Steven Carr

<a href="http://examinedlifejournal.com/archives/vol3ed10/drange.shtml" target="_blank">http://examinedlifejournal.com/archives/vol3ed10/drange.shtml</a>

Guthrie writes that God can create worlds , containing created beings (called Ivan in his example) where
'Under no circumstances will Ivan choose evil', so Guthrie admits that such worlds are feasible

Of course, he did not write that.
What he wrote was ''Under no circumstances will Ivan enroll in Philosophy 101.'

But this is the same thing!

If Guthrie believes that there are worlds where Ivan , of his own free will, will never choose a particular course of action, then there must be worlds where Ivan , of his own free will, never chooses a particular course of action, where that action is evil.

So Guthrie has destroyed the free will defense.

Jobar

You know, my own thread here- 'If God has free will, why can he not do evil?'- can be used the same way. If God has free will, yet never does evil- then why could he not have created humans with the same sort of forebearance? To deny that he could have done so is to deny omnipotence.

Dr. Retard

Guthrie's just parroting Plantinga, if my cursory scan is reliable. It's not that there are no possible worlds where Ivan never chooses evil. Such happy words are quite possible. But, unhappily, God cannot bring those worlds about. God can only bring about the first part of a world and then he needs Ivan's help for that world to become one of the happy worlds. This because of some necessarily true propositions about what Ivan would do in different circumstances. And since these propositions are necessarily true, they're out of God's hands. That's a short, short summary.

quip

In my review of this link it seems Shandon Guthrie, in refuting Professor Theodore Drange’s “Argument from Evil and Nonbelief”, makes the claim that God could not feasibly design a suffer and evil-free (or near-free) world given to man’s free-will propensity.

In other words man is his own worst enemy because man (invoking free-will) will inevitably (at least temporarily) choose evil as a course of action. Thus for God to remove evil is to remove free-will from man.

It seems here though that Guthrie falls prey to “Putting the cart before the horse”

If Guthrie would simply read his book of Genesis, he would discover that: the world was initially created by God, subsequently man (with his associated free-will) was created to inhabit this ready-made world.

Guthrie’s argument assumes just the opposite, which is logically and biblically impossible.

The only argument against this is that God, in all his omniscient glory, foresaw such a free-will conundrum before creation of the world. Yet if this is the case, it refutes Guthrie’s earlier refutation against statements (A-2) and (A-3) from the original “Argument from Evil and Nonbelief”.

Which brings Guthrie back to square-one.

ManM

Jobar,
To claim that God created us with the freedom to oppose him is also to deny omnipotence.

B. H. Manners

So you are saying that whichever way you look at it God is not omnipotent?

ManM

BH,
If we are free, God cannot be omnipotent. And so if someone uses the free will defense in an attempt to preserve God's omnipotence, they have basically contradicted themselves.

B. H. Manners

Thanks for the reply ManM.

Synaesthesia

BH,

No simply because in addition to being omnipotent, God is also inscrutable. We need simply use the immortal black box technique.

1.God who is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient.

+

2.**Black box feature of above god which restricts him from benevolently wielding a tiny fraction of his omni-potence to solve even a tiny fraction of the world's current suffering.**

=

3.Omni-benevolent, potent and scient God who is comptaible with the current degree of evil.

B. H. Manners

I don't get the "black box" part. What do you mean?