Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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 ...
Plantinga proposed a "free-will defense" in a volume edited by Max Black in 1965, [32] which attempts to refute the logical problem of evil, the argument that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God. [33]
In his recent book, Evil, Sin and Christian Theism (2022), Andrew Loke develops a Big Picture free-will defense argument arguing that God's justification for allowing suffering is not mainly based on an argument from future benefits but on the very nature of love which involves "allowing humans to exercise their free will in morally significant ...
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.
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.
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 .