• Play-doh
    9
    When discussing Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom (CCFs), there is the example used that God cannot actualize a world in which Adam and Eve freely drop the apple because the circumstances of this world say that Adam and Eve would freely eat the apple. There would be (should be) a world out there where Adam and Eve freely drop the apple, but said world is said to exist in a universe outside of one that God is in and, therefore, does not exist.

    There is an objection raised to using the concept as an argument for the Problem of Evil that God could have created another version of Adam and Eve—Schmadam and Schmeve—that freely drop the apple, without ever having created the fallible Adam and Eve.

    However, it seems to me that it is possible for God to have actualized a world in which Adam and Eve do freely drop the apple, instead. In fact, I believe that God created the world with the potential for Adam and Eve (if the story is true) to eat or drop the apple. Because Adam and Eve chose to eat the apple, the world split into two separate world/occurrences: one in which Adam and Eve dropped the apple and the other in which they ate the apple (and according to the story, we happen to live in the one in which they did eat the apple). One of these worlds actualized and the other became a possible world--one that could have existed but does not (at least not in our universe). I don't think it's that God could not actualize a world—He could—but it was the decisions of humans that has caused the world—our world—to actualize as it has. It is not circumstantial; we forged it ourselves.

    Of course, the argument then lends itself to the issue of free will and whether God would then be truly omnipotent.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    there is the example used that God cannot actualize a world in which Adam and Eve freely drop the apple because the circumstances of this world say that Adam and Eve would freely eat the apple. There would be (should be) a world out there where Adam and Eve freely drop the apple, but said world is said to exist in a universe outside of one that God is in and, therefore, does not exist.Play-doh

    I don't have much of a background on "middle knowledge" or the "counterfactuals of creaturely freedom." Could you explain the argument for the above?
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