Philosophy 450/650 / EP&E 478: The Problem of Evil Nov. 28
“can” and “cannot” and a series of cars: “This one can go 100 mph; this one can’t”
“cannot”: don’t have the power vs. presence of a strong reason against / don’t have the power to do it w/o violating some relevant constraint
(Mark 6:5: “He [could not / was not able to] do any miracles there…”)
-Thoughts on “omnipotence” (and perhaps also on “omniscience”) and the (“limited”?) God of the FWD—and on “Leibniz’s Lapse”
The Free Will Defender, you recall, insists on the possibility that it is not within God's power to create a world containing moral good without creating one containing moral evil. His atheological opponent agrees with Leibniz in claiming that if (as the theist holds) God is omnipotent, then it follows that he could have created just any possible world (or any such world including his existence) he pleased. We now see that this contention—call it Leibniz's Lapse—is a mistake. The atheologian is right in holding that there are many possible worlds containing moral good but no moral evil; his mistake lies in endorsing Leibniz's Lapse. So one of his central contentions—that God, if omnipotent, could have actualized just any world he pleased—is false. (Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, p. 184)
Hick
Review: Good Hick; bad Hick & the 3 “cannot”s passage
178.7: Hume’s objection: “Might not the Deity exterminate all ill, wherever it were to be found; and produce all good, without any preparation or long progress of causes and effects?” (compare Lewis EfFS?, p. 149bot-150top)
Start of Hick’s reply: “The initial answer is of course that God, being omnipotent, could do this. But let us imagine Hume's suggested policy being carried out,…
Eventually (179.8): “Perhaps most important of all, the capacity to love would never be developed”
169.2: Hick’s “ethically reasonable judgement” and…
169.4: “hazardous adventure in individual freedom”
169.8-170top: why no “hedonistic paradise”?
170.7: “For if our general conception of God's purpose is correct the world is not intended to be a paradise, but rather the scene of a history in which human personality may be* formed towards the pattern of Christ. Men are not to be thought of on the analogy of animal pets…”
*most valuably?
171.3: goal spelled out a bit.
177.7: “epistemic distance”
Focus: 180.8-end: “Excessive or dysteleological suffering” and “mystery”
183.5 “sheerlydysteleological and destructive”
186.4: appeal to mystery
186.6: “the method of counterfactual hypothesis”
For next time: Swinburne, “The Problem of Evil”
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