Plantinga’s The Nature of Necessity (1974) contains a largely neglected argument for the claim that the proposition “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good” is logically consistent with “the vast amount and variety of evil the universe actually contains” (not to be confused with Plantinga’s famous “Free Will Defense,” which seeks to show that this same proposition is logically consistent with “some evil”). In this paper I explicate this argument, and argue that it assumes that there is more (...) moral good than evil in the cosmos. I consider two arguments in favour of this assumption, proposed by William King and Plantinga respectively, and argue that they are flawed. I then consider a sceptical objection to the assumption due to David Hume, and argue that this objection is at least prima facie plausible. (shrink)

James Sterba has recently argued that the free will defense fails to explain the compossibility of a perfect God and the amount and degree of moral evil that we see. I think he is mistaken about this. I thus find myself in the awkward and unexpected position, as a non-theist myself, of defending the free will defense. In this paper, I will try to show that once we take care to focus on what the (...) class='Hi'>free will defense is trying to accomplish, and by what means it tries to do so, we will see that Sterba’s criticism of it misses the mark. (shrink)

Proponents of The Free Will Defense frequently argue that it is necessary for God to create self-directing beings who possess the capacity for producing evil because, in the words of F.R. Tennant, “moral goodness must be the result of a self-directing developmental process.” But if this is true, David Paulsen has recently argued, then the proponent of the Free Will Defense cannot claim that God has an eternally determinate nature. For if God has an eternally determinatenature (...) and moral goodness must be the result of a developmental process, then God cannot be considered morally good. In response, I argue that (1) many contemporary Free Will theists do not affirm a developmental concept of morality and thus avoid Paulsen’s criticism and that (2) even those who affirm a developmental concept of morality on the human level need not grant that divine morality is also developmental in nature. (shrink)

The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part constitutes a critique of the two most popular versions of the Free Will Defense to the problem of moral evil, one based on a neo-Molinist account of the relationship between providence and freedom, the other on the movement known as Open God Theology. I argue that the Molinist version fails, because we have reason to reject its doctrine of Middle Knowledge. I maintain that the Open God version fails (...) in its claim to be offering a biblically based conception of God's relationship to human action. ;The second part of the dissertation begins by defending Aquinas's claim that God causes our actions---that our actions are every bit as much God's creatures as anything else. This thesis provides an additional reason to reject the Free Will Defense, which erroneously supposes that free creatures can act independently of divine causality. Yet the claim that God causes our actions also leads to difficulties. Many have thought that Aquinas's position entails theological determinism, eliminating human freedom and rendering God responsible for sin. I maintain, on the contrary, that Aquinas's views do not commit him to theological determinism. Not only are his views compatible with a libertarian conception of human freedom; they leave God no more responsible for sin---perhaps even less so---than does the Free Will Defense. ;Although I concede that the attempts most often used by Aquinas and his contemporary defenders to show that his teaching is compatible with human freedom leave him vulnerable to the charge of theological determinism, I maintain that Aquinas provides other resources that can be employed successfully in his defense. I argue that determinism presupposes a certain logic or explanatory scheme that Aquinas's understanding of God, and, in particular, of divine simplicity, will not accommodate. Consequently, the kinds of inferences needed to make theological determinism intelligible do not apply in Aquinas's case. (shrink)

It is widely believed that (1) if theological determinism were true, in virtue of God’s role in determining created agents to perform evil actions, created agents would be neither free nor morally responsible for their evil actions and God would not be perfectly good; (2) if metaphysical compatibilism were true, the free-will defense against the deductive problem of evil would fail; and (3) on the assumption of metaphysical compatibilism, God could have actualized just any one of those (...) myriad possible worlds that are populated only by compatibilist free creatures. The primary thesis of this essay is that none of these propositions is true. This thesis is defended by appealing to a recently proposed novel, acausal, composite, unified theory of free action – the Theory of Middle Freedom – that evades the central problems plaguing traditional theories of metaphysical compatibilism. (shrink)

A proposition that theism has traditionally tried to establish, as part of its general effort to reconcile the existence of God and that of evil in the (supposedly God-made) world, is the following; that natural evil is logically a precondition of freedom of choice. Often the approach to this task has been through the free will defense. In my paper I argue that the standard formulation of that defense will not succeed in the specific task mentioned, and (...) propose a variation upon the standard formulation. Then I try to defend the variation against some powerful objections. (shrink)

Chapter Four of Richard Gale’s On the Nature and Existence of God constitutes an ambitious 80-page monograph on the “free will defense” (FWD). Much of Gale’s argument is aimed at Plantinga’s FWD, but the scope of his criticism extends, finally, to all versions. Gale’s main contentions are that: (i) no version of the FWD can get off the ground without the substantive, true conditionals often called “counterfactuals of human freedom” by contemporary Molinists; (ii) the best theory of these (...) conditionals (Gale’s “minimalism”) implies that the Molinists’ conditionals are true (so traditional omniscience requires that God know them, as the Molinists allege that he does); (iii) but Molinism would make God a puppet-master, and incapable of creating free persons after all. Gale concludes that proponents of the FWD must accept that there are contingent truths God does not know. I argue that Gale’s objections to non-Molinist versions of FWD are easily rebutted; but that his criticisms of Molinism have considerably more bite. (shrink)

In this article, I advance what I think is a more theologically robust and informed free-will defense, which allows me to address the problem of evil in a more theologically robust and informed way. In doing so, however, I do not claim to offer a comprehensive response to the problem of evil, or full-blown "theodicy"; instead, I offer a partial response, which I place in the service of a full-blown theodicy. Moreover, my own approach is explicitly Thomistic, insofar (...) as I formulate much of it drawing on Thomas Aquinas's own formulations of the doctrines of original justice and original sin, or the human being as created and fallen. Structurally, the article consists of three main sections. In first section, I consider and critique a recent, expanded free-will defense offered by Peter van Inwagen, which also incorporates the doctrines of creation and the Fall. I then introduce key aspects of Aquinas's own thought in order to make the requisite improvements to this approach. In the second section of the article, I consider some main objections to my own Thomistic approach, as I will have formulated it so far: in particular, that the doctrines of original justice and original sin are unintelligible from the standpoints of moral psychology and evolutionary biology. I also begin to consider the objection that there is no intelligible way of explaining the transmission of original sin. In the third and final section of the article, I respond to these objections, offering a final defense of my central claim that the free-will defense is best served when it is wedded with a specifically Thomistic construal of the human being as originally created in a state of original justice, but now subject to defects (both bodily and spiritual) that are the inherited consequences of original sin. (shrink)

As a response to the problem of evil, the free will defense proposes that evil might exist as a consequence of God’s endowing human beings with moral freedom which we have tragically misused. Standard versions of the free will defense assume that (1) our moral freedom began in this earthly existence and (2) what explains our suffering in this world must constitute an abuse rather than a right use of our moral freedom. However, there is another (...) variation of the free will defense that does not share these assumptions. This version of the free will defense appeals to the pre-existence of the human soul. Here I consider a premortalist free will defense according to which each human soul might have rational concourse with God prior to the start of her earthly career and during which she might choose the sort of life she is to live on earth, complete with all of the trials and difficulties necessary to develop a certain kind of desirable character. Given the possibility that such a theory is true, the reach of the free will defense is significantly expanded. (shrink)

Few arguments have enjoyed as strong a reputation for philosophical success as Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense. Despite the striking reputation for decisiveness, however, concerns about the success of the FWD have begun to trickle into the philosophical literature. In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Pruss has contributed to this flow with an intriguing argument that a proposition necessary to the success of Plantinga’s FWD is false. Specifically, Pruss has argued, contrary to the FWD, that, necessarily, (...) God is able to actualize a world containing at least one significantly free creature who never does anything morally wrong. Thus, Pruss purports to demonstrate that it is not possible that every creaturely essence suffers from transworld depravity. Since the possibility of universal transworld depravity is essential to Plantinga’s defense, Pruss concludes that the defense in its Plantingian form ultimately fails. After presenting Pruss’s argument, I argue that the free will defender can resist it, in large part because the free will defender can quite reasonably reject the dominance principle on which the supposed counterexample depends. (shrink)

Plantinga’s Free Will Defense is an argument that, possibly, God cannot actualize a world containing significant creaturely free will and no wrongdoings. I will argue that if standard Molinism is true, there is a pair of worlds w1 and w2 each of which contains a significantly free creature who never chooses wrongly, and that are such that, necessarily, at least one of these worlds is a world that God can actualize.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Spring, 1980, 123-32.

In a recent book and article, James Sterba has argued that there is no free will defense. It is the purpose of this article to show that, in the most technical sense, he is wrong. There is a version of the free will defense that can solve what Sterba (rightly) takes to be the most interesting and severe version of the logical problem of moral evil. However, I will also argue that, in effect (or, we (...) might say, in practice), Sterba is correct. The only working version of the free will defense requires embracing a view that entails consequences theists traditionally have not and cannot accept. Consequently, the one and only free will solution is not viable. Unless some other solution can be found (Sterba argues there is none), the logical problem of evil, as Sterba understands it, either commits one to atheism, or a version of theism that practically all theists would regard as a heresy. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt's well-known counterexample to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) has recently come under attack by those who argue that the success of that sort of counterexample depends on the falsity of incompatibilism. In response, I argue that, given one controversial assumption, there are Frankfurt-style counterexamples to PAP that don't take the falsity of incompatibilism for granted. The controversial assumption is the Molinist one that something like middle knowledge is possible. I then show how the falsity of PAP causes (...) some trouble for the Free Will Defense standardly offered in response to atheistic arguments from evil. (shrink)

I begin with a distinction between narrow and broad defenses to the logical problem of evil. The former is simply an attempt to show that God and evil are not logically incompat-ible whereas the latter attempts the same, but only by appealing to beliefs one takes to be true in the actual world. I then argue that while recent accounts of original sin may be consistent with a broad defense, they are also logically incoherent. After considering potential replies, I conclude (...) by proposing an account of original sin that is both logically coherent and consistent with a broad defense. (shrink)

Flew's attack on the free-Will defense (fwd) is well known, As are the defenses of the fwd based on the claims that the fwd (now at least) employs an indeterminist sense of free, Free (i), Rather than the compatibilists sense of free, Free (c), That flew used. This paper tries to (1) modify the flew attack so that it does apply to free (i) versions of the fwd, (2) show that even the modified (...) flew attack fails to defeat the fwd, And, In passing, (3) make some comment on coherence of standard (thomistic) doctrine of foreknowledge of future free (i) acts. (shrink)

A critique of Plantinga's free will defense. For an updated version of this critique, with a reply to objections from William Rowe and Alvin Plantinga, see my "The logical problem of evil: Plantinga and Mackie," in Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 19-33.

The aim of this essay is to create a coherent theistic model of a solution to the problem of evil. To this end, it is shown that the differences in Kierkegaard’s and Plantinga’s accounts of the problem of evil can be reconciled if looked at from a broader theistic perspective. This requires, on the one hand, that Plantinga’s immanent and logical vision be extended to include Kierkegaard’s spiritual and existential view of evil, and, on the other hand, that a correction (...) be made to Kierkegaard’s view thereof, as a result of the way in which Plantinga presents the relationship between good and moral evil in the world. Consequently, in Plantinga’s Free Will Defense the existence of God is consistent with the existence of evil, not because God has a reason to permit evil in the world, but because evil as a real element of the temporal world does not come from God. In Kierkegaard’s Free Spirit Offense, in turn, the interpretative model applied demonstrates that the existence of moral good must be independent of the existence of spiritual evil, for otherwise the moral evil of immanence would not be able to be forgiven by the spiritual good of transcendence. (shrink)

Paradigmatic examples of logical arguments from evil are attempts to establish that the following claims are inconsistent with one another: (1) God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good. (2) There is evil in the world. Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense resists such arguments by providing a positive case that (1) and (2) are consistent. A weakness in Plantinga’s free will defense, however, is that it does not show that theism is consistent with the proposition that there (...) are non-moral evils in the world (i.e., that there obtain morally bad states of affairs for which no creature is morally responsible). But many of us firmly believe that there are evils of that sort. I show how Plantinga’s free will defense can be extended so as to redress this weakness. (shrink)

I test the ability of Plantinga's free-will defense of theism against logical arguments from evil to defend the version of the theory I call orthodox Christian theism against a reformed logical argument from evil. I conclude that his defense fails in that task.

Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate-as (...) measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge-does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed. (shrink)

One version of the free-will argument relies on the claim that, other things being equal, a world in which free beings exist is morally preferable to a world in which free beings do not exist (the 'value thesis'). I argue that this version of the free-will argument cannot support a theodicy that should alleviate the doubts about God's existence to which the problems of evil give rise. In particular, I argue that the value thesis (...) has no foundation in common intuitions about morality. Without some sort of intuitive support, the value thesis lacks the resources to serve as the foundation for a theodicy that addresses the powerful intuition, which affects believers and non-believers alike, that a perfect God would not allow so much evil. (shrink)

Otte :165–177, 2009) and Pruss :400–415, 2012) have produced counterexamples to Plantinga’s famous free will defence against the logical version of the problem of evil. The target of this criticism is the possibility of universal transworld depravity, which is crucial to Plantinga’s defence. In this paper, we argue that there is a simpler and more plausible free will defence that does not require the possibility of universal transworld depravity or the truth of counterfactuals (...) of creaturely freedom. We assume only that libertarianism is possibly true and that God’s existence is consistent with the existence of free agents who never go wrong. We conclude the paper by explaining how our defence may be able to succeed without assuming, in a way that is consistent with compatibilism. (shrink)

This paper 1) argues that libertarians are virtually as badly off as compatibilists in the face of the objection to the Free Will Defence that omnipotent God could have ensured that all free beings always but freely did right, and 2) explores the prospects for an "upgraded" Free Will Defense which takes freedom merely as a necessary condition for a further higher good which logically could not be achieved if God employed any of the (...) available strategies--under both compatibilist and libertarian assumptions--for creating morally free beings without the risk of moral evil. (shrink)

In a recent book, The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan discusses the Cartesian, or agent causation, view of free will. According to this view, when a person acts of his own free will his action is not caused by antecedent events but is caused by the agent himself, and in acting the agent acts as an uncaused cause. Flanagan argues at length that this view is false. In this article, I defend the agent causation view (...) against Flanagan’s criticisms and I go on to critically address his own ‘neo-compatibilist’ alternative to the agent causation view. In doing so, I hope to exhibit some common misconceptions about the nature of the agent causation view and to show that this is a view that deserves more serious consideration. (shrink)

In his recent book The Natural Selection of Autonomy, Bruce Waller defends a view that he calls “natural autonomy.” This view holds that human beings possess a kind of autonomy that we share with nonhuman animals, a capacity to explore alternative courses of action, but an autonomy that cannot support moral responsibility. He also argues that this natural autonomy can provide support for the ethical principle of noninterference. I argue that to support the ethical principle of noninterference Waller needs either (...) a libertarian or a compatibilist theory of autonomy. I then go on to argue that, contra Waller, the libertarian view is both compatible with Darwinism and able to make sense of how autonomous acts belong to the agents who perform them. Thus, I conclude that the libertarian position is a live option for Darwinians. If however, naturalism is taken to include a deterministic view of the universe (at least at the nonquantum level), as is often the case, then my article takes some strides in defending “Darwinian non–naturalism.”. (shrink)

In a recent paper Anthony Flew gives an argument which can be outlined as follows: 1. Any attempt to give a ‘free will defence’ must be based either on a compatibilist notion of free will or a libertarian, incompatibilist, notion of free will. 2. A free will defence based on a compatibilist notion of free will must fail, for on a compatibilist view of free will, God (...) could make creatures who were free but never chose evil. 3. A free will defence based on a libertarian notion of free will might have other difficulties, but on a libertarian view of free will God could not both leave men free and bring it about that they never chose evil. 4. But a free will defence based on an incompatibilist, libertarian notion of free will can be rejected, since: It is not clear that the ordinary use of such key terms as ‘action’ and ‘choice’ carry any implications of libertarian free will. If such terms did carry the implication of libertarian free will it becomes hard to see how anyone could be in a position to know that a choice had been made or an action performed. The possession of libertarian free will by created beings seems to be incompatible with the essential theistic doctrine that all created beings are always utterly dependent on God as their sustaining cause. 5. Therefore the free will defence fails. (shrink)