I recommend you actually read what he has to say instead of assuming he hadn't answered those questions. — username
"Maybes" are essential to his argument, but I can see how that's as easy to overlook as the fact that Plato's Republic is not actually about political philosophy but about justice as a personal virtue: it's the problem that frames the rest of the work, but most of the work is not talking directly about it. In the case of the Republic, all the talk about how to organize society is just a big analogy for how the human soul should be organized.Plantinga's response involves no maybe's. — username
there are things that an omnipotent God cannot do, such as force people to freely do something — username
"More evil" and "less value" are the same thing in this context. Plantinga thinks (that it's plausible to argue that) a world with less murder etc but no free will is morally worse (not as good, less valuable, more "evil") than a world where people are free to murder etc, and so an all-good God would have to prefer the latter over the former.He also doesn't assert that the world would have more evil in it if we didn't have free will but rather that the ability to choose to do right is of greater value than being forced to do it. — username
That depends heavily on what sense of "good" you mean. It reflects less positively on the character of the people in question, they are less virtuous, sure. But the consequences are the same either way. And while I think virtue, justice, and goodness of consequences are all important in their own ways, the good of allowing for the virtue of someone choosing not to murder when they could have does not outweigh the bad of allowing someone to murder if they want to. If it did, then we oughtn't have punishments for murder, because that then leads to people having less-virtuous, selfish, self-preservation reasons for avoiding doing murders, and erases from the world the good that might have existed had they selflessly chosen not to murder, just to spare some people's lives.I think we can agree that if someone did what was good or virtuous because they were forced to, it would be less good then someone who did it on there own accord. — username
if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, — ModernPAS
Plantinga.... asserts that there are things that an omnipotent God cannot do, — username
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