What amount of free will is necessary for Plantinga's "Free Will defense?"

God wants us to want him. Choicelessness, the inability to choose something other than God, would preclude love, or it would be an unappreciative love that did not know the depths of God’s sacrificial love, patience and mercy, not to mention grace.

Nature does what’s natural. It can’t do anything else. God can’t do better. Not at this level of existence.

Free will is meaningless. Creation involves suffering for all concerned. Choice doesn’t come in to it for anyone concerned.

Evil isn’t the problem. Nature is. It’s perfect. It lacks nothing. One doesn’t have to explain evil because of God. One has to explain God because of nature.

There is no warrant for God in nature. One has to look elsewhere

Not if one knows about God’s providence, à la Maggie.

The cosmos disagrees.
 

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
    and night to night reveals knowledge.

 
Psalm 19:1-2

Transformation and Hope spring eternal.
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

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  • I share with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, their position regarding Determinism and their disdain for Free Will. However, contrary to Sam Harris’ claim otherwise: The reason I am not Mr. X and, therefore do not do as he does, is–I say–not because “luck” played a decisive role in who I am and in who Mr. X is, but because Mr. X is Mr. X and I am who I am, and there appears to be a law of physics which is says that there can only be one of each of us in the Universe at the same time.

What is luck that all our swains commend her?

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!

― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
 

(That was Reepicheep, I believe?)

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One only knows it through Jesus I’m afraid. Is this Maggie more significant than He?

It would be fair to say that God’s providence is more significant than an individual, I guess, but maybe not to that individual. And God’s supreme providential intervention into time and space, Jesus, is… supreme.

David had his now 3,000 year old beliefs through which to see the stars. We don’t have the bliss of that ignorance.

The date stamp is irrelevant – there is ageless warrant in nature.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
 
Romans 1:20

 

Don’t I recall that you (like I) weep at the beauty of it?

I should be so ignorant of God as David was.

Actually that depends on what free will actually consists of. If it is just some bit of magic added to human beings alone then you are right. But I don’t think that is what it is at all. I think the whole universe with its mathematical laws of nature running things automatically is a part of it. That is what provides an existence and reality apart from God, then the self-organizing process of life is the other part of it. So this doesn’t just explain the existence of human evil but also the suffering due to the operation of those laws of nature. Too much intervention by God (i.e. contrary to the laws of nature) would pull the rug out from under all of this. This does not mean no involvement by God at all because the laws of nature are not causally closed. But it does mean that what He does can be dismissed by unbelievers as no more than coincidence and subjective perception.

Thus the theory of evolution is a big part of the answer to the problem of evil AND suffering, because it mean that life is not a product of design and control. Death and suffering is how life develops and there would be no life without it. The demonstrable flaws in our genetics and biology are not because God want to torment people, but rather this is part of what life is – we have fixed rules by which we learn and adapt to what has been given us in the environment.

There is just one “little” problem with that. You only need compatibilism if the universe is deterministic and science tells us that this is not the case. Because of quantum physics and the experiments showing Bell’s inequality is violated, physical determinism is dead. It is the way of science to accept such results rather than insist on what you want to believe regardless. The finding was that there are no hidden variables determining the outcome of quantum measurements. Now to keep determinism alive you have to go outside the premises of the scientific world view. Whatever your reason for doing this may be, it is not science.

LFW is alive and kicking and it is compatibilism which is a desperate answer to an antiquated understanding of the universe.

But there is much more to this than you have covered. You haven’t even addressed the biggest problem with the idea of free will. How is free will even logically coherent – what does it mean?

The problem is this…
How can it be will unless we are the cause of our actions?
But if we are the cause of our actions then how is it free?
This is the much more challenging question!

In a worldview restricted to time-ordered causality this an impossible contradiction. But we have less reason to accept this restriction than you might think. The more robust treatment of causality by Aristotle saw this idea of time-ordered causality as only one of four. Thus the idea of free will is that rather than our past being the cause of our actions, we become the cause of our actions. And in this way instead of cause coming before the effect in time both come into being at the same time. The question of course is whether you can accept such a thing as coherent.

It should be noted that if free will does exist and you insist on looking at the universe according to time-ordered causality then what you will see is some events which don’t seem to have a cause at all but are just random. And this is exactly what we see.

I don’t think many mainline Christians endorse this view of God. Even those of us who accept evolution do not think design, control and evolution are mutual exclusive from God’s perspective at least. If you deny God as creator and designer of the universe, you take an even more minimalist view of Genesis 1-2 than me despite chastising me for calling it nonsense when taken literally. Keep chopping off pieces and there is nothing left to the story but vague metaphor about the human condition and an incorrect origin of it. Hardly sacred scripture true.

You seem to be trying to extend Plantinga’s free will defense to the material universe. Which seems like patent nonsense to me. I think professional philosophers would eat this alive and claiming all atoms and nature is “self organizing” when scientists are reducing all interactions down to 4 fundamental forces seems silly.

Life would seemingly have to be designed to be self organizing, otherwise, “organizing”towards what meaningful-goal? “Self organizing” seems to be an equivocation for laws of physics in your view and it’s a process occurring outside God’s control and planning. That is just bad theology. Seems like you’ve drank the naturalist kool aid. …Did the laws always exist? Did they create themselves?We’re they finely tuned? I’d suggest no for the first two and yes for the latter.

If a person doesn’t believe in genuine free will I’m honestly not sure of the point of even discussing anything with them. If a person thinks life is ultimately meaningless and all our love, morality and sense of justice is just the subjective illusion of an advanced primate then their worldview refutes itself. They will obviously live a life of grotesque hypocrisy.

If I were to engage in a professional debate with a materialist arguing over free will, my opening line would be “Your mother is a whore.” Then I’d go on and fallaciously justify it and use the shock and appall at my statements and let the discussion roll from there. I think it would be quite comical.

If we are determined to sin who really cares. We aren’t really guilty of anything and Jesus certainly didn’t need to come die for us. Praising or blaming a person in a deterministic universe makes as much sense praising or blaming a rock on the side of the road. A cheating husband had no choice. A child molester had no choice. For a fallen world blindly steeped in sin and in need of salvation, I guess it makes sense why some would deny the existence of free will. It is to deny you are a sinner in need of God’s love and grace. It is tantamount to atheism. Based on all of our behaviors and experiences, our language, free will is an axiom. It needs no defense. Determinism is the hypothetical “evil genius” or conspiracy theory or invisible pink elephant looming in the background.

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??? Wouldn’t wrong choices be evidence of imperfection?
If so, the free beings who make wrong choices would seem, I think, to be imperfect and one might ask how they came to be imperfect if they were ever perfect to begin with. Who can we blame it on? Who can we “put in the dock” and on trial?
On the other hand, I suppose, if your free beings never make wrong choices, then having free will to make wrong choices seems to oblige us to recognize that the free beings actually would bear personal responsibility for their wrong choices if they were ever to make any, which–being free–they would never do, no? In which case, God would not be responsible for the wrong choices they could make and He might be responsible for the right choices that they do make, no?

Self organizing means it comes up with its own meaning and goals. Otherwise it wouldn’t be self-organizing.

The laws of nature are a part of the mathematical space-time structure of the physical universe (i.e. that which we can measure). The finding of science is that the physical universe did not always exist, but came into existence 13.8 billion years ago – and that includes its measures of space and time. Therefore we have no reason to presume that any laws of nature extend before that time either, and the idea of the naturalist which imagines some non-measurable laws of nature causing that event has no more objective validity than the idea of the theists a creator is responsible. That is a highly subjective choice of faith.

We know that some of them are the result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, so I guess it is a possibility, but it does seem unlikely to me.

I think the laws of nature were designed to promote the self-organizing process of life. But the fine tuning arguments adopt dubious premises which I see no reason to accept.

There… I answered your questions and ignored everything else as beneath my contempt.

Aye. That’s my nature. Paul’s rhetoric no longer works for me, especially when taken out of context. I’m in paradise as we speak; Holme Next The Sea. The privilege is absurd. The things that have been made by blind evolution include eye worms.

The only warrant for God is Jesus. Nothing in nature. Including Maggie. Especially eye worms.

Your first fallacy Vinnie. Appeal to the many : )

Design? Control? THE universe? God as designer? Of what? When? Like the many many many including all Thomists and WLC you have no appreciation of the impact of eternity. It changes everything, including God.

The story starts as that. Nothing chopped off. And nothing incorrect. And nothing vague either. No false dichotomy. It’s a peerless, inspired metaphor yearning for meaning, projecting the best of 500 BCE moraity on to evolving God.

Agreed. As the free will defense of 'evil" is nonsense in the first place. But nature is obviously meaninglessly ordered; self as in autonomously, intrinsically, deterministically organizing.

Eternity says the laws are prevenient. And God instantiates them from eternity as the ground of being. He has no choice. It’s that or nothing. The prevenient laws determine self tuning of the hand[f]ul of mea[s]ured constants. God’s design, control, planning are the bad theology. Self-organization as purposed, meaningful is bad philosophy. Increasing complexity with entropy fully explains being.

Not a fallacy. Just because most Christians believe something that does not make them right. I’m certainly not a big fan of the Trinity. I believe @mitchellmckain professes to take the Bible seriously though I certainly can’t speak for all the nuances of his particular model of inspiration since I don’t know it. I was raising this as an issue of scriptural exegesis. Most Christians (I mean those reading the Bible at a scholarly level–not pew warmers) under the guise of some form of inspiration do not see this version of God being articulated in the text.The sovereignty and control of God is all over the place. This may be the over

What is your view of “eternity”? Our universe was not eternal as best as I can tell from current cosmology though the laws of physics as we know them break down before Planck time(10^-43s) about 13.8 billion years ago.

The story itself starts with God creating and centers around that activity. He shapes and fastens the sky, earth and humans, the latter of which he breathes life into. To call Genesis 1-2 “inspired metaphor yearning for meaning, projecting the best of 500 BCE morality on to evolving God” is a bridge built too far to me. If it is the completely incorrect babble of a 500BC group merely yearning for meaning void of any deep theological truths its nothing more than any other creation account, which are legion as you know, that all yearn for meaning. If there is no difference between an inspired and uninspired text, the distinction has no meaning. For some of us, its hard to buy into that the only truth of Genesis 1-2 is that God is somehow ultimately responsible for the universe which organizes itself, makes its own morality, goals, meaning and purpose in manner completely unknown and unpredictable by God. This looks a lot like apotheosis and it certainly isn’t consistent with a lot scripture.

That God doesn’t have a choice is an open issue to me. The nature of eternity and time outside the context of our universe and how it does or does not apply to God is an open issue to me. Traditional view? Open view theism? Some might think God’s own nature forces him to do certain things but to think we actually understand God is silly. His thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways not our ways. We see in part as in a mirror dimly lit.

You have not postulated what I define as God, a maximal being. Am I wrong in saying you appear to have relegated God to the category of a helpless, mute. The penultimate naturalistic process from which all others arise? God is a “being” of some sort or irrelevant to me. Either we have God’s image or who really cares? I’m seeing pantheism cloaked under the guise of panentheism.

Vinnie