I’ve finally started after several stumbles. What’s different, this time, is that history and background is provided, and a vivid picture is painted behind the raw principles that I have to imbibe from today till mid-October this year.
Fancy that, it appears I need relational content/context to be able to have any interest in whatever I’m studying. A cool discovery, this… for me, at least.
In other news, I’ve decided that OpenOffice just isn’t working as well as I thought it would have. Besides adapting to an alien workspace (something I don’t like), I spent an hour or two a few days back just trying to figure out how the damn thing works. Now I can’t be bothered anymore, and have transcribed my new set of notes onto MS Word. So much for open source ra ra-ing.
I saw an interesting paper over at Online Papers in Philosophy(OPP) taking to task Plantinga’s celebrated Free Will defense viz. the Problem of Evil (i.e. God’s omnibenevolence is contradictory to His allowing evil in the world). Said article is here.
It’s a short PDF doc, restating Mackie’s arguments against Plantinga’s Free Will defense, quite good. To summarize, God’s omniscience allows him to know the a, actions of an agent p with respect to situation c for all possible worlds. However, there is a possible world in which p does not commit a. And if such a world exist where p does not commit the morally evil act a, then God is either free to create such a world or not. If he doesn’t, then the Problem of Evil remains.
I don’t think I’ve seen the defense before, but that’s not saying much; I can’t remember much of anything, these days.
