I didn't say that every action is willed; but according to libertarianism, any action that is not caused by anything external to the agent is freely willed- so your knee jerking when the doctor whacks it is just as freely willed as choosing what tie to wear. I say again- libertarianism does not provide a sufficient condition for free will.
Except that something external did cause your knee jerking at the doctor's office, namely, the doctor hitting your knee, which in turn sends electro-chemical signals up your spinal cord, which then are received in the brain, which then are transmitted by neurons, etc., etc. Again, this is perfectly compatible with libertarian free will. All the libertarian is committed to is that
at least some of our actions are willed, not that
all of them are willed. This is just a straw man. Again, who have you been reading that leads you to think that defenders of free will are committed to the supposition that all our actions are freely willed? I know of no libertarian who defends such a position.
Sure. And likely other possibilities we can't even imagine, but God could- and could enact, provided they are merely logically possible.
But a world could be logically possible yet not
feasible for God to actualize.
Plausible good reasons don't really cut the mustard for God; the goods achieved by the existence of suffering must not only logically entail the existence of suffering, they must somehow be of such worth as to be in some sense better than a world in which this good was not achieved, but suffering did not exist (which strikes me as, at the very least, not an altogether terrible sort of world)- and that's provided we're assuming something like consquentialism in the first place.
Since it is possible that people have free will, it turns out that the supposition that "God, if he is all-powerful, can create any world He wants" is not necessarily true. For if people have free will, they may refuse to do what God desires. So there will be any number of possible worlds that God cannot create because the people in them wouldn't cooperate with God's desires. For all we know, it is possible that in any world of free persons with as much good as in this world, there would also be as much suffering. This conjecture may not be true or even probable, but so long as it is logically possible, it shows that it is not necessarily true that God can create any world that He wants. So the assumption that "God, if he is all-powerful, can create any world He wants" is just not necessarily true. On this basis alone, the Problem of Evil is logically fallacious.
But what of the assumption that "if God is all-loving, He prefers a world without suffering"? This, again, doesn't seem to be necessarily true. For God could have overriding reasons for allowing the suffering in the world. We all know cases in which we permit suffering in order to being bout a greater good (going to the doctor; getting surgery; childbirth; etc). The atheist might insist that an omnipotent being would not be so limited -- that He could bring about the greater good directly, without allowing any suffering. But clearly, given freedom of the will, that may not be possible. Some goods, for example, moral virtues, can be achieved only through the free cooperation of people. It may well be the case that a world without suffering is, on balance, better overall than a world without suffering. In any case, it's at least
possible, and that is sufficient to defeat the claim that the proposition "if God is all-loving, He prefers a world without suffering" is necessarily true.
That may not be the route you want to take, as you may be pulling the rug out from underneath your own feet; if you're saying we're not in a position to evaluate the morality of God's actions or plan, then by the same token we're not really in a position to ascribe to God the property of omnibenevolence.
That's no problem for the Thomist. For, on Thomism, for a thing to be perfect is just for a thing to participate fully in its essence. And since God's essence, on this view,
just is his existence...
Its not clear to my why that should follow.
It's perfectly clear: without free will, there is no moral responsibility and hence no moral goods in the first place. For a world in which there is no free will is not any more significant than a world which is populated by trillions of billiard balls just bumping into one another, causally determining their trajectories.
Because you cannot even inflict harm even if you wanted to in such a world. It would be a greater strain on one's will to refrain from hurting someone they truly have the capacity to hurt than if they otherwise couldn't.
Again, you state this without argument- I don't see why this should be so. Belief in an external world plays a crucial role in pretty much all of our epistemic projects, and would fit in the sequence of justifications for any given claim at some point. But not so with free will- the existence of free will isn't a presupposition for the majority of our truth-claims about the world, as is belief in an external world, or other minds. And as I said, we're not just assuming the truth of Plantinga's epistemology here- so whether belief in the external world is a properly basic belief in the first place isn't just a given.
But I
did give an argument. [Claim] "for, after all, one must first make use of his capacities to freely reason
that there is an external world in the first place." See, in order for one to come to a free decision on the matter of whether there really is an external world in the first place,
one must be able to freely reason as much. For if our belief that the external world is determined, we have all the more reason to think that such a belief is undermined (i.e. the belief in an external world).
Yes. Of course, leave it to Craig to faithfully and charitable relate his opponents positions.
You'll notice, ladies and gentlemen, that no attempt whatsoever has been offered as to how the argument is a "straw man." Curious creature indeed. Keep your hands and feet inside the safari bus at all times.
Well no- or rather, "good" and "bad" could just be far different than normally conceived. If they are, as they likely are, adaptive behavioral patterns encouraging cooperative social strategies, then they are real, in a sense- these particular ways of interacting with others have proved to be more successful in the past than others. And that a given society has the norms and values that it does is certainly a matter of fact. But there is nothing more to moral norms and values than this- rules we've made up that encourage certain types of behavior, which have proven successful and mutually beneficial in the past.
Right, but if someone were to enter your home and put a bullet in a loved one's head, you wouldn't think "Hm, I'm feeling quite angry and disturbed at the moment, but I must remind myself that these feelings are nothing more than helpful survival instincts that exist simply to encourage genetic fitness." You'd think "this is wrong/evil/etc." In any case, the nihilist who gives lip service to the claim that there is no right or wrong is always going to be less plausible than the claim that some things truly are right or wrong.
Well, no, it doesn't, and for the same reason that nihilism doesn't entail any such thing.
Yes it would. Very obviously so. If (A) you aren't responsible for your action/you didn't freely will it (and, indeed, if
all your actions are nothing more than those knee jerks you get at the doctor) and (B) there is no such thing as right or wrong in the second place, then one cannot make sense of any sort of moral responsibility whatsoever.
Again, you leave home for work and you come back home to find your infant daughter sliced in half and your wife with her head cut off, her body obviously sexually abused. The killer is still in the house. Isn't it just obvious that what he did was wrong and despicably so?
That's all she wrote, folks.
