An alterantive Free Will Defence

Abstract

Many philosophers have written in the past as though it were nearly obvious to rational reflection that the existence of evil in this world is incompatible with the presumed properties of the Christian God, and they have assumed a proof of incompatibility to be easy to construct. An informal underpinning for this line of thought is easy to develop. Surely God in his benevolence finds evil to be evil, and hence has both the desire and the means, provided by his omnipotence and omniscience, to eradicate it. But it remains a brute fact that evil exists. While this seems plausible enough at first glance, and seems damaging to the rationality of Christian belief, attempts to pin down a definite proof of incompatibility have encountered difficulties. The root difficulty is perhaps that the surface plausibility of incompatibility is ultimately mistaken. In what he calls a Free Will Defence against natural atheology, Alvin Plantinga has presented what seems a definitive proof, on rather modest assumptions, of the logical compatibility of God's nature and the existence of evil. Logic alone can neither prove nor disprove God's existence, since the defence rests on the empirical assumption that evil exists in this world. What Plantinga shows, put very simply, is that God may have created a world as good as any that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent being might have created given that human beings must exist in that world. Whether Christianity ought to court logical rationality may seem highly dubious, but on the supposition that it does, Plantinga's proof that the existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of evil seems to me to (provisionally) settle the issue of whether Christianity is a possible object of rational belief, at least insofar as the problem of evil is considered the major obstacle to rationality of belief. Perhaps it is now clear that I do not intend here to attack the validity or the significance of Plantinga's proof. At the same time, I think it possible to argue for Plantinga's conclusion on other grounds, grounds that seem to me philosophically more appealing, and grounds that are manifestly compatible with the Biblical record. After briefly summarizing Plantinga's argument, I shall propose an alternative free will defence that circumvents some of the presuppositions of his arguments, an alternative that may be attractive to philosophers who are not interested in an ontology involving Plantinga's conception of possible worlds.