The Free Will Defense Really is Irrelevant

The Free Will Defense (FWD) makes two substantial claims: First, that God, being omni-benevolent, must grant humans freedom of the will.  [This can be argued for by, e.g., showing that a world in which humans have free will is better, all things considered, than one in which they don’t since it allows for the possibility of genuine moral goodness (this is, roughly, Plantinga’s take).]  Second, having granted us free will, God has necessarily allowed the possibility of moral evil (that is, evil that results from the choices of free agents).  The possibility of moral evil is thus a necessary consequence of the granting of free will (which, if we follow Plantinga, is necessary for the possibility or moral goodness).  All that is required is the assumption that some people will sometimes choose to bring about bad consequences and we have made God’s existence (and omni-benevolence) consistent with the actual presence of moral evil.

Mackie famously took issue with this last additional assumption, claiming that an omnipotent God could create free beings who are so-constituted that they always choose the good.  This, in turn, leads to the wonderful realm of trans-world depravity (in other words, right into Plantinga’s wheelhouse).  But there is an objection to the FWD that is more to the point and much easier to articulate and defend.

In 1978 Stepehn Boer published an article entitled “The Irrelevance of the Free Will Defense” in which he argued that (in case you couldn’t have guessed), the Free Will Defense is irrelevant to the problem of evil.  His point was that God need not interfere with anyone’s free choices in order to prevent any evil that may result from such choices.  Thus, suppose that Jones wants to kill his business rival Smith.  Jones drives to Smith’s house late one evening, breaks in, and finds Jones asleep in his bedroom.  Jones pulls out his Walther PPK and fires.  God need not interfere with any of Jones’ freely made choices in order to prevent Smith’s death.  He need only intervene, at the last moment, to deflect the bullet so that it does not kill Smith. We can extrapolate this pattern of intervention to cover most, if not all, cases in which a person chooses to bring about harm; it seems likely that in most cases God can find some way to prevent the harm without violating anyone’s free will.

In my next post I will discuss Frank Dilley’s response to Boer’s argument.

What is Ultimate Reality?

I’ve been reading quite a bit of philosophy of religion (Hicks, Cottingham, Rowe, Craig, & more) as well as some what you might call ‘spiritual literature’ (Alan Watts, Frankl, an interesting new book by Michael Dowd) and I find that such writers are found of the term ‘ultimate reality.’  So I have been wondering what this term means.  I have tried to come up with a few different accounts and list them below:

I.  Ultimate reality as a person

A monotheistic personal God who created and sustains the universe.

II.  Ultimate reality as fundamental physical particles

Reductive materialism

III.  Ultimate reality as the unknowable source of the universe/existence

This seems to be the position that Dowd is articulating in Thank God for Darwin.  I would describe it as materialism plus the claim/observation that the heart of reality is an ultimate mystery (since scientific explanations must ultimately bottom out in some basic irreducible brute fact).

People such as Dowd and Alan Watts, each of whom defends something like position III, seem to want to draw some deep spiritual conclusion from the fundamentally mysterious nature of existence (whereas the version of materialism that they disagree with, supposedly entials that there are no deep spiritual truths; no ultimate meaning or purpose).

I think that Dowd (and Watts before him) offer an intriguiging alternative to the theist/atheist dichotmy that is worth exploring with a bit more philosophical rigor.

Conceivability and Personal Identity

I was pondering the role of conceivability in metaphysical investigations recently and I produced the following:

I ask myself, “What am I?  Am I my body?”  And I think that to answer this it is perfectly reasonable to imagine that my body undergoes various changes up to and including a complete, molecule-for-molecule replacement and then ask myself certain questions about these imagined scenarios.  What if part of my body, my arm, were removed and attached to another body; Who would be me?  What if my brain were removed and placed in another person’s skull; Where would I be?

But why let my imagination be a guide here?  Isn’t it possible, for all I know, that if my brain were removed, and a new one were placed in my skull, that I would still exist here, in this body, with this new brain?

But surely there are some things that, by merely imagining, we can rule out.  Suppose someone became convinced that he was a rock on Mt. McKinley.  Not just any rock, but a specific one, one that he had held himself just last summer on a hiking trip through Denali National Park.  Is it conceivable that Bob might really be the rock?  Well, we might examine him as follows,
“You say that you are this rock?”
“Yes”
“But you admit that the rock does not have eyes or ears or any other sense organ?”
“No, that I do not admit.  Identity is transitive. Since I have ears and eyes, and I am a rock, it follows that the rock has ears and eyes.”
“But if I kick this rock, you will not feel pain.”
“True.”
“And tomorrow you will leave Alaska and travel back to your home in California.”
“Yes, that’s the plan.”
“And yet the rock will stay here?”
“Clearly, since I am the rock, the rock will also travel.”
“But you will not carry this rock in your suitcase?”
“No.”
“And if I stay here and come back to this spot, next week, I will see this rock.”
“Yes”
“Even though you are thousands of miles away?”
“No.  I am the rock and thus I will be here, but my body will be in California.  And since my sense organs are attached to this body, I can see, hear, and feel, where this body goes. And so, if you come here next week, you will see me, but, since my eyes will be in California, I will not see you.”
“You are some kind of composite organism, then. A rockperson, so to speak?”
“The same is true with respect to what you believe yourself to be:  You claim to be a complex organism made up of parts; a head, and a torso, and arms, and legs, and a heart, etc.  And you believe that some of these things are not essential to your identity.  If you remove your heart, and replace it with an artificial one, you would still exist.  That is what you believe, is it not? You do not take yourself to be identical to your own heart and you do not believe that your arms are essential to your own existence.  You are a composite being, albeit one that your language has a convenient name for.”
“But all of my parts are attached, all are present in one spatial location.”
“If you wish to limit your own conception of yourself, that is none of my concern.  I exist as a rock who has a body which, because of its sensory and motor functions, can explore the world, while I remain here, safe.”
“And what happens to you when your body dies?”
“Then I cease to have a body, and I cannot see or hear or move anything of my own volition.  But I still exist. And I can hope that someday I will get a new body.”
“And what would happen to you if I were to destroy this rock; if I pulverize it into dust?”
“If you destroy the rock, you destroy the person.  Pulverize the rock, and I cease to exist.”

We can appeal to Bob’s sense of imagination and ask him to imagine that the rock is destroyed and that, nonetheless he still exists; but this will not convince him.

I am at least as convinced that I am my brain as Bob is that he is the rock.  I am convinced that if my brain is destroyed, then I am gone, just as Bob is convinced that if the rock is pulverized, he is gone.  At least one of us is wrong.  But what role does conceivability play here?  Sure, I can conceive that I am not a brain, but that no more makes it so than does the fact that I can conceive that I am a rock make it the case that I am a rock.: