![Alvin Plantinga](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Alvin_Plantinga.jpg)
Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American
analytic philosopher
Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United ...
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving epistemic justification), and logic.
From 1963 to 198 ...
and published in its final version in his 1977 book ''God, Freedom, and Evil''. Plantinga's argument is a defense against the
logical problem of evil
The problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,The Problem of Evil, Michael TooleyThe Internet Encyclope ...
as formulated by the philosopher
J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955.
Mackie's formulation of the logical problem of evil argued that three attributes of
God
In monotheism, monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator deity, creator, and principal object of Faith#Religious views, faith.Richard Swinburne, Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Ted Honderich, Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Ox ...
,
omniscience
Omniscience () is the capacity to know everything. In Hinduism, Sikhism and the Abrahamic religions, this is an God#General conceptions, attribute of God. In Jainism, omniscience is an attribute that any individual can eventually attain. In B ...
,
omnipotence
Omnipotence is the quality of having unlimited power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence only to the deity of their faith. In the monotheistic religious philosophy of Abrahamic religions, omnipotence is often listed as one ...
, and
omnibenevolence
Omnibenevolence (from Latin ''omni-'' meaning "all", ''bene-'' meaning "good" and ''volens'' meaning "willing") is defined by the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' as "unlimited or infinite benevolence". Some philosophers have argued that it is impos ...
, in orthodox
Christian
Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι ...
theism
Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of a supreme being or deities. In common parlance, or when contrasted with ''deism'', the term often describes the classical conception of God that is found in monotheism (also referred to ...
are logically incompatible with the existence of evil. In answer to the question, “Why didn’t God create a sinless world, since such a world is logically possible?”, Plantinga proposes that it is possible that in any possible world feasible for God to bring about, human beings would eventually have freely chosen to sin. So while sinless worlds are logically possible, they are not feasible for God to bring about. Plantinga terms this situation “transworld depravity.”
Mackie's logical argument from evil
The logical argument from evil argued by
J. L. Mackie, and to which the
free-will
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It also continues to co-manage many of its ...
defense responds, is an argument against the existence of the
Christian God based on the idea that a logical contradiction exists between four theological tenets in orthodox
Christian theology
Christian theology is the theology of Christianity, Christian belief and practice. Such study concentrates primarily upon the texts of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, as well as on Christian tradition. Christian theology, theologian ...
. Specifically, the argument from evil asserts that the following set of propositions are, by themselves, logically inconsistent or contradictory:
# God is
omniscient
Omniscience () is the capacity to know everything. In Hinduism, Sikhism and the Abrahamic religions, this is an attribute of God. In Jainism, omniscience is an attribute that any individual can eventually attain. In Buddhism, there are diffe ...
(all-knowing)
# God is
omnipotent
Omnipotence is the quality of having unlimited power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence only to the deity of their faith. In the monotheistic religious philosophy of Abrahamic religions, omnipotence is often listed as one ...
(all-powerful)
# God is
omnibenevolent
Omnibenevolence (from Latin ''omni-'' meaning "all", ''bene-'' meaning "good" and ''volens'' meaning "willing") is defined by the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' as "unlimited or infinite benevolence". Some philosophers have argued that it is impos ...
(morally perfect)
# There is evil in the world
Most orthodox
Christian theologian
Christian theology is the theology of Christian belief and practice. Such study concentrates primarily upon the texts of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, as well as on Christian tradition. Christian theologians use biblical exegesi ...
s agree with these four propositions. The logical argument from evil asserts that a God with the attributes (1–3), must know about all evil, would be capable of preventing it, and as morally perfect would be motivated to do so. The argument from evil concludes that the existence of the orthodox Christian God is, therefore, incompatible with the existence of evil and can be logically ruled out.
Plantinga's free-will defense
Plantinga's free-will defense begins by asserting that Mackie's argument failed to establish an ''explicit'' logical contradiction between God and the existence of evil. In other words Plantinga shows that (1–4) are not on their own contradictory, and that any contradiction must originate from an atheologian's ''implicit'' unstated assumptions, assumptions representing premises not stated in the argument itself. With an ''explicit'' contradiction ruled out, an atheologian must add premises to the argument for it to succeed. Nonetheless, if Plantinga had offered no further argument, then an atheologian's intuitive impressions that a contradiction must exist would have remained unanswered. Plantinga sought to resolve this by offering two further points.
First, Plantinga pointed out that God, though omnipotent, could not be expected to do literally anything. God could not, for example, create square circles, act contrary to his nature, or, more relevantly, create beings with free will that would never choose evil. Taking this latter point further, Plantinga argued that the moral value of human free will is a credible offsetting justification that God could have as a morally justified reason for permitting the existence of evil. Plantinga did not claim to have shown that the conclusion of the logical problem is wrong, nor did he assert that God's reason for allowing evil is, in fact, to preserve free will. Instead, his argument sought only to show that the
logical problem of evil
The problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,The Problem of Evil, Michael TooleyThe Internet Encyclope ...
was invalid.
Plantinga's defense has received strong support among Christian academic philosophers and theologians.
[: "It used to be widely held by philosophers that God and evil are incompatible. Not any longer. Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense is largely responsible for this shift."] Contemporary atheologians have presented arguments claiming to have found the additional premises needed to create an explicitly contradictory
theistic
Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of a supreme being or deities. In common parlance, or when contrasted with ''deism'', the term often describes the classical conception of God that is found in monotheism (also referred t ...
set by adding to the propositions 1–4.
In addition to Plantinga's free-will defense, there are other arguments purporting to undermine or disprove the logical argument from evil.
Plantinga's free-will defense is the best known of these responses at least in part because of his thoroughness in describing and addressing the relevant questions and issues in ''God, Freedom, and Evil''.
Further details
As opposed to a
theodicy
Theodicy () means vindication of God. It is to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus resolving the issue of the problem of evil. Some theodicies also address the problem of evil "to make the existence of ...
(a ''justification'' for God's actions), Plantinga puts forth a ''defense'', offering a new proposition that is intended to demonstrate that it is logically possible for an omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient God to create a world that contains
moral evil
Moral evil is any morally negative event caused by the intentional action or inaction of an agent, such as a person. An example of a moral evil might be murder, war or any other evil event for which someone can be held responsible or culpable."The ...
. Significantly, Plantinga does not need to assert that his new proposition is true, merely that it is logically valid. In this way Plantinga's approach differs from that of a traditional theodicy, which would strive to show not just that the new propositions are valid, but that the argument is sound,
prima facie plausible, or that there are good grounds for making it. Thus the burden of proof on Plantinga is lessened, and yet his approach may still serve as a defense against the claim by Mackie that the simultaneous existence of evil and an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God is "positively irrational".
As Plantinga summarized his defense:
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
Moral evil is any morally negative event caused by the intentional action or inaction of an agent, such as a person. An example of a moral evil might be murder, war or any other evil event for which someone can be held responsible or culpable."The ...
. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.
Plantinga's argument is that even though God is omnipotent, it is ''possible'' that it was not in his power to create a world containing moral good but no moral evil; therefore, there is no logical inconsistency involved when God, although wholly good, creates a world of free creatures who choose to do evil. The argument relies on the following propositions:
# There are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being can not actualize.
# A world with morally free creatures producing only moral good is such a world.
Plantinga refers to the first statement as "Leibniz's lapse" as the opposite was assumed by Leibniz. The second proposition is more contentious. Plantinga rejects the compatibilist notion of freedom whereby God could directly cause agents to only do good without sacrificing their freedom. Although it would contradict a creature's freedom if God were to cause, or in Plantinga's terms ''strongly actualize'', a world where creatures only do good, an omniscient God would still know the circumstances under which creatures would go wrong. Thus, God could avoid creating such circumstances, thereby ''weakly actualizing'' a world with only moral good. Plantinga's crucial argument is that this possibility may not be available to God because all possible morally free creatures suffer from "transworld depravity".
Plantinga thus argues that we cannot rule out the hypothesis that all free human beings suffer from transworld depravity. So this hypothesis may, for all we know, be true. And if it were true, it would rule out the possibility of a world in which human beings make free choices, but always act in good ways. Hence, if the hypothesis cannot be ruled out, this shows that the existence of evil is, after all, consistent with the existence of a God with the traditional attributes. (This goes through via the principle that, if the conjunction of P and some other proposition R (consistent with P), entails Q, then P is consistent with Q. Thus, if the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly benevolent god, together with the hypothesis of transworld depravity, entails the existence of evil, (and if the transworld depravity hypothesis is consistent with the existence of a god with the three traditional attributes), then the existence of such a god is consistent with the existence of evil.)
Reception
According to Chad Meister, professor of philosophy at
Bethel University, most Christian philosophers accept Plantinga's free-will defense and thus see the logical problem of evil as having been sufficiently rebutted.
Robert Adams says that "it is fair to say that Plantinga has solved this problem. That is, he has argued convincingly for the consistency of
God and evil
Theodicy () means vindication of God. It is to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus resolving the issue of the problem of evil. Some theodicies also address the problem of evil "to make the existence of ...
."
William Alston
William Payne Alston (November 29, 1921 – September 13, 2009) was an American philosopher. He is widely considered to be one of the most important epistemologists and philosophers of religion of the twentieth century, and is also known for hi ...
has said that "Plantinga ... has established the possibility that God could not actualize a world containing free creatures that always do the right thing."
William L. Rowe has written "granted
incompatibilism
Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that persons have free will, the latter being defined as the capacity of conscious agents to choose a future course of action among several available ...
, there is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God", referring to Plantinga's argument.
In ''Arguing About Gods'',
Graham Oppy
Graham Robert Oppy (born 1960) is an Australian philosopher whose main area of research is the philosophy of religion. He currently holds the posts of Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Research at Monash University and serves as CE ...
offers a dissent, acknowledging that "
ny philosophers seem to suppose that
lantinga's free-will defenseutterly demolishes the kinds of 'logical' arguments from evil developed by Mackie" but continuing "I am not sure this is a correct assessment of the current state of play". Concurring with Oppy, A. M. Weisberger writes "contrary to popular theistic opinion, the logical form of the argument is still alive and beating." Among contemporary philosophers, most discussion on the
problem of evil
The problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,The Problem of Evil, Michael TooleyThe Internet Encycl ...
presently revolves around the ''evidential'' problem of evil, namely that the existence of God is unlikely, rather than illogical.
Mackie had argued in ''The Miracle of Theism'', Plantinga's hypothesis of transworld depravity can and should be rejected. It depends on the assumption that God, in creating humans, is faced with a limited number of possible essences that they can have. In particular, there is no essence available to him which is such that it is that of a free human agent and it is not afflicted with transworld depravity. But why might such a limited range of essences be available to an omnipotent God? The reason cannot be that it is logically impossible that a created human agent should always act rightly: even without being compatibilists, we can argue that there is no contradiction in the notion of a created agent who has alternatives, but who is inclined to exercise his free choice between alternatives only in good ways. But if it is not logically impossible that there should be such an essence, with which God could endow human beings, how would God (who, remember, is the omnipotent creator) be faced with any limit as to the range of possible human essences available to him?
"The concept of individual essences concedes that even if … freedom in the important sense is not compatible with causal determinism, a person can still be such that he will freely choose this way or that in each specific situation. Given this, and given the unrestricted range of all logically possible creaturely essences from which an omnipotent and omniscient god would be free to select whom to create, … my original criticism of the free will defence holds good: had there been such a god, it would have been open to him to create beings such that they would always freely choose the good." (Mackie, ''The Miracle of Theism'', p. 174)
Additional objections and responses
Incompatibilist view of free will
![FreeWillTaxonomy2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/FreeWillTaxonomy2.svg)
Critics of Plantinga's argument, such as the philosopher
Antony Flew
Antony Garrard Newton Flew (; 11 February 1923 – 8 April 2010) was a British philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught a ...
, have responded that it presupposes a libertarian,
incompatibilist
Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that persons have free will, the latter being defined as the capacity of conscious agents to choose a future course of action among several availabl ...
view of free will (free will and determinism are metaphysically incompatible), while their view is a
compatibilist
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.
Compatibilists believe that freedom can be present or absent in situations for r ...
view of free will (free will and determinism, whether physical or divine, are metaphysically compatible). The view of compatibilists is that God could have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil. In such a world people could have chosen to only perform good deeds, even though all their choices were predestined.
Plantinga dismisses compatibilism, stating "this objection ... seems utterly implausible. One might as well claim that being in jail doesn't really limit one's freedom on the grounds that if one were not in jail, he'd be free to come and go as he pleased".
Transworld depravity
Plantinga's idea of weakly actualizing a world can be viewed as having God actualizing a subset of the world, letting the free choices of creatures complete the world. Therefore, it is certainly possible that a person completes the world by only making morally good choices; that is, there exist possible worlds where a person freely chooses to do no moral evil. However, it may be the case that for each such world, there is some morally significant choice that this person would do differently if these circumstances were to occur in the actual world. In other words, each such possible world contains a ''world segment'', meaning everything about that world up to the point where the person must make that critical choice, such that if that segment was part of the actual world, the person would instead go wrong in completing that world. Formally, ''transworld depravity'' is defined as follows:
Less formally: Consider all possible (not actual) worlds in which someone always chooses the right. In all those, there will be a subpart of the world that says that person was free to choose a certain right or wrong action, but does not say whether they chose it. If that subpart were actual (in the real world), then they would choose the wrong.
Plantinga responds that "What is important about the idea of transworld depravity is that if a person suffers from it, then it wasn't within God's power to actualize any world in which that person is significantly free but does no wrong – that is, a world in which he produces moral good but no moral evil" and that it is logically ''possible'' that every person suffers from transworld depravity.
Leibniz' lapse
Plantinga writes in ''God, Freedom, and Evil'' that
J. L. Mackie has presented the objection that God, being omnipotent and omnibenevolent, would easily be able to create the
best of all possible worlds
The phrase "the best of all possible worlds" (french: Le meilleur des mondes possibles; german: Die beste aller möglichen Welten) was coined by the German polymath and Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work ''Essais de Th ...
. He reasons that such a world would be one in which all humans use their free will only for good – something they do not do. Hence, the free-will defense fails. Plantinga responds by pointing out two flaws in Mackie's reasoning, which, together, he names Leibniz' Lapse, owing to their reliance upon the misunderstandings of the German philosopher
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
. The first is the presumption that God can force humans to use their free will only for goodwhich is an inherent contradiction, because if this were so, their actions would no longer be free. The second that Plantinga labels is the very idea that there is a "best" of all possible worldshowever good the world is, there could always be at least one more good person inside it, so the idea of a "best" is incoherent.
Molinism
The focus on possible worlds in Plantinga's free will defense unwittingly reinvented the
Molinist doctrine of middle knowledge—knowledge of the
counterfactuals
Counterfactual conditionals (also ''subjunctive'' or ''X-marked'') are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactual ...
of human freedom, thereby precipitating a revival in the interest of Molinism. Parts of
Luis de Molina
Luis de Molina (29 September 1535 – 12 October 1600) was a Spanish Jesuit Catholic priest, priest and Scholasticism, scholastic, a staunch defender of free will in the controversy over human liberty and God's grace. His theology is known ...
's ''Concordia'' were translated into English for the first time. Molinism was applied not only to the problem of evil, but also to the incarnation, providence, prayer, Heaven and Hell, perseverance in grace and so on.
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{{Use dmy dates, date=April 2019
Christian apologetics
Free will
Philosophy of religion
Theodicy