Tiffany’s Reviews > God, Freedom, and Evil > Status Update

He completely lost me on the examples of propositions that are impossible to determine the possibility of. "Can you see without eyes?" This question lost me. It seems obviously not. But I think some clarification is in order... Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with this "dispute" but it seems biologically impossible. I'm also tired and this is not a light read. Time for bed.

Plantinga further explains how identifying necessary truths can expose contradictions. He introduces 'broadly logical necessity'. This includes truths of logic, mathematics, and other propositions that are necessarily true based on the relationships between concepts or the meanings of terms. Examples include "Nobody is taller than himself" and "Bachelors are unmarried."

Plantinga responds to Mackie's claim that the theist contradicts himself. He clarifies the difference between explicit contradiction and formal contradiction. He then argues the propositions "God is omnipotent," "God is wholly good," and "Evil exists," are not formally contradictory because the laws of logic do not allow us to deduce the negation of any of these propositions directly from the others in the set.

Mowing the lawn analogy: Plantinga's analogy suggests that just as we can believe in a connection between a decision --a cognitive process that can proceed the action by quite a bit of time -- and a series of complex bodily actions without knowing the exact nature of that connection, theists can believe in God's reasons for permitting evil without knowing the specifics of those reasons.

Suppose the theist admits they don't know why God permits evil. Why suppose if God does have a good reason for permitting evil, that the theist would be the first to know?... The fact that the theist doesn't know why God permits evil is, perhaps an interesting fact about the theist, but by itself shows little to nothing relevant to the rationality of belief in God.

Now one reply would be to specify God's reason for permitting evil or creating a world that contained evil. Such an answer to Hume's question is sometimes called a theodicy.

'Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?' - Epicurus - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion- David Hume

...what I have called natural atheology -- the attempt to prove that God does not exist or that at any rate it is unreasonable or irrational to believe that He does.

...the typical function of natural theology has been to show that religious belief is rationally acceptable.