreknowledge. He planned everything that has ever happened or ever will happen in the smallest detail.
Whether choice exists or not is irrelevant, since he planned those choices as well.
God being atemporal is irrelevant, both because the universe is not, and because an omnipotent god could intervene at any time anyway.
Sure, but the point is that it’s the case whenever there’s actual moral value riding on the choice.
But then, as noted before, whatever is the apex evil would be just as much a point of contention. Why can’t God make it so that we can’t steal candy from a baby? But of course, going down that road eventually erodes all moral value to zero, because it takes away the possibility of morally significant choice.
I’m not assuming that we live in the best of all possible worlds; I am (or Plantinga, as I understand him, is) arguing that living in the best of all possible worlds (which is entailed by the existence of a tri-omni God) isn’t inconsistent with there being evil in the world.
Sure; but then, that’d just amount to denying the existence of a tri-omni God. The goal of theodicy is to reconcile that notion with the presence of evil, so if you deny that starting point, the need doesn’t arise in the first place. To my mind, that’s the obviously preferable option, but that doesn’t mean that arguments that explore other options aren’t valuable in themselves.
That’s a stipulation, not an argument, and it’s hard to see how it could be true. For one, time is a property of the universe, so it’s not clear what would be meant by ‘foreknowledge’ in a context where time doesn’t apply.
That God planned something doesn’t mean they are causally responsible for its occurrence, though. If I play chess, and my opponent moves exactly according to my plan, that doesn’t mean they’re not free in their choice of moves.
Besides, that ‘everything happens according to God’s plan’ is itself kind of a debatable point. There have been multiple alternatives proposed in theological debate, such as Molinism, where God possesses ‘middle knowledge’, or knowledge of counterfactuals regarding human action (again, mere knowledge of an action isn’t enough to make the action unfree, since I can know today what you had for dinner yesterday without this making it any less of a free choice), or Arminianism, where God allows for expressly free actions. (However, I’m not equipped or interested in debating either of these positions; my point is merely that there is a long and complex history of reconciling free choice with divine providence, and no matter how obvious the issue seems to you, it’s worth thinking a bit more carefully about if you really want to enter into a good-faith debate.)
It’s not clear that they could: an omnibenevolent deity can’t act in such a way as to make the world, as a whole, worse, and if the world is the best it can be, then any interference will tend to make it worse. This isn’t a violation of omnipotence any more than the whole ‘unable to make a stone they couldn’t lift’ thing is: it’s just not possible for God to do evil.
And at any rate, even being limited in your actions by divine power doesn’t necessarily take your freedom away. Take the old Frankfurt-style example: suppose you have a bomb wired in your head such that it were to detonate if you choose option B rather than A. Without the bomb, we may hold that you can choose A freely. But suppose that with the bomb, you now choose A. As the bomb does nothing, has no causal relevance to your action, it’s difficult to see how you made that choice any less freely. In particular, if the original choice had moral value, it seems it still has that same value right now. So replace the bomb with God, who’d stop you if you did B, and thereby deviate the world from the optimal path: if you do A, the choice is still as morally valuable as before. And plausibly, God may know that you choose A, too; so everything goes ‘according to plan’, in that sense. (In any case, I have my troubles with Frankfurt-style examples, so this isn’t really an argument I would endorse; but like the other points, I believe they deserve at least some consideration, rather than just being swept from the table by some blanket statement that ‘God’s plan means choice is irrelevant’. It’s a lot more complicated, and interesting, than that.)
I think that’s a much harder case to make than it seems. It might be plausible that God could bring about circumstances such that there is moral value without there being moral evil, say by bringing only such creatures into being that they know will not freely choose evil in a given set of circumstances (i.e. ‘heaven’ or what have you), but of course, he could not force them to be so (causally secure this to be the case). But one needs a much stronger claim, namely, that it is necessary that if God exists it is within their power to non-causally bring about such circumstances and creatures. And that’s very plausibly just false: or at the very least, it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that every creature is such as to choose evil over good at least once, no matter the circumstances (the name Plantinga gives to this condition is ‘transworld depravity’, which at least is a fun term to drop into casual conversation once in a while).
And I was disputing that. You said “otherwise—i.e., choose evil.”, and I pointed out you can have a choice between doing something virtuous and not doing that thing – this is not interchangeable with “choose evil”.
And let’s keep the main topic in mind here, because I’m not seeing how having choices of “moral worth” is mandatory to having free will, even if I agreed with you that choices of moral worth necessarily entails being able to choose evil.
So speculating that God could have made a world without suffering is defeated by the speculation that maybe suffering is necessary? It’s just asserting a defeater without reason.
The default position should be maybe it is possible and maybe it isn’t, but the point is, I mentioned heaven because typically people that invoke free will as a defense of the problem of suffering / evil also believe in heaven. So the assertion that heaven is not possible would also be problematic.
So having a predilection against a particular behaviour means no free will? If it turns out that zero humans have the desire to roll around naked on broken glass, we aren’t free?
Sure, and again, then that’s not a choice with moral value riding on it. That’s something you only get if you choose the right thing over the wrong thing—it’s a choice that matters, morally speaking.
It’s… not? Rather, free will is necessary (on the assumption of incompatibilism) in order for choices to have moral value. If you were an automaton compelled to always do the right thing, great, but you could hardly take any moral credit for your actions.
No. It needs to be necessarily the case that God could’ve brought about a situation in which each instantiated creature always only freely chooses good in order to question the logic of the free will defense. But this would require a strong substantiation, as prima facie it seems at least possible for the condition of transworld depravity to obtain. That’s just the (modal) logic of the argument.
I don’t see how you get this from what I wrote—could you elaborate?
For a third time, I dispute that, and you just keep asserting it. I think a choice between a virtuous action and doing nothing at all does have moral value. I just think it’s also irrelevant to this argument against the problem of evil.
But the issue here is that you seem to saying that decisions of moral worth are necessary, and there’s no connective tissue there without asserting that free will needs decisions like that, and indeed this is what you go on to claim later in the same post:
No. There can be many options, infinite options, with no particular option being evil. The implicit assumption here seems to be that if evil options are not considered then there must be only one, forced, decision. That doesn’t follow at all.
Well perhaps I misunderstood your point then. You said God could bring “creatures into being that they know will not freely choose evil in a given set of circumstances (i.e. ‘heaven’ or what have you), but of course, he could not force them to be so (causally secure this to be the case)”. But what does this non-forcing mean to an omnimax god? ISTM that if God is giving entities predilections towards this or that behaviour, and can know the future, then it’s as good as choosing those things himself. You seem to be agreeing with this notion somewhat, but it’s worth bearing in mind that humans are far from a moral blank slate; we aren’t some idealized agent balanced on a knife-edge between all actions; we are born with lots of predilections, both immediately manifest and those that kick in at puberty or other triggers.
In Plantinga’s words, “an action is morally significant, for a given person at a given time, if it would be wrong for him to perform the action then but right to refrain, or vice versa”. It’s either one of those, or the action doesn’t have moral significance. I don’t see how it could be right to do a given thing, but not wrong not to do it: if something is morally obligatory, refraining from doing it is not morally permissible (this is at least standardly enough believed to form a definition of moral permissibility in deontic logic).
I (rather Plantinga) am saying that God, being omnibenevolent, aims to instantiate the best possible world, which is the one with the highest moral value; decisions that carry moral value are those where one can choose good over evil.
This again misunderstands the logic of the argument. The only way to counter Plantinga’s logic would be to show that for a tri-omni God (or god) it is necessarily the case that they could bring about circumstances in which there is no possibility for any of the instantiated creatures to freely choose evil; whether there are no evil choices, or whether they never go down that path, is immaterial. But it is far from clear that this is the case: it seems at least possible in that there is no obvious logical contradiction entailed by the stipulation that every possible being chooses evil in every possible circumstance, and that there is an evil choice in every possible circumstance (I mean, just think about what it would mean to constrain choices such that there is no possibility for evil: no way of saying something harmful to another, or self-harming, or what have you—I see no credible way of eliminating any such means).
This non-forcing just means that God can’t be causally responsible for making people do good, because that would eliminate the possibility of moral value. So they can’t just straightjacket everybody into making good decisions, but have to ensure it in some other way (Plantinga distinguishes between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ ways of bringing a given end about). A possibility would be creating a circumstance such that the entities brought into being within it never choose evil. And conceivably, that would indeed be within God’s power: but again, that’s not sufficient for defeating the free will defense, because it has to rather be established that it’s inconceivable that God might not be able to do this; but this seems rather just as conceivable.
What we have here is an optimization problem. An omnibenevolent god has optimized “good” whatever that means. We might say that a world with free will is better than a world without stealing candy from a baby. Fine. Humans can’t find the optimal world, but god should be able to. However, even if we can’t solve for optimality, we can certainly say that some worlds are better than others - like ones without mass murder. Or worlds without natural evils.
If you believe in an omnibenevolent god, you are definitely saying we live in the best of all possible worlds, because if there was a better one within god’s power, we’d be living in it. No problem with there being evil, I never argued that there wouldn’t be any in the best world (or good in the worst world), just that the impact of the evil is less than the impact of making it impossible.
And the worst of all possible worlds does not deny the existence of a tri-omni god - it just maps omnibenevolence to omnimalevolence. Omnibenevolence seems to me to be one of those Christian marketing claims (like positing hell and then offering a get out of hell free card) that is not required for theism. The Greek gods were hardly omnibenevolent. I don’t recall any of my Hebrew school teachers telling me that my god was omnibenevolent - but that would have been hard to do less than 20 years after the Holocaust.
I hate it when atheists use the “God can’t make a stone too heavy to lift” argument, because I agree that the only sensible definition of omnipotence is that it only applies to logically possible things.
However, say we have two gods A and B. A is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, B is just omnipotent. Say someone is firing a gun at a good person. In the optimally good world, the gun misses, perhaps god invisibly cause the gunner’s hand to shake. God A will do that, he has to. But God B can either let the shot hit t he man or miss him. God B clearly has more options he can do than God A, so you cannot call God A omnipotent. In fact if you some magic means of determining the optimally good action in every instance, God A is constrained to following that. Thus, omnibenevolence and omnipotence are incompatible.
Irrelevant, since it provably isn’t. If so much as have an itch and scratch it, I have made the world better; therefore, the world wasn’t “the best it can be”. It’s trivially easy to make the world better, therefore it can’t be the best. Not even close.
Yes, I already said the Bible isn’t consistent on the matter. But the modern Christian God (or gods if you want to think of each conceptually different manifestion as a different god) is born from and drawn from the Bible as it’s source. But I’ll take your rewording for simplicity.
While I agree a starting point can be has and progress made, there certainly is room for improvement in definitions if we can’t coherently say “omniscient means knows every action and decision everyone will make before they make it”. Saying that god might be atemporal and thus knows the outcome as it is made then precludes changing the outcome. If he could change the outcome, then the decision could be different, but then how would be know to change the outcome?
The concept of an atemporal being is a foreign to us as an omnipotent or omniscient or omnibenevolent one. We don’t experience the world that way, and any attempt to do so is like a 2D creature trying to conceive of being in a 3D one.
If we can’t agree on how God experiences the world, then we can’t reach agreement on what is and is not possible for that being, so we cannot agree that a particular outcome is logically sound.
So this god created the world. He created everyone and everything in it. He gave us “free will”, which means we have the ability to choose moral good or moral evil actions. But then every possibility was created by this God. So god had to have created evil for there to be evil possibility.
Except god is all-good, so he couldn’t create evil. But then he didn’t create evil - where did it come from and how did it invest his creation? How could his know what evil is without there being evil for him to work from?
But then if god did create evil, he would have to be capable of evil in order to know what it was and to make it an option.
If god couldn’t create a good world without evil in it, than how can God be good without evil in him? If good is only defined in contrast to evil, then how can God be all-good?
But is it fair to just speculate that without justification? In other words, we can imagine a world with some limits on available evil that still allows people a moral choice. Your argument that God has to allow full evil is because that’s the version that gives the most moral value, but there’s no justification to say that, just a preposition that it might be that way. Well it also might be that god is an evil bastard that wants us to suffer to make himself feel superior. I probably have more justification for that than that god is omnibenevolent and this is the best world be could create.
Sure, but what we can’t say is if it was within God’s power to create these worlds. We can point to any evil and say, ‘the world would be better if that hadn’t happened’, and that would be true; but if there is such a thing as a best possible world, and that world has some degree of evil in it (as you grant), then we could do the same thing in that best possible world, but it wouldn’t be true that God could make it so that this-and-that evil thing hadn’t happened. So if it’s possible that we live in the best possible world, it’s possible that it’s not within God’s power to improve on it.
Yes, of course; the reason for the free will defense is to understand how it could be the case that this best of all possible worlds still has evil within it. Again, if you don’t think you have a reason to believe in a tri-omni God (and I don’t think there are any), then the problem of evil doesn’t pose itself.
In both God A and God B, ‘omnipotence’ can validly mean ‘having all possible powers’. ‘Making God A do something evil’ just isn’t a possible power, because of omnibenevolence. That’s not really different from the example with the stone.
You’re still in the same world after scratching your itch, and that scratching is just part of the best possible world. The question would be, could one create a better world in which the itch had never existed? You certainly couldn’t, but the intuition seems to say that God, in their omnipotence, could. But Plantinga’s argument questions this intuition.
Perhaps this is a good time to run through the argument again. (I’ll closely follow the exposition here, which I found particularly clear.) The task is to show the following two propositions consistent:
(1) God is omniscient (possesses maximal knowledge), omnipotent (possesses all possible powers), and omnibenevolent (possesses maximal goodness)
(2) There is evil in the world.
Now, if the two are consistent, then the fact that we observe evil is in keeping with the possibility that such a tri-omni God exists; but if such a God exists, we necessarily live in the best possible world, as this is the only world such a God would instantiate. So the existence of evil is, under this stipulation, not inconsistent with living in the best possible world; ergo, then, it must be the case that there is no possible world from which any given evil of the best possible world has been removed.
How do we show that (1) and (2) are consistent? Plantinga’s observation is that “one way to show that a proposition p is consistent with a proposition q is to produce a third proposition r whose conjunction with p is consistent and entails q.” Further, he notes that “r need not be true or known to be true; it need not be so much as plausible. All that is required of it is that it be consistent with p, and in conjunction with the latter entail q.”
What is that proposition r? One candidate is the following:
(3) God is omnipotent and it was not within his power to create a world containing moral good but no moral evil.
(Note again that this merely needs to be possible!) Together with the fact that God wants to instantiate a world containing moral good, this directly entails that in whatever world God instantiates, there will be evil, despite their tri-omni nature. So why should we think that (3) is possible? Plantinga argues for that from two further premises: (A) an agent acting freely is incompatible with being causally determined in their actions (incompatibilism), and (B) morally good acts are such that agents have a morally significant free choice. (Here, as noted above already, “an action is morally significant, for a given person at a given time, if it would be wrong for him to perform the action then but right to refrain, or vice versa”.) With these taken together, it is not within God’s power to bring it about that there are creatures who only perform morally good acts, without ever doing anything morally bad.
An added wrinkle here is the one @Mijin (IIUC) raised: God couldn’t constrain beings to only perform morally good acts, but couldn’t he bring about circumstances and creatures such that (as God knows, thanks to omniscience) they will only perform morally good acts, given those circumstances? (Let’s call this ‘perfect conditions’.) And the answer is possibly, but ‘possibility’ is to weak to counter the argument, since we only need (3) to be possible—so if is merely possibly the case that God could bring about perfect conditions, it’s also possibly the case that they couldn’t, which preserves the possibility of (3). So anybody aiming to challenge the argument along these lines would have to argue that it is necessarily the case that God could bring about perfect conditions, which is a much more demanding task.
So this then seems to give us a solid case for the possibility of (3). Although again, there is no need to accept (3) as being actually the case! All that matters is that if (3) is possible, then (1) and (2) are consistent, and there is no logical problem with the existence of evil in a world created by a tri-omni God. So it’s possible, even given the evil we see in the world, that there is a tri-omni God (to the extent the notion makes any sense at all, of course, which I don’t think it really does—but that’s beside the point). Therefore, it is possible, despite the evil we see in the world, that this is the best possible world (the best world it is within God’s power to instantiate), since that is the kind of world they would in fact instantiate. Therefore, it is also possible that any (morally significant) change would either make the world worse overall, or simply not yield a world it is possible for God to instantiate. Moreover, anybody who believes in a tri-omni God should believe these things to be true, and would not be inconsistent in their belief.
I’m hoping the above clarifies things somewhat. First of all, God may know the counterfactuals of all human action—what they do under which conditions (this is Molina’s ‘middle knowledge’). (Why middle knowledge? Because it is ‘in between’ God’s knowledge of all possibilities, and God’s knowledge of what is actual.) So all possible courses of history are part of God’s knowledge, and they know which way history actually takes. I see no difficulty with that history including any divine acts as God sees fit.
So how do you think that impacts the argument as given above? It has no commitments to any particular way God ‘experiences’ the world (if that is the right word) that I can see.
That doesn’t follow. If God created Adam and Eve in paradise, and Eve chooses to kick Adam in the nuts, that doesn’t mean God had to first create ‘kicking in the nuts’; they may have created the conditions necessary for doing so, but those conditions aren’t in and of themselves evil unless they are actually used in an evil act.
Again, that just doesn’t follow. I’m completely incapable of playing the bagpipes, but I still know what they are. And furthermore, it’s not as if God laid out evil options; the world isn’t an RPG game with some form of moral branching. If you create a screwdriver, you don’t thereby commit an evil act just because somebody could use it to stab someone. Evil is in the doing.
None of this hangs together by any logic I can figure out. Why should the fact that my creation contains something imply I must also contain that thing? I made a fire yesterday, does that mean there must be something burning inside me? Also, good isn’t defined in contrast to evil—actions with moral value are those where one can choose good over evil (and does so). But those actions are good on their own terms.
And Platinga is wrong, it’s a terrible argument. We aren’t even close to the “best possible world”, we can just look around and see ways to make it better and we aren’t even gods. And morally if this is the best a god could do, they shouldn’t have made a world at all.
It should be clear, by the argument laid out above, that this isn’t a sensible objection; if it’s not, I don’t think I have the means to explain it to you.
The lack of a desire, or even possibility, of committing evil acts does not entail only being able to choose one thing. This has to be true not only for people who believe in a heaven, but even people that believe we have free will right now, on earth.
Because it is trivial to point out things that Homo sapiens can’t and don’t want to do. No humans is able (or would enjoy) trying to eat material from the sun’s core. Not being able or willing to do that doesn’t mean we don’t have choices. Not wanting to eat stellar core does not entail all humans can only ever eat macaroni cheese. And an angel, say, not being willing or able to commit evil doesn’t mean they only ever have one option.
On Plantinga:
I’ll weigh in on this again, because I think some posters are talking past each other.
As I conceded upthread, I think Plantinga’s argument does seem to work against the logical argument of evil. He’s right to say that the existence of suffering does not prove there is no god. So some posters who are speaking in “proof” terms probably need to reexamine the argument.
But OTOH, I think why no-one here is finding Plantinga’s argument very convincing, is because it does nothing to weaker forms of the argument, which I what I think most people actually mean. The existence of suffering is extremely difficult to reconcile with an omnimax god, and Plantinga’s argument if anything serves to demonstrate this; because it is conceding that we need a good reason for why an omnimax god would allow suffering, while proposing a reason that doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Essentially it’s interchaneable with “mysterious ways”. Omnimax god allows suffering because he works in mysterious ways. This shouldn’t be a compelling solution for anyone.