Could God Create a Perfect World?

For the purposes of this article the counter apologist will be known as "CA."Free will defense as "FWD." I will answer one major point in CA's essay but I think it is a point upon which his entire project for the article rests.

In this essay I focus upon the deterministic contradiction CA thinks he has found in the FWD. At the end I will briefly discuss the question in the title.

My goal is to show that Christian responses to the problem of evil while referencing Libertarian Free Will (LFW) are at best ineffectual at answering the problem of evil because LFW does not preclude god creating what I call “heaven world” where any natural number of created beings all freely choose to never sin and always freely choose to love god. Theistic and especially Christian apologists want to deny that god could create such a world, despite it being a logically possible world and god supposedly being able to do anything logically possible by way of his omnipotence.[1]

The upshot being that if God could have created that world then why didn't he? Why did he create this world instead? At this point he introduces the thoughts of 16th-century Spanish Jesuit priest and Roman Catholic theologian Luis de Molina.Molina believed that God knew all counterfactuals. Here is CA's actual example: “Bob will always freely choose X in situation Y”.[2]

this schema, god looks at all logically possible worlds, and then chooses which one to instantiate along with the people who will be in it. Then creation plays out deterministically, where the sum total of situations of the universe god created plays out and each person god created goes through them. The key is that each person makes a “free decision” that god knew they’d pick for every situation they live through.[3]

If Bob always chooses xin Y then God can't make a world in which Bob chooses not X.This is what CA says."What strikes me is exactly how deterministic this libertarian free will ends up being. The idea is that Bob always freely chooses X in situation Y, yet the theist apologist will insist that somehow it is still logically possible that Bob chooses ~X in situation Y."[4]

At this point he thinks he's shown that free will responses to theodicy are contradictory since they insist that Bob still has free will even tough he always only chooses one way."What strikes me is exactly how deterministic this libertarian free will ends up being. The idea is that Bob always freely chooses X in situation Y, yet the theist apologist will insist that somehow it is still logically possible that Bob chooses ~X in situation Y. I believe that this is where a hidden contradiction is being glossed over."[5]

But since Bob is only hypothetical and is predetermined by his place as an example, there is no actual role played by Bob. This example has nothing to do with real world outcomes. Suppose I decree an example that Bob sometimes chooses not X? Does that not reverse the argument? There is no determinism involved in the real world account of this example.

Consider the alternative, what if we insist that “always” is not a rigid designator for the identity of ‘Bob’ because we want to hold that it is logically possible that 'Bob'

freely chooses ~X in situation Y? In this case there is a logically possible world in which ‘Bob’ freely chooses ~X in situation Y and a logically possible world where ‘Bob’ freely chooses X in situation Y. Here it is up to God to choose which world to instantiate.  If this is the case then the schema for Molinism falls apart, because then god can't have foreknowledge of which choice Bob will make in situation Y without god having to choose which world to instantiate, which in turn seems to rob 'Bob' of his supposedly libertarian free will.

So no matter what Bob chooses it's deterministic? That makes no sense because the argument is based upon Bob always doing the same thing.CA's answer to Bob changing is that it's still deterministic. That is clearly foolish because it means the terms of his original example are meaningless.

The CA is beating up on some strain of thought he doesn't like, but I did a piece on free will defense without using any of these categories. CA's argument does not disprove the faith,It's more like the partial failure of some Free Will theodicy.[6]

As for the larger question: can God make a perfect world? My question is how do we know what a perfect world is, from God's perspective. Probably it would involve people who can be in a relationship with God. Of course God can make a perfect world but he can't stockit with people who freely love the good unless he allows them to go through the process of choosing freely. That necessitates free will and that risks people making evil choices.

If God supports free will then for him a world of robots who are created having chosen would not be perfect, their choices would not be their own. God can create a perfect world but he has to first allow us to go through the muck to build one,

NOTES

[1]The Counter Apologist, "The Utter Failure of the Free Will Theodicy," Counter Apologist Blog. (oct 17,2022) https://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-utter-failure-of-free-will-theodicy.html#more. accessed feb15,2023.

Orubted transcrit here: https://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-utter-failure-of-free-will-theodicy.html#more

[2]Ibid

[3]Ibid

[4]Ibid

[5]Ibid

[6]Joseph Hinman,"My Free Will Defense," Metacrock's Blog,(JANUARY 29, 2023) https://metacrock.blogspot.com/2023/01/my-freewill-defense.html" accessed Feb 24 2023