This is precisely what I deny in (1). I say that being controlled by someone constitutes being un-free. I’m not going to argue for this premise, but I think it is plausible, and at the very least, acceptable, even if you do not find it compelling.
The funny thing is that I do agree with you. I just don’t agree that bringing about the specific world where the agent simply
chooses to act in a certain way is a “control” of any kind.
It makes no difference. Remember that in your example God knows exactly what someone would do in a given situation. In the same way, I know exactly what my dog will do in a given situation.
It makes all the difference. The dog is unable to reason, and unable to act against its instinct.
This is my argument: If God intentionally brings about a world where an agent will only act exactly as God wants him to, the agent is being controlled, and there is no significantly free agent. So I’m saying that God cannot bring it about that no creature do no moral wrong, if there is to be significantly free will, which I believe is what the Free Will Defense is all about?
Here is Planinga’s argument:
“A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.”
First, the opening sentence is a bare assertion. I would argue that there is nothing valuable about unlimited freedom (which we don’t have anyway!), or to be more precise, I would say that a well designed system without any way to go awry is infinitely better than a system which may go wrong. But this would be a different conversation.
The rest hinges upon the idea that “
intentionally creating a world where the agent will freely act in some manner negates the agent’s freedom”. And that is what makes no sense. Besides, the “unintentional” creation is an oxymoron. How can a “creative” action be “unintentional”? But Plantinga’s
major error lies in the assumption that the
possibility to act “wrongly” will logically ential that “wrong actions” will
actually happen.
And that is why I introduced the one agent, one decision scenario, because it is obvious that the agent is not compelled in any way to act as he is “supposed” to act. This is why I made the father/child/playground scenario, and you agreed that the child is free to choose whichever implement he wants to choose. He has significant freedom.
But it can be argued even further. Suppose that God “created” a “random, unintended” world, where the agent makes one decision, and it
just happens to be a morally good decision. At that moment God terminates the experiment. There you had a world where there was free will and no morally incorrect actions. This simple scenario refutes Plantinga’s argument. If you say that in this world the first agent, who is confronted by the first moral dilemma
logically and necessarily must choose incorrectly, then you
really denied free will for the agent.
Just for the fun of it, here comes the final analysis.
We do not put any limitation on the number of the agents, nor on the number of morally significant decisions. They both can be as large as you wish. Say, there are exactly “N” morally significant decisions to be made. Therefore, there will be exactly 2^N (two to the power of N) possible worlds. In each possible world, there are “n” morally good decisions, and there are “2^N - n” morally incorrect decisions, where n = 0, 1, 2, …, 2^N.
All of these worlds are possible, and no other worlds are. God, if he wants to create at all,
must choose one of them. According to your analysis, God cannot choose any one of them, since actually making a deliberate choice, God would render all the decisions “predestined” (and this is what I deny). This means that God cannot create anything - as long as he is “intentional” about it. He may be able to create some random world, if he “closes his eyes” and picks one at random (question: how could God be random about his own choices?). But even in this case, there is one possible world, where n = 2^N (that is each decision just happens to be the morally correct one). So God
may get lucky and select one world without morally incorrect decisions and
without intending it. As soon as it happens, and it is bound to happen, God has the “intended” world, without intending it.
The trouble for Plantinga is simple. He is no mathematician, probably never heard of the binomial theorem, and did not think about its ramifications.
There is one more possible objection. You may argue that among all those huge number of decisions, there
might be some interrelations, and the result of one morally right decision will make it impossible that another decision also be resolved in a morally right fashion. This is also impossible, if there is significant free will.
