At this point, the conversation was dying down, and we had abandoned our agreement to keep unrelated stuff separate from conversation stuff. For that reason, I’m just going to cut out half of the following email.
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Angie,
I'm writing my research paper on Alvin Plantinga's solution to the deductive problem of evil. While studying it, I've come to the realization that I grossly oversimplified it when I explained it to you. In fact, I may have even misrepresented it. There's part of it I'm having a hard time understanding. You see, Plantinga (as well as most theists) understand omnipotence as the ability to do anything logically possible. So God could not, for example, create a four-sided triangle or a rock to heavy for an all powerful God to lift, because those entail contradictions and are not logically possible. But since they aren't logically possible, God's inability to do them doesn't diminish his omnipotence. God can do anything that power can do, because he is all powerful, and his inability to engage in logical absurdities has nothing to do with a lack of power. Anyway, one would think that if God can do all things logically possible, then God could actualize any possible world. But Plantinga argues that there are some possible worlds God can't actualize, because it would entail some kind of contradiction. At this point, I don't really understand that part. There's one part of it I understand. He says if there are possible worlds in which God does not exist, then God could not actualize those worlds, since it's impossible for God to both exist and not exist. But that isn't good enough for his argument. He needs to argue that there are possible worlds in which God exists that God could not actualize, and that's the part I don't understand. It goes into counterfactual propositions that describe possible worlds, and shows, using these counterfactuals, that there are some possible worlds it would be impossible for God to create. The nature of the counterfactuals makes it impossible. I'm just having a hard time following the argument. I think I may have to fudge through this part in my paper.
Your ole buddy,
Sam
Clarification on Plantinga's argument
3 comments:
Steve,
I suppose one could understand "all powerful" in one of two ways. Either it means God can do anything possible, or it means God can even do things that are not possible. "Possible" is taken in the broadly logical sense, so contradictions are not possible.
Christians usually take "all powerful" to mean simply that God can do all things logically possible. That does not include his ability to do the logically impossible (such as creating objects too heavy for an all-powerful God to lift or existing and not existing at the same time and in the same sense).
Now you may argue that that isn't what "all powerful" means. If it really does boil down to semantics, and your definition of "all powerful" is correct, then Christians would simply have to use different terminology to describe God besides "all powerful" but it wouldn't change the fact that Christians take God to be able to do all things logically possible.
But let's suppose the Christian idea of God being all-powerful really does mean what you say it means--God can even do the logically impossible. If God has that kind of ability, then God is not limited at all by logic. If God is not limited by logic, then the problem of evil is no problem at all, because, as we have stipulated, God can engage in logical impossibilities, including the ability to be all good even if he happens to be evil. And if we insist that God is not evil, that poses no problem either, since God able to not be evil even if he is evil. If we say that God is all-powerful in the sense that you say it must mean, then no argument against God can be made, because nothing that contradicts his attributes or existence can count against his attributes or existence. God can exist and not exist. He can be all powerful and not all powerful. He can be all good and not all good. He can be all knowing and not all knowing. If the idea of being all-powerful creates contradictions, then so much the worse for logic!
I don't know what the context is of that quote, but it sounds like Kant is critiquing the ontological argument.
IF one assumes that "all powerful" includes those logically impossible activities, such as creating a four sided triangle, then can we not argue that an "all powerful" anything is logically impossible?
This same thing occured to me earlier today. Yes, I think I agree with you.
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