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Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in its final version in his 1977 book God, Freedom, and Evil. [1] Plantinga's argument is a defense against the logical problem of evil as formulated by the philosopher J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955.
The greater good defense is more often argued in response to the evidential version of the problem of evil, [141] while the free will defense is often discussed in the context of the logical version. [142] Some solutions propose that omnipotence does not require the ability to actualize the logically impossible.
Free will argument for the nonexistence of God [ edit ] Dan Barker suggests that this can lead to a "Free will Argument for the Nonexistence of God" [ 8 ] on the grounds that God's omniscience is incompatible with God having free will and that if God does not have free will, God is not a personal being .
The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how choices can be free, given that what one does in the future is already determined as true or false in the present. [52] Theological determinism The idea that the future is already determined, either by a creator deity decreeing or knowing its outcome in advance.
Free will furthers this argument by providing a premise which, in conjunction with the existence of evil, entails that God's existence remains consistent. [102] Opponents have argued this defense is discredited by the existence of non-human related evil such as droughts, tsunamis and malaria.
Twentieth-century philosopher Alvin Plantinga's freewill defense argues that, while this may be the best world God could have created, God's options were limited by the need to allow freewill. Alvin Plantinga's ultimate response to the problem of evil is that it is not a problem that can be solved. Christians simply cannot claim to know the ...
It's increasingly popular to believe that humans are merely machines and therefore can't control their behavior. But biology doesn't let us off the hook.
In Christian theology, natural evil is often discussed as a rebuttal to the free will defense against the theological problem of evil. [3] The argument goes that the free will defense can only justify the presence of moral evil in light of an omnibenevolent god, and that natural evil remains unaccounted for. Hence, some atheists argue that the ...