Plantinga’s Free Will Defence

Plantinga’s Free Will Defence

Plantinga’s response to Mackie’s Logical Argument from Evil goes by the name “the Free Will Defence.” Give a 4-5 page exposition of Plantinga’s Free Will Defence (found in God, Freedom and Evil, pages 29-55) in which you identify and asses five crucial assumptions that must be presupposed in order for the defense to work.

Plantinga disagrees with Mackie’s Logical Argument on the basis that a world where God is morally capable of good will enable humans with free will. Mackie argues that a world where God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent but where evil persists is contradictory and logically inconsistent. Platinga refutes this claim and asserts the free will defence; he shows that its is possible and logically consistent for God to simultaneously be omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent and for evil to exist in a world where people have free will.[unique_solution]

Free Will – Statement

Platinga uses his conception of free will to undermine Mackie’s argument. Mackie argues: There are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being can not actualize and that a world with morally free creatures producing only moral good is such a world. To Platinga, a world in which creatures have the free will to perform morally significant actions is more valuable than a world where none have free will at all. However, he also clarifies that to perform what is morally good, God has to equivalently allow creatures to consider morally evil actions, or else the concept of free will is compromised. Taken into account that creatures do not always do what is right freely, creatures perform morally right over morally evil actions most of the time, however as we know, it also happens that certain creatures will chose to do evil over good. Therefore, it is not God’s omnibenevolnce that is compromised, but rather the moral agent’s actions that are evil. God’s omnipotence and his goodness cannot be accountable for the evil performed by moral agents. Platinga challenges Mackie’s argument by showing that a world where evil exists, God can also exist though being omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient.

This being said, Platinga’s view meets flaws too. Firstly, his definition of omnib

Transworld depravity – Statement

Furthermore, Plantinga suggests that we should consider the possibility that God couldn’t create moral good without also creating moral evil because it is possible that human beings suffer from transworld depravity. Transworld depravity are all the possible worlds like ours where different actions are taken but not actualized by God. One can suffer from transworld depravity when in all possible worlds a person chooses moral evil at least once. Therefore, Plantinga claims that it is possible that human beings suffer from transworld depravity, and since it’s possible that we all produce moral evil in every world in which we exist, then it is possible that God couldn’t create moral good