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Essay on The Problem of Evil/ The Free Will Defense
One of the most trenchant philosophical responses of our time to the question of God and evil has been advanced by Alvin Plantinga, in the company of like-minded others. In the so-called Free Will Defense, Plantinga answers particularly a classic essay by J. L. Mackie that asserts that theists cannot simultaneously affirm three propositions: that God is good, that God is all-powerful, and that evil exists. The theist simply must compromise, or give up outright, one of these three affirmations.
To round out his argument, Mackie specifies additional premises: "that good is opposed to evil, in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can, and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do." Plantinga's response is complicated, requiring dozens of pages to lay out even in the dense style of analytical philosophy. But in essence it goes like this: God desired to love and be loved by other beings. God created human beings with this in view. To make us capable of such fellowship, God had to give us the freedom to choose, because love, though it does have its elements of "compulsion," is meaningful only when it is neither automatic nor coerced. This sort of free will, however, entailed the danger that it would be used not to enjoy God's love and to love God in return, but to go one's own way in defiance of both God and one's own best interest. This is what the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden portrays.
The present task is to review and evaluate a very fascinating and instructive part of the debate over the logical problem. Taking Version I of the logical problem of evil as a point of departure, Alvin Plantinga developed a response that has now come to be known as the Free Will Defense.................
