God and the Playpen: On the Feasibility of Morally Better Worlds

Religions

CherylK. Chen¹ 

[1] Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;

关键词: problem of evil;    free will defense;    Alvin Plantinga;    David Lewis;    James Sterba;    Molinism;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rel12040266

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

According to the free will defense, God cannot create a world with free creatures, and hence a world with moral goodness, without allowing for the possibility of evil. David Lewis points out that any free will defense must address the “playpen problem”: why didn’t God allow creatures the freedom required for moral goodness, while intervening to ensure that all evil-doing is victimless? More recently, James Sterba has revived the playpen problem by arguing that an omnipotent and benevolent God would have intervened to prevent significant and especially horrendous evil. I argue that it is possible, at least, that such divine intervention would have backfired, and that any attempt to create a world that is morally better than this one would have resulted in a world that is morally worse. I conclude that the atheologian should instead attack the free will defense at its roots: either by denying that the predetermination of our actions is incompatible with our freely per-forming them, or by denying that the actual world—a world with both moral good and evil—is more valuable than a world without any freedom at all.

【 授权许可】

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