The section on transworld depravity seems like nothing more than a naked assertion to me.

Why? Why would P go wrong?

I would make this same argument, as I have in the past. I do not think the theist has a good answer. However, I wouldn't make this from a compatabilist perspective. Rather, I'm just testing the internal consistency of their argument.

From my experiences, depending on how free will is defined, I either think it doesn't exist, isn't meaningful, or trivial. Everything about us is the result of what we physically are. A philosophical zombie that is physically the same as a human, but has no free will just means that free will is nothing.

Well, for me, this little tidbit destroys pretty much any respect I had for the argument.

It relies on modal logic so is not worth taking seriously.

Modal logic is an extremely contrived concept which maps very poorly to any real issues, and is all but impossible to make sense of, so only makes things less clear than 'ordinary' logic, even if it would take more words to express the same ideas.

Modal logic uses very unintuitive concepts, like making a distinction between 'possible' and 'necessary' where something 'necessary' is excluded from the category addressed by the label 'possible', in contradiction to normal usage. Not only does this greatly increase the difficulty of rigorously applying this 'logic', it is totally 'unnecessary', if the aim is to design a system of logic to make it easier to address concepts not easily mapped into the binary true/false world of simple logic, which is the most obvious reason for extending logic.

The category of concepts that the term 'necessary' would seem to reasonably apply to are quite distinct from what we would apply the idea of 'possible' to. Typically, necessary applies to the conclusions of systems of logic and math, which are 'necessarily' true if the axioms are true.

Whereas 'possible' applies to everything that is not inherently contradictory, including virtually all empirical 'facts' about the Universe.

Modal logic is way too mired in medieval concepts, especially the old idea of 'necessity', which was a favourite in the many Theistic and Theological arguments.

I see modal arguments riddled with category errors, IOW, including in the one proposition elements which really can't meaningfully be related. 

Which is why it continually shows up in these attempts to 'prove' God.

IMHO, the more useful direction to go from binary logic is Bayesian analysis, which explicitly addresses the rigorous treatment of propositions which are not known with 100% certainty.

Platinga is either dishonest or intellectually deluded. He is not worth taking seriously unless you are explicitly studying pathological/deluded mind-sets.

It is saying that in all possible worlds, (that is any number of possible worlds that a god could create) that it is the case that than in any given world that evil would occur.

Freedom in modal forms presupposed prior to the creation of these worlds, so it has no grounding. Plantinga however does not care, because he is not positing this as true, per se, but as possibly true, thereby giving an account for evil.

I don't share Bob's sentiment with modal logic does have its uses. We often times use it without realizing it.

Eh, okay, I sort of misspoke.

His response to natural "evils" is a separate issue from his free will defense. But, nevertheless, his response to natural evils is simply ridiculous. We know why natural disasters happens; it is nothing supernatural. Perhaps he will construct another free will defense for "rebellious spirits" and "fallen angels?"

Honestly, I don't worry about this kind of stuff very much. I do not think that it's as much of a problem of you understanding it as that it is something that just doesn't make any *ucking sense obfuscated with ambiguous terms and, sometimes, philosophical jargon. I admit that I don't really understand it either, but once I've made that conclusion, I get kind of lazy in trying to figure out exactly how and in what ways it doesn't make sense...

Well, maybe I'll go through this step by step and see if my poor brain can handle it.

Okay, so transworld depravity is something you "suffer" from. It's a state? The person only suffers from it if all of the following hold.

Okay, the person is "significantly free" (whatever the hell that means) in a world, and the person always does what's right. There is also an action A. There is a maximal world segment S' (what the hell does that mean?).

Okay, this maximal world segment has actions that are morally significant for the person.

The people are free to perform that action or not.

Okay, I think this is important. S' is included in W. So, I believe we can think of S' as a subset of W. S' is a part of W. There are A's in S' that morally significant for P's, and the P's have free will. There we go. 

Okay, S' includes neither P's performing A nor P's refraining from performing A.............wtf? Okay, so these people neither perform A nor not perform A?...Um, doesn't that violate the law of excluded middle? I'm confused.

I can't figure out how this conclusion was reached at all.

Edit: Ah, no wait, this isn't a conclusion. This is also a condition for someone to suffer from transworld depravity. Okay, so the condition is "If S' were actual, P would go wrong with respect to A.".................what?

"If I were you I would consider modal logic."

This is a modal statement using a counterfactual. I'm not you, but if in world W I was, I would consider modal logic.

Ah, your tag line makes so much more sense now.

Does the condition:

If S' were actual, P would go wrong with respect to A

mean 

If the maximal segment (ie a state of affairs prior to the action) existed, then P would choose evil?

Logically, that is not a clearly defined statement, ie it is a poor example to give as an example of a logic of any kind.

"If I was/were you" begs questions of identity and what defines "me" as distinct from "you", so is not really treatable in any strictly logical framework as phrased. All you are clearly saying is that you 'consider' modal logic, which is a simple assertion of a 'fact'.

Informally, such a statement is a suggestion or recommendation from you that someone in my position should 'consider modal logic'.

So far, your statements imply that virtually anything can be understood in 'modal' terms, which is arguably true, and can therefore be analysed via modal logic.

However, unless I specifically employ modal logic concepts such as possibility and necessity in analysing something, it is empty and meaningless to say I am using it.

You are a long way from justifying my 'consideration' of modal logic with that feeble example, sorry.

What is so hard about it? It is a simple syllogism.

This is a red herring as it is addressing soundness, not validity. And if you wish to get muddled down in this sort of discussion as to "what defines 'me' as distinct from 'you'", I suppose I could kill anything with the death of a thousand qualifications.

So unless I formally use logic, I'm not actually employing it? From what I can tell, that's were you're going with this. I think that's disingenuous.

transworld=b13

a binary star system

birthplace of broken symmetry

I personally do not have a problem with it. I'm sorry if it is not precise enough for you, but that is hardly a refutation. It sounds more to me like a complaint or a preference.

This is yet another red herring.

Then you're conceding the point, that we use modal logic when we don't realize it. I don't even need an example if this is the case.

No we don't. Modal logic is just one, somewhat contrived, attempt to formalize certain applications of basic logic.

In ordinary but adequately coherent reasoning, when not consciously applying any formal logic, we are simply reasoning in a way consistent with, describable in the language of, logical concepts.

When you get to the point of asserting that 'necessary' is not a subset of 'possible', within this context, I call bullshit. That is a recipe for confusion, not clarification.

All irrelevant to this thread, where we were addressing a particular argument framed in terms requiring a certain amount of care to disentangle, rather different to the ordinary process of reasoning just referred to.

My assessment so far is that Platinga's argument amounts to the assertion that as long as God can create a world such that:

even though individuals would be created free to make bad choices IF confronted with a situation where at least one of the options open to them would be considered evil, even from their own perspective, THEN:

as long as there were possible sequences of events within that world in which that situation never arose, or was 'actualized', in Platinga's words, THEN God is 'let off the hook' so to speak.

IOW creation of such a world does not necessarily conflict with his 'goodness', because in such a world, even with 'free will', situations in which people are presented with the option to make evil choices are not inevitable.

He would still need to prove that it was not possible to create beings with the capacity to make free choices but without the capacity to knowingly make choices which would be likely to have effects that they themselves would regard as 'evil'. The choices we can make are already limited for all kinds of reasons, so some further such restriction does not conflict with the idea of 'free will'.

So 'transworld depravity' is not a necessary consequence of 'free will'.

So I am not impressed with this devious attempt to distance God from the consequences of his decision to create the world as we find it.

It is not necessary for us to have the capacity to make evil choices for us to have meaningful 'free will', any more than is it necessary for there to be evil in order for the idea of 'good' to be meaningful. That ignores the reality of a spectrum of consequences from neutral to downright evil. And it really is not necessary to consider the extreme case of 'evil' - there is a whole range of consequences that are, on balance, undesirable to a greater or lesser extent, and ones where the results are a mix of good and bad.

It also doesn't address all the evil that does not involve our choices at all, such as natural disasters, or choices whose evil effects we did not anticipate, or could not, but are inherent in the 'design' of the world. IOW, all the stuff that is directly his fault.

If you take his line of argument far enough, that God and his omni-attributes are limited by such logical constraints and so not inherently contradictory, especially when you acknowledge such deeper consequences of logic, you end up in a God who serves no purpose, since the world we find ourselves in is fully determined by what is physically and logically possible, which is fully consistent with a non-Theist world-view. IOW God himself is not necessary.

I suppose I could call this "bullshit" too. Separating logic as something categorical distinct from something you define as "reasoning in a way consistent with, describable in the language of, logical concept" is equivocating.

Modal logic is completely relevant as Plantinga is invoking it. Your dismissal of Plantinga's argument had nothing to do with the argument per se, but the validity form of logic Plantinga invokes.

Well, yes, it's logically conceivable, but you don't really think that makes it a good defense, do you?

Psh, why doesn't God just put out the fire? Change the course of events so that the evil person never gets his hands on the baby in the first place? Have someone stop him before he tortures the baby? How does that affect the person's free will? Not only can he not stop the person from making the decision to torture the baby, he can't even stop the person from having the ability to do so?

I did criticise the logic he employed, but I followed up by expressing his argument more conventional logical terms, so as to more unambiguously point out its flaws.

Modal logic is not necessary to phrase his argument, at most it may be more compact, but 'modal' logic cannot conflict with basic logic, or it would be invalid. Modal logic makes it easier to confuse the issue, by the way it uses the concepts of necessity and possibility. The further we get away from basic logic, the more possibilities for unnoticed errors to slip in especially when imperfectly defined concepts are involved, like God and infinity. These difficulties are why we see significant disagreements about the validity and applicability of the various approaches to enhancing and extending logic.

Mathematics, which is also a deductive system, largely avoids these problems by restricting itself to discussing the relationships between elemental precisely defined 'entities' such as number, shape, ratio, length, area, angle, etc.

Like Metaphysics, any attempt to apply a purely deductive, ie non-empirical, non-inductive, approach to understanding reality, is doomed to get terminally lost in un-resolvable complexities.

Even Math has run into this, and many have resorted to a more empirical approach, employing computers to experimentally explore the consequences and implications of various equations and propositions, and abandon the hope of being able to have everything comprehensively defined and proved.

I am quite certain that everything is ultimately uncertain.... 

Maybe not everything - I accept cogito ergo sum as being as close to certain for me as anything can be, but beyond that the fuzziness grows...

The important thing to recognize is that there are degrees of uncertainty, and 'uncertain' does not equate to useless, or imply something which cannot contribute to enhancing our confidence in some empirical/inductive proposition. See Bayes Theorem.

Logic, ie the Law of Identity and the Law of Non-Contradiction, pretty damn close to necessary starting points... (in case you notice anything, the Law of Excluded Middle I regard as problematic: either entailed by the first two, or only applicable to the particular case of Binary Logic,) .

You might be interested in this discussion: http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article020103.html, very relevant to points raised here. It is titled "A Dialogue on Mathematics and Physics [with] Cristian S. Calude and Gregory J. Chaitin".

And no, if a proposition expressed in modal logic cannot be expressed in non-modal logic, it implies the fundamental propositions of modal logic are invalid.

If the basis of modal logic can be defined in terms of more fundamental logic, then any valid argument employing them can be expanded into terms employing simpler concepts. If they can't, they cannot be given the same status as fundamental logic, meaning they have 'slipped in' an unsupported assertion, an additional 'axiom', or it rather strongly suggests they are invalid. It does mean that any such additional axiom has to be made explicit. Any extension of logic or math requires additional axioms or rules to be defined, which have to be expressed or defined using more fundamental logic terms.

Platinga's commitment to Molinism means that he shares the same dedication to coming up with a plausible logical justification for his a priori commitment to Christian Theism, just as was Luis de Molina himself, and so has a strong incentive, not necessarily conscious, to skate over strict logical thoroughness and consistency.