Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil: The Free Will Defense

Suppose a person can keep a promise or break it. She keeps it, without anyone forcing her. There is no contradiction in that description. Now suppose every person freely chooses rightly on every occasion. Whether God could bring about that outcome while leaving those choices free is a further question. Confusing these two questions makes Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense much easier to state and much easier to misrepresent.

In God, Freedom, and Evil, first published in 1974, Plantinga examines whether an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God could coexist with evil. His defense concerns logical compatibility. It does not identify God's actual reason for allowing a particular loss. Understanding its limited aim requires following the distinction between a possible world and a world God can actualize through the free actions of creatures.

The logical problem of evil alleges that belief in God conflicts with acknowledging evil. The familiar starting points are that God has unlimited power, knows what happens, and is perfectly good, while suffering and wrongdoing occur. But these statements do not display a contradiction by themselves. Additional premises must connect divine power and goodness with the absence of evil.

For example, one might add that a good being always eliminates every evil it can eliminate. That principle needs qualification if preventing an evil would also prevent an outweighing good or require an equal or worse evil. A surgeon may permit pain while performing a necessary operation. This is an ordinary illustration of the logical distinction, not an explanation of why an all-powerful God permits suffering. God would not face every limitation a surgeon faces.

The illustration identifies the work still needed. An argument against God must explain why divine power removes any possible reason for allowing evil. A defense must present a genuinely coherent possibility in which goodness and power coexist with it. Merely imagining a sentence containing all three words would establish nothing. The proposed description must withstand scrutiny.

Plantinga's discussion engages the logical challenge associated with J. L. Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence." The important issue for reading Plantinga is the argument's burden, rather than a story in which one philosopher conclusively silences another. A claim that theism is contradictory differs from a claim that the evidence makes theism unlikely. Defeating the first would leave the second available.

An evidential argument can concede that God and evil might coexist while asking whether this much apparently pointless suffering is to be expected if God exists. That argument compares explanations or probabilities. It does not need to derive a formal contradiction. A reader should therefore identify which argument a proposed answer addresses before assessing its success.

A theodicy attempts to identify God's actual reasons for permitting evil. A defense, in Plantinga's use, offers a possible account sufficient to answer an allegation of inconsistency. Its proposed account need not be established as the history of our world. It must nevertheless be possible and compatible with the divine attributes under discussion.

This difference matters when evaluating a hypothetical explanation. Saying that a valuable form of freedom might provide a morally sufficient reason for permitting some wrongdoing does not establish that freedom explains a particular murder. It also does not establish that every consequence of a free choice must remain unprevented. The abstract compatibility question and the justification of particular harms require different arguments.

The defense thus makes a more limited demand than proving God's existence. A consistent set of beliefs can still be false. Likewise, a possible explanation can fail to be the actual explanation. Someone can accept Plantinga's logical distinction while remaining an atheist, and someone who believes in God can accept it while rejecting a proposed theodicy.

The limitation is part of the argument's content. It prevents the reader from treating a modal conclusion, about what could be the case, as a report about what is the case. It also prevents a logical discussion from pretending to supply the understanding someone seeks in grief. Those questions can be connected without being interchangeable.

Plantinga's defense uses freedom with respect to a particular action. In the relevant sense, a person can perform the action and can refrain from performing it; antecedent conditions and causal laws do not determine which she does. This is a libertarian conception of freedom. The defense does not establish that this conception is the only acceptable account of human agency.

An action is morally significant when performing it would be wrong and refraining right, or the reverse. Choosing between two equally harmless refreshments need not involve that kind of significance. Keeping a serious promise ordinarily does. The defense concerns the value of morally significant freedom, rather than simply having many available options.

Consider the promise again as a hypothetical illustration. If a person's decision is causally determined by a controller to be the right one, it lacks the freedom Plantinga is invoking. That remains true even if the controller produces a pleasant feeling of independence. Being unaware of control would not remove the control.

But if she freely keeps the promise, nothing in the definition requires her to break a different promise later. A capacity to do wrong is not the same as actually doing wrong. Nor does freedom require a particular frequency of mistakes. This distinction is essential: the defense cannot infer the necessity of evil simply from the definition of freedom.

Plantinga proposes that a world with significantly free creatures who freely do more good than evil can be more valuable, other things equal, than a world without free creatures. This is a proposed evaluative premise. Its inclusion helps construct the defense; it does not establish a general rule that freedom outweighs any amount of suffering.

A possible world is a complete way things could have been. It is not necessarily a distant physical universe. Talking about a world where a person freely keeps a promise describes a possible history, including the person's action. It does not yet tell us who can bring that history about.

Plantinga challenges the assumption that omnipotence entails being able to actualize every possible world. Where a history includes undetermined choices by others, bringing about the surrounding circumstances need not determine the complete history. God's creating an agent and placing her in a situation would not, on this account, amount to causally producing her free decision.

A useful distinction concerns what would happen if particular circumstances were actual. A counterfactual of freedom says, for example, that if a person faced a certain temptation in specified circumstances, she would freely resist. Such a conditional is stronger than saying she could resist. The first concerns what she would do; the second concerns an ability or possibility.

Suppose, in a hypothetical case, that she would freely break the promise in the circumstances God brings about. The complete world in which those circumstances obtain and she freely keeps it might still be logically possible. But those circumstances would not be a route by which God could actualize that world, given what she would freely do. Making her decision causally inevitable would change the kind of action being described.

This distinction does not automatically vindicate Plantinga. A critic can question whether there are determinate truths about what an undetermined agent would do in circumstances that never occur. Another can question how such truths constrain divine action. Those are questions about the defense's machinery. They cannot be settled merely by repeating that God is omnipotent.

Plantinga introduces transworld depravity to develop the possibility that God cannot actualize a world containing moral good without moral evil. The technical definition uses possible persons, their essences, and counterfactuals of freedom. An essence, in this setting, specifies an individual's essential identity. The argument concerns which possible persons God could create, not just the people who happen to exist now.

In outline, consider each possible world in which a person is significantly free and always acts rightly. Transworld depravity requires an obstacle involving what that person would freely do if God actualized an appropriate portion of that world: at some morally significant choice, the person would go wrong. Thus an always-right history's being possible does not ensure that God can actualize it through that person's free choices.

The definition does not say that the person does wrong in every possible world. Indeed, it is formulated by considering worlds where the person freely does only what is right. It also does not say that the person makes the same wrong decision in every circumstance. Different proposed worlds can encounter different obstacles.

The defense then considers the possibility that every creaturely essence suffers from transworld depravity. If that is possible, a world with morally significant creaturely freedom but no wrongdoing might be unavailable for God to actualize, even though such a world is not contradictory in itself. The quantifier matters: describing only the depravity of actually existing people would leave open creating other possible people.

Plantinga needs this scenario to be possible for his defense. He does not establish that every possible creature actually has transworld depravity. Nor does the argument make evil a necessary feature of all reality. God might create no significantly free creatures. The proposed reason for accepting the risk concerns the value of such creatures and their freely produced moral good.

This is also why the square-circle comparison has limits. A causally determined yet libertarian-free decision is contradictory under the stipulated description. A free decision that happens to be right is not. The more demanding question about God's options requires the counterfactual argument, rather than a verbal analogy with an impossible shape.

There is a further distinction between describing an available option and requiring God to select it. Even if a world with some free wrongdoing were available, a defense would still need the moral premise that choosing such a world could be permissible. A fact about what creatures would do supplies no automatic conclusion about what God ought to permit. Conversely, identifying a good that could justify permission would not establish that the relevant history is available to actualize. The moral and modal parts of the defense need to fit together. Treating either as a substitute for the other would leave the compatibility claim underargued.

Human wrongdoing does not by itself account for earthquakes or disease. In the usual distinction, moral evil concerns wrongdoing attributable to agents; natural evil concerns harms whose apparent causes are natural processes. A defense covering moral evil therefore needs an additional proposal if it is to address evil in the broader sense.

Plantinga considers the possibility that nonhuman free agents are responsible for what appears to us as natural evil. The proposal draws on the religious idea of fallen spiritual agents. Within the defense, its role is to provide a possible extension of the agency account. It should not be presented as a scientific explanation of disease or as evidence that a particular disaster was caused by such beings.

The same standard of coherence applies here as elsewhere. A critic need not accept the possibility merely because the defender can describe it. Questions remain about the proposed agents' powers, God's permission, and whether the account supplies a morally sufficient reason. A defense must answer the logical objection with a coherent scenario, not with an unexplained label.

This step also shows how far the defense remains from a general explanation of suffering. Even if a possible account blocks a contradiction, it gives no basis for diagnosing the cause of a particular person's illness. Moving from a hypothetical logical role to such a diagnosis would add an unsupported claim.

A further difficulty concerns intervention. In the promise example, one can distinguish the agent's choice from its consequences. A person might freely attempt a wrong even if another person prevents the injury. It therefore does not follow from the existence of significant freedom that every harmful consequence must occur.

This observation supplies a question for assessing the defense: why could God not preserve the choice while limiting more of the damage? It is not answered by saying that freedom includes the possibility of wrongdoing. That describes a feature of the choice; it does not, by itself, establish a requirement about each subsequent physical event.

The question becomes sharper when considering the amount and distribution of suffering. A possible reason for allowing some evil does not by itself explain why the actual pattern of evil is permitted. Plantinga's book includes separate discussion of the amount of moral evil, natural evil, and whether evil makes God's existence unlikely. The book is broader than a bare assertion that a contradiction has not been established.

It would therefore misrepresent him to say that he simply grants the evidential argument or never addresses probability. He argues against probabilistic arguments from evil as well. Those further arguments must be assessed separately. The logical defense alone does not establish their success.

The distinction allows a more exact disagreement. One reader might accept that divine goodness and some evil are compatible while finding our world's suffering strong evidence against theism. Another might think the wider religious picture defeats that evidence. Their disagreement concerns the evidence and explanatory assumptions, even if they agree about abstract consistency.

God, Freedom, and Evil also examines arguments for God, including a modal ontological argument. That project asks whether considerations about possibility and necessity can support a positive conclusion about divine existence. It is separate from showing that an objection to belief fails. The book's structure therefore places defensive and constructive reasoning alongside one another without making them the same inference.

For the Free Will Defense, a productive reading keeps four questions distinct:

• Is the proposed conception of freedom coherent?
• Could every possible creature suffer from transworld depravity?
• Could permitting moral evil for the sake of significant freedom be consistent with perfect goodness?
• What does accepting that possibility establish about the actual world's suffering?

An answer to the first does not automatically answer the others. The defense's interest lies in the connections it tries to establish among them. Rejecting its conclusion calls for identifying a failed connection or an incoherent assumption. Accepting it calls for keeping its conclusion within the scope of the argument.

Return to the person keeping her promise. Her acting freely and rightly is a possible description. Whether God can ensure that every creature freely acts rightly raises questions about counterfactuals and actualization. Whether the actual suffering of the world is justified raises further moral and evidential questions. Plantinga's defense becomes intelligible when those questions remain separate long enough to see what each requires.

• Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (1974), part I.a, especially the sections on actualizing possible worlds, transworld depravity, natural evil, and probability. The 1977 Eerdmans edition reprints the work.
• Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, chapter IX, "God, Evil, and the Metaphysics of Freedom," for the more technical modal treatment.
• J. L. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence," for the logical challenge with which Plantinga engages.