Sample Material of UPSC Mains Philosophy (Optional) Study Kit
Topic: Philosophy of Religion (The Free Will Defence)
ALVIN PLANTINGA
SINCE the days of Epicurus many philosophers have suggested that the existence of evil constitutes a problem for those who accept theistic belief. Those contemporaries who follow Epicurus here claim, for the most part, to detect logical inconsistency in such belief. So McCloskey: Evil is a problem for the theist in that a contradition is involved in the fact of evil, on the one hand, and the belief in the omnipotence and perfection of God on the other. And Mackie: I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another ... 3 and essentially the same charge is made by Professor Aiken in an article entitled ‘God and Evil’. These philosophers, then, and many others besides, hold that traditional theistic belief is self-contradictory and that the problem of evil, for the theist, is that of deciding which of the relevant propositions he is to abandon. But just which propositions are involved’? What is the set of theistic beliefs whose conjunction yields a contradiction’? The authors referred to above take the following five propositions to be essential to traditional theism: (a) that God exists, (b) that God is omnipotent, (c) that God is omniscient, (d) that God is wholly good, and (e) that evil exists. Here they are certainly right: each of these propositions is indeed an essential feature of orthodox theism. And it is just these five propositions whose conjunction is said, by our atheologians, to be self-contradictory.
Apologists for theism, of course, have been quick to repel the charge. A line of resistance they have often employed is called The Free Will Defence; in this paper I shall discuss and develop that idea. First of all, a distinction must be made between moral evil and physical evil. The former, roughly, is the evil which results from human choice or volition; the latter is that which does not. Suffering due to an earthquake, for example, would be a case of physical evil; suffering resulting from human cruelty would be a case of moral evil. This distinction, of course, is not very clear and many questions could be raised about it; but perhaps it is not necessary to deal with these questions here. Given this distinction, the Free Will Defence is usually stated in something like the following way. A world containing creatures who freely perform both good and evil actions-and do more good than evil-is more valuable than a world containing quasi-automata who always do what is right because they are unable to do otherwise. Now God can create free creatures, but he cannot causally or otherwise determine them to do only what is right; for if he does so they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, he must create creatures capable of moral evil; but he cannot create the possibility of moral evil and at the same time prohibit its actuality. And as it turned out, some of the free creatures God created exercised their freedom to do what is wrong: hence moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes err, however, in no way tells against God’s omnipotence or against his goodness; for he could forestall the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good. In this way some traditional theists have tried to explain or justify part of the evil that occurs by ascribing it to the will of man rather than to the will of God. At least three kinds of objections to this idea are to be found both in the tradition and in the current literature. I shall try to develop and clarify the Free Will Defence by restating it in the face of these objections.
