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 f… - Alvin Plantinga

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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.

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About Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American philosopher and holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics.

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Native Name: Alvin Carl Plantinga
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Well, I don't think there are any methodological conflicts either. As for those social conflicts, those aren't conflicts—in my opinion—between science and religion. They're conflicts between Christians and atheists or Christians and secularists: Christians want to do things one way, secularists want to do things another way. But that's not a science/religion conflict at all. You might as well say it's a science/secularism conflict. In each case, each group wants to do science and then use it in a certain way.

Like I say, you gotta have a PhD in engineering just to use your thermostat. And that seems over the top to me. [...] It’s not real nice, you know. If you live in Arizona, you get used to it, but we don’t. And it’s right after a really cold, kind of wet, spring. So we weren’t really up for that at all. [...] You know, there are worse things. I mean, if it were like, say, ten below zero, that would be worse.

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At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because (from the point of view of the model) the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence. We don't know what our happiness consists in, and we don't know how to achieve it. We don't know that we have been created in the image of God, and we don't grasp the significance of such characteristically human phenomena as love, humor, adventure, science, art, music, philosophy, history, and so on.

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