Posted: May 05, 2012 6:09 am
I think the idea of "free will" in the way the term is used in arguments like this is actually incoherent, but ignoring that and accepting for the purposes of argument that it exists...
Also, accepting for the purposes of argument that a world with free will is more valuable than one without it....
This does not explain why God does not allow everyone the free will to commit morally good or morally bad actions, but with the world being manipulated or having been previously arranged to stop the worst effects of those actions.
For example, we might say that free will means that people like Nazis exist, and that Nazis will want to gas Jews, but is a world in which gas chambers work when used by Nazis really more valuable than one in which they don't? What exactly is supposed to be added to the world by the gassings or any number of other activities that might not be possible if the world were arranged differently? A good God, for example, could presumably arrange it so that the random decisions of quantum mechanics made the world develop in such a way as to frustrate the actions of evil-doers, or that some strange laws of physics happened to work against evil-doers. Now, Christians may claim that God actually does this - but this should be regarded as clearly nonsense, as we could easily imagine it being done to a greater extent than any extent to which it is currently being done.
For an argument like Plantinga's to work, you have to commit yourself to something quite monsturous - that not only is the freedom to commit good and bad acts valuable, but the consequences of bad acts are valuable in themselves, and that a world where they were edited out would be poorer for it. Try saying that to someone whose family got gassed.
Further, an argument based on free will does nothing to answer natural disasters.
A further problem is this: it is fine to say that humans are "free", but there is clearly a statistical relationship between the behaviour and moral development of humans and their environment. For example, many German people supported Hitler in the 1930s for a number of different reasons - some of them economical and some of them based on the defeat in World War I. How can we really say that everyone has free will when statistics applies? For example, suppose some economic and political situation means that a sociologist could predict in advance that most people will support a particular (evil) political party. is that really fair to the people exercising their free will in this way? God has made each of them with free will, yet each is parachuted on birth, through no fault of his own, into a situation which, according to how human behaviour works, is likely to make him behave badly. To argue against this by saying that he has free will is ridiculous: the statistics of the situation say that whatever free will he has is compromised by the way in which the situation into which he has been dropped creates a statistical bias towards particular behaviour. We might say that everyone who voted for Hitler could have voted for someone else - but this ignores the fact that on a large scale, statistics takes over. I think this conflict between individual action and statistics could create a lot of problems for people making free will arguments.
Also, accepting for the purposes of argument that a world with free will is more valuable than one without it....
This does not explain why God does not allow everyone the free will to commit morally good or morally bad actions, but with the world being manipulated or having been previously arranged to stop the worst effects of those actions.
For example, we might say that free will means that people like Nazis exist, and that Nazis will want to gas Jews, but is a world in which gas chambers work when used by Nazis really more valuable than one in which they don't? What exactly is supposed to be added to the world by the gassings or any number of other activities that might not be possible if the world were arranged differently? A good God, for example, could presumably arrange it so that the random decisions of quantum mechanics made the world develop in such a way as to frustrate the actions of evil-doers, or that some strange laws of physics happened to work against evil-doers. Now, Christians may claim that God actually does this - but this should be regarded as clearly nonsense, as we could easily imagine it being done to a greater extent than any extent to which it is currently being done.
For an argument like Plantinga's to work, you have to commit yourself to something quite monsturous - that not only is the freedom to commit good and bad acts valuable, but the consequences of bad acts are valuable in themselves, and that a world where they were edited out would be poorer for it. Try saying that to someone whose family got gassed.
Further, an argument based on free will does nothing to answer natural disasters.
A further problem is this: it is fine to say that humans are "free", but there is clearly a statistical relationship between the behaviour and moral development of humans and their environment. For example, many German people supported Hitler in the 1930s for a number of different reasons - some of them economical and some of them based on the defeat in World War I. How can we really say that everyone has free will when statistics applies? For example, suppose some economic and political situation means that a sociologist could predict in advance that most people will support a particular (evil) political party. is that really fair to the people exercising their free will in this way? God has made each of them with free will, yet each is parachuted on birth, through no fault of his own, into a situation which, according to how human behaviour works, is likely to make him behave badly. To argue against this by saying that he has free will is ridiculous: the statistics of the situation say that whatever free will he has is compromised by the way in which the situation into which he has been dropped creates a statistical bias towards particular behaviour. We might say that everyone who voted for Hitler could have voted for someone else - but this ignores the fact that on a large scale, statistics takes over. I think this conflict between individual action and statistics could create a lot of problems for people making free will arguments.