God and Evil: Alvin Plantinga on Free-will Defense

Alvin Plantinga is probably the best contemporary  Christian philosopher in America .   He’s best known for God, Freedom , and Evil (1974), God and Other Minds (1967),  The Nature Necessity (1979), The Nature of Things (1974) , and Warranted Christian Belief (200).  In God, Freedom, and Evil, Plantinga articulates or describes the theory of the Free-Will Defense,

…among good states of affairs there are some that not even God can bring about without bringing about evil: those goods, namely, that entails or include evil states of affairs. The Free Will Defense can be looked upon as an effort to show that there may be a very different kind of good that God can’t bring about without permitting evil. There are good states of affairs that don’t include evil; they do not entail the existence of any evil whatever; nonetheless God Himself can’t bring them about without permitting evil. So how does the Free Will Defense work? And what does the Free Will Defender mean when he says that people are or may be free? What is relevant to the Free Will Defense is the idea of being free with with respect to an action. If a person is free with respect to a given action, then he is free to perform that action and free to refrain from performing it; not antecedent conditions and/or causal laws determine that he will perform the the action, or that he won’t. It is within his power, at the time in question, to take or perform the action and within his power to refrain from it. Freedom so conceived is not to be confused with unpredictability.  You might be able to predict what you will do in a given situation even if you are free, in that situation, to do something else. If I know you well, I may be able to predict what action you will take in response to a certain set of conditions; it does not follow that you are not free with respect to that action. Secondly, I shall say that an action is morally significant, for a given person, if it would be wrong for him to perform the action but right to refrain or vice verssa. Keeping a promise, for example, would ordinarily be morally significant for a person, as would refusing induction into the army. On the other hand, having Cheerios for breakfast (instead of Wheaties) would not normally be morally significant. Further, suppose we say that a person is significantly free, on a given occassion, if he is then free with respect to a morally significant action. And finally we must distinguish between morlal evil and natural evil.  The former is evil that results from free human activity; natural evil is any other kind of evil.

Given these definitions and distinctions, we can make a preliminary statement of the Free Will Defense as follows. A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For If He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither againts GOd’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good” (Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, quoted in ED. L. Miller, Questions that Matter: An Invitation to Philosophy, 377).

 

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