If you asked me why I don’t believe in God, I could give you a myriad of answers. Among the more convincing answers (in my mind) would be the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil asks why there can be evil in the world if God is all-powerful and all-good. Would he not eradicate evil? When I think of all the pain and suffering, I truly do find the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being to be absurd.
I recently read Alvin Plantinga’s book God, Freedom, and Evil. My edition was published in 1977 and reprinted in 1983. I was referred to the book by my professor for my class Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Our topic for the class was religion. We’d read Plantinga’s “Theism, Atheism, and Rationality” for class. I read God, Freedom, and Evil because I needed it to write my final paper.
The book’s divided into two parts: 1) Natural Atheology, and 2) Natural Theology. The bulk of the book is devoted to the Problem of Evil. It also addresses the compatibility between freedom and omniscience. The second part quickly touches on the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, and then spends most of its time on the ontological argument. The Problem of Evil was most relevant to my paper topic and, coincidentally, the part I found most interesting.
Plantinga uses what he calls the Free Will Defense to escape the Problem of Evil. This must be distinguished from a project of theodicy. Theodicy tries to explain why God created evil. For example, Milton’s Paradise Lost could be said to give an account of evil in the world. The Free Will Defense does not purport to know the mind of God. Plantinga’s goal is just to show that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly good and Evil exists are logically consistent.
It’s a complicated and long argument. The summary in my essay was already inadequate and a blog entry will surely compress it more. The main things to understand are the limits on omnipotence and transworld depravity. God does not have the power to make 2+2=5 (according to Plantinga); God can do only what is logically possible. So God’s ability to eliminate evil is subject to logical constraints. If by removing one evil he were to create more evil, then he could not remove that evil.
Transworld depravity. Goodness, I had to read that passage a bajillion times in order to understand it. I’m not sure I can summarize it in a way that makes sense to anyone without some background in philosophy. I’ll do my best. Someone suffers from transworld depravity if there’s some moral action where he’ll always make the morally wrong decision. If God created a world where the person has to make a choice, the person will do something morally wrong. If God makes the person make the right choice, then he has removed free will. So if we assume that all people would suffer from transworld depravity then there’s no way God could have made a universe where people are free but there’s no evil.
Still with me? Well, what about volcanoes and tsunamis one may ask. Surely there’s no free will involved there. Plantinga says perhaps there are nonhuman persons who cause these natural disasters. It’s a preposterous claim, but he’s not purporting the truth of it. He’s just showing that God and the existence of evil aren’t logically inconsistent.
Has this shaken my belief in the Problem of Evil? To be honest, it has shown me that the Problem of Evil is not as ironclad as I thought. I have heard versions of a free will defense from theists before, but never from anyone well-versed in philosophy. Their versions made no sense, and this one does.
The Problem of Evil still appeals to me on a visceral, non-rational level. I’m still perplexed when I see death on a massive scale (from afar) and people insist that a perfect God exists. (If you believe in an imperfect God, I will be less perplexed at your belief.) There are other versions of the Problem of Evil, and it would be interesting to study those.
If I were to embark on a critique of Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, I would be tempted to go in many directions. When I think about it, though, I would have to concentrate on one thing. I think free will is a nonsensical concept because of the way I think our minds work (which is strongly influenced by Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop). Typically, free will is envisioned as some last minute mechanism in our brain. We get all the inputs, and then this mysterious “free will” thing takes over right before the decision is made. There’s some sort of gap. I don’t think there is. That’s not to say that we’re all mindless automata. Far from it. Decision-making is so much more complex and wonderful than this magical free will concept.
Can Plantinga’s defense not theodicy strategy work here? No, because if free will is not a logical phrase, then God could not have created it. Ergo, a free will defense cannot be used.
Of course, this kind of criticism is beyond the scope of this weblog entry. I am, furthermore, ill-equipped to embark on such a project at this time.
After reading this book, if someone were to ask me to articulate the Problem of Evil, I would recognize that I couldn’t do it in a way that I could not refute myself. I’ve learned that something I thought was a sure thing isn’t such a sure thing. After this book, I have less certainty, but more knowledge. That’s enough to make the book worth the read.