Abstract
This paper argues against the sufficiency of Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense, as presented in God, freedom, and evil as a response to the logical problem of evil. I begin by introducing the fundamental issues present in the problem of evil and proceed to present Plantinga’s response. Next, I argue that, despite the argument’s wide acceptance in the field, a central notion to the defense, transworld depravity, is internally inconsistent and that attempts to resolve the problem would result in an abandonment of the original terms of the discussion. Finally, I consider some potential alternatives for a free will defense beyond the one presented by Plantinga and conclude that the logical problem of evil may have more worth as a philosophical topic than has been thought in recent years.
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Notes
Contemporary epistemology notes a difference between ‘coherence’ and ‘consistency.’ While informative, the distinction is not necessary for our present purposes. Those familiar with the distinction ought to apply whichever standard he or she feels most appropriate to the discussion.
See (Stone 2003).
Here I eschew consideration of the stance that God’s omnipotence would entail God’s not being constrained by logical laws, a stance Mackie (1955) apparently endorses. I do so as I believe such a position precludes the possibility of rational discussion on the issue, and perhaps precludes rational discussion in general.
In truth, these explanations are often the most satisfactory for a religious thinker. I particularly have in mind Aquinas’s resolution to the problem of divine foreknowledge. (Aquinas 1994) This argument solves a metaphysical issue more than an epistemological one. We, as temporal minds, cannot have any notion of what God’s timeless knowledge might be like. As such, talk of God’s eternality is surely consistent, but our thoughts of God must always be from our temporal perspective.
For future reference, I shall refer to this argument as the “Branching Paths” objection.
Talk of contingent certainties such as this paper raises concerns for typical logical translations of modal propositions, which, while interesting, are beyond the scope of this paper.
Of course, as Gettier famously demonstrated, the inverse entailment does not hold.
Plantinga addresses this argument as an independent atheological position; my use thereof will not be as such, but rather only as a tool in demonstrating the impossibility of transworld depravity.
Most notably Aquinas, in the previously mentioned passage.
This is a generally accepted view, though dispositional essentialism offers a case for the strong logical necessity of natural laws. I eschew consideration of this possibility for the sake of maintaining a reasonable scope. In any case, while the dispositional essentialist could deny (49a)’s applicability with regard to knowledge, the view’s commitment to the strong logical necessity of natural laws may preclude human freedom in a much broader sense.
Or, alternatively, one could think of the grounding objection as drawing from the ‘true’ element of the traditional analysis of knowledge: justified true belief.
When one considers the sheer volume of free actions that a free agent does not act on, one can begin to understand the vast range of facts regarding a possible world that fall into (by our present considerations) the realm of the logically unknowable.
See Peter van Ingwagen’s “What Does an Omniscient Being Know About the Future?”, the article to which, in large part, Pruss’s work is a response.
This is a natural language rendering of Pruss’s proof on 259.
For instance: “the evil existing in the world is necessary for trees to grow and the growth of trees is the highest possible good to which the universe can attain.” While (with hope) no one would actually believe this, the atheist must first reject this account and all others before making claim to having demonstrated that theism is irrational.
References
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Aquinas, T. (1994). Summa theologica. Great Books of the Western world (Mortimer J. Adler (Ed.) Trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote). Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica. (Vol. 17, pp. 3–826)
Mackie, J. L. (1955). Evil and omnipotence. Mind, New Series, 64(254), 200–212.
Mackie, J. L. (1982). The miracle of theism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Molina, L. (1988). On divine foreknowledge. Ithica: Cornell University Press.
Plantinga, A. (1974). God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Pruss, A. (2011). From restricted to full omniscience. Religious Studies, 47(2), 257–264.
Stone, J. (2003). Evidential atheism. Philosophical Studies, 114(3), 253–277.
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Meslar, S. Transworld depravity and divine omniscience. Int J Philos Relig 77, 205–218 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9499-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9499-5