It was way back on June 8 last year that we last revisited Plantinga’s repudiation of the common view that the reality of evil is at odds with the Christian affirmation of God as good, omnipotent and omniscient. Plantinga ends up with two propositions:
4. God is omniscient, omnipotent and wholly good.
5. God creates a world creating evil and has a good reason for doing so.
Plantinga argues that the so-called Free Will Defence succeeds in showing that these two propositions are consistent and that, therefore, the following four propositions are also consistent:
- God is omnipotent
- God is wholly good
- God is omniscient
- Evil exists
Plantinga had earlier demonstrated “that among good states of affairs there are some that not even God can bring about without bringing about evil: those goods, namely, that entail or include evil states of affairs” (29). The Free Will Defence is a little different. It acknowledges there are good states of affairs that don’t include evil and do not entail the existence of any evil whatever. However, God himself can’t bring them about without permitting evil.
Central to the Free Will Defence is the idea of being free with respect to an action. Here we are assuming a person is significantly free, on a given occasion, with respect to a morally significant action. Before proceeding Plantinga points out:
- Freedom is not to be confused with unpredictability. I am able to predict what I will do in certain given situations, while still being free in those situations to do something else. The fact that I am able to predict what my wife will do in response to a certain set of conditions does not demand the conclusion that she is not free with respect to the action she carries out.
- An action is morally significant for a given person if it would be wrong for him or her to perform the action but right to refrain or vice versa. Plantinga distinguishes between such actions as keeping a promise - morally significant - and what cereal you choose for breakfast - not morally significant.
- A person is significantly free, on a given occasion, if he is then free with respect to a morally significant action.
- Moral evil, resulting from free human activity, must be distinguished from natural evil, that is, any other kind of evil.
The Free Will Defence contends: “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.” God can create free creatures but he can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right, for if he does they aren’t significantly free. The Free Will Defence reasons: “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” (30). The Free Will Defence argument is that it is possible that God could not have created a universe containing moral good (or as much moral good as this world contains) without creating one that also contained moral evil. Given this, it is possible that God had a good reason for creating a world containing evil.
At some later time we will need to consider some of the objections to this kind of defence and summarise how Plantinga deals with this so as to arrive at his overall conclusion, namely, “that the existence of God is compatible, both logically and probabilistically, with the existence of evil; thus it solves the main philosophical problem of evil.”
Posted January 21, 2010
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