The Free Will Defense
Could an omnipotent God have created free beings who always choose good, and if not, does that excuse the existence of evil?
Alvin Plantinga developed this argument in 1974 in response to the logical problem of evil. He argued that God's omnipotence does not extend to logical impossibilities, and that creating genuinely free creatures who always choose good may be precisely such an impossibility.
Plantinga, A. (1974). God, Freedom, and Evil. Harper & Row.
The logical problem of evil
The logical problem of evil, associated with philosopher J. L. Mackie, claims that the following propositions cannot all be true at once: God exists, God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, God is perfectly good, and evil exists.
If God is all of those things, the argument goes, God would want to eliminate evil, would know how, and would have the power to do so. Evil's existence therefore seems to contradict God's. Mackie called this "the greatest difficulty" for theism.
The free will defense
Plantinga's reply distinguishes what is logically possible from what is within God's power. God can do anything that is logically possible. But there may be things that are logically impossible even for an omnipotent being.
Plantinga argued that creating significantly free creatures who always freely choose good may be one of those things. Freedom, on the standard libertarian free will account, requires that the agent could have done otherwise. A being whose every act was determined to be good would not be free in this sense; it would be a puppet whose strings happened to produce good outputs.
If genuine freedom is incompatible with guaranteed good choices, then a world containing free creatures who sometimes choose evil might be better, all things considered, than a world with no free creatures at all. God could have created such a better world only by tolerating the possibility of evil.
Plantinga does not claim this is why God permits evil. He claims only that this story is possible, and that one possible explanation is sufficient to defuse the logical incompatibility Mackie alleged.
The main objections
Natural evil is the first serious challenge. Earthquakes, diseases, and floods cause enormous suffering and are not explained by human freedom. Plantinga's response invokes the possibility of demonic free agents responsible for natural evil, a move most philosophers find unpersuasive.
Transworld depravity is Plantinga's own technical concept: the idea that some free creatures would go wrong in any world God could have created. This handles the objection that God could have simply created people who happen always to choose good. But critics question whether the concept of transworld depravity is coherent or well-defined.
The deeper challenge is that the free will defense addresses only the logical problem: whether God and evil are strictly incompatible. Most contemporary philosophers of religion have conceded this much to Plantinga and shifted to the evidential problem: whether the actual quantity and distribution of evil gives us strong evidence against theism, even if it doesn't prove God's nonexistence. The free will defense leaves that problem largely untouched.
Discussion questions
- Is human freedom worth the cost of all the suffering that comes with it?
- Does the free will defense apply to natural evils like disease and earthquakes?
- If God could have made free beings who always chose good, would that undermine the defense?
Take it to the dinner table.
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