Third, a caveat: this essay is a work in progress, and also quite long for a decorabilia post*. Feel free to comment; it will not appear in final form until I've sharpened my arguments and read a lot more. And, given my voracious reading habits, that may not be until some time long into the future.
So, to the issue.
In the central argument of the book, Plantinga adds up the premises which (as far has he can tell) are the only way to find a contradiction between the existence of God and the continuance of evil. They are:
(1) God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good.
(2) Evil exists [more precisely, "evil states of affairs exist"]
(3) There are no nonlogical limits to what an omnipotent being can do
(4) An omniscient and omnipotent good being eliminates every evil it can properly eliminate, ergo
(5) If God is omnipotent and omniscient, He can properly eliminate every evil state of affairs
Plantinga posits that these statements entail no contradiction in the light of human free will: "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" (p. 30).
Notice that (4) is framed positively, ignoring a different slant on the argument. If, as Plantinga has claimed elsewhere, God is involved in every action in creation, "from the Big Bang to the sparrow's fall," does that not change the argument? Now a "good being" is not only not eliminating evil, but actively perpetrating and sustaining it. While a God who lets the universe (mostly) run on its own can sidestep the blame for evil's persistence, in the world of "serious theism," God is "actively and intimately involved" in it. Therefore, a "natural atheologist" would frame (4) as "An omniscient and omnipotent good being does not perpetrate or sustain evil." Broadly speaking, the logical "problem of evil" is a problem only for the serious theist.
Furthermore, Plantinga declares (5) impossible, because eliminating evil state E would necessarily eliminate good state G, which outweighs and depends on E's existence. His example is that of courage, a moral good that not only outweighs the evil it strives against, but could not exist without it. "It is a necessary truth that if someone bears pain magnificently, then someone is in pain" (p. 23).
However, there are many kinds of good which do not depend on any sort of evil for their existence--generosity, creativity, kindness, patience, and so forth. Perhaps God could have created a world in which only those sorts of good existed.
Furthermore, God could also have created a world in which morally significant action was possible--stealing, for example--but humans were limited, physically, in their ability to wreak havoc. (Imagine skin that doesn't so easily puncture, tear, and bleed; imagine a brain packed in a thicker skull; imagine a genetic inheritance that makes people all about the same height and weight.) Plantinga claims that God couldn't have done these things for some unknown (and, ultimately, unknowable) reason. Furthermore, Plantinga wonders if there are transactions between spiritual beings we know nothing of--like the frame story in Job, where God settles a wager with Satan by torturing his faithful servant. In short, defenses against this evidentiary argument from evil rely on ineffable, inscrutable reasons and unobservable, immeasurable entities. All well and good for the person of faith; hardly convincing to the skeptic.
Let us look deeper, though.
To accept Plantinga's Free Will Defense, we must accept two concepts: real (not just apparent) human freedom, and transworld depravity. The first goes assumed by Plantinga; the second is declared "possible," though it seems entirely ad hoc, contrived for the purpose of showing how God might be unable to actuate a world that includes morally free creatures who always choose rightly. So, Plantinga's argument shows that it is possible that there is no logical inconsistency; it does not show that such is obviously or necessarily true.
What sort of freedom (leaving aside such issues as predestination, foreknowledge, and the like) does Plantinga assume?
If a person is free with respect to a given action, then he is free to perform that action and free to refrain from performing it; no antecedent conditions and / or causal laws determine that he will perform the action, or that he won't.... Freedom so conceived is not to be confused with unpredictability. You might be able to predict what you will do in a given situation even if you are free, in that situation, to do something else (pp. 29-30).
Note that this sort of freedom lacks explanatory power, and is likely wrong, since it entirely removes human choice from the sphere of cause and effect--and, in doing so, makes humans into little Gods, able to effect uncaused actions.
Even if we grant that truly free will exists, though, we must ask: if free will is inviolable, yet humans, thanks to transworld depravity, are continually prone to abuse it, how is heaven, a place free of pain, suffering and sin, logically possible?
Furthermore, if God is both morally good and sinless, and (presumably) the most "valuable" being in all possible worlds (since He is the object of reverence and worship), did He create beings greater than himself with respect to moral freedom? Remember, Plantinga claims that transworld depravity precludes an actual world where free beings always choose the good. There is but one way to exclude God from this without declaring His nonexistence: by removing God's moral freedom. To recap: if God freely always does the right thing, Plantinga's argument implodes. If God has freely chosen the wrong thing, He is not wholly good. If God cannot help but always do the right thing, then humans are more "valuable" than God.
Again, Plantinga assumes--as do most Free Will Defenders--that free will is "valuable". From a human perspective, perhaps this is true. But from God's? If Plantinga's possible world scenario is correct, then God cannot actualize a world without depending on the undetermined choices of human (and other?) free agents. No wonder theistic worldviews are often apocalyptic. The Director's instructions go unheeded. In corners of the set, flats have been torn down. In others, self-styled artistes tack on shambling additions. Prima donnas extemporize their lines, affect stupid accents, shout down other characters. Yet, thanks to vaunted Free Will, "the show must go on," until the Director, no longer able to contain a few millennia's worth of festering fury, burns down the stage, sweeping up a few chosen actors and leaving the rest to perish in flames.
There's much more I could say, but won't; this post is long enough. Take a serious look at The Evidential Argument From Evil, though, if you want a much more in-depth discussion.
*And here are all the other tangential musings I would have included:
For all the value assigned to Free Will in theodicies, it seems to bear much less importance in theologies. Submission to the will of God is paramount; paradise is paradise due to the utter absence of contrarians.
What would the world look like if humans operated on moral principles derived from God's conduct?
I can imagine a possible world in which one free creature (call him Adam) exists, surrounded by unfree beings. (In fact, this is nothing more than the original creation story in Genesis, in classic Christian understanding.) My deity, though, goes one better than Yahweh. When Adam becomes distressed and bored after a day of doling out names to koalas and mantises, he complains to God; the deity, rather than creating Eve (and all the attendant problems to follow), decides to wipe Adam's memory clean as he sleeps. Adam wakes up to a new world with all its glorious possibilities. His free will has not been tampered with, and evil is nowhere in sight.
In a strange inversion of value, a world of full sinless automatons (devoid of evil) is worth less than a world full of evil, sinful humans; however, a heaven scattered with a few saved souls is worth more than a hell full of the lost.
And now, for the kicker. Epistemologically, how would it be possible to tell the difference between a world of clever automatons and a world of "free" beings, without resort to tautology?
13 comments:
I've been wanting to comment on your criticisms but I wanted to wait until I had refreshed myself on Plantinga. I re-read his essay from Nature of Necessity, and felt very refreshed when I was finished.
I will reserve my comments to your final two criticisms, as you seem to consider those the most telling. I will also point out that I am not a huge fan of Plantinga's project, though it is difficult to underestimate how indebted I am as a Christian philosopher to him. There is MUCH about his method that is disconcerting to me, not least of which I will highlight below.
1) Free will: I am curious to hear what sort of free will you think humans have that allows them to be in "the sphere of cause and effect" and yet not have their decisions be subject to causal laws. It seems your criticism amounts to: (1) Plantinga assumes that humans have wills that aren't subject to causal laws. (2) Human wills are subject to causal laws. (3) Plantinga's account is insufficient. Isn't this tantamount to a denial of free will? I will quote Plantinga from Nature of Necessity: "What God thought good...was the existence of creatures whose activity is not causally determined--who, like he himself, are centres of creative activity." I take this as a fairly uncontroversial definition of free will. You're not criticizing Plantinga's argument with your challenge--you're just denying free will. If you do that, then of course a free will defense won't succeed!
With respect to the "logical possibility" of heaven, it is CLEARLY logically possible. Heaven is merely populated with people who chose and who are choosing good. It would be my guess that Plantinga would accept something notion of character formulation through the repetition of choices--what Christians know as sanctification. Heaven would be the place for those who are sanctified, who formed their characters appropriately.
2) I will state up front that I am very uncomfortable with the notion of trans-world depravity. However, as you mentioned, Plantinga only needs it to be possible for his defense to work. After all, he is offering a defense and not a theodicy, a very important distinction. The fact that he only offers a defense fits in well with his broader Reformed Epistemology. This is where I start to get really, really uncomfortable for a number of reasons. However, I will reserve those reservations for another time.
I will point out one thing: Plantinga's argument is that a world with the possibility of moral goodness is more valuable than a world with automatons. In asserting that because God always does good he is in the category of "automatons" you are making a category error. "Always does good" and "automaton" are significantly different things, as I tried to argue in the case of heaven. Heaven will be full of people who fit the former category because their "nature" is such that they always do good. How, on ANY account, does this entail the latter? But if it doesn't, then your criticism fails.
This has turned from a "comment" into an "essay." Hope the remarks are helpful.
Indeed, they are. And here are some replies and further comments for your dissection.
My own (evolving?) view of "free will" takes three different tacks:
epistemological free willWe will (likely) never know all the complex causal mechanisms in mentality, never mind determining a causal path for one decision event. Indeed, as Wegner brilliantly shows in The Illusion of Conscious Will, and as can be seen in various works by Oliver Sacks, even our own consciousness conspires to deceive us, making us think we are aware of unconscious choices. In this sense, human behavior is mysterious (but not fundamentally inexplicable as in Plantinga's scheme), and so we have every right to assume that our actions are truly free until proven otherwise.*
evolutionary free will
Nevertheless, the previous definition, for most, is unsatisfying. Daniel Dennett, in his book Freedom Evolves, tries to describe how evolutionary processes lead to conscious choice-making by autonomous beings, which give every appearance of being made independently, even if not "freely" in Plantinga's sense. In other words, I make all the choices I make, even if such choices partially consist of the effects random quantum behavior, mutations, or chance environmental pressures, and I alone bear responsibility for those choices, irrespective of which specific reasons or causal mechanisms I bring to them.
ontological free will
If the previous two accounts (or a mix of the two) are inadequate, and "real" free will exists, still, beings do not make choices ex nihilo, without regard to circumstance or consequence. In that sense, they are part and parcel of the "sphere of cause and effect," itself a slippery term (for no one, really, has an adequate description of free will, especially not me).
Those, like all other thoughts, are tentative, but I would like to point out that my criticism of Plantinga's argument is not dependent on a critique of free will per se, as I will try to clarify in response to your other comments.
We both agree that Plantinga needs "transworld depravity" to "work" for his Defense to be sound. I don't think it does, because of special pleading, as I explained in the essay, but perhaps not clearly enough, which is perhaps why you object,
I will point out one thing: Plantinga's argument is that a world with the possibility of moral goodness is more valuable than a world with automatons. In asserting that because God always does good he is in the category of "automatons" you are making a category error. "Always does good" and "automaton" are significantly different things, as I tried to argue in the case of heaven. Heaven will be full of people who fit the former category because their "nature" is such that they always do good. How, on ANY account, does this entail the latter? But if it doesn't, then your criticism fails.I return to the paragraph where I wrote,
Furthermore, if God is both morally good and sinless, and (presumably) the most "valuable" being in all possible worlds (since He is the object of reverence and worship), did He create beings greater than himself with respect to moral freedom? Remember, Plantinga claims that transworld depravity precludes an actual world where free beings always choose the good. There is but one way to exclude God from this without declaring His nonexistence: by removing God's moral freedom. To recap: if God freely always does the right thing, Plantinga's argument implodes. If God has freely chosen the wrong thing, He is not wholly good. If God cannot help but always do the right thing, then humans are more "valuable" than God.Again: if God, a free being, has the choice to do wrong, but always does the right thing, then "transworld depravity" is either a form of special pleading, or utterly incoherent. If God has no choice but to always do the right thing (as being "wholly good" might entail), then He is not free, and thus humans are more "valuable" than God.
If heaven is populated by those whose "nature" dictates they always chose the good, it now becomes incumbent upon a free-will theodicist to show why an omniscient God could not have created a world that included only those people. In other words, why would God unnecessarily create billions more who are doomed to suffer for eternity? My guess is that any defense of this would include using the damned as a means to an end (the perfection of saints, perhaps?), which is morally dubious.
Lastly, I'm curious about your other criticisms of Plantinga's "project." Perhaps (hint hint) they could show up sometime on your blog?
*Wegner attempts to show that free will doesn't exist at all, but I'm unconvinced; simply because "we" are unconscious of a choice doesn't mean we didn't freely make it, unbeknownst to "us." Our mental experience is not entirely unified (Dennett, in his other works, trashes this view, calling it the "Cartesian theater of the mind"), but it is entirely "ours."
By mistake, I hit the "trash button" and deleted your comment, so here it is again:g.k.c. wrote:
I'll limit my main comments to your restatement of your criticism. As for your explanation of your view of free will, I'm not sure I understand how those work together. Also, an incompatibalist view of free will merely states that humans aren't under causal laws--not that there are not other factors that go into exercising free will. I've been interested for some time in pursuing some reading on whether reasons are properly "causes" in the sense that we talk about physical causes. My guess is that they are not.
As for what you wrote, I'll proceed sentence by sentence: Again: if God, a free being, has the choice to do wrong, but always does the right thing, then "transworld depravity" is either a form of special pleading, or utterly incoherent."
Not necessarily. To suggest that humans might be subject to transworld depravity while God is not isn't "special pleading" or "incorhent" at all. Rather, it *might* just be that creaturely freedom is different in this respect than God's freedom. More on that in a second.
"If God has no choice but to always do the right thing (as being "wholly good" might entail), then He is not free, and thus humans are more "valuable" than God."
Ah, are choices necessary for a will to be free? I am really convinced by Frankfurt's account of free will--what it means to have a free will is to have the will you want to have, not to act in any manner you want. To suggest that because God always chooses good His will is not free does not take into account the fact that God always chooses what He wants to choose, and there is nothing inhibiting from this. His will is perfectly free. Freedom of the will might not have anything to do with choice or alternative possibilities. (Interestingly, you affirm Dennet who argues that moral responsibility doesn't depend on alternate possibilities, but then criticize *my* account of God's free will as not needing alternate possibilities. That seems inconsistent.)
"If heaven is populated by those whose "nature" dictates they always chose the good, it now becomes incumbent upon a free-will theodicist to show why an omniscient God could not have created a world that included only those people. In other words, why would God unnecessarily create billions more who are doomed to suffer for eternity? My guess is that any defense of this would include using the damned as a means to an end (the perfection of saints, perhaps?), which is morally dubious."
In no way would I ever appeal to the damned as a means to an end. Ends in themselves humans are, Yoda says. : ) It is my hunch that the answer depends upon your conception of hell. What is your conception of hell?
Again, hope I have been of some help! I am enjoying, as always, the conversation.
I see that we're getting further away from Plantinga's argument, which is fine, because we're treading (into) more interesting water.
Let me first say that I'm going to re-read Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, in which he goes over a lot of this turf, and then pick up Freedom Evolves again, where he expands on the thoughts set down in Elbow Room. I am going on memory right now, and am muddling the discussion because of it, which is why you frame my comment as "Interestingly, you affirm Dennet who argues that moral responsibility doesn't depend on alternate possibilities," which I don't think accurately represents what Dennett is claiming, or even what I claim Dennett is claiming, when I state that "I make all the choices I make, even if such choices partially consist of the effects [of] random quantum behavior, mutations, or chance environmental pressures." I don't see "a lack of alternate possibilities" in the equation.
Frankfurt's conception of free will is interesting, and I'd like to learn more, but it doesn't really affect Plantinga's use of the term--calling it "the will you want to have" doesn't address the issue of possible worlds and divine or human choice, core to the Free Will Defense.
I'm curious why you find Frankfurt's definition so compelling. To say that free will could exist without alternate possibilities seems very much like a semantic dodge; what would that free will "do" that would mark it as "free?" (That is also why I asked, tangentially, the question: how would it be possible to tell creatures with "free will" apart from clever automatons guided by sophisticated deterministic programs?)
Besides, claiming that free will is "the will you want to have," and simultaneously claiming it might have nothing to do with "choice" or "possibility" is to make the word "want" meaningless. Does not "wanting" imply choice? If I want one outcome, is there not also, even if only tacitly, an alternative outcome I do not want? If choice plays no role in free will, what does the statement "God always chooses what He wants to choose" mean?
Lastly:
If a person is free with respect to a given action, then he is free to perform that action and free to refrain from performing it; no antecedent conditions and / or causal laws determine that he will perform the action, or that he won't.
This is Plantinga's definition; insert the word "God" instead of "a person," and see that it still works.
At any rate, Plantinga doesn't give a different definition for divine freedom. If "creaturely freedom" is different from "divine freedom," I am curious to know how, and by what warrant.
More will follow, I'm sure. When this entire conversation is done (which is far in the future, no doubt), we ought to publish it somewhere other than on a glorified Google advertisement.
This time g.k.c. re-posted my entire previous posting by accident, so I deleted it and will re-post only *his* comments. (Not that anyone else reads these, and thus might possibly be confused.)
g.k.c. said:Regarding my comment on Dennett, I was taking that from background knowledge. Look up his essay "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise--So What?" in the October 84 issue of Journal of Philosophy. There he argues that alternative possibilities--or the ability to do otherwise--is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. You affirm Dennett's notion of "free will," of which this is a part, yet you are arguing that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for God to have a free will. That seems inconsistent.
That makes your following questions valid, but also challenges to Dennett. One question was "What would that free will "do" that would mark it as "free?" It seems your confusing "freedom of will" and "freedom of action." The two concepts are not synonymous. Having freedom of the will means that we are free to form our wills according to second order desires--I desire to desire to x--not that we are free to x. Properly speaking, we can have a free will and have no ability to do anything at all, because freedom of will is not synonymous with freedom of action.
In response to your second question, I don't think that "want" tacitly implies choice at all. It implies desire, but what about desire suggests choice? In fact, there's almost nothing logical about "want"--it is a psychological predicate and a necessary component of human action. Human action is another project I have lined up--but initially I think that "want," like "intend" need not have any element of choice attached to it.
Finally, my views of free will are in the works still. I will clarify--I have posited (along with Daniel Dennett) that the ability to do otherwise is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Furthermore, I have contended that freedom of the will isn't synonymous with choice between two courses. Both these theses seem to be in accordance with classical theism. They do not, by themselves, absolve God from moral responsibility, and I think there is moral responsibility on God. I think even on Plantinga's account of free will (which I think is just a standard Libertarian Free Will) alternative possibilities (which you claim are necessary for free will AND for moral responsibility) are not in fact necessary. So even if an agent has a free will (on any account) and could do otherwise, that is not a sufficient condition for moral responsibility. But if this is the case, then your criticism fails. In other words, I think that Plantinga's specific FW Defense is congruous with other formulations of FW.
Where the heck would we publish them? I'll only let it happen if I win. : )
Again, don't confuse what I criticize in Plantinga's position (that God has the ability to "do otherwise," roughly speaking) versus what I might maintain (even tentatively) about Dennett's position. An internal inconsistency in the first doesn't have anything to do with the truth-claim of the second. Besides, if you haven't guessed, my views on "free will" are clear as Clinton.
Also, from my reading in Elbow Room, it seems that Dennett advocates what I called "epistemological free will"--perhaps a "weaker" version than Plantinga's. I'm almost done with ER, and will have to reread Freedom Evolves, a much later work, to see how Dennett's thinking has changed.
But I'll return to this later, when I have more time. Thanks for all your incisive comments so far.
"To accept Plantinga's Free Will Defense, we must accept two concepts: real (not just apparent) human freedom, and transworld depravity. The first goes assumed by Plantinga; the second is declared "possible," though it seems entirely ad hoc, contrived for the purpose of showing how God might be unable to actuate a world that includes morally free creatures who always choose rightly. So, Plantinga's argument shows that it is possible that there is no logical inconsistency; it does not show that such is obviously or necessarily true."
The last sentence quoted above seems confused, as a brief foray into Plantinga's modal semantics will reveal.
A proposition is possible iff it obtains in some possible world. Two propositions are copossible iff their conjunction obtains in some possible world. The atheist (in question) claims that "1. evil exists" and "2. God exists" are coimpossible--that is, that there is no possible world in which their conjunction obtains. Given that the first conjunct seems to obtain in the actual world, the argument goes, God does not exist in the actual world.
For the FWD to work, Plantinga need only show that it is *possible* for their to be a logical consistency (non-contradiction) between 1 & 2. That is, if Plantinga can point to a possible world in which they both obtain, they are copossible.
Whether he does this or not is another matter, of course, but my point is this: If Plantinga has shown that it is *possible* that there is no contradiction entailed between 1 & 2, he has shown that there is *no* contradiction between 1 & 2. The two conditions are equivalent. You speak of "obvious" consistency, but that seems to be an epistemic, and not a modal, condition.
Finally, given Plantinga's modal theorems, the following is true:
3. It is possible that P, It is necessary that it is possible that P.
Replace P with "1&2" and Plantinga has armed himself for a general refutation of your final claim. (I note that although some modal logicians have disputed 3, it stands for the most part as a non-controversial postulate.)
Cheers. =)
-Andrew
Andrew,
First, thanks for the clarification of "copossible" and "coimpossible," which aren't terribly clear in Plantinga's text (brief as it is).
The confusion in my terminology comes from my own under-education in the field of modal logic; I need to get more strict about using terms like "necessarily" in a possible-world framework, if that's what I'm trying to dissect. (My degrees are in English / history and education, not philosophy, and most of my knowledge in that discipline comes from scattershot reading, discussion, and debate.) What would you recommend as a primer on modal logic for the non-novice?
Without a doubt, Plantinga's _The Nature of Necessity_. It's a gem. Plantinga does more than merely introduce his reader to modal logic, I would note:
The overall project is a defense of 'de re' modality, using the semantics of possible worlds. I found its scope and ingenuity to be breathtaking. Along the way, Plantinga gives a detailed discussion of the metaphysics of modality, the modality/ontology of fictional creatures, a treatment of the FWD and ontological argument (the source material that G, F, & E was distilled from), and more. Well worth the read.
If modal questions make you itch, I would also reccomend Van Inwagen's collection of essays.
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