Isn't that more of a Physics question now?
Hmmm, philosophy of physics perhaps!
Uhhhh....no. It's still essentially, the study of one man's irrational opinion or the still further irrational criticism of this opinion by someone else, all of which lead to no conclusion because it never made any sense in the first place.
In that case you've contradicted what you said before: the study of
irrational opinion is not the same thing as the study of
nothing. And of course the study of "irrational opinion" can lead to conclusions. You can conclude that the irrational person certainly had this opinion.
Of course, to assume that all the people studied in theology are or were irrational is itself a pretty irrational thing to say, and really little better than playground abuse. It puzzles me when people are unable to tell the difference between
rightness and
rationality (or, conversely,
wrongness and
irrationality). I think Aquinas was wrong, at least when it comes to theology. But I don't think he was irrational because of that - on the contrary, he was one of the most rational people who ever lived. I also think that Dawkins is right on a lot of matters. But I don't think he's rational, at least when it comes to philosophy and religion - on the contrary, he's a fundamentalist as extreme as any Bible-basher.
It's an academic exercise to debate points which have no meaning outside of their academic assumptions. That's why I never get involved in the many moral scenarios posted at CFC. They're all based on totally unrealistic situations. I don't derive any satisfaction, since a conclusion can never be reached as the situation is unlikely to occur.
I take it you're referring to questions like the famous trolley car problem (it's going to kill five people, but you could change its direction and have it kill just one, so what do you do etc). I think you misunderstand the point of these "thought experiments". Of course they could never really happen, at least not with such limited possible outcomes. But the whole point of trying to see what you would do
if they happened is to shed light on the moral values that guide you in the real world. For example, if you said that you would change the course of the trolley car to kill only one person, although that person would have lived had you done nothing, then that suggests that you think it of overriding importance to minimise loss of life even when that necessitates actively causing some loss of life in order to prevent a greater loss elsewhere. And that tells us something about how you think morality works.
It's even clearer in the kind of "thought experiments" that philosophers of mind talk about. For example, we can imagine that someone has a cell in their brain replaced with a tiny artificial device that works in exactly the same way: it receives signals from the cells around it and sends out signals just as the original neuron would have done. Is that person still the same person they were before? Now imagine that, every day, another neuron gets replaced in the same way, until eventually there are no biological cells left in the brain and it is entirely artificial. It still functions in precisely the same way and the person has never felt any change. Are they still the same person? Are they human at all? Suppose that all the cells, when taken away and replaced, were reassembled somewhere else and you now had a functioning human brain in a jar. Would that brain be the original person? Has a new person come into being? Or what? All this is completely impossible, but that's not the point. The answers you give to these questions show how you think about matters such as personal identity and the nature of the mind.
Goes back to my previous point. If you are intent on outarguing illogical premises within their own sphere, for your own satisfaction, go right ahead, but it doesn't gain you anything. The most religious people are so irrational that they care nothing for arguments anyway, and so will not be moved.
I don't know what you mean by "outarguing illogical premises within their own sphere" - that's just a collection of words that don't mean much to me. However, once again, your assumption that the more religious someone is the less rational they are is quite unfounded. Presumably most people would agree that the archbishop of Canterbury is a particularly religious person; yet Rowan Williams is certainly not irrational. On the contrary, he's extremely learned and sensible.
I like the way you think, there. I have a few historical questions about the Free Will Defence in theodicy:
Did it become more popular when the 3-"Omni" characterization of God became official dogma?
Did the "contra-causal" definition of free will also become more popular?
What are the historical origins of the "contra-causal" interpretation of free will?
Thanks.
The notion of contra-causal free will really goes back to Platonism, I think. You can certainly find it in the Middle Platonists, who were writing in around the first and second centuries AD. They were typically engaged in polemics with the Stoics, who were determinists. The Platonists responded that if determinism were true then there would be no morality, since to perform a morally significant action demands the possibility of
not doing it. That's basically the argument in the passage of Justin Martyr that I quoted before, and he lifted it from the pagan Middle Platonists (he was essentially a Christian Middle Platonist).
Now although the Christians usually relied upon this notion of free will in their ethics, it became important in theodicy with Origen - though not as part of the "free will defence" as normally conceived. Origen argued that everything created by God is good. Whence, then, evil? The answer is that it comes from creaturely free will: only a free act can be evil. In fact it is only acts that are evil, properly speaking, not things. However, Origen combined this with a fundamentally Irenaean theodicy, arguing that suffering etc is part of God's plan for the world, which means that creaturely free acts - although free - are part of that plan. That would preclude the use of a full free will defence, since the essence of that defence is that suffering is
not part of God's plan but there's nothing he can (or will) do about it because it's an unfortunate side effect of free will.
Now the free will defence proper really became popular with Augustine. Augustine believed that Adam had contra-causal free will. He could do good or evil as he saw fit. Unfortunately, Adam chose evil. As a result, human beings became corrupted and lost contra-causal free will. They can no longer do good, at least not to any significant degree. We are all driven by "concupiscence" - an overriding tendency to sin. Now, because of Christ, concupiscence can be overcome, and in the next life, we will be free of it completely. In fact, in the next life, we will still not have contra-causal free will, but our determination will be reversed: we will be unable to sin at all. And Augustine thinks that that is actually a greater freedom than the original freedom to do good or evil was. To put it another way, Adam was free
to sin; in the next life, we will be free
from sin.
There are a couple of things that are important to recognise about the free will defence in history, though, and these are not often appreciated. In fact I've never seen them in any book and only worked them out myself after a long time.
First, Augustine argued that the existence of sin
in the first place was due to the misuse of creaturely (contra-causal) free will. That is, Adam chose to sin, thereby messing everything up. However, Augustine denied that people
now have (contra-causal) free will. This is quite different from the most common modern form of the free will defence, which argues that
every evil act comes from the misuse of creaturely (contra-causal) free will. In other words, the modern proponent of the free will defence is typically committed to the claim that we now have (or may have) contra-causal free will; Augustine actively denied that we do.
Second, and more important, the free will defence in its modern form was rarely used until modern times. You don't find it in medieval theology, for example. In fact, medieval theologians don't seem much bothered by the problem of evil at all. And they
couldn't use the modern form of the free will defence at all, because it would conflict with their understanding of divine grace. To clarify, the modern form of the free will defence goes something like this:
(1) We have contra-causal free will.
(2) The actions of a being with contra-causal free will are inherently unpredictable or at any rate can't be interfered with if that being is to retain contra-causal free will.
(3) God cannot predict (or interfere with) our actions. (From 1 and 2.)
(4) All suffering is directly or indirectly caused by us (or by other beings with contra-causal free will).
(5) God cannot predict (or interfere with) the occurrence of suffering. (From 3 and 4.)
(6) Anything that God cannot predict (or interfere with), God cannot prevent.
(7) God cannot prevent suffering. (From 5 and 6.)
(8) Anything God cannot prevent, God is not responsible for.
(9) God is not responsible for suffering. (From 7 and 8.)
Or something like that. You might replace the "cannot"s with "will not", perhaps, but it makes little difference.
Now the problem is that premise (3) is a direct contradiction of the traditional understanding of grace. According to this, although creaturely acts are indeed free, they are nevertheless the acts that God wants creatures to perform. You see, after Augustine defeated Pelagius theologically, it was the orthodox belief that we do not save ourselves: God saves us by grace, and this grace is internal, not external. That is, God doesn't simply provide the conditions under which we can save ourselves and then leave it up to us (as Pelagius believed) - he actually goes into the soul, as it were, and does something to it. So are we simply puppets in the hands of God? No, because we still have free will nevertheless. It is still necessary for the creature to do something in response to God's grace, because God's grace (in some form) is bestowed upon everyone, yet not everyone is saved (according to Augustine). There is therefore some kind of cooperation which the creature has to do in order to be saved.
This means that the creature must do something, but it must still be what God intended the creature to do. If salvation were entirely determined by the creature's response then you'd have something akin to Pelagianism. But if God determined the creature's response then you'd have strict predestination, which the Catholic Church has always rejected. Thus, here you have what must be a free creaturely act which is nevertheless predicted and willed by God.
To put it a bit more broadly, Christians also traditionally believe in providence, the notion that God is actively guiding what happens. Now if you reject predestination then you must reject the notion that God actually causes everything to happen, but you can still believe that what happens is what God wants to happen, and this is the view of the Catholic Church. And in fact most Christians today seem to believe that too. If something good happens to them, they are grateful to God (if they remember to be). This is the case even if the good thing is the result of someone else's free decision, for example if they get a job that they wanted. If the employer has contra-causal free will then the decision to hire was entirely their own, but the Christian still sees God's hand in it. In other words, what happens is what God wants to happen, even when it is the result of the exercise of contra-causal free will. And if that is so, then God clearly can predict free acts - indeed, more, he can decide which free acts are going to be performed, without affecting their freedom. Leibniz talked about God surveying all the possible universes that he might create - each one containing many free acts, all of which God knows and comprehends - and then God selects the possible universe that is best and actualises it. And that is the real universe. On this view (which is basically Molinism), God knows every free choice made by every free creature before he even creates them. He still doesn't determine what their free choices will be; he only determines which free creatures are going to exist, in the full knowledge of what they are going to do. Leibniz didn't believe in contra-causal free will - he was a compatibilist - but that doesn't really make much difference to the account.
Now on all this - which, again, is the traditional faith of the church - the free will argument in the form given above is impossible. Because premise (2), which is the key premise of the argument, is false. And that means that someone who accepts the traditional belief in providence cannot use the free will argument to explain evil. The funny thing is that many of them still try.
I'm not sure if there's any specifiable time when the "three-omni" view of God became "official dogma"; something like it was common currency among Middle Platonists in the patristic period so the Christians picked it up without too much difficulty. I suppose Origen was really the major figure in developing it (or something like it) in a Christian context, but once again Augustine would have been the major figure in making it standard. It was those two, for example, who insisted that God is outside time, a notion that would have been foreign to earlier theologians such as Justin and even Tertullian. The notion of the timelessness of God was developed at roughly the same time by Origen and the first Neoplatonists, but it became central to mainstream Christianity thanks to the efforts of Athanasius (who lived after Origen but before Augustine). In response to the Arians, who (like Justin and Tertullian) insisted that there was a moment in time when the Father produced the Son, Athanasius used Origen's idea of an eternal generation of the Son to show that this needn't be the case. With the theological defeat of most of the Arians by the end of the fourth century, this became the standard view.
