The Free Will Defense

The Free Will Defense argues that God permits evil because free will is so valuable that a world with free beings - even ones who sometimes choose evil - is better than a world of moral robots. It is the most influential theistic response to the Problem of Evil, developed by philosopher Alvin Plantinga in his 1974 book God, Freedom, and Evil. Most philosophers agree Plantinga successfully defeated the logical Problem of Evil, making this one of the major achievements in 20th-century philosophy of religion. But major gaps remain, and the argument scores 40/100 for soundness.

The Core Argument

Plantinga’s defense runs in four steps:

1. Free will is a great good - so valuable that a world with free will is better than one without it, even counting the evil that free beings produce.
2. Real free will requires the real possibility of choosing evil. A being that can only choose good is not truly free.
3. It is logically impossible for God to create beings with real free will who are guaranteed to always choose good. Not even omnipotence covers logical impossibilities.
4. Therefore, God is morally justified in allowing moral evil as the unavoidable cost of creating free beings.

The argument is technically a defense rather than a theodicy (an attempt to explain why God allows evil). Plantinga only claims to show that God’s existence and evil’s existence are logically compatible - that there is no formal contradiction between them.

Transworld Depravity

Plantinga’s most original contribution is transworld depravity. He argues it is possible that every possible free creature suffers from transworld depravity - meaning that in every possible world where that creature exists and is free, they would choose at least some evil. If this is true, God cannot create a world with free beings and no evil, because every free creature would go wrong somewhere.

This is a claim about possibility, not about what is actually true. Plantinga only needs it to be possible that every free creature has this property to show God and evil are logically compatible. Critics like J.L. Mackie first argued the concept was incoherent, but most philosophers now accept it as logically possible, even if unlikely.

Why Philosophers Consider It a Success

The Free Will Defense is widely regarded as having resolved the logical Problem of Evil. Before Plantinga, atheist philosophers like Mackie argued that “God is all-powerful,” “God is all-good,” and “evil exists” form a logically contradictory set - that no possible world contains all three.

Plantinga showed this is false. There is at least one possible scenario where all three coexist: God creates free beings, free will is valuable enough to justify the risk, and those beings freely choose evil. The logical contradiction vanishes. This shifted the debate from the logical problem to the evidential Problem of Evil - the argument that the amount and distribution of evil, while logically compatible with God, make God’s existence improbable.

The Natural Evil Gap

The biggest weakness is that the Free Will Defense only addresses moral evil - suffering caused by human choices like murder, cruelty, and theft. It says nothing about natural evil: earthquakes, tsunamis, childhood cancer, genetic diseases, parasites, and the millions of years of animal suffering before humans existed.

These sources of suffering involve no human free will. No one chose for tectonic plates to shift beneath cities. No one freely decided children should get leukemia. If God designed the natural world, these features are divine choices, not consequences of human freedom.

Plantinga later suggested natural evil might be caused by the free choices of fallen angels or other non-human free agents. Most philosophers find this extension ad hoc and unsupported. It raises more questions than it answers - why would God grant demons the freedom to cause earthquakes but not stop them from doing so?

The Scope Problem

Even granting that free will justifies some moral evil, the defense struggles with the sheer scale and extremity of suffering. Could God not create free beings a little more inclined toward goodness without removing their freedom? Humans already vary enormously in their moral tendencies - some are naturally more empathetic, patient, or compassionate. A world populated with people at the better end of that range would still contain free will and some evil, but far less suffering.

William Rowe developed this objection into the evidential Problem of Evil. Even if God and evil are logically compatible, the specific evil we see - its intensity, distribution, and apparent pointlessness - seems far beyond what free will requires. A child dying slowly of bone cancer serves no clear free-will purpose.

The Heaven Problem

This may be the toughest objection for the Free Will Defense. Most Christian theologians teach that heaven is a state where free beings exist without evil - the redeemed keep their freedom but never choose sin. If this is possible in heaven, why was it not possible on Earth from the start?

The defender faces a dilemma. Either heaven lacks real free will (which undermines its value and makes it less desirable than earthly life), or free will without evil is logically possible after all (which undermines the entire defense). Some theologians argue earthly life is a needed “soul-making” period that prepares beings for heavenly freedom, but this raises further questions about why an all-powerful God requires such a process and why it involves so much suffering.

The Problem of Hell intensifies this. If some free beings end up in eternal torment as a result of their free choices, the value of free will must be weighed against infinite suffering - and it becomes unclear whether free will is valuable enough to justify an eternity of conscious torment for those who misuse it.

Compatibilism and Libertarian Free Will

The Free Will Defense requires libertarian free will - the view that human choices are genuinely undetermined, not the inevitable product of prior causes. If compatibilism - the view that free will and determinism CAN both be true - is correct, then God could have determined all beings to freely choose good. The defense collapses under compatibilism.

This is a serious weakness because compatibilism is arguably the dominant position among modern philosophers. The PhilPapers survey found that about 59% of professional philosophers lean toward or accept compatibilism. If they are right, God could have created a deterministic world where beings act freely (in the compatibilist sense) and never choose evil.

Plantinga accepts this dependence on libertarian free will and defends it, but the defense then inherits all the philosophical problems of libertarianism, including how undetermined choices can be genuinely yours rather than random events.

Moral Responsibility Without Libertarian Freedom

Even setting aside the compatibilism debate, some philosophers question whether libertarian free will is needed for moral development. John Hick’s soul-making theodicy suggests what matters is the process of moral growth through facing challenges - but this could be achieved without the extreme suffering that actual free will produces. If moral growth is the goal, God could have designed creatures that develop through challenges tuned to be productive rather than devastating.

The Logical vs. Evidential Distinction

Understanding the Free Will Defense means knowing what it does and does not do. It shows logical possibility - the mere compatibility of God and evil. It does not show plausibility, probability, or actuality. Showing that God could have a good reason for allowing evil is very different from showing that God does have such a reason.

This is why the modern debate has shifted almost entirely to the evidential Problem of Evil. Philosophers like Rowe, Paul Draper, and others argue that even if God and evil are compatible in principle, the specific patterns of suffering we see are much more likely on naturalism than on theism. The Free Will Defense does not address this probability-based argument.

Influence on the God Debate

Despite its limits, the Free Will Defense has shaped the entire field. It forced atheist philosophers to abandon the claim that God and evil are logically contradictory - a claim that had been central to atheist philosophy for decades. The debate moved to more nuanced territory, with both sides agreeing that the relationship between God and evil is more complex than a simple contradiction.

The defense also influenced theology. Many theologians now take the value of free will as a starting point for explaining evil, even when they supplement it with soul-making, divine mystery, or hope for the afterlife.

Our Scoring

Soundness: 40/100. The argument has a mixed record. On the positive side, Plantinga genuinely solved the logical Problem of Evil - a major philosophical achievement that most professional philosophers acknowledge. On the negative side, the defense fails to account for natural evil, struggles with the extreme scope of suffering, faces the devastating heaven problem, and depends entirely on libertarian free will, which is a contested view. It also does nothing to address the evidential Problem of Evil, which is now the main battleground.

Personal God: 50/100. This score is moderate because the defense, if successful, removes a major objection to a personal God’s existence. However, it does not positively establish that a personal God exists - it only shows evil is not a knockdown argument against one. Removing an objection adds some plausibility but is fundamentally different from providing evidence.

Creator/Designer: 50/100. This score matches the Personal God score. The defense is equally relevant to a creator deity, since the Problem of Evil applies to any being that designed the universe with the capacity for suffering. Removing the logical contradiction helps a creator concept to roughly the same degree.

Higher Power: 50/100. This score is identical because the Free Will Defense operates at the same level for all three god concepts. It addresses whether any good, powerful being can coexist with evil - a question that applies equally regardless of how the deity is defined. Unlike cosmological arguments that differentiate sharply between god concepts, the Free Will Defense’s logic applies uniformly across all three.