A Study In Plantinga's Free Will Defense

The existence of evil has always been considered as a serious threat to theism,because the theist believes in an omniscient,omnipotent,all-good God,such a god should be able and willing to eliminate the evilness in our world,but he failed to do so apparently.This is what we called "the problem of evil".Theists have presented different kinds of theodicy to prove that God is justified to permit the existence of evil so as to solve this problem.Among those theodicies,the most famous and acceptable line of theodicy is the one called Free Will theodicy which was brought up by St.Augustine.However,the famous contemporary philosopher John Leslie Mackie claimed that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of an omniscient,omnipotent,all-good God,and he harshly challenged the free will theodicy with the logical problem of evil.In order to meet the challenge and defend his faith in Christianity,a well-known theologian Alvin Plantinga fully utilized the methodology of analytic philosophy and emphatically deployed the notion of possible worlds to propose a new version of free will theodicy,which is called free will defense.Plantinga put forward his idea that the existence of evil is compatible with an omniscient,omnipotent,all-good God in his free will defense.Firstly,God could not actualize any world he wants,secondly,every person who has free will is possibly suffering transworld depravity,which means that once God actualize a possible world,the possible person who has free will would go wrong with respect to at least one acton in that world,therefore,God could not actualize a world containing no moral evil but only moral good.Plantinga's free will defense used to be considered as a successful answer to the logical problem of evil,but then it started to come under direct attacks.Some philosophers criticize the libertarian free will he endorsed in his defense,others question his notion of transworld depravity and claim that we have no grounds to believe the possibility of transworld depravity.Besides,Plantinga put a limit to God's omnipotence,and his defense is incompatible with the original sin theory and the existence of Heaven.So it is fair to say that planting's defense is not successful,and The problem of evil will continue to be the greatest challenge to Theism.