The problem of evil mackie

Mackie j evil and omnipotence

The fact that God cannot do the logically impossible is not, Plantinga claims, a genuine limitation of God's power. Mackie spends most of the article considering various responses to this question. Both worlds are populated by creatures with free will and in neither world does God causally determine people to always choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong. According to Plantinga's description of morally significant free will, it does not seem that God would be significantly free. But once one shifts to probabilistic formulations of the argument from evil, the situation is very different: details about concrete cases of evil may be evidentially crucial. Eleonore Stump offers another response to the problem of evil that brings a range of distinctively Christian theological commitments to bear on the issue. But what underlies this intuitive idea? Mackie one of the most prominent atheist philosophers of the mid-twentieth-century and a key exponent of the logical problem of evil has this to say about Plantinga's Free Will Defense: Since this defense is formally [that is, logically] possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another. So either way, the argument that goodness requires evil as a counterpart is shown to be weak. If you took away our free will, we would no longer be the kinds of creatures we are. It is important to notice, however, that in formulating an indirect inductive argument from evil, one need not proceed along the route that Draper chooses. W3: a God creates persons with morally significant free will; b God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong; and c There is no evil or suffering in W3. In other words, 15 A set of statements is logically consistent if and only if it is possible for all of them to be true at the same time.

They reasoned that there must be more to the problem of evil than what is captured in the logical formulation of the problem. The important question is: which one s? Mackiep.

Mackie fallacious solutions

Originally, Plantinga claimed that W3 is not a logically possible world because the description of that world is logically inconsistent. In the case where one focuses only upon a single action whose known wrongmaking properties outweigh its known rightmaking properties, the result is as one would expect, namely, that the probability that the action in question is not morally wrong relative to the totality of its morally significant properties, both known and unknown, must be less than one half. That Plantinga initially focused upon abstract formulations of the argument from evil was not, perhaps, surprising, given that a number of writers—including Mackie, H. Death, disease, pain and even the tiresome labor involved in gleaning food from the soil came into the world as a direct result of Adam and Eve's sin. Each of these things seems to be absolutely, positively impossible. Imagine a possible world where God creates creatures with a very limited kind of freedom. We only blame a person if we think their actions come from a bad character. Using these, we can deduce a contradiction from the three propositions we started with. And for that they must be free. To make the conflict more clear, we can combine 1 , 2 and 3 into the following single statement. Given the program running inside the robot and its exposure to an empty soda can, it's going to take the can to the recycle bin. As an attempt to rebut the logical problem of evil, it is strikingly successful. Clearly, his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and perfectly good. The distinction of first and second order goods and evils.

The problem with that premise, as we saw, is that it can be argued that some evils are such that their actuality, or at least their possibility, is logically necessary for goods that outweigh them, in which case it is not true that a perfectly good being would want to eliminate such evils. A crazed cult leader pushes eighty-five people to their deaths in Waco, Texas.

The problem of evil mackie

According to Plantinga, Mackie is correct in thinking that there is nothing impossible about a world in which people always freely choose to do right. However, consider the sort of freedom enjoyed by the redeemed in heaven. When theists say that making wrong choices is necessary for freedom, Mackie accuses them of confusing freewill with randomness. But improbability is not the same thing as impossibility. What rational human would willingly submit to him? None of the statements in 1 through 4 directly contradicts any other, so if the set is logically inconsistent, it must be because we can deduce a contradiction from it. Plantinga suggests that morally significant freedom is necessary in order for one's actions to be assessed as being morally good or bad. Similarly, 3 also seems plausible, and here too one can derive 3 provided that one is willing to accept the principle that only necessarily false propositions have a probability equal to zero. According to classical theism, believers in heaven will somehow be changed so that they will no longer commit any sins. Evil and the Concept of God. But what if God, rather than being characterized in terms of knowledge, power, and goodness, is defined in some more metaphysical way—for example, as the ground of being, or as being itself? But, by contrast, it is not true that this is so if one rejects, instead, the inference to 1.

Thus, it does not appear that, with respect to any choice of morally good and morally bad options, God is free to choose a bad option. But versions of the argument often differ quite significantly with respect to what the relevant fact is.

Is 18 correct? Therefore, probably: Q No good has J.

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