RE; The Contingent God and the Necessary Universe.

This video responds to his third premise - if a necessary being exists, then all that he does he does necessarily.

I contest in the video is that this is not the case. Rather, it is possible that God does things contingently provided that he freely choose to do those. They do not change his immutability because he is immutably a possible world creator, not immutably a world creator. When he takes on the property of world creator, it is relative to there existing a created world that he freely willed.

I sense that this isn't the end of the discussion, but we'll see what happens.

[Tdisputations]

Well, under a compatibilist idea of free will, this wouldn't be an issue because God's actions are not caused by anything external to Him. I would say that God could have done otherwise because God contains the fullness of being within Him (all of the playdough molds), but God chose to create the universe the way that He did because of the befittingness of the universe to God's goodness. It is not impossible in the sense that God doesn't lack the power to create the universe in a different way, but God simply wouldn't do so. It is possible for God to create a universe different from the one He did create because God's goodness exists regardless of even whether the universe exists at all, but God would not do so because God created the universe according to His divine wisdom.

Yes, you can think of it as the end (God's goodness) causing God's action, but God's goodness is His free will, so it isn't really an issue under a compatibilist idea of free will, imho.

I also left a comment on his video addressing his premises directly, btw.

[coffeesmug]

Right so I take that the idea is that our actions as both determined and free. Everything we do here in the sensible world is causally determined but if we belong to an intelligible world our actions would be free of all prior causal determination.

Yet even if free actions could be supposed to belong to a different "noumenal" world of things in themselves I'm not sure how that would help in explaining someone’s action. For example, it is possible that someone does his duty for its own sake but also recognizes more additional justifications for doing the same thing, like an inclination, and also recognizes more justifications for doing something else instead. So although we may say that someone recognized that a certain action was justified, by some reason or other, saying this is no explanation of the action since It does not explain why it occurred.

[jamalchristian]

Creator is not a property. it's a title