Skip to content

Course 15 · Lesson 2.3

Plantinga’s free-will defense

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 15 outline

Module 1: Stating the Problem

  1. The ancient problem: Epicurus, the Psalms and Augustine
  2. The logical problem: is God’s existence compatible with evil?
  3. The evidential problem: Rowe, the fawn and gratuitous evil
  4. Defense and theodicy: what each tries to do

Module 2: Moral Evil and the Free-Will Defense

  1. Moral evil and human responsibility
  2. Augustine on evil, privation and the will
  3. Plantinga’s free-will defense
  4. Objections: horrendous evils, determinism and the freedom of the saints

Module 3: Natural Evil and Soul-Making

  1. Natural evil, the laws of nature and animal suffering
  2. Traditional accounts: the fall, fallen powers and the groaning of creation
  3. John Hick and soul-making theodicy
  4. Objections to soul-making: excess, injustice and who benefits

Module 4: Providence and the Limits of Explanation

  1. What providence means: creation, sustaining and governing
  2. Providence in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant thought
  3. Divine sovereignty, human freedom and open theism
  4. Skeptical theism and the limits of human knowledge

Module 5: Job, the Cross and Silence

  1. The Book of Job: Job, his friends and the rejection of easy answers
  2. God’s answer from the whirlwind and the ending of Job
  3. The crucifixion and suffering: Christ’s cry and the meaning of the cross
  4. Divine hiddenness and the silence of God
  5. Unanswered prayer in Scripture and in Christian life

Module 6: Living with Grief and Writing a Response

  1. Lament and the Psalms
  2. Christian accounts of grief: Lewis, Wolterstorff and the tradition of consolation
  3. Caring for those who suffer: presence, patience and what not to say
  4. Writing a reasoned response to the problem of evil

All courses

Program / Course 15: The Problem of Evil and Suffering / Lesson 2.3

What you will learn

  • State the free-will defense in its basic form and in Plantinga’s refined form.
  • Explain Mackie’s objection that God could have made free creatures who always choose rightly.
  • Explain transworld depravity and what role it plays in the argument.
  • Say what the defense does and does not claim to show.

The big idea

The free-will defense says that a world with free creatures who do some good is more valuable than a world of beings who cannot do wrong, and that God cannot cause creatures to freely do right without removing their freedom. Alvin Plantinga refined the idea in the 1970s to meet Mackie’s objection that God could simply have made free beings who always choose well. He argued that it is possible that every free creature God could have made would have gone wrong somewhere. If that is possible, then God and moral evil are not contradictory.

Key terms

Free-will defense
A reply to the logical problem of evil that says God permits moral evil because he wants creatures to be free, and freedom includes the ability to do wrong.
Libertarian freedom
The view that a free act is one that is not fully determined by prior causes, so that the agent could have done otherwise.
Compatibilism
The view that an act can be both determined and free, provided the agent acts from their own desires without coercion.
Transworld depravity
Plantinga’s term for the possibility that every creaturely essence would, if actualized, go wrong in at least one free choice.
Counterfactual of freedom
A statement of what a free creature would freely do in a given situation, such as If Peter were tempted, he would deny Jesus.
Actualize
To bring about that a possible world is the real one. God actualizes a world by creating.
Middle knowledge
The view of Luis de Molina that God knows what any free creature would freely do in any circumstance, before deciding what to create.

Background

The idea that God permits evil for the sake of freedom is old. Augustine used it, and so did Aquinas and many others. Mackie’s 1955 argument made it important to state it with care. He had answered that it would have been logically possible for God to make people who freely choose right every time, and that a wholly good and all-powerful God would have done so. If this were true, the appeal to free will would fail.

Plantinga, a Protestant philosopher then at Calvin College and later at the University of Notre Dame, published his reply in God, Freedom and Evil (1974) and in a longer work, The Nature of Necessity (1974). His argument is technical in places but its core can be explained plainly. The key is to ask what God can and cannot do, given that free actions are up to the free creature.

This lesson explains the argument. Remember that Plantinga offered it as a defense, to show that the logical problem fails, and did not claim that it was the true explanation of all evil.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: The basic idea

A world that contains creatures who are free to choose between right and wrong is, other things equal, better than a world with no such creatures. In a world of mere puppets there could be no love freely given, no courage, no moral choice. But if creatures are truly free in what they do, then God cannot make them do right, for then they would not be free.

So, the defender says, God could create free creatures only by giving them the power to do wrong. Some of them might use it. Moral evil would then be the price of a great good. This does not say that God wills the evil, only that he permits it for the sake of freedom.

Step 2: Mackie’s objection

Mackie answers that there is no contradiction in the idea of a free being who always chooses right. God might have made all people so that they freely do right in every case. If it is logically possible, then an all-powerful God could have done it, and a wholly good one would have.

This is a strong objection. It is not enough for the defender to say that freedom is valuable. The defender must show that God could not have guaranteed that free creatures would always choose well. Plantinga takes up this task.

Step 3: Plantinga’s reply: God cannot control free choices

Plantinga points out that if an act is really free, then God does not cause it. Whether a free creature, placed in a given circumstance, will do right or wrong is up to the creature. There may be truths of the form If this person were placed in these circumstances, he would freely do this. These are the counterfactuals of freedom. God may know them, but he does not control them, because they depend on what the creature would freely choose.

Now take all the possible creatures God might create. Perhaps for each one, there are circumstances in which it would freely do wrong. Plantinga calls such a creature transworld depraved. If every possible creature were transworld depraved, then God could not create any world with free creatures and no moral evil. That is not because of a limit to God’s power, but because of what the creatures would freely choose.

Step 4: What the argument shows

Plantinga does not claim that all creatures are transworld depraved. He claims only that it is possible. If it is possible, then it is possible that God, though all-powerful and wholly good, could not create a world with free creatures and no evil, and that the world he created is one with a favorable balance of good over evil. If so, the claims that God exists and that evil exists are consistent.

The argument leaves open that other possibilities are true. It is not a claim to know why God made this world, or that every evil is due to freedom. It is a demonstration of consistency. Most philosophers accept that it achieves this limited aim, though they do not all accept that it has other use.

Step 5: Some responses and discussion

Some philosophers ask whether the counterfactuals of freedom can be true at all. If a choice is free, they say, there may be no fact in advance about what the person would do. Open theists hold something like this, and Molinists hold that such facts exist. Plantinga needs only that it is possible for them to be as he describes, and so the dispute does not harm his argument.

Others ask whether the argument shows too little. It says nothing directly about natural evil, though Plantinga suggests, as a possibility, that natural evils might be caused by the free actions of nonhuman beings such as fallen angels. He admits this is speculation. Still others ask whether the amount of evil is justified by freedom, a question for the next lesson and for the evidential problem.

  1. Why does Mackie think God could have made free beings who always do right?
  2. In what sense does God not control the free choices of creatures, according to Plantinga?
  3. What is transworld depravity, and why does it matter that it is only possible?
  4. Does it matter whether freedom is understood in a libertarian or a compatibilist way?
  5. Why might a defense that addresses only moral evil be incomplete?
  6. What goods in your own life depend on the freedom of other people to do otherwise?

Examples

A gift freely given

A friend gives you a gift because she wants to. If she had been programmed to give you gifts, her gift would mean nothing. The defense says that love and trust are like this. They have value only if they could have been withheld.

Peter’s denial

Jesus tells Peter before the arrest that Peter will deny him three times (Luke 22:34). The Gospel presents Peter’s denial as his own act, and Jesus does not prevent it. Some Christian philosophers use the story to illustrate how God can know what a free person will do without causing the act.

A chess analogy

A grandmaster plays a beginner and knows she can win whatever the beginner does. The beginner makes real choices, and some are poor ones. The analogy is sometimes used to suggest that God could govern a world of free beings without removing their freedom. It is only an analogy and it is disputed.

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic theology has long taught that God made rational creatures free, and that moral evil comes from their misuse of freedom. Aquinas and the Catechism both say that God permits it without willing it. Catholic thinkers disagree about how divine knowledge relates to free acts. The Dominican school and the Jesuit school, which follows Molina, have differed for centuries.

Orthodox

Orthodox theology holds strongly that humans are made free and that God does not force the will. Freedom is central to the idea of communion with God. Orthodox writers usually avoid the technical vocabulary of possible worlds, and some doubt that such abstract tools can capture the relation between God and creatures.

Protestant

Arminian and Wesleyan traditions welcome the defense, since they teach that God gives real freedom. Reformed traditions teach that God ordains all that happens yet that creatures act freely in a way compatible with this. Plantinga is Reformed, yet he holds a libertarian view of freedom for the purposes of the defense. Many Reformed thinkers dispute that view.

Philosophical critics

Some, like J. L. Mackie in his later work, accept that Plantinga’s argument shows consistency but doubt it is plausible. Others accept the defense in some form but dispute its details, such as whether God can know what free creatures would do. Some hold that the logical problem is not really answered but only changed to the question whether freedom is worth its cost.

Why it matters

The free-will defense is the most discussed Christian reply to moral evil and a model of philosophical care. Understanding why it is built as it is, and what it leaves out, lets a student judge fairly both its strengths and the objections of the next lesson.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The free-will defense claims that all suffering is caused by free choices.

Correction: It is aimed at moral evil, and offered to show consistency. Plantinga himself treats natural evil only as a speculative extension. Other replies are needed for natural evil.

Misunderstanding: Transworld depravity is a claim that all humans are wicked.

Correction: It is a claim about what is possible for every possible creature in at least one circumstance. Plantinga does not assert that it is true.

Misunderstanding: If God knows what will happen, nobody is free.

Correction: This is a long-debated question. Many philosophers hold that knowing an act in advance does not cause it, as Boethius argued in the sixth century. Others deny that God foreknows free acts in the usual way. The defense works under several of these views.

Knowledge check

What is the free-will defense in its simplest form?

It says that God made creatures free because a world with free beings who can love and choose rightly is very good, and that freedom brings the possibility of wrongdoing. God cannot cause free beings to do right without removing their freedom. So moral evil is the cost of freedom, and not something God directly wills.

What was Mackie’s objection and how did Plantinga answer it?

Mackie said God could have made free creatures who always choose right. Plantinga replied that it is possible that every creature God could have made would have done wrong in some circumstance, so that God could not have guaranteed a world of free beings without evil. This possibility, called transworld depravity, is enough to show consistency.

Why does the defense only need a possibility?

The logical problem claims that God and evil cannot both exist. To refute that, it is enough to show a coherent way in which both could. The defense does not claim to know the actual reason for any evil. That is why it is called a defense, and not a theodicy.

What is a weakness the defense leaves open?

It does not directly address natural evil such as disease and earthquake, and it says little about whether the amount and kind of moral evil is worth the value of freedom. Those questions are raised by the evidential problem and by the objections taken up in the next lesson.

Think it through

  1. Would you choose a world in which people could not do wrong over one where they could? What do you give up?
  2. Does the idea that God cannot control free choices change how you think of his power?
  3. What would you say to someone who says the price of freedom is too high for the innocent who pay it?

Independent assignment

Restate the defense

In your own notebook, write about 450 words. Without looking back at the lesson, restate Mackie’s objection and Plantinga’s reply in your own words, using one concrete example in place of the technical terms. Then write one paragraph on whether you think the defense is persuasive as an answer to the logical problem, and one on whether it is persuasive as an answer to the pain of the world. Keep the work private.

Further study