Freedom and the problem of evil › Permission, prevention, and the scale of suffering

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.