ris3n's Apologetics Codex

Argument

Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense

Intro

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The hardest objection to Christianity goes like this. God is supposed to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. But evil exists. So either God cannot stop it (not all-powerful), or He does not see it (not all-knowing), or He does not want to stop it (not all-good). Either way, the Christian God does not exist.

The Free Will Defense, in its strongest form from Alvin Plantinga in 1974, makes one quiet but decisive move. It does not try to tell you why God permits any specific evil. It only shows that God exists and evil exists are not logically contradictory.

Here is the logic. Free creatures are worth more than puppets. A world where people can really love, choose virtue, and resist temptation contains a kind of goodness no world of pre-programmed robots could ever contain. But once you allow free choice, you allow the possibility that some choices will go wrong. Even God cannot create a world where people are genuinely free and yet guaranteed to never choose evil; that would be a contradiction in terms.

So it is at least possible that God permits evil because the alternative, no free creatures at all, would be worse. That possibility is enough. To win the logical version of the problem of evil, the atheist needs contradiction, not just unlikelihood. Possibility breaks the contradiction. Even J. L. Mackie, the philosopher who pressed this objection hardest, eventually admitted Plantinga had answered him.

This argument doesn't end every conversation about suffering. There is a separate version of the problem (the evidential problem) that asks whether evil makes God unlikely, not impossible. That conversation continues. But the logical version was the strongest atheist weapon, and it is broken.

In full

Plantinga's classical defense (not theodicy) against the logical problem of evil. The Free Will Defense (FWD) does not attempt to explain why God permits each particular evil, it shows only that the conjunction "God exists and evil exists" is not contradictory. That alone is fatal to the logical POE (Mackie 1955). This page is structured as debate prep: each premise of the atheist's argument and each premise of Plantinga's reply carries a second-order positive case, anticipated objections, rebuttals, a live-cite kit, and tactical notes. The single most important live-debate move is distinguishing the logical POE from the evidential POE, confusing the two is the most common opponent failure mode, and exposing the conflation usually wins the exchange.

Argument structure

The atheist's argument (logical POE, Mackie 1955):

# Premise
A1 If God exists, He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent.
A2 An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being would prevent all evil.
A3 Evil exists.
AC Therefore no such God exists.

Plantinga's Free Will Defense (response):

# Premise
P1 It is possible that creating significantly free creatures is a great good.
P2 It is possible that any world containing significantly free creatures will contain some evil (free creatures can choose evil).
P3 It is possible that God could not have actualized a world with the same level of moral good and no moral evil, because (given transworld depravity) every feasible world with significantly free creatures contains some evil.
P4 Therefore it is possible that God permits evil for the sake of greater goods that require free creatures.
C Therefore the coexistence of God and evil is logically compatible. The logical POE fails.

Form

Defensive / possibility-based (modal). The argument does not claim its components are actually true; it claims only that they are possibly true. Possibility is sufficient to defeat the claim of necessary contradiction. This is the lower bar Plantinga deliberately works at, he is answering Mackie's logical claim that "God + evil" is contradictory, not the evidential claim that "God + evil" is improbable. Mackie himself conceded in The Miracle of Theism (1982) that Plantinga had refuted the logical POE; the dialectic has shifted to the evidential POE (Rowe 1979) where the FWD is one ingredient but not by itself sufficient.

P1, It is possible that creating significantly free creatures is a great good

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

  1. Free creatures can do morally significant good. A world with creatures who can love, choose virtue, and resist temptation contains a kind of value (moral goodness) that a world of pre-programmed automata cannot contain. The biblical anthropology of imago Dei (Genesis 1.27) presupposes this, humans are made for moral agency, not behavioral conformity.
  2. Free love uniquely glorifies God. Coerced affection is not love; programmed worship is not worship. The kind of relationship God designed creatures for (Deuteronomy 30.19; Mark 12:30) requires creatures who can refuse, and freely don't. This is the sister-argument Free Will Argument from Love.
  3. The bare possibility is enough. Plantinga does not need to prove free will is in fact a great good, only that it is possibly a great good. This is a low bar; rejecting it requires the atheist to insist that free will is necessarily not a great good, which is wildly implausible.

Anticipated objections

  1. "Compatibilist freedom is enough." Compatibilist (Frankfurt-style) freedom, acting in accord with one's desires, even if those desires are determined, gives all the value of "freedom" without permitting evil. So God could have determined creatures to always desire good.
  2. "You haven't shown free will has enough value to outweigh actual evil." Even granted some value to free will, it must be weighed against the Holocaust, child cancer, the Black Death. The scales don't balance.
  3. "The biblical text doesn't actually require libertarian free will." Reformed compatibilists (e.g., John Frame) read Scripture's "choose" language compatibilistically. The exegetical case for libertarian freedom is contested.

Rebuttals

  1. The compatibilist deflection mistakes the dialectic, and even compatibilists can grant possibility. Plantinga's defense works on the libertarian assumption, but the bar is modal possibility, not actuality. Even a compatibilist can grant the possibility of libertarian-free creatures being a great good, the defense only requires that some possible world coheres in which free creatures + permitted evil + omnibenevolent God all obtain. The compatibilist who denies this is making an extraordinary modal claim. Failure mode: confusing actuality with possibility (the "modal-collapse" mistake).
  2. The weighing objection is an evidential POE move smuggled into the logical POE. "The value of free will doesn't outweigh actual evil" is a probabilistic claim about expected value, not a logical claim about contradiction. The atheist is moving the goalposts mid-argument: starting with "logical contradiction" and retreating to "implausibly disproportionate." That is conceding the logical POE has failed and switching arguments. Force-commit: ask the opponent whether they are arguing logical impossibility or evidential improbability.
  3. Exegetical disputes about freedom don't touch the modal defense. Even if Reformed compatibilism is the correct biblical anthropology, Plantinga's defense remains a defense of theism generally, it shows no worldview combining theism + evil is contradictory. Whether free will is libertarian or compatibilist is an intra-Christian question that doesn't bear on the theist-vs-atheist dialectic. (See Free Will and Determinism for the intra-Christian dispute; Calvinism vs Arminianism vs Molinism vs Open Theism for the comparison.)

Live-cite kit

  • Scripture: Genesis 1.27 (imago Dei); Deuteronomy 30.19 (choose life); Joshua 24:15 (choose whom you will serve); James 1:13 (God tempts no one)
  • Scholarly: Plantinga (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974, ch. 1-2); Plantinga (The Nature of Necessity, 1974, ch. 9, the formal modal version); Mackie's own concession (The Miracle of Theism, 1982, ch. 9); C. S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain, 1940, ch. 2)
  • Aphorism: "A defense, not a theodicy, possibility is enough."

Tactical notes

  • Lead with the modal-possibility framing immediately. Most atheist debaters in popular contexts have not internalized that Plantinga is making a modal claim, not a proportionality claim. Stating "I'm not claiming this is true; I'm claiming it's possibly true, which is enough to defeat the logical contradiction charge" reframes the entire debate.
  • What NOT to defend live: the evidential POE. That is a separate fight (skeptical theism, soul-making theodicy, eschatological resolution). Stay on the logical POE; if pressed on the evidential, defer to Skeptical Theism and Greater-Good Theodicies.
  • Force-commit move: "Are you claiming theism + evil is contradictory, or that theism + evil is improbable? Because those are different arguments and require different responses."

P2, Any world with significantly free creatures will contain some evil

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

  1. Significant freedom entails the genuine ability to do otherwise. A creature who cannot do otherwise (in the morally relevant cases) is not significantly free. Therefore any creature with significant freedom can sin; whether they will depends on what they freely choose. This is the entailment, not a probabilistic claim.
  2. Mass actualization makes some sin near-inevitable. Plantinga's transworld depravity argument: it is possible that for every significantly-free creature God could create, there is at least one circumstance in which that creature would freely sin. If transworld depravity holds for every creaturely essence, no world of significantly-free creatures is sin-free. Plantinga shows transworld depravity is coherent, not actual, but possible, which is enough.
  3. Empirical confirmation. Every observable society of free creatures we know of contains moral evil. This is consistent with, though doesn't prove, the claim that the link is necessary.

Anticipated objections

  1. "Couldn't God have made free creatures who always freely choose good?" Mackie's famous challenge: "If God can make free creatures, why not make them such that they always freely choose right?"
  2. "Heaven exists, so a sin-free world of free creatures is possible." Eschatological state has perfected freedom without sin; this proves the conjunction is possible in the actual world too.
  3. "Transworld depravity is wildly implausible." Why think every possible creaturely essence would freely sin in some circumstance?

Rebuttals

  1. The Mackie challenge equivocates on "make." God can make free creatures; God cannot make them freely do anything in particular, that is a contradiction in terms ("forced free choice"). The atheist demand collapses on its own grammar. Plantinga's reply: if a creature freely chooses A in W, then in W, the creature is not made to choose A; the creature freely chose A. God's creating-the-creature includes the capacity for free choice, not the determination of the choice. Failure mode: equivocation on "make."
  2. The heaven objection ignores the path-dependence of glorified freedom. The redeemed in glory have been trained through earthly trial (cf. Aquinas, ST I-II q. 5 a. 4) into the non posse peccare, the inability to sin that is consequent on perfected love, not constitutive of pre-fall humanity. Heaven doesn't show a sin-free initial condition is possible; it shows a sin-free consummated condition is possible given the prior history of free moral formation. This is what Hick's soul-making theodicy makes explicit. The heavenly state is the destination, not the starting point.
  3. Transworld depravity needs only to be possible, not actual. Plantinga does not assert that transworld depravity is true, he asserts that it is possibly true. The atheist must show it is necessarily false to defeat the defense. No atheist has done so. The objection's force depends on confusing implausibility with impossibility. Failure mode: confusing actuality / plausibility with modal possibility.

Live-cite kit

  • Scripture: Genesis 3 (the Fall as misuse of free will); Romans 5.12 ("through one man sin entered the world"); Romans 3:23 (universal sinfulness)
  • Scholarly: Plantinga (The Nature of Necessity, 1974, §9.4, transworld depravity); Plantinga (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974, pp. 44-53); Mackie ("Evil and Omnipotence," Mind 1955); Mackie (The Miracle of Theism, 1982, ch. 9, the concession); Hick (Evil and the God of Love, 1966, soul-making rival)
  • Aphorism: "God can make free creatures; God cannot make them freely choose."

Tactical notes

  • The Mackie challenge is the single most common atheist move on this premise. Have the equivocation reply ready and rehearsed.
  • Don't confuse defense with theodicy. Plantinga is not claiming transworld depravity is true; he is claiming it is coherent. The opponent who asks "but is it true?" has missed the dialectical point.
  • Tactical opening: "Plantinga isn't trying to give the reason God permits evil; he's trying to show the atheist hasn't proved a contradiction. The bar is much lower than people think."

P3, God could not have actualized a sin-free world of significantly free creatures

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

  1. Counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are not under God's strong-actualization control. God can strongly actualize states of affairs that don't depend on creaturely choice; God can only weakly actualize states of affairs that include free creaturely choices, by setting up the circumstances and letting the creature freely choose. This Molinist-leaning distinction (Plantinga endorses it modally) means there are possible worlds God could not have actualized even given omnipotence, namely, worlds whose constitutive counterfactuals of freedom are not in fact true. (See Counterfactuals of Freedom, Molinism.)
  2. Transworld depravity (if true in some essence) blocks the sin-free world. If Curley Smith would freely accept a $35,000 bribe in any feasible world where he is free, then no feasible world contains a free Curley who refuses bribes. Generalize: if transworld depravity holds for every creaturely essence in at least one circumstance, then no feasible world contains universally bribe-refusing free creatures. The defense needs only the possibility that transworld depravity is universally instantiated. (Plantinga, Nature of Necessity §9.4.)
  3. The defense shifts the dialectical burden. Once Plantinga has shown that possibly God could not actualize the sin-free world, the atheist must show that necessarily God could. No atheist has produced such a proof, the defense leaves Mackie's project incomplete in principle.

Anticipated objections

  1. "Counterfactuals of freedom are incoherent." William Hasker, Robert Adams, William Lane Craig (in his Molinist-rejecting moods) have all attacked counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. If they are incoherent, Plantinga's argument needs reformulation.
  2. "Open theism dissolves the problem differently." Open theism (Pinnock, Sanders, Boyd) holds that God doesn't know future free choices because they're not yet objects of knowledge, so the "could God have actualized?" question is malformed.
  3. "Why couldn't God just not create essences with transworld depravity?" If God knows in advance which creaturely essences would freely sin, He could simply create only the non-sinning ones.

Rebuttals

  1. Counterfactuals of freedom defenses are well-developed. Thomas Flint (Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, 1998), Alfred Freddoso, and Plantinga himself have given technical defenses. The grounding objection (what makes counterfactuals of freedom true?) is real but not decisive, the most common reply is that creaturely-essence properties ground them. The defense does not require Molinism be true, only that the possibility of it (or some equivalent) hold. Failure mode: confusing internal-Christian metaphysical disputes with the theist-atheist dialectic.
  2. Open theism is one option among the responses available to the theist. If counterfactuals of freedom are incoherent, the Open Theist reply works (Open Theism: God doesn't know because the future is open; God permits evil because He cannot prevent free choices in advance). The defense is over-determined, multiple metaphysical packages support it. The atheist must defeat all of them to defeat the defense.
  3. The "create only the non-sinning essences" objection presupposes Molinism's strong-grounding view and presupposes that such essences exist in sufficient number to populate a worthwhile world. Plantinga's transworld depravity worry is precisely that every significantly-free essence might freely sin in some feasible circumstance, in which case no selection of essences gives a sin-free world. The objection assumes what the defense denies; it begs the question.

Live-cite kit

  • Scripture: Romans 9:14-24 (God's sovereignty in creation; the potter and clay imagery); Acts 17:26-28 (God appoints the times and places of nations); Ephesians 1:11 (God works all things according to His counsel)
  • Scholarly: Plantinga (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974, §I.9); Plantinga (Nature of Necessity, 1974, §9.5); Thomas Flint (Divine Providence: The Molinist Account, 1998); William Lane Craig (The Only Wise God, 1987, Molinism); William Hasker (God, Time, and Knowledge, 1989, Open Theism); Robert Adams ("Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil," American Philosophical Quarterly 14, 1977)
  • Aphorism: "God can make free creatures; He cannot guarantee what they freely do."

Tactical notes

  • What NOT to defend live: the technical Molinist apparatus. The defense doesn't require it; it requires only the possibility of something like it. If pressed, defer to Molinism and Counterfactuals of Freedom.
  • The Open Theist over-determination move is powerful. Even if the opponent rejects Molinism, the Open Theist alternative still defends the theistic conjunction. Force-commit: "Are you saying both Molinism and Open Theism are incoherent?"
  • If the opponent grants counterfactuals of freedom and starts arguing about transworld depravity's plausibility, you've already won the logical POE, they're now arguing evidence, not contradiction.

P4, Therefore it is possible that God permits evil for the sake of greater goods

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

  1. The conjunction follows by modus ponens. From P1 (free creatures = great good, possibly), P2 (any free-creature world has some evil, possibly), P3 (no sin-free free-creature world is feasible, possibly), it follows that possibly God permits evil to obtain the great good of free creaturely existence. The modal logic is straightforward.
  2. Greater-good is not the only possible reason. The defense doesn't claim free will is the only reason God might permit evil, it claims free will is one possible reason, sufficient to defeat the contradiction charge. Other possible reasons (soul-making, eschatological compensation, demonic-agency-for-natural-evil, divine glory through redemption) are additional ammunition.
  3. The defense is ecumenical. It holds across libertarian and Molinist Christian metaphysics, Open Theist metaphysics (with adjustments), and most non-Christian theistic metaphysics. It doesn't depend on a contested intra-Christian position.

Anticipated objections

  1. "You've replaced one inscrutable mystery with another." The original POE: why does evil exist? FWD answer: because free will is a great good. Atheist reply: but why permit specific evils X, Y, Z?
  2. "This is just the 'mysterious ways' move dressed up in modal logic." Defenders of the FWD are doing what theologians always do, appealing to inaccessible divine reasons.
  3. "Even granted the defense, it's a hollow victory." The defense leaves theism technically coherent but evidentially battered. Who cares about logical possibility if the actual evil is overwhelming?

Rebuttals

  1. The defense doesn't address "why each particular evil", that's theodicy, not defense. The dialectic the defense answers is Mackie's claim of contradiction. To defeat that claim, the defender needs only one possible reason for evil's compatibility with God. Particular evils are addressed by particular theodicy moves (soul-making for character, eschatological for compensation, free-will-collateral for personal moral evil, natural-law-defense for natural evil). The defense buys the theodicies time and space to operate. Failure mode: conflating defense with theodicy.
  2. The "mysterious ways" charge cuts the wrong way. The FWD is not an appeal to divine inscrutability, it's a positive argument that free creaturely existence is a coherent good God might value enough to permit evil for. The argument names a specific possible reason (free will), not "God knows but won't tell us." This is the opposite of fideistic mystery-mongering.
  3. The "hollow victory" objection is a concession, not a rebuttal. When the atheist retreats from "logical contradiction" to "evidential implausibility," the FWD has done its work, it has defeated the logical POE. The dialectic now moves to the evidential POE, where Rowe's argument is engaged by skeptical theism, soul-making theodicies, and eschatological responses. The FWD is not defeated by the new battlefield; it has forced the opponent onto a new battlefield. (See Skeptical Theism, Greater-Good Theodicies, Hick Soul-Making Theodicy.)

Live-cite kit

  • Scripture: Romans 8:18-25 (sufferings of present time vs glory to be revealed); 2 Cor 4:17 (light momentary affliction working eternal weight of glory); Revelation 21:4 (every tear wiped away); James 1:2-4 (testing produces endurance)
  • Scholarly: Plantinga (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974); Mackie (The Miracle of Theism, 1982, p. 154, concession); Hick (Evil and the God of Love, 1966, soul-making complement); Stephen Wykstra ("The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering," 1984, skeptical theism cousin); Eleonore Stump (Wandering in Darkness, 2010, narrative theodicy)
  • Aphorism: "The defender wins by showing the door is unlockable; the theodicist asks whether they have the key."

Tactical notes

  • The single most important tactical move on this premise: explicitly close the logical POE. "Plantinga's defense, by Mackie's own concession in 1982, succeeded in defeating the logical POE. We are now necessarily talking about evidential probability, not logical contradiction. Are we agreed?", once the opponent concedes, the rules of engagement have shifted in your favor.
  • Do not extend into theodicy unless asked. The defense is its own win; theodicy is a separate enterprise with separate burdens.
  • For audiences who don't know Mackie, paraphrase: "The 20th century's leading atheist philosopher of religion publicly conceded this argument worked. The conversation has moved on."

Natural evil sub-defense

The FWD addresses moral evil. Natural evil (earthquakes, disease, predation, tsunamis) requires additional moves. Three are standard:

  1. Demonic-agency defense (Plantinga). Natural evil could result from fallen angelic agency (the demonic). This is possible, even if unprovable, and possibility is the bar. The defense extends modal-possibility logic to natural evil. Critics call this implausible; defenders point out implausibility is irrelevant to the modal-possibility bar.
  2. Augustinian Fall-cosmology (Romans 8:20-22). Natural evil entered the cosmos consequent on the Fall, the cosmic disorder following human sin. This is the classical Christian view; it requires a substantive theology of cosmic-redemption-history.
  3. Natural-law defense (Swinburne, Reichenbach). A world with stable natural laws (necessary for free agency, scientific reasoning, and predictable moral consequences) inevitably contains some natural evil as collateral. A world with no earthquake possibility is also a world with no plate tectonics, which is also a world with no liveable continents.

These are complementary, not exclusive. The defender needs one to work; preferably all three available as live options. (See Natural Evil for fuller treatment.)

Master objections to the whole argument

  1. "Mackie was bullied into conceding; the logical POE is still alive." No. Mackie's concession in The Miracle of Theism (1982) is explicit, prose-careful, and reproduced in standard secondary literature (Howard-Snyder, Adams). It is a philosophical concession, not a personal capitulation. Reply: point them to the text, ch. 9.
  2. "The defense saves theism only at the cost of making God less than omnipotent." If God cannot actualize a sin-free free-creature world, isn't He limited? Reply: omnipotence has always meant power to do what is doable, not power to do the logically impossible. "Forcing free creatures to freely choose only good" is in the same impossibility class as "creating a square circle." Aquinas (ST I.25.3): God can do anything that does not involve a contradiction.
  3. "This makes God complicit in evil." If God permits evil for the sake of greater good, He is a moral consequentialist tolerating evil for utility. Reply: the FWD frames God as permitting creaturely choices, not causing evil. The moral framework is Augustinian (privation; cf. Evil as Privation of Good), God permits the misuse of a good gift, not the production of an evil substance. This is not consequentialist tolerance; it is the metaphysics of agency and gift.
  4. "The defense doesn't help with horrendous evils (Marilyn Adams' line)." Some evils are life-ruining in ways that no greater good could compensate. Reply: Marilyn Adams' point is real but is an evidential / theodicy objection, not a logical objection, it concedes the logical POE has fallen. Adams' own response (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 1999) is a Christological theodicy of incarnation-and-eschatological-defeat, not a denial of the FWD.

Tactical opening / closing lines

Opening: "Mackie's logical problem of evil, that 'God + evil' is contradictory, was conceded defeated by Mackie himself in 1982 after Plantinga's Free Will Defense. So when you press the problem of evil, are you arguing logical contradiction (already conceded) or evidential improbability (a different argument)?"

Closing: "The Free Will Defense doesn't tell us why God permits any particular evil, it tells us the door is unlocked. The theodicies, the eschatological hope, and the cross are how we walk through it. But the door is not barred by logical contradiction. That much is settled."

Connection to Scripture

Patristic / scholarly note

Patristic:

  • Augustine (Confessions VII; City of God XI-XIV; De Libero Arbitrio), the classical free-will theodicy + privation theory; the patristic source of both Plantinga's defense and Aquinas's systematization
  • John Chrysostom (Homilies), pastoral free-will theology; humans uncoerced
  • John of Damascus (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.30), distinguishes God's antecedent will (universal good) from consequent will (permission of free creaturely choice)

Medieval:

  • Aquinas (ST I, q. 49, God not the cause of evil; De Malo), systematizes Augustine; evil as privation; God permits but does not cause
  • Anselm (De Casu Diaboli), fall of Satan as misuse of will

Modern:

  • Alvin Plantinga (God, Freedom, and Evil, 1974; The Nature of Necessity, 1974, ch. 9), the definitive contemporary defense; the modal apparatus
  • J. L. Mackie ("Evil and Omnipotence," Mind 1955; The Miracle of Theism, 1982 ch. 9, the concession), the atheist Mackie initiated the modern logical POE and conceded its defeat
  • John Hick (Evil and the God of Love, 1966), soul-making theodicy alternative
  • William Rowe ("The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," American Philosophical Quarterly 1979), the evidential POE the dialectic shifted to
  • Marilyn Adams (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 1999), Christological theodicy
  • Eleonore Stump (Wandering in Darkness, 2010), narrative-Thomistic theodicy
  • Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil, 1996), standard anthology
  • Greg Welty (Why Is There Evil in the World?, 2018), Reformed engagement
  • John Frame (Apologetics, 2015, ch. 6), Reformed engagement
  • David Bentley Hart (The Doors of the Sea, 2005), Eastern Orthodox alternative emphasizing Christ's defeat of evil over philosophical defense

Connection to codex concepts (added 2026-04-28 bulk extraction)

  • Problem of Evil, names this hub as the "primary modern syllogism" answering the logical problem of evil; cites Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil (1974)
  • Libertarian Free Will, names this hub as the free-will defense that requires libertarian (not compatibilist) freedom; load-bearing premise of the Plantinga argument
  • Arminianism, flagged under Arminian / libertarian appeals to free-will defenses; Arminian theology naturally hosts this defense

See also