Falsification and the Existence of God: A Discussion of Plantinga's Free Will Defence

Abstract

Plantinga's Free Will Defence is an attempt to rescue belief in God from the Problem of Evil. I shall argue that, in spite of his remarkable ingenuity, Plantinga fails to eliminate what is a disturbing anomaly for the beliefs of the theist. The significance of an examination of his arguments, however, is not exhausted by the intrinsic interest, great as it is, of the conflict between theism and atheism. For Plantinga's latest statement of the Free Will Defence is embedded in a book, The Nature of Necessity, which is predominantly concerned with modal logic and in particular with the notion of de re modality, a notion which Plantinga believes to have been unjustly maligned by contemporary philosophers (notably Quine). As is inevitable in a work on modal logic, the book is full of arguments about possible worlds. These arguments are baffling and intriguing-just how baffling will no doubt be illustrated all too graphically in what follows. Yet even though such arguments strain our modal intuitions to breaking point, investigation into them is by no means a merely scholastic exercise. For unless we pay close attention to modal logic we can have no hope of doing justice to the subtlety of the logic of ordinary discourse, and no guarantee that our vision of philosophical theories will not be impaired by a modal blind spot. My primary objective remains an examination and rebuttal of Plantinga's defence to the Problem of Evil. What is the problem? In the recent literature' the approach usually taken has been to maintain that there is prima facie an inconsistency between the theist's belief that God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good on the one hand and the incontestable fact that there is evil in the world on the other. For example, J. L. Mackie, in a powerful exposition of the atheist's case, presses this charge: I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another (op. cit., p. 200). Plantinga remarks that it is obvious that there is no formal contradiction between statements (1) and (2): (1) God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good (2) There is evil in the world.2