Possible epic thread at MD&D
Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2011 9:35 am
SAUCE
Highlight for me was this:
LOL- Not a fan of Plantinga, but ol Jeremy here clearly doesn’t understand Plantinga’s Free Will Defense against the logical problem of evil, really doesn’t have anything to do “mystery”.
PROTIP: If you want to display someone’s ignorance about God and show the shining glory of the Restored Gospel as some kind awesome thing, try dealing with the scholar’s actual works, not a reader’s digest version given in an interview. You are not doing yourself or your message any favors by proving to me you are almost totally ignorant of what you seek to critique.
Highlight for me was this:
17:10 Alvin Plantinga, Notre Dame Professor of Philosophy:
"(God) had all these different possibilities, all these different possible worlds He could have made actual, He wanted to make a really Good one actual, all the best ones contained Incarnation and Atonement, but any world that contains Incarnation and Atonement also has to contain Evil, Sin. And not just a little bit of it; I mean, if all the evil there was was, uh, mere peccadillo on the part of an otherwise admirably-disposed Angel, then it would be massive overkill for there to be Incarnation and Atonement, so there's got to be a lot of it. And hence, any world, any really good world, is going to contain a great deal of evil."
"So God is choosing worlds that have evil, so that tantamounts (sic) to God creating evil. Close to it."
"I don't know that it amounts to His creating evil, but it does amount to His choosing worlds that contain evil. I mean, the evil is a necessary condition of something really good. It's not that the evil gets chosen for its own sake, but this whole world, which contains evil, does get chosen."
"Has to"? If God is the all-powerful creator, contingent on nothing other than His own designs, then nothing "has to" contain anything. He chooses everything. There are no external constraints limiting Him to worlds in which Incarnation and Atonement necessarily need Sin and Suffering and Death. If He is "choosing" these worlds then He is, indeed, the author of all evil.
This type of philosophy is simply a capitulation to Mystery designed to let God off the hook. To the contrary, we believe that God does not have the power to destroy evil, because there is no such power - but we believe He cannot tolerate Sin, which is Death; He shows us how to carve out Gardens of Light and Life where we can create peaceful Zions, shining colonies organized and drifting within the darkness and trying to illuminate it.
"It may be that, um other creatures, other free creatures, have had a substantial hand in the whole development of life on earth, so that all the, all the waste, all the pain, all the suffering that goes along with predation, um, and the whole evolution of life starting, maybe, starting, say, uh, oh, I don't know, maybe 500 million years ago or something like that, all that is also, in the long run, due to the free activity of other creatures. That's a possibility. It's kind of a wild suggestion, and one which nowadays will raise eyebrows, but I don't think that's anything against it."
If you create them from nothing, they are not free, because you determine everything about them. God is yet again the Devil.
LOL- Not a fan of Plantinga, but ol Jeremy here clearly doesn’t understand Plantinga’s Free Will Defense against the logical problem of evil, really doesn’t have anything to do “mystery”.
PROTIP: If you want to display someone’s ignorance about God and show the shining glory of the Restored Gospel as some kind awesome thing, try dealing with the scholar’s actual works, not a reader’s digest version given in an interview. You are not doing yourself or your message any favors by proving to me you are almost totally ignorant of what you seek to critique.