god, freedom, and evil - alvin plantinga
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PAGE 18 IS MISSING. HERE IS THE MISSING TEXT:18 pressed by Mackie's argument and won't find any difficulty in the contradiction set A is alleged to contain. This view you is not very popular, however, and for good reason; it is quite incoherent. What the theist typically means when he says that God is omnipotent is not that there are no limits to God's power, but at most that there are no non logical limits to what He can do; and given this qualification, it is perhaps initially plausible to suppose that (20) is necessarily true.But what about (19), the proposition that every good thing eliminates every evil state of affairs that it can eliminate? Is that necessarily true? Is it true at all? Suppose, first of all, that your friend Paul unwisely goes for a drive on a wintry day and runs out of gas on a deserted road. The temperature get to -10°, and a miserably cold wind comes up. You are sitting comfortably at home (twenty-five miles from Paul) roasting chestnuts in a roaring blaze. Your car is in the garage; in the trunk there is the full 5 gallon can of gasoline always keep for emergencies. Paul discomfort and danger are certainly an evil, and one which you could eliminate. You don't do so. But presumably you don't thereby forfeit your claim to being a "good things"- you simply didn't know of Paul's plight. And so (19) does not appear to be necessary. It says that every good thing has a certain property- the property of eliminating every evil that it can. And if the case I described is possible- a good person's failing through ignorance to eliminate a certain evil he can eliminate- then (19) is by no means necessarily true.But perhaps Mackie could sensibly claim that if you didn't know about Paul's plight, then in fact you were , at the time in question, able to eliminate the evil in question; and perhaps he'd be right. In any event he could revise 19 to take into account the kind of case I mentioned.19 a every good thing always eliminates every evil that it knows about and can eliminate., you'll notice, is not a formally contradictory set- to get a formal contradiction we must add a proposition specifying that God knows about every evil state of affairs. But most theists do.TRANSCRIPT
