Freedom and the problem of evil › What a charge of contradiction must establish

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.