Freedom and the problem of evil › Reading the book without overstating the result

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.