God, Freedom, and Evil
By Alvin Plantinga
W.M. Eerdmans Publishing, 1974
One of our colleagues, upon arriving at work, saw a coworker with a grim expression. She learned that her coworker had lost a good friend. Emotionally devastated by the news, the coworker also struggled to understand intellectually how God could have allowed such a thing to happen.
Perhaps without knowing it, the coworker was asking one of humanity’s oldest questions about God and evil. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the ancient Book of Job deals with exactly that question. The third chapter of Genesis offers insights into the sources of evil and its downstream consequences. For centuries, many nonfiction and fiction writers have explored the question. And, because evil undoubtedly exists in the world, and because it often causes so much hardship, we all wonder whether and how God fits into the whole story.
The problem, simply stated, is that if God is omnipotent, all-benevolent, and omniscient, why does evil exist in the world? If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does he permit evil? Why didn’t he create a different type of world in which there is no evil? Considered superficially, it seems like evil contradicts the theist’s belief in God.
In his classic book titled God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga, a renowned modal logician who taught at the University of Notre Dame, carefully considers the intellectual aspects of evil. He does not gloss over the painful emotional experiences caused by evil, but he argues that when people have intellectual truth about this question, they can better recover from the emotional pain.
Plantinga’s book also provides help for people who have doubts about God because of the so-called “problem of evil.” Many people encounter popular philosophers who use the problem to argue that God does not exist. And if those people deal with this valid question in an unserious, lackadaisical manner, they can easily abandon faith in God simply because they did not take the time to think carefully.
If a person is sincere about this question, then he or she should be willing to thoroughly study the theistic responses. Plantinga provides an excellent tool for doing that. In a mere eighty pages, he leads readers through each element of the problem of evil, one syllogism at a time, in a fair and honest manner. He looks at the essence of the question, presents the theistic responses, analyzes the objections to those responses, and then lands on a logic-based conclusion.
We encourage you to find a copy of this old classic and read it carefully, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll provide a short summary of the book.
Critics of those who believe in an omnipotent, benevolent, and omniscient God say that evil contradicts their own belief. Plantinga disputes that position by presenting what is called the “free will defense.” In basic terms, this defense says that an all-powerful, all-benevolent God could have allowed evil to exist in the world if he had good and benevolent reasons for doing so.
But what could those reasons be? A common reason is that free will is essential for there to be authentic love and meaning. Without free will, humans would be robotic beings, unable to love or experience meaning. But human freedom necessarily involves the risk that people will choose moral evil.
Plantinga summarizes the basic elements of the freewill defense as follows.
“Now God can create free creatures, but he can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right,” he says. “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…. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against his goodness, for he could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good” (p. 30).
Plantinga recognizes and addresses the atheistic objections to the free will defense. (You can read the book to see his full analysis of these objections.) One of the main objections is that God, being all-powerful, could have created a different type of world in which people were both free and only moral. Plantinga refutes that idea, first by saying that an omnipotent God cannot create logical contradictions. For example, an omnipotent God could not have created a world with gravity that also had no gravity. It’s one or the other.
In this context, Plantinga says that because God created humans with free will (thereby enabling love, meaning, and moral goodness), it would be a logical impossibility for humans to not have free will. It’s one or the other. And, as we have seen, moral free will necessarily (in terms of logical impossibilities) comes with the risk that humans will choose evil.
After using modal logic to analyze the free will defense and the objections against it, Plantinga makes the following summary statement.
“The existence of evil … does not disconfirm God’s existence,” he writes. “The existence of God is neither precluded nor rendered improbable by the existence of evil. Of course, suffering and misfortune may nonetheless constitute a problem for the theist; but the problem is not that his beliefs are logically or probabilistically incompatible…. But this is a problem of a different dimension. Such a problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care. The free will defense, however, shows that the existence of God is compatible, both logically and probabilistically, with the existence of evil; thus, it solves the main philosophical problem of evil” (pp. 63-64).
The Scriptures add many more layers of encouragement, not addressed by Plantinga, to help us understand the existence of evil and how to reduce it. The central message of the Gospel centers around forgiveness, grace, redemption, spiritual transformation, hope, and love. God sent his Son into the fallen world, to pay the price for human evil and offer his forgiveness. God is not a distant, uncaring, uninvolved being; rather, he is working to redeem and restore a broken world, and he is calling us to work with him in this effort.
We are here for a reason, and that reason is love.
Quotes to Ponder
“I never knew how much like heaven this world could be when two people love and live for one another.” — Louisa May Alcott
“To err is human; to forgive, divine.” — Alexander Pope, 1553