Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense

Alvin Plantinga is perhaps the foremost Christian philosopher of our generation. He has been, until his recent retirement, the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His fame is due primarily to two things: 1) His development of the idea that the belief in God is properly basic and is warranted without any external evidence (Reformed Epistemology). 2) His Free Will Defense which is viewed by many as having demolished the logical problem of evil. I have, in a prior post,  discussed the essence of his Reformed Epistemology. In this post, I would like to point out a few problems with his Free Will Defense as a solution for the logical problem of evil.

The logical problem of evil, as opposed to the evidential problem of evil, is the contention that to posit the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good god in an evil world constitutes a logical contradiction. In other words, an all-powerful god, all-knowing god, and a perfectly good god could not permit evil. (The evidential problem of evil says it is unlikely, not necessarily impossible, for such a god to exist given the amount of  evil in the world).

Plantinga explains the essence of his argument:

[W]e can make a preliminary statement of the Free Will Defense as follows. A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so (God, Freedom, and Evil [1977], 30).

1. A world with significantly free creatures is more valuable than one with creatures who are not significantly free.

I would like to know on what basis Plantinga makes this claim. How can one say that a world with significantly free creatures is really more valuable than one without such free will? He is making "significant free will" more important than the permission of evil and the subsequent suffering it entails. I would like to see an argument for this assertion.

2. An act can only be considered morally significant or praiseworthy if the individual could have made a different choice.

In other words, if one is not capable of making an evil choice, then his choice to do right is not morally praiseworthy. Plantinga explains:

What is relevant to the Free Will Defense is the idea of being free with respect to an action. If a person is free with respect to a given action, then he is free to perform that action and free to refrain from performing it; no antecedent conditions and/or causal laws determine that he will perform the action, or that he won't. It is within his power, at the time in question, to take or perform the action and within his power to refrain from it.

...[I] shall say that an action is morally significant, for a given person, if it would be wrong for him to perform the action but right to refrain or vice versa (Ibid., pp. 29-30).

This would mean that none of God's actions are morally praiseworthy and that in reality the term morality does not apply to God. As James R. Beebe puts it:

God, it seems, is incapable of doing anything wrong. Thus, it does not appear that, with respect to any choice of morally good and morally bad options, God is free to choose a bad option. He seems constitutionally incapable of choosing (or even wanting) to do what is wrong. According to Plantinga’s description of morally significant free will, it does not seem that God would be significantly free. Plantinga suggests that morally significant freedom is necessary in order for one’s actions to be assessed as being morally good or bad. But then it seems that God’s actions could not carry any moral significance. They could never be praiseworthy. That certainly runs contrary to central doctrines of theism ("Logical Problem of Evil").

3. To accomplish the greater good, God is justified in permitting evil.

Plantinga writes:

The Free Will Defense can be looked upon as an effort to show that there may be a very different kind of good that God can't bring about without permitting evil (God, Freedom, and Evil, p. 29).

My problem with this is twofold. First, it contradicts the concept of absolute morality which Christians claim to hold. However, in the Free Will Defense, it is okay to allow some evil so that a greater good will come from it. This is "the end justifying the means" which Christians usually attribute to moral relativism. Such a view takes a teleological or consequential view of ethics as opposed to what Christians normally insist upon, a deontological view. In other words, actions are not intrinsically right or wrong but are judged to be right or wrong depending upon the results of the actions.

Second, to permit an evil to occur when one could have prevented it makes one culpable. Christians often make the distinction between God permitting evil and God causing evil. They argue that God cannot cause evil because that would violate his holy character. Why does it not violate his holy character for him to permit evil? If I permit my child to do evil, how can I hold him responsible for what I permitted; and, furthermore, how can I escape culpability in the evil he committed? Permitting something is a form of condoning it.

The Essence of Reformed Epistemology

One of the most respected Christian philosophers of our age is Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Plantinga is the author of numerous journal articles and at least seven books:

• Warranted Christian Belief (2000)

• Warrant and Proper Function (1993)

• Warrant: the Current Debate (1993)

• Does God Have a Nature? (1980)

• God, Freedom & Evil (1974)

• The Nature of Necessity (1974)

• God and Other Minds (1967)

He is famous for his Reformed Epistemology in which he claims that belief in God is warranted or justified without any evidence. In other words, it is just as properly basic for man to believe in God as it is for man to believe in other minds or in the reality of the past (i.e., memories). He argues that this belief in God is a result of the sensus divinitatis (sense of the divine) which is found in each man (apparently based on Romans 1:19-21).

Although he is extremely erudite and his tomes demonstrate the highest of scholarship, when you actually "boil down" what he is saying, it comes down to: Belief in God just seems right (based on the reliabilist theory of knowledge).

See the first few minutes of the following video clip:



While technically Reformed Epistemology would allow for the basic belief in God to be defeated if the right evidence surfaced, practically speaking, it doesn't appear that Plantinga would really give up his belief. He writes:

...it is possible, at any rate in the broadly logical sense, that just by following ordinary historical reason, using the methods of historical investigation endorsed or enjoined by the deliverances of reason, someone should find powerful evidence against central elements of the Christian faith; if this happened, Christians would face a genuine faith-reason clash. A series of letters could be discovered, letters circulated among Peter, James, John, and Paul, in which the necessity for the hoax and the means of its perpetration are carefully and seriously discussed; these letters might direct workers to archaeological sites in which still more material of the same sort is discovered . . . . The Christian faith is a historical faith, in the sense that it essentially depends upon what did in fact happen: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile" (I Corinthians 15:17). It could certainly happen that by the exercise of reason we come up with powerful evidence against something we take or took to be a deliverance of faith. It is conceivable that the assured results of HBC [Historical Biblical Criticism] should include such evidence. Then Christians would have a problem, a sort of conflict between faith and reason.

However, nothing at all like this has emerged from HBC, whether Troeltschian or non-Troletschian; indeed, there is little of any kind that can be considered "assured results," if only because of the wide ranging disagreement among those who practice HBC. We don't have anything like assured results (or even reasonably well-attested results) that conflict with traditional Christian belief in such a way that belief of that sort can continue to be accepted only at considerable cost; nothing at all like this has happened. What would be the appropriate response if it "did" happen or, rather, if I came to be convinced that it had happened? Would I have to give up Christian faith, or else give up the life of the mind? What would be the appropriate response (emphasis mine)? Well, what would be the appropriate response if I came to be convinced that someone had given a wholly rigorous, ineluctable disproof of the existence of God, perhaps something along the lines of J. N. Findlay's alleged ontological disproof? Or what if, with Reid's Hume, I come to think that my cognitive faculties are probably not reliable, and go on to note that I form this very belief on the basis of the very faculties whose reliability this belief impugns? If I did, what would or should I do--stop thinking about these things, immerse myself in practical activity (maybe play a lot of backgammon, maybe volunteer to help build houses for Habitat for Humanity), commit intellectual suicide? I don't know the answer to any of these questions (emphasis mine). There is no need to borrow trouble, however; we can think about crossing these bridges when (more likely, if) we come to them (Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 420-421).

So, it seems that he doesn't think it even remotely possible that some defeater could surface but in the unlikely event that it did, he doesn't know what he would do. I predict he would continue to hold on to his belief and find a way to explain the new evidence to agree with his faith.

Plantinga also makes another very interesting admission. He acknowledges that his epistemology could be applied to confer warrant for other religions such as Islam (Warranted Christian Belief, p. 350 and Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, eds. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, p. 78). So, his argument for a properly basic belief in God does not uniquely apply to Christianity.

He also uses a somewhat strange argument to counter the logical problem of natural evil. He says that natural evil could be caused by demons (God, Freedom, and Evil, p. 58). While he offers this only as a potential solution to defeat the logical problem of evil, nevertheless, it sounds more like a Medieval philosopher than it does one of the brightest lights of the modern era in philosophy.

So, while many today are enamored with Reformed Epistemology and the philosophy of Alvin Plantinga, I am not one of them.

For some excellent criticisms of Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology see, Matt McCormick, Finding God in My Own Mind

Jaco W. Gericke, FUNDAMENTALISM ON STILTS: A RESPONSE TO ALVIN PLANTINGA’S REFORMED EPISTEMOLOGY

Erik Baldwin, Could the Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model Defeat Basic Christian Belief ? (Philosophia Christi, Vol.8, No. 2 2006)

For a layman's summary of Baldwin's paper see the series on Common Sense Atheism

Evan Fales interview on Common Sense Atheism