Steven Carr

As has been discussed recently on this board. Craig holds that God knows what everybody will freely choose in each situation.

See
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billc...cs/hasker.html

Craig writes
'Against Hasker I argue that such propositions are grounded in states of affairs belonging to the actual world logically prior to its full instantiation and are contingently true or false.'

(How counterfactuals , such as what Craig would have done if he had been Head Coach of the New York Giants, can be grounded in states of affairs belonging to the actual world is beyond me?)

So God knows all these propositions.....


Yet Craig writes in http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billc...ig-smith7.html
'Well, again, on a Thomistic model, God’s knowledge is not propositional in character. It's a simple intuition of the truth, which human beings, in order to conceptualize, break into propositions. So that I would say, on a Thomistic sort of model, the number of propositions is potentially infinite, but there aren’t such things, they don't exist, outside the mind of God, and they don't exist as distinct ideas in the mind of God.'

So propositions don't even exist, God's knowledge is not propositional, yet God knows all these propositions, which are true even before the world is instantiated.....



Craig does seem to be all over the place on counterfactuals.

In his essay, he writes '15. The aether has the property of immobility. But the problem is that (15) is in fact false, since there is no aether and merely possible objects neither exist nor have properties.'

........
And he continues.....


' Plantinga has defended the possibility of transworld depravity--that every creaturely essence is such that, if exemplified, its exemplification would have committed moral evil.'

End quote.

But how can these esences have the property , that if exemplified, its exempflication would have committed moral evil.?

If not exemplified, it is a merely possible object, and has no properties.

In the other debate , Craig writes 'That's a sort of abstract object. That's the question we’re raising, and I'm saying, no, I don't think there are these sorts of ideal or abstract entities existing out there somehow in an ideal space. I don't even understand, in a sense, what such things are, or what they would be...... I'm just so anti–Platonistic in my orientation that I prefer some kind of conceptualism.'

Baffling that Plantinga can talk about the properties of these essences, and that Craig can agree with him, while denying that abstract entities exist in any way, or can have properties.


Craig writes in

'Platonism is theologically unacceptable.} The abstract objects posited in a Platonist ontology exist, to borrow Plantinga's phrase, just as serenely as your most solidly concrete object. There are thus infinite upon infinite realms of necessarily existing objects--numbers, curves, n-dimensional geometries, propositions, properties, relations, essences, possible worlds, theories, musical scores, and so on and so forth--which exist independently of God. Platonism thus entails a metaphysical pluralism which compromises the aseity of God'

http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/archives...ackground.html explains how Plantinga's defense against the logical problem of evil, relies on the very concept of necessary essences that Craig denies.


Double-talk by Christian philosophers?

Braveheart