Free Will Defense

The Free Will Defense is Alvin Plantinga‘s response to the Logical Problem of Evil. Plantinga argues that even an omnipotent God could not actualize a world containing genuine free will and no evil, because the freely chosen actions of created beings are not strictly within God’s control. If a world of free creatures who always choose rightly is not within God’s power to actualize, then the existence of moral evil is consistent with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.

The argument is a defense, not a theodicy: Plantinga is not claiming that God’s actual reasons for permitting evil are these, only that the existence of evil cannot be shown to be strictly inconsistent with theism. The conclusion is logical compatibility, not justification.

The argument is widely regarded as having succeeded against the strict version of the logical problem. J. L. Mackie himself in The Miracle of Theism conceded as much, while shifting his attack to the evidential version. Critics have continued to press whether the defense covers natural evil, whether transworld depravity is a coherent doctrine, and whether the conclusion of mere compatibility is enough. None of these has overturned the consensus that, as a response to the logical problem narrowly construed, the defense works.

The Free Will Defense is the most-cited single piece of argumentation in late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy of religion. It is also the move that, in Margaret Halloran’s reading, started the shift in how she understood her assignment to read Alvin Plantinga in the first place.