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GGD, FWD and the limitation of logic arguments

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发表于 2007-8-4 13:23:58 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

Christianity holds that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Does the fact that there are evils on this world means some contradiction to God’s property? Surely not to a theist, they provide many logic arguments on the topic, the Great Good Defense(GGD) and the Free Will Defense(FWD) are among them. I’ll say something about these two sorts of defenses. Then as a reflection on those defenses themselves, I’d like to make a brief discussion about the limitation of logic arguments.
GGD state: every evil is a logic requirement of a greater good. Such a metaphor is always mentioned: in order to let the children leave away from certain danger, the parents scold or even beat them. Scolding and beating are evils but leaving away from danger is a good and the good overbalances the evils. If we look God as a parent, humankind being His children, then evil is not always so bad concerning the good overbalanced it.
Brian Leftow provide an objection to GGD. He thinks that the GGD compare goods and evils, but goods and evils are different sorts of things that incomparabale. There might be great goods and great evils, they are great in terms of their repective way, such as in comparing evils in contrast to goods. He suggest we’d better look evil as a necessary part of a picture in God’s mind and not look evil as a means to a good. Leftow’s premise –good and evil are incomparable sorts of things- looks like not so reasonable. Obviously, the good of everlasting life is more greater than the evil of a pin prink, if good and evil are incomparable, where our obvious belief comes from? Another evident can be find in Holy Bible. God would like to test Abraham, so He told him to offer his only son Isaac as a burn offering, Abraham did as God’s demand, just when he was preparing to kill Isaac, God appeared… (Genesis 22) In this story, a comparing between good and evil is a basic hypothesis. if there is no comparing between the greater good-loyal to God, is there any reason to think Abraham is right as for he intents to kill his son?
Plantinga’s FWD is a sound one, his logic clue lies here : A world containing free creatures is more valuable than containing no free creatures at all. God create free creatures according to the principle of good(He is omnibenevolent).and He permit the creatures to take action freely. Being possession free will the creatures can perform both good and evil, God cannot limit the creatures from performing evil and this is the source of evil. If He limit them, He turns against the principle of good. It’s impossible to breake logic laws even for the omnipotent God.
An objection comes from J.L.Mackie: “ If God has made man such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made man such that they always freely choose the good?” Mackie’s point lies: supposing God cannot create creatures that only perform good, that is inconsistent with God’s omnipotent. But Mackie failed to see the paradox of his logic. Following Mackie’s logic, God is omnipotent, is it plausible if we supposing God cannot create creatures that can choose to perform evil only or choose to perform good and evil at the same time? If Mackie argue that, yes God can create creatures who can do anything as he like, but since God is omnibenevolent He would not creat those creatures. This suggest there being a conflict between God’s omnipotent and omnibenevolent, it’s impossible. Furthermore as Plantinga mentioned, Mackie shares the same premise with Leibniz, but his conclusion is contrary to Leibniz. Mackie doesn’t give a reliable argument against Leibniz, now why should we belief Mackie being right and Leibniz being wrong? According Leibniz’s Best of All-Possible Worlds Arguments, God is omnipotent so he can create any possible worlds, meanwhile being omnibenevolent He must have chosen to create the best world he could, the actual world is the best world. Though there are many difficulties in Leibniz’s argument, at least Lebniz provides us a complete argument, it’s not proper to neglect Leibniz’s work.
we have disscussed two kinds of defenses on evil above, now let us turn to another question: the limitation of logic arguments. Perhapes we can provid some sound arguments on the issue, but are those enough? Exactly not. The God we get from logic arguments is the one in the sense of philosophy , in this sense God is looked as a carryer of rational thinking, He do not live in our mind. Logic arguments stopped at personal experence, which K.J.Clark called the existential problem of evil. Clark mentions that: “the personal experence or witness of horriffic evil which, while not logically refuting the existence of God, actually has the psychological power to separate one from belief in God.” Clark take C.S.Lewis as an example. In his influencial books Lewis provided successful defends for the rationality of belief in God, but when miserable pain falled to him-his honey wife died of cancer, the man whose arguments had persuaded so many people could not persuade himself. Like Job, he became God’s accuter finally. For Lewis, logic aguments stopped. Though logic arguments meet their limitation at personal experence, it doesn’t means we have had an excuse stopping the efforts of logic explores, no matter you understand those questions in the view of a christian or a philosopher.