We meet the problem of transworld depravity in Plantinga's God, Possible Worlds and the Problem of Evil selected for us by Professor Mahon. We discussed this work and a Nagel work for our first meeting. Previously, I have played the role of secretary for our little exercise in thought, but in this entry I hope to solve the problem of transworld depravity or at the very least gain more clarity with respect to the scope and severity of the problem.
Plantinga's Transworld Depravity argument is the following:
A person P suffers from transworld depravity iff for every world W in which P is significantly free and always does what is right, there is a state of affairs T and an action A such that
(1) God strongly actualizes T in W and T includes every state of affairs God strongly actualizes in W,
(2) A is morally significant for P in W,
and
(3) If God had strongly actualized T, P would have gone wrong with respect to A.
"What is important about transworld depravity is that, if a person suffers from it, then it wasn't within God's power to acualize any world in which that person is significantly free but does no wrong - that is, a world in which he produces moral good but no moral evil." (Plantinga, "Which Worlds Could God Have Created," 550).
Why is it necessary that God have anything whatever to do with his creations. Couldn't it be the case that God, and omnipotent omniscient God of the kind Plantinga describes, could create a world in which he is not a part. For instance, if I make a sandwich I am not, in any way, a part of my sandwich. It is entirely my creation, but I am not necessary for its existence once created. It's essence, once created, has nothing to do with me. The actual world and any possible world does not require the existence of God in that world in order for God to still exist. God could exist independent of any and all possible worlds. Returning to the problem of transworld depravity, then, it seems it is not actually a problem if we grant that God could exist independent of any and all of his creations.
My argument places the existence of God in question, but I am not concerned with arguing for or against the existence of God. Stictly speaking, I sought to argue that the problem of transworld depravity is not, in fact, a problem at all in any possible world.
Posted by hourenk at May 6, 2005 06:54 PMIn a nutshell, if Transworld depravity exists then God could not have created world where people are "significantly" free and there is no moral evil.
My problem with the entire Plantinga piece is his idea of freedom/free will. What does it mean to be significantly free? that seems to entail a greater degree as well as a lesser degree to which we can be free. Alot of our freedom comes from knowledge, our realization of freedom also has its roots stemming from that.
The main problem I have his his conception of free will. Why can God not have created a world in which our knowledge of ourselves was restricted so that we only did "good" things but felt we were free agents? If we were born like that, we would 1. consider ourselves free 2. be good.
seems a bit too simple, but making a qualitative judgement on our free will from this world neglets the possible variations that one could have in free will... given that we actually have free will and not awareness of will...
Posted by: Pranab at May 7, 2005 01:50 PMAlso I relalize that Plantinga is playing to a selective audience that:
1. Believes in the existence of God
2. Believes in a property ridden(the omnis) conception of god
3. Believes that God is logical and logic is more powerful than God.
4. God would like us to understand why he is doing what he is doing.
Now, it is my belief that if philosophy is to cover the entire specturm to human existence and deal with life as such, it has to be able to deal with the problem besseching all men. Of the five assumptions made above (3) would have the least number of supporters in a god believing community. Further the entire notion is based on a western/judeo-christian conception of the almighty and his purposes. It neglects other views of God/the almighty which do not necessitate such a hard clear cut distinction. Given that the properties of God can never be emperically proven, the starting of this argument based on these unprovable yet conceptually restrictive properties makes no attempt to actually understand God. It in essence makes God an essenceless concept.
My main point is then, is it more important to clarify the basics(God, life, love etc), to understand the basic, given that one will probably never ever totally clarify them is it right for us to move on and take statistical groupings of mankinds incilinations towards certain understandings and proceed to rationalize from there? (a concetion with the Meno here)
Essentially Plantingas logic is restricted to a given set number of people. These people will find the argument useful given thier prior organzied set of beliefs. But should not philosophy be philosophy for anyone, anywhere?
Now is philosophy directed to a target audience? it clearly has to do a better job than just showing people the wonders/miseris of life on TV. It certainly has to do more than just come up with arguments (again Meno and Phaedrus conncetions). Is philosophy the questioning or the answering? or inclusive of both? Is the peice by Plantinga a question or an answer?