Questions Does God exist?Freedom has a price: evil does not contradict God

Does God exist?TheismThe problem of evil

Freedom has a price: evil does not contradict God

The free will defense

Alvin Plantinga born 1932Belief in God can be rational without proof, and evil does not make it incoherent.

What it claims

The existence of evil does not contradict that of an all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good God: the logical problem of evil fails.

Why

A world of free creatures is worth more than a world of automata, and God cannot force free beings to do only good.

The same idea through history

Augustine of Hippo395Moral evil comes from the misuse of freedom, which is a good: a horse that strays is better than a stone that does not.

Alvin Plantinga1965"The Free Will Defence": a reply to Mackie and Flew, who called evil inconsistent with God. Plantinga does not look for God's actual reason, only a possible one.

Alvin Plantinga1974The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom, and Evil: the definitive version, with the idea of "transworld depravity".

In short

"Freedom has a price: evil does not contradict God" is an argument by Alvin Plantinga ("The Free Will Defence", 1965; God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974, 1965) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: theism). Its claim: The existence of evil does not contradict that of an all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good God: the logical problem of evil fails. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

"The Free Will Defence", 1965; God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974

Valid with an implicit premise

In 1955, the Australian philosopher J. L. Mackie claimed that belief in God is contradictory: an all-powerful and wholly good God would let no evil exist. The American philosopher Alvin Plantinga answers him. He does not claim to know why God permits evil (that would be a "theodicy"): he only wants to show that a possible reason exists, which he calls a "defense". If a good God could want truly free creatures, and if it is possible that every free creature sometimes chooses evil, then God and evil do not contradict each other. Even atheist philosophers have judged this answer successful, on this precise point.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where freedom is worth more than its absence, where God cannot force free goodness, and where God still has no possible reason to permit evil: for instance if a good being must never permit any evil, whatever good is at stake.

Valid with P4. Plantinga assumes it more than he defends it: it is the principle, also granted by Mackie, that a good being may permit an evil for a greater good. The heart of the argument is P3: Mackie said that God, being all-powerful, could have created free beings who always choose the good. Plantinga answers that what truly free beings will choose is not up to God. Note the scope: the argument does not prove that God exists, nor that freedom is the real reason for evil. It only shows that believing in God despite evil is not contradictory. It also assumes freedom in the strong ("libertarian") sense: a free choice is determined by nothing, not even by God.

Analogy. Parents want a child, not a robot that always obeys. They know that a truly free child will, sooner or later, misbehave, and that they cannot choose in its place without taking away its freedom. Having a child is not a fault for all that. Plantinga's question is not whether the parents were right, only whether it is contradictory to be good parents and have a child who sometimes does wrong.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

J. L. Mackie 1955 · attacks premise 3

If a man can freely choose the good once, or several times, there is no logical impossibility in his freely choosing it every time. So God did not have to choose between innocent automata and free beings who sometimes go wrong: he could create free beings who always choose the good. If he did not, he is not both all-powerful and wholly good.

Plantinga replies

Alvin Plantinga 1974 · Plantinga's reply (1974, restated in 2009)

A world where everyone always freely chooses the good is possible in itself, but it does not depend on God alone: it also depends on what those beings would freely choose. Now it is possible that every person God could create, placed in any situation, would do wrong at least once. In that case God could not create a world with free beings and no evil, and that remains compatible with his having created a very good world.

William Rowe (atheist philosopher) 1979

Rowe, though a defender of the argument from evil, judges that no one has succeeded in proving that God and evil are contradictory. He grants that, if one accepts freedom in the strong sense, Plantinga's argument is fairly compelling. That is why he moves to another version of the problem, based on probabilities.

See the rest of the debate (1)

Robert M. Adams 1985

On the "logical" problem of evil, Adams, though critical of Plantinga on other points, concludes that it is fair to say Plantinga has solved it.

The debate goes on (our summary) The debate then moved on: most critics no longer say that God and evil are contradictory, but that evil makes God improbable (see Rowe's argument). One point remains disputed: the defense assumes that freedom is determined by nothing. Those who think a choice can be free while having causes ("compatibilists", like Flew) reject P2 from the start.

H. J. McCloskey, Antony Flew (natural evil) 1960 · attacks the conclusion

Even if it worked, the free will defense would explain only part of evil: the evil humans do. Earthquakes, diseases, animal suffering before humans appeared come from no free choice. The problem remains whole for them.

Plantinga replies

Alvin Plantinga 1965

Traditional doctrine ascribes a good deal of evil to Satan, a free non-human spirit, created long before man, who rebelled. It is logically possible that all natural evil comes from the free choices of such spirits. The same reasoning then applies, and that is enough to show there is no contradiction.

Antony Flew (quoted by Plantinga)

Invoking devils is just a desperate ad hoc expedient, invented for the purpose, as long as no independent evidence of their existence is produced.

See the rest of the debate (2)

Alvin Plantinga 1965

To answer the charge of contradiction, the believer does not need this hypothesis to be probable, or even true. It is enough that it does not contradict God's existence.

Robert M. Adams 1985

Fallen angels do not settle the moral question. If their sins caused cancer, an all-powerful God could have let them sin without sustaining the causal links by which their sins result in cancer.

The debate goes on (our summary) As with Mackie, the defense holds on strictly logical ground. But many, believers included, find the devil hypothesis hardly credible as an explanation of earthquakes. Other defenders (Swinburne, Hick) prefer to say that a world with stable laws, and their dangers, is needed for free choices to mean something.

Robert M. Adams ("counterfactuals of freedom") 1977 · attacks premise 3

P3 assumes there are truths of the kind "if God created Peter in this situation, Peter would freely choose evil", true even before Peter exists. Sixteenth-century Jesuit theologians such as Molina called knowledge of them "middle knowledge". Adams argues that such sentences cannot be true: if the choice is truly free, nothing settles in advance what it would be. Without such truths, "transworld depravity", as Plantinga states it, loses its footing.

Plantinga replies

Alvin Plantinga 1974

Plantinga had foreseen this case. Even if such sentences have no truth, God, in creating free beings, could not be sure of the outcome: he was taking a risk. So it is still possible that he tried to create a world without sin and that his creatures chose evil all the same.

Robert M. Adams 1985

Adams grants it: rejecting these truths does not weaken Plantinga's solution to the logical problem, since a God without "middle knowledge" takes real risks in creating free beings. But he adds (already in 1977) that freedom can play a part in an explanation of evil without being able to bear its whole weight.

J. L. Mackie (why does God not intervene?) 1955 · attacks premise 2

Even granting freedom, why would God not leave men free to will rightly, while intervening when he sees them beginning to will wrongly? If he can and does not, then a bad free choice would be worth more than no choice, which believers refuse to say elsewhere about sin.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Plantinga in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) The usual answer from defenders of freedom: a being whom God stops whenever it is about to choose wrongly no longer really has the choice of evil, and so no longer really has the choice of good. The open question is whether that freedom is worth the price of the worst crimes: there the discussion becomes moral, not merely logical.

What today's voices say

Defend it