Theodicy does not justify evils taken singly, only evil taken abstractly.Next, David A. Conway "The Philosophical Problem of Evil." Int J Phil Rel. 24:35-66 (1988):
And the skeptics’ claim is not that (A)2 is necessarily true or that it is contingently true; it is that (A)2 is true.Okay, so if you haven't read much analytic philosophy, you may not understand why that's a zinger.
Also, I've got a little more on Plantinga's treatment of free will, which I criticized as an incidental part of my review of van Inwagen on that subject:
The focus of the discussion, clearly, must be on the compatibilist claim that if an action isn't causally determined with respect to a given person, then it is a matter of mere chance that he performs it... But I find this wholly incredible. God, for example, performs free actions; and surely it is not the case that he is causally constrained to perform the actions he does.This is from Plantinga's "Self-Profile," written for a 1985 anthology dedicated to himself. It is preceded by an admission that his previous responses to critics of his libertarian position on free will weren't so great. I can't say I'm much more impressed by this response.
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