The Complaint Department Is Closed #6

My name is William Occam and John has kindly allowed me to contribute an article to his blog in support of his ongoing battle against the website, “godisimaginary.com.” Of course, my views are not necessarily John’s, and vice versa. We probably disagree about a great many things, since I am a somewhat liberal Christian and he a conservative. Nevertheless, we share a commitment to the truth of biblical Christianity. I will defend that worldview by refuting “Proof #6” from GII.
 
Proof number 6: Ponder God’s Plan 

 
The first argument is actually two closely related arguments. The proof has been condensed into the logical syllogism as follows.  We will refute them one at a time.
 
(1) Everything that happens is part of God’s plan, if God exists. Support: Christian inspirational literature including, primarily, Rick Warren; and perhaps some anecdotal evidence from layman Christians.
(2) So, everything bad that happens is part of God’s plan, if God exists. For example, abortions, Hitler’s atrocities, disease, and death would all be part of God’s plan.
(3) But it is impossible for something bad to be part of God’s plan.
(4) Therefore, God does not exist.
 
It should be obvious that we do not have enough evidence to warrant our accepting (1). Essentially, GII is asking us to take Rick Warren’s word for it that unless God planned out every event that occurs in the universe, God cannot possibly exist. It is asking us to affirm this proposition in the absence of rational proofs, just because Rick Warren claims that it is true. I’m sure Rick Warren is very intelligent, but a reasonable person will not be willing to take his word that something so important is the case. (1) turns out to rest on an illegitimate appeal to authority.
 
Premise (3) of the first argument says that it is impossible for something bad to be part of God’s plan. But this is merely a way of putting the argument from evil! The Christian is on familiar, comfortable ground; perhaps he reaches for his copy of Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga, or searches the web for sites like Stand to Reason which has many articles answering the problem of evil. The problem with the argument from evil, as everyone knows, is that it is vulnerable to the free will defense. God cannot do logically impossible things, and it could have been logically impossible to create a world with free beings in which there was no evil. Consequently, there is no reason to think that God’s plan cannot involve any evil, and GII’s first argument fails on a second count.
 
The first argument doubly dispatched, let’s move on to GII’s second argument which is also summarized in a logical syllogism.
 
The second argument:
 
(1) Everything that happens is part of God’s plan, if God exists. Support: Christian inspirational literature including, primarily, Rick Warren; and perhaps some anecdotal evidence from layman Christians.
(2) If everything that happens is part of God’s plan, then there is no free will.
(3) But there is free will. Support: We believe that morality exists, and the existence of morality is impossible without free will; and we believe that we can decide things like who we will marry.
(4) Therefore, God does not exist.
 
 
Premise (1) of this argument is the same as premise (1) of the first argument, so it is prone to the objection we raised before, and we will not discuss it a second time.
 
Premise (2) of the second argument is interesting. It seems to rest on a sort of equivocation between the sense of “plan” which Rick Warren accepts and the sense of “plan” that implies that everything is determined. Let me explain.
 
Earlier, we saw that Warren is not a legitimate authority to appeal to for this argument. But even if Rick Warren is a legitimate authority to appeal to, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this argument. GII does not show that Warren agrees with (1) in the sense necessary for premise (2) of the second argument to be true. In order for the second argument to work, you see, (1) must be true in a very specific sense. It must employ a sense of the word “plan” that is conceptually close to “determine.” (1) must say, in effect, that if God exists, then God determines us to act however we act. Otherwise, (2) is not necessarily true. GII will, then, need to show that Warren supports a sense of (1) sufficient to make (2) true. How can GII do that?
 
GII provides quotes from Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life in support of its claim that Rick Warren would affirm (1) in the sense necessary for (2) to be true, but every quote that GII provides is consistent with the interpretation that Rick Warren only thinks God plans for us to act a certain way in the sense of wanting us to act a certain way, not that God plans for us to act a certain way in the sense that God determines us to act in a certain way. In other words, Warren may believe that God wants us to act one way, and plans for us to act that way, without taking steps to determine that we will act that way.
 
This libertarian interpretation of Warren turns out to be more plausible than the deterministic interpretation of Warren: Given that Rick Warren is writing a book on how to improve one’s life, he probably doesn’t think we’re determined. GII drops the distinction between planning and determining in its interpretation of Warren; as a result, it advances an implausible interpretation of Warren, and the entire foundation of the second argument of “proof #6” collapses, because Warren provides the main evidence for (1).
 
Ultimately, it seems like we have to reject premise (2), since nobody can solve the problem of free will. The problem of free will might be formulated like this. The universe in general, apart from man, is obviously deterministic. Man is the one exception to this rule, the one entity which possesses free will. Free will seems impossible, since even quantum physics leaves us with determinism at the macro level, but free will exists. Free will, then, is a problem for every worldview. GII has simply stumbled onto a version of the problem which applies to theists. GII has no right to use this as a reason to reject theism until a solution to the problem of free will that works within an atheistic worldview materializes. There is little merit to either of the arguments that constitute “Proof #6,” apart from logical validity, which in itself does not constitute a valid argument since one or more of the premises as we have seen is false. I conclude that “Proof #6” is no proof at all.
 
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William Occam is a contributor to Truth in Religion & Politics. Please visit Occam’s Blog for more articles by William.