Saturday, July 4, 2009

Essential Goodness and Freedom

There seems to be a tension between the essential properties of God and the Free Will Defense. After all, if God is perfectly good, then it seems that there are some states of affairs that God is not free to actualize, but other beings are free to actualize. Take, for example, torturing someone for a thousand years without a reason. While it seems possible for humans to actualize such a state of affairs, it does not seem possible for God to actualize such a state of affairs - for in actualizing such a state of affairs, God would fail to be perfectly good.

But if God, a perfectly good being, cannot actualize states of affairs that are incompatible with perfect goodness, then what is so good about free will? On the one hand, if we say free will is a great good, then we admit that God lacks a great-making property - that is, the ability to actualize states of affairs that are incompatible with perfect goodness. But if we say that God's freedom is better than free will, on the other hand, then it's hard to see how free will justifies the existence of evil, for God had a clearly better option: create essentially good free creatures that never do evil. Thus, there is a dilemma:
(1) Either God is free to actualize states of affairs that are incompatible with perfect goodness or he is not.

(2) If God is free to actualize states of affairs that are incompatible with perfect goodness, then God is not essentially good.

(3) If God is not, then God lacks a great-making property. So:

(4) God is not essentially good, or God lacks a great-making property.
Now one might object to (3) and argue that God's freedom is great. But in this case, (3) can be revised:
(3") If God is not, then free will is not as good as God-freedom and God should have actualized a world in which creatures have God-freedom.
Now one might object to (2) by saying that God never acts in a way that is incompatible with his perfect goodness, but he could if he so willed. But this does not seem to solve the problem. For in saying that God is essentially good, the theist seems to affirm:
(G) God is perfectly good in all possible worlds.
And in saying that God could act contrary to his perfect goodness the objector seems to imply:
(P) There is a possible world in which God behaves in a way that is incompatible with his perfect goodness.
But (G) and (P) are contradictory: they cannot both be true. For if God is perfectly good, then there is no possible world in which he behaves in a way that is incompatible with his perfect goodness; and yet (P) affirms the opposite.

Is there a way to fix this from a Molinist perspective? That is, could it be that God does not behave contrary to his perfect goodness in any possible world, and yet there is a counterfactual of divine freedom that is true, such that if it is true, God could behave contrary to his perfect goodness? For example:
(C) If God were in circumstances C, God would freely torture a rabbit for a thousand years without a reason.
This could be true while at the same time there is no possible world in which God freely tortures a rabbit for a thousand years without a reason. What would the circumstances C be, then? I don't know. Could there be any circumstances under which God would freely torture a rabbit for a thousand years without a reason? (Maybe circumstances in which God is not perfectly good - which seems impossible.) Also, under what type of knowledge would such a counterfactual fall - God's middle knowledge or God's free knowledge? I'm not sure.


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