The Free Will Defense

in #philosophy5 years ago


The free will defense
freewill.jpg


“Because free will is a good, a wholly good being might wish for others to have free will. But it is impossible to both give free will to creatures and stop them from using that free will to do evil. (To do the latter would be to take away, to that extent, their free will.) Hence a wholly good creature might well not eliminate evil which it was within its power to eliminate, when doing so would be an infringement on the free will of the creature causing the evil.”

Is it logically possible that God has good and sufficient reasons for allowing evil in the universe? A world created by God containing creatures who are significantly free is intrinsically more valuable than a world containing no free creatures at all, and since beings created by God are free to choose to do good or evil, God is not responsible for the evil that results from the free choices of the beings. If God is omniscient, omnipotent and wholly good, and human beings have freewill, there is the serious problem of reconciling God’s omniscience with human freewill and responsibility. If god is all-knowing, he must know what choices a person will ultimately make in the foreseeable future. If God foreknows what a person will freely choose in the future, that persons choice is predetermined and therefore cannot be free.
If God is all loving and omniscient, there would appear to be a contradiction that an all loving god would create beings knowing the evil that they would create.

The founding fathers believed in the concept of Deism. That the universe or God existed but it did not actively intervene in the affairs of its creation. I share the same position. This position seems more plausible and it is my contention that The Universe, Buddha, Krishna, The Unifying Field, or the manifestation of that which we call God is all loving however there are limitations within its power of omniscience and omnipotence.

If human’s evil is due to their freewill to choose evil, then the problem is to reconcile free will with determination. The Free Will Defence demonstrates that the limits of God’s omnipotence may apply to nature and that human freewill imposes necessary limits on what God can do within the context of moral and natural realms.

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You say an allknowing god is needed to foresee the future, but wouldn't a big physics simulation be enough to foresee human behaviour?
Because as far as I know the quantum indeterminism is negligible on the scale of individual neurons that make up your behaviour including your claims of a free will.

What is your definition of God?

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