It has been argued that there might be no best of all possible worlds. Alvin Plantinga finds it suspect in God, Freedom, and Evil, and I believe argues against it elsewhere. I am only vaguely aware of the argument at this point, so the following should be taken as my starting point prior to investigation.
The argument that there might be no best of all possible worlds seems to go as follows. Suppose you have some possible world. It has various properties in virtue of which it is a world of such-and-such goodness. If it had more of this sort of property, called "world-great-making properties," it would be a better world. But there seems to be no reason to suppose that we could not add some of these world-great-making properties on to a world ad infinitum, and thus there would be no cap to greatness of worlds.
The examples of world-great-making properties tend to be physical things like happy people and beautiful beaches. Other examples are also possible, such as good deeds or magnificent accomplishments. Where I seem to disagree with those who hold that there may be no best of all possible worlds is that I find the idea that we could keep on adding world-great-making properties on ad infinitum without consequence.
Take the example of possession of beautiful beaches. Suppose that a world is better the more beautiful beaches it has. In that case, we would, all else being equal, want as many beautiful beaches as we could. Not all else would be equal, however, because the world is one where beaches take up space and physics is set up in such a way that one cannot just keep enlarging the earth. Even if one did, perhaps at some size it would be a world-ungreat-making property in virtue of making it take so long for civilizations to communicate with each other.
One might respond that God could have altered the laws of physics to accommodate the scale of the planet and thus the beaches. This is not obvious, however. Physics is rather elegantly set up. This elegance is quite likely a world-great-making property. It is not at all obvious what options God had for logically consistent, life enabling physics systems. Perhaps others were too clunky, or had other problematic side effects.
A similar response can be given to the case of good deeds. Given that time does not end, in fact, if good deeds are a world-great-making property, then this world has an infinite quantity of greatness, since we will do an infinite number of good deeds after the resurrection. Nevertheless, it is plausible that, in actualizing some world, God might bracket that phase of each world. What we seem to be interested in is, rather, whether this is the best of all possible world segments from creation up to, but not including, heaven.
Each good deed takes some amount of time. Actually reaching heaven seems to be a world-great-making property, and the supposition that God might bracket heaven out of the best-world equation relies on heaven actually occurring in each possible world under consideration. So one could not have an infinite number of good deeds, and one might only be able to fit so many before the amount of time added counteracted the greatness added to the world.
Just as world-great-making properties might not be worth adding because of world-ungreat-making properties which they require, some world-ungreat-making properties might be mitigated or redeemed by world-great-making properties which they enable. Our understanding of how various events interact and the values of various world-great- and world-ungreat-making properties makes it quite difficult to tell preecisely how great of a world we have ended up with. As a case in point, the death of Jesus Christ occurring is a very large world-ungreat-making property. However, the resurrection is a much greater world-great-making property which the disciples did not anticipate.
My argument is not a knock-down argument, of course, but neither is the one I am responding to. What I have read of Plantinga seems to say little more than that it is not obvious that one could not keep increasing greatness by adding various items or states of affairs. I am responding that it is not obvious that one could do so. It may well come down to a clash of intuitions.
No comments:
Post a Comment