Sunday, November 25, 2007

"I hate the outdoors. To me the outdoors is where the car is." - Will Durst

***

"Another motivation for Christian belief in libertarian free will comes from its use in addressing the problem of evil. Thus, Plantinga (1974) has mounted a famous “Free Will Defense” against the logical problem of evil. There are reasons, however, not to follow this route:

(i) The pay-off for appeal to libertarian free will is very slight. At most, appeal to free will as libertarians construe it shows that there is no logical inconsistency between the goodness of God and the (bare) existence of moral evil. This does not begin to allay worries about evil and suffering and the untoward vagaries of life. It does not even touch the problem of natural evil—earthquakes, birth defects and other sources of suffering.

(ii) With or without libertarian free will, evil is and remains inscrutable. On considering great and undeserved suffering, we have to fall back on our faith anyway. We are already saddled with the mystery of the distribution and amount of both moral and physical evil; adding faith that there is no logical inconsistency between the existence of God and the (bare) existence of evil at all does not seem much of a stretch. So, we may as well not compromise the traditional Augustinian view of grace by appeal to a libertarian conception of free will."

--- Why Christians should not be libertarians: an Augustinian challenge, Lynne Rudder Baker


How honest (for once)! Except that it makes you wonder why she wrote the rest of the paper...