(F) The disobedient acts of the first human persons ruined all of creation and caused God to be hidden.According to tradition, 'ruined all of creation' explains why the world contains as much pain, suffering, disaster, and mortality as it does. In short, we are told that (F) entails something like the further thesis
(E) The disobedient acts of the first human persons are the reason that the world contains pain, suffering, disaster, and mortality.But we have every empirical reason to reject (E). We know from, e.g., the fossil record that creatures have been suffering and eating each other and dying for hundreds of millions of years prior to the activity of any human persons. So, we know that (E) is false. By modus tollens, (F) must be false too.
Which raises two questions: To what extent does the tradition still endorse (F) and (E)? If, on the other hand, the tradition gave up on (F) and (E), approximately when?
The extent to which 20th century analytic philosophers of religion have, e.g., defended premises and assumptions such that natural evil is a necessary condition for the observed regularities of the natural world, which regularities are themselves in turn necessary for the acquisition and development of moral knowledge in human persons. What's become a commonplace in discussions of the problem of divine hiddenness -- that it is necessary for God to hide in order to protect his creatures from epistemic coercion -- explicitly contradicts (F). Another prominent example might be Plantinga's suggestion that it is possible that each and every human person suffers from transworld depravity, according to which, for every human person, there is no possible world in which that person performs only morally good actions. Insofar as tradition emphasizes that The Fall is a human failure, it may create tension to think that every world that contains human persons was unavoidably bound to be a fallen world.
No comments:
Post a Comment