The Free Will Defense and the Problem of Heavenly Freedom

Abstract

According to the logical problem of evil, the co-existence of evil and the theistic God who is considered to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent is impossible. The fact that our world contains evils invalidates the existence of the theistic God. A libertarian theistic response to this problem, the free will defense, holds that if God actually has or could have a sufficient reason to actualize a world containing evils, the problem fails. This good reason, according to the defense, might be significant freedom, the freedom to choose between moral good and evil. Yujin Nagasawa, Graham Oppy, and Nick Trakakis, however, approach this debate from a different angle and argue that the traditional theistic view of heaven is a problem for this theistic response when we ask whether there is freedom in heaven. They contend that if the inhabitants of heaven do not have significant freedom, free will cannot be a great good that gives God a good reason to create a world containing evils. Thus, the free will defense fails. In this paper, I claim that this is mistaken. I argue that even though the inhabitants of heaven are not free in the most robust sense (i.e. they are no longer capable of sinning), this does not show that significant freedom is not a great good that justifies God’s creating a world containing evils.