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A new solution to an old problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

George B. Wall
George B. Wall
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Lamar University, Texas
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Extract

Although a personal god of mixed moral character is logically possible, no personal god that has been represented as less than wholly good has gained more than a strictly local appeal. The Judaeo-Christian god is no exception. The god is represented as merciful, kind, longsuffering, forgiving, loving - in a word, wholly good. Of course, representing a god as wholly good is one thing; providing a convincing defence of his goodness is quite another. Indeed, many would contend that of all the defences provided within the Judaeo-Christian system, the defence of the goodness of God is the least convincing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 1979 , pp. 511 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

page 512 note 1 See my article, ‘Heaven and a Wholly Good God’, The Personalist, LVII1 (1977), 352–7Google Scholar. Some authors maintain either that the idea of a heavenly existence is logically impossible or unintelligible, or that it is not an idea of an existence any better than our earthly existence. I address both the points in an article to be published in Sophia, ‘Other Worlds and the Comparison of Value’.

page 513 note 1 I am viewing determinism here essentially along the lines outlined by Berofsky. See Berofsky, Bernard, Determinism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 268–9.Google Scholar

page 513 note 2 The considerations which move me may be briefly put as follows. If we view the future as non-existent (as not having occurred) and God as temporal, as not now existing in the future, then God cannot know an indeterminate future. To say otherwise would be to say that God could infallibly predict the future; but by definition an indeterminate future cannot be infallibly predicted. If we deny God's temporality, saying that the whole process of history is atemporally before God, we say something which is incoherent. (See, for example, Penelhum, Terence, Religion and Rationality, New York, Random House, 1971, pp. 151–4 and chap. 21Google Scholar; and Pike's, Nelson ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’, Phil. Rev. LXXIV (1965), 27–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as his God and Timelessness, London, Schocken, 1970Google Scholar.) If we deny the non-existence of the future, we say something equally incoherent. (See Schlesinger, George, Religion and Scientific Method, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1977, pp. 112–13.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 516 note 1 Landé, Alfred, From Dualism to Unity in Quantum Physics (Cambridge: University Press, 1960), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

page 516 note 2 For a criticism of the notion that the denial of determinism requires the acceptance of sheer randomness see Foot, Philippa, ‘Free Will as Involving Determinism’, Phil. Rev. LXIV (1957), 439–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 516 note 3 See Schlesinger, , op. cit. pp. 104–12.Google Scholar

page 517 note 1 See Plantinga, Alvin, God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974), pp. 45–9.Google Scholar

page 518 note 1 If our thinking here includes creatures which God could have created but did not, then God's foreknowledge would require what has been called middle knowledge, a form of knowledge about which I have serious doubts. See Adams, Robert Merrihew, ‘Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil’, Amer. Phil. Quart. XIV (1977), 109–17.Google Scholar

page 529 note 1 Plantinga, , op. cit. pp. 27–8.Google Scholar

page 530 note 1 Ibid. p. 57.