Some interesting points about the problem of evil and the free-will defence

Erik J. Wielenberg

Research Summary

Many people find Alvin Plantinga’s free-will defence to be a successful solution to the problem of evil. Essentially, Plantinga’s defence is that a world containing creatures that sometimes freely perform morally good actions is better than a world with no freedom. The author finds problems with this defence. He finds that it contradicts other important ideas about God, for example, that God is morally perfect – in this case, a hypothetical person who always freely chooses morally good actions would surpass God in morality (God, as morally perfect, cannot perform any immoral actions). He takes up a possible counter-argument – that God, as the ultimate source of His own actions, can always freely do what is morally right, because there are no controls over His actions – and rejects it, on the grounds that even if there are no controls over God’s actions, God being God still entails that He cannot perform any immoral actions. The points made can be used during discussions and debates in A level Philosophy and Ethics lessons, as will be shown in more detail below.

Researcher

Erik J. Wielenberg

Research Institution

De Pauw University, USA

What is this about?

• Does the existence of evil rule out the existence of God?
• Does the free-will defence stand up (that it is better to create free creatures, but freedom will always result in some evil actions)?
• If God, as morally perfect, cannot perform immoral actions, does this make a person who always freely performs morally good actions more moral than God?
• Or does God always do what is morally right freely, because there are no controls over God’s actions?

What was done?

This is a philosophical discussion about God, evil and the free-will defence, analysing and criticising different philosophers’ views and drawing insightful conclusions.

Main findings and outputs

• Alvin Plantinga’s free-will response to the problem of evil is often held to be successful. Plantinga argues that a world containing creatures that sometimes freely perform morally good actions is better than a world with no freedom.
• The author of the article, Erik Wielenberg, thinks that there are problems with Plantinga’s argument. God is, according to Plantinga and others, a morally perfect being whose perfection cannot be exceeded. Yet God’s morally good actions are not done freely. God cannot help but do what is morally good and is incapable of morally wrong actions.
• This seems to mean that a hypothetical person who always freely chose to do what was morally good would exceed the moral perfection of God.
• Wielenberg discusses a possible solution to the problem he has identified, provided by Kevin Timpe. Timpe proposes that God, as the ultimate source of His own actions, can always freely do what is morally right, because there are no controls over His actions.
• Wielenberg finds this counter-argument to fail. There may be no external controls over the actions of God, if God exists: but the nature of God, as essentially perfect, entails that God cannot freely perform any morally good actions.
• Wielenberg concludes by saying that in the light of the points he has made, believers in God ‘have some thinking to do’.

Relevance to RE

Colleagues teaching A level Philosophy and Ethics will find the original article very stimulating and useful, though it is closely and at times technically argued and needs ‘translation’ for use with A level students. However, having said that, the above list of Main findings and outputs could be transferred to a power point presentation and used to structure an extension lesson on the problem of evil. The points could be discussed and debated by students. The What is this about? questions could be used as the basis of a starter activity beforehand. Finally, students could be asked to evaluate Wielenberg’s arguments against Aristotle’s: Wielenberg believes that the concept of God may be contradictory because God cannot freely perform morally right actions, but Aristotle’s Prime Mover does not really perform actions in any case.

Generalisability and potential limitations

The points presented in the article are generally very useful within Philosophy lessons about the problem of evil and, as suggested above, could be used to extend students’ learning.

Find out more

Plantingian theism and the free-will defence, Religious Studies 52.4 pages 451-460 (published online 28 June 2016), 10.1017/S0034412516000135

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412516000135